I thought I made a post on open thread 371, but now I'm unable to find it. Are posts ever silently deleted? I'm not sure what was controversial about it. I was even trying to "admit I was partially in the wrong" for a prior post in 370.
Posts are't silently deleted ever, AFAIK. It s very hard to find one buried in a huge thread though. You can search for yout name or a distinctive word in your post using CMD-F. Before you search you should make sure no threads on the page are collapsed, though, because they aren't included in the search if they are
If it's deep in a thread it won't be searchable at the level. You might have to expand it several times. If not, I'd advise going to your activity tab under your user name, finding the post you replied to in that thread and start going deeper until you find the correct reply or a deleted message.
Oh, it's not a deep AI question at all, it's a practical one! I've gotten somebody I know interested in working on AI alignment. His degree and technical skills sound (to my non-tech ears, anyhow) approximately right, & he's now job-hunting because he thinks his present job is only very indirectly helpful to the world. So I sent him to the 80,000 Hours job board, where you can find a bunch of Alignment jobs. 5 or 6 came up when I searched there. I was just wondering if that's an adequate way to search for AI alignment jobs, or if there was some other place he should also be looking.
You should consider the above resources as the results of a brief, kinda low quality search over my AI alignment knowledge rather than something comprehensive (with medium quality being "spend a weekend or afternoon collating everything" and high "cross reference and follow up on results of recommending those resources")
We had a check on the table made out to my wife. I asked her about it, then I took it to my wife to sign it. After that, I brought it back to the table to get my phone so I could scan it in.
I open the Android app drawer. At the top are 4 apps. I think the most used or most recent, I've never figured it out.
My banking app was there as one of the 4. I hadn't opened it in weeks.
And it's not like this is a Friday thing. It was an unexpected check we've had sitting around for a while.
It was the app I picked up my phone to use. But it couldn't have known that. But it knew,
Years ago a guy working in app security told me his company didn’t allow android phones into the office. BlackBerry or iPhone were the only two brands allowed.
Your phone had probably just been eavesdropping on the conversation between you and your wife. It was just trying to be helpful. Nothing to worry about. (this is one of those times where i wonder if i should add I’m just kidding)
We observe as well that if we're talking about some random thing, my wife starts getting ads for exactly this thing on her phone. Is the phone eavesdropping, or is this some sort of frequency illusion?
Could one of you have done a Google search for something that you were talking about? If I search for say ‘hiking boots’ my wife and i will see targeted ads for hiking boots in our shared newspaper subscriptions.
No, we were just discussing something like e.g. getting a new garden shed, and then an hour later she sees these ads for sheds in the Facebook or Amazon app. But as I said, I don't know how many ads she gets for all kinds of things, so it could be some sort of cognitive bias.
HPMOR *still* refers about 20% of new users to LessWrong, putting it in the same weight class as ACX.
There is probably some difference between an HPMOR meetup and a LessWrong meetup, though I continue to be confused at the venn diagram overlaps in this community.
Jack Voraces, a professional narrator and voice actor, did a free audiobook reading of HPMOR that he released as a serialized podcast. He started it in 2021, finished it this past summer, and has continued the podcast with a reading of a sequel fic, Significant Figures by Alexander Davies.
The podcast seems to have gotten a fair number of people interested in HPMOR again, at least to judge by activity on the fan subreddit.
A talk by Matt Arnold. This isn't a complete summary, but I think it covers the major points. I've left out the names of specific cults. I think one of the basic themes is that ordinary life is worthy of respect.
Cults amplify traits that healthy groups need. Groups need some money to keep going, but they shouldn't extract as much as possible from their members. Groups need friendships and connections among their members, but they shouldn't be the only source of relationships.
What does nihilism mean? I think it means the belief that there's no truth and no values, but I'm not sure.
Feelings are emphasized over thinking in bad groups.
There is no cult-proof ideology
David Chapman-- Cults offer "the illusion of complete certainty, understanding, and control"
Bad sign: A system where no one is good enough at achieving the goals of the group.
Don't let not being a good enough polyamorist make you miserable.
Coming alive should be the first priority.
Wow factor-- an impressive idea isn't necessarily true.
Have some people in your life with low openness to new ideas. People who can say, "That's fuckin' weird". [This doesn't address the possibility that in some societies, the mainstream is a cult.]
People should not feel an obligation to save the world. And sometimes it's combined with hopelessness.
In general, not feeling permitted to take care of yourself is a bad sign.
Don't let too many people who need the group for a sense of purpose into the group. They will make the group into a toxic perfection spiral.
Eternalism-- "it's this or nothing".
It's important for a group to permit challenges to ideas-- don't be supportive to everyone about every idea they have. Epistemic hygiene is needed.
Don't just say "It's complicated". Say "it's complicated in this way".
Is it safe to have the concept of infohazard? Perhaps the concept of infofragility is more useful.
Don't be extremely pro-woo or anti-woo. Aim for being able to use all the mental tools.
You will find what you look for. If you believe there's a pattern in history, you will find it, and if you believe your mind has certain elements, your mind will obligingly create them for you.
Ada Palmer as a good historian who looks for what's ambiguous in history rather than simple lessons.
Ideas from whatever source are more like spores-- starters for new ideas rather than things which are reliably transmitted.
Still banned from ACXD. Still barred from ACN due to the Zizians. Anywho. Experienced a brief spat of homelessness, which "encouraged" my family to seek therapy with me. Any tips regarding how I should approach it? I know aggressively truth seeking will just engender conflict, but I'm unsure how these things generally work. My first appointment is on Tuesday, so if anyone has tips on how this werks that would be swell.
The only thing I could tell you, and I have been in a lot of therapy over my life, is to try and represent yourself, truthfully; your own feelings, your own thoughts. Those you’re entitled to, and might find some relief in getting them out there in a neutral setting where there is someone to monitor.
Whats a culturally possible(without an *cough* overthrow) but optimized to win democratic party platform for 2028... or 2036?
How do you fly your private jets to European conferences to then ban straws because its polls well with your base* (poll was actually done on insane far left group and they were lying); while connecting with the average voter? How do you talk about democractic ideals then pushing bernie out.... again? How do you claim jk roweling is far right then convince actual centrists to accept your frame of reference?
It's pretty easy (for either party) to come up with an election-winning platform, just be public-minded centrists.
The problem is that the people whose cooperation you'll need are not interested in being public-minded centrists. You don't go into politics, or donate millions of dollars to politics, because you're interested in serving the agenda of Joe Median in Mediansburg OH, you do it because you want to serve your own agenda, whether that's political extremism, ingroup preference or just plain old self-interest.
The question of politics then becomes not how can you give the people what they want, but how can you triangulate between giving the people what they want and giving your allies what they want.
All they have to do is back off the woke nonsense. Understand that most of the country is white and that they're not evil. Understand that most people view trans as mental illness and won't tolerate having it normalized. Just back off the social justice and moderates will flock. If they'd just nominated Hillary last time I would've sprinted to the polls to vote for her. All most people want is someone competent and sane.
Go back to the days when it was the party of the working class, but I don't know if that's possible. They nailed their colours to the mast on abortion, trans rights, etc. and now they have a tiny but extremely vocal minority tail that is wagging the dog. I don't believe there is, for example, such a thing as "abortion rights" but if they could row back to "safe, legal and rare" they'd meet a lot more of the country (except they can't because apparently "rare" is abortion shaming people who had abortions and it should be abortion for everyone all the time).
Gavin Newsom is giving some signs of preparing for 2028 with what he's been saying recently, but the problem there is that he is so transparently doing whatever the heck it takes out of expediency not principle that they'll run into the worst of both worlds; the very left to left of centre who will not vote for this kind of naked opportunistic flip-flopping so they lose a chunk of Democratic party voters, plus they won't pick up right of centre voters who know their guy is just doing the "these are my principles and if you don't like them, I have others!" bit.
Also, be sure to change the water coolers or the air conditioning filters or whatever the heck it was in the building that made them think running a candidate on endorsements from *the Cheneys* was a good idea. That's the kind of galaxy-brained take that made me go "what the flibberin' hell is this?"
EDIT: Seriously. "The GOP Great Satan himself says vote for Kamala"? Who thought that was a good idea? See, this is why drugs should not be legalised.
>They nailed their colours to the mast on abortion, trans rights, etc. and now they have a tiny but extremely vocal minority tail that is wagging the dog. I don't believe there is, for example, such a thing as "abortion rights" but if they could row back to "safe, legal and rare" they'd meet a lot more of the country (except they can't because apparently "rare" is abortion shaming people who had abortions and it should be abortion for everyone all the time).
The pro-choice side wins abortion referendums most of the time even in red states. This "abortion for everyone all the time" messaging would indeed hurt the Democrats, fortunately for them it doesn't exist outside the heads of conservatives. Look at how while it's practically law that every new TV show has to have at least one gay character, people on TV almost never get abortions.
> if they could row back to "safe, legal and rare" they'd meet a lot more of the country
Im not sure thats possible; the right wing is happily educating the new black voters about demographics paranoia and planned parenthood founding, the internet has back logs of women who have had dozens of abortions existing and being .... well morally disgusting in other ways.
"Im not sure thats possible; the right wing is happily educating the new black voters about demographics paranoia and planned parenthood founding"
They've been doing that for 30 years with nothing to show for it.
"the internet has back logs of women who have had dozens of abortions existing and being .... well morally disgusting in other ways."
Never heard of that. There's a catch-22 where anti-abortion people don't want to portray abortion patients sympathetically but also don't want to portray them poorly lest people ask if maybe it's a good thing they aren't having kids or are having fewer kids.
> They've been doing that for 30 years with nothing to show for it.
Its different when you agree with a person, and demographics is becoming a bigger issue, chinas one child policy will start hitting the wall and *everyone* on earth should notice not only those who understand compound interest.
> Never heard of that.
As much fun as it is to point out yet another example of "the left debates with a strawman right, while the right wing knows the left inside and out from having thier views pushed everywhere all the time", I think this is a blunt fact, radical feminists who talk proudly about their 12th abortion disgust me and I only needed 1 example to find hate.
Video of a circumcision, botched trans surgreys on children, rape cases being buried for racial reasons, criticisms of European criminals getting longer sentences then the criminal themselves, ovisous fake trans rapist going to a female prision; 1 example a name, face, picture and your never getting me back to be "moderate" with current talking points.
Such evidence is usually kept off search engines and many are gore so even parts of 4chan swing the ban hammer hard. I know your not aware of them, but they were never not effect my opinion. Blunt political facts and disgust; the "safe legal rare" medecial freedom compromise isnt on the table for me anymore because I simply dont believe the left to keep its word, if you want abortion for when it matters maybe talk about criminalizing gross over use.
Blunt fact: if your unable to humor the idea that Ive seen a view of someone proud of their 12th abortion and willing to say "if that happened it be bad"; I wont care what you say on the topic and it will make the left weaker.
It's true that declining fertility, absent AGI, will become a bigger issue in the future. The problem with promoting abortion bans as a solution is that, notwithstanding dysgenics, we're trying that now and it doesn't work. Very odd about anti-abortion people, they won this great victory three years ago, got rid of Roe, but now they just keep talking like "ban abortion" is a theoretical future thing.
>As much fun as it is to point out yet another example of "the left debates with a strawman right, while the right wing knows the left inside and out from having thier views pushed everywhere all the time"
Suppose everyone agrees that the GOP has reorganized in a way that took a key faction away from Democrats. This suggests an underlying belief that parties are to be visualized as coalitions of factions, where any faction with significant voting power is on one side or the other, and any given individual is mostly in one faction - where that faction goes, that individual will go, and while that individual could change factions (e.g. civil rights advocate deciding her main concern is now foreign wars), change happens slowly and marginally - one can see signs of it at least a year in advance, and it's not the case that an entire faction's members suddenly decide they're all goldbugs or something.
Given that framework, the easiest, most be-like-water strategy I see for Democrats is to start by ruling out certain possibilities. The primary option to avoid: trying to turn the clock back to 2008. Whatever they lost, they're not likely to get back in exactly that form. That means blue collar people who went to Trump for blue collar reasons aren't going to about-face and head back to Democrats for those same reasons. People who hated Biden's response to COVID aren't going to flock back to Democrats if Democrats declare lockdowns and face masks are even lamer than Trump says they are and vaccines are even more dangerous than RFK Jr. has been arguing. (Indeed, this won't even be relevant if there isn't another pandemic for four years.) People who were fed up with the riots and hostile workplaces produced by wokism and DEI aren't going to even grudgingly decide the Democrats were right all along, let alone convert into fervent supporters.
Another strategy to avoid are changes on the persistent issues like abortion, gun control, EPA- and FDA-style regulation, macroeconomics, and so on. The battle lines on those have been drawn and reinforced and lined with wire and mines for decades, and more importantly, have settled roughly 50-50; I don't think Democrats can suddenly peel off voters by changing their stance on these issues faster than they'd lose voters for appearing to have let down their traditional side.
So what's left? Well, the Democrats might not get blue collars and Latinos and immigration reformers and vaccine mandate opponents that they lost. But they *might* get voters from around the back. Visually, imagine GOP/Dem as a sort of yin-yang; the movement that brought us Trump made a push around the wheel on one side. The Dems won't make much headway on that front. Instead, they push on the other side of the wheel, where Rep attention hasn't been as focused. In some cases, they get back the same individuals! It's just that the voter that went to the GOP for immigration reasons won't flip back to Dem for immigration reasons, but will flip for, say, environmental reasons or foreign policy reasons or something else.
This might require waiting for a crisis and being prepared to use it to make a point. For example, if Dems were to quietly fortify state emergency rescue efforts, only to have a major hurricane or quake or wildfire hit, and they keep their eye on the ball, they now look like the party of emergency preparedness. What was different? "We identified certain key services that could be better run locally, and coupled them with a network we funded to quickly shunt critical resources from neighboring localities to keep price gouging down." Crime wave? "We began an initiative at the state level to address gang warfare in a novel way, making it easier to disperse gangs before they form serious threats."
Some things don't have to wait for a crisis. "We conducted an overhaul of existing law at state levels to expedite the release of non-violent inmates and clear prison space for violent offenders, while comprehensively helping new releases to rehabilitate and re-enter civilian society." Health care? "We revisited the issue, and noticed that the one issue where the dollar did the most good was heart disease prevention. Two-pronged approach: research into new procedures for addressing heart issues, and prevention to make it easy for people to avoid heart disease in the first place."
The overall theme here is to change the game. Don't push back against the Republican success of the week or even initiative of the week; instead, find a new game. There are plenty. It's just that they require visiting territory that isn't getting much attention right now.
In times of great confusion the promise of certainty is very compelling. Trump exudes certainty, and when he says “Only I can fix this, and I can,” it is very seductive. There is a long history in America of the saga of the Lone Ranger riding into town and sorting things out. It is a new era, and the Democratic Party is going to be in the weeds until such time as there’s a train wreck so to speak. The train wreck will almost certainly come, because train wrecks always come, but until then it’s High Noon and Trump is Gary Cooper.
>How do you fly your private jets to European conferences to then ban straws because its polls well with your base*
I dunno, how do you give billionaires a trillion-dollar tax cut and cut social programs to pay for it, because that polls well with the working class (poll was actually done on insane far-right group who thinks that social programs only go to illegal immigrants)?
Perhaps the key is not describing your opponent's platform in the most insanely uncharitable way possible.
No, I mean *you* might be less confused about how the Democrats can have a marketable platform if you didn't pretend that plastic straws are a central plank of their platform.
(Assuming, of course, that you actually asked your question out of genuine curiosity and not simply to snipe at the things you don't like about Democrats.)
The marketable platform is pretty simple. "Donald Trump is setting the economy on fire so his billionaire friends can get even richer. We don't want that to happen."
> The marketable platform is pretty simple. "Donald Trump is setting the economy on fire so his billionaire friends can get even richer. We don't want that to happen."
Except people are just going to extrapolate the unsaid last line of the platform: "We want _our_ billionaire friends to get richer instead"
I don't think the Dems will have any success convincing the median voter that the Dems are good and the the Republicans are evil. The Dems all believe it themselves, which is part of the problem, but that's not a message which resonates with the people in the middle who think (quite justifiably) that both parties are overall pretty similar.
That guy is asking how the Dems can win next time, which means he's likely on their side and wants it to happen, which means he's not being uncharitable to an opponent's platform at all. He's being clear eyed about how they behave and how they're perceived.
He's wrong, obviously, if he wants the dirty dirty lefties to win, but he's not confused at all.
I don't know if I want the dirty dirty lefties to win, but there must be some normal Democrats out there, surely? EDIT: Depends on the dirty dirty lefty in question; I'd have some sympathy towards Syndicalism but not the DSA type of "help, we are all white middle-class college graduates here, where are the real proletariat members, comrades?" problem.
I've been told before that the DNC is largely irrelevant and I hope to hell that's true, because things like this are what you'd expect as a parody from very conservative Youtuber channels, but it's real: "we need gender balance by our regulations so you have to vote for one man, one woman, and one person of any gender".
If they could corral all these people off in their own little committee to do things and then the rest of the party with the normal people ignore all that and do the real stuff, that might be a huge help.
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats.
- Noam Chomsky, 2012
The only way for real change is for at least one party to boot business out. But that will become harder over time because wealth and power are accumulating at the top, so what do you do if practically the entirety of both parties represents business interest, and your political system marginalizes third parties into irrelevance?
Realistically, the only ways for a reset in such a tightly closed system is going to be a bang or a whimper: violence or terminal decline. It would be far from either the first or last time in history.
I'm mostly wondering if the democrats survive and replaced by some hybrid of greens and libertarians. Unlikely, but I think something has to change the lefts engery feels super low and money comes from believing it's 50 50
You answered your own question then. If the under-25s don't vote, and the over-25s also become more numerous thanks to demographics, you make politics for the over-25s, and do it better than the other party. That means corporatist politics from both sides, with a dash of scapegoating brown and yellow people for when too many over-25s start contemplating they might not be temporarily embarrassed millionaires after all.
So there are people who have some idea of what went wrong and where they should go (but sorry not the Bernie wing, that's never going to win elections), but will they be listened to, or will the party and supporters continue with "it is the fault of the people" even harder?
To secure the Dem vote in 2028, probably run on the Supreme Court. It's the #3 issue for Democrats by importance (1). Specifically, the Court is roughly 6-3 conservative at this point. In 2028, Thomas will be ~80 and Alito will be ~76. Sotomayer will also be ~72 with diabetes. It's very likely that the 2028-2032 president will be able to replace at least one justice. More importantly, it's very easy, measurable, and plausible that the Democrats can do this. Like, improving the economy, always #1 issue, or fixing climate change are big, difficult issues that an administration could totally "work on" for 4-8 years without achieving anything.
That's kinda also the problem with winning over some Republican voters. The top things that Republicans care about and Dems don't, the kind of things you can bend on, are violent crime and immigration. It would be great if Dems could pivot on these but who would believe it? The Democratic "brand" has been pretty solidified on these things for decades and that's not gonna flip any time soon. Imagine Kamala's "I'm not woke, I'm tough on immigration" pivot. It was probably the right move but it was also laughable and the American electorate is dumb but they're not that dumb.
That leaves foreign policy or the economy as the area where there looks like a gap. That's tough though. Economy is by far the #1 issues for Republicans but making the economy good is also, like, really hard and it's not clear what should be done. It's just not a thing president's really have a lot of control over. As for foreign policy...I dunno, I think there's room to pivot but people are also losing their mind over Ukraine. It's starting to feel like certain cultural issues where the Democrats, for internal reasons, just can't pivot.
Yeah, it's hard for me to be very sympathetic towards "oh no the Supreme Court is chock-full of partisans!" when, so long as the partisans were liberals to left, it was just fine and dandy to have it be chock-full of them and any objectors just had to shut up because them's the rules. now this is the law of the land, checkmate bigots.
Funny how principles get dragged out from the top of the wardrobe and dusted off when it's the *other* lot in power who are now using the tools to get what they want which you used to get what you wanted when you were in power. (This applies to whether it's Tweedledee or Tweedledum in power).
If Alito and Thomas don't retire during Trump's term that would be very dumb. Similarly dumb to RBG not retiring before Obama left office.
Sotomayer will hold on for four years if it's even remotely possible. She would probably do the same for the next four years at least if another Republican is elected in 2028.
Has there been a party platform that ran on the deaths of judges? That should effect every year, but the election ads "our 9th oligarch will *DIE*, vote democrate so the right people can be made judges for life" may remind people of death or whatever reason it doesn't seem ran on.
"Tough on crime" democrates was totally a thing, Biden was a raging racist in the 70s, by modern standards, could just.... regress just a little. It be hard, but maybe possible to go tough on crime if you discarded the woke.
Regressing means getting progressive staffers who are standing in the way to stand down. Every mealy mouthed centrist posting their grand vision for the next Bill Clinton never articulates a plan of action for accomplishing that step.
Kamala Harris can't pretend to be tough on immigration but the party doesn't need to run Harris in 2028. Yeah, she's the plurality choice now, but that's just name recognition + long way away.
Oh, sorry if this was unclear, but this isn't a Kamala specific problem. Like, can Pete Buttigeig run as strict on immigration? Yeah. Are 47 year-old white hunters in the Midwest going to believe him? Gavin Newsom could run as tough on crime but are Hispanic voters in Nevada and Arizona going to believe him?
Like, the party's candidate gets judged in part by the reputation of their party, not just on their own stance. Which Democratic candidate is credible enough that they could convince swing voters in swing states that they are credibly different? That's not impossible but it's not easy.
Can they run on it? Yes, absolutely. Both Buttigieg and Newsom are carefully putting out more 'centrist' positions at the moment. Can they pull it off? Very doubtful, it's too much of an insult to the voters' intelligence (though Buttigieg does have the advantage that he can credibly point to accusations that he wasn't gay enough/the wrong kind of gay and so his moderate views on LGBT (especially the T) issues is genuine).
Is “fly your private jets to European conferences to then ban straws” a real thing? When I google “ban straws” all I see are articles about Trump banning paper straws from the federal government.
Is the issue that some Democratic donor once flew a private jet to a European conference, and then an entirely unrelated Democratic city council somewhere consisting of middle-class people who will never see a private jet in their life passed a ban on plastic straws? Then some right-wing influencer blew it up?
If that’s a real thing people are concerned about, the next Democratic platform should focus on how not to let the right control the media, including social media.
It's a turn of phrase deliberately conflating two issues for humourous and rhetorical effect.
The version I've heard more often is "flying your private jet to a conference to talk about climate change", which is a real thing that happens every year (there's many more conferences about climate change than plastic straws after all).
"Several US states have banned single-use plastic straws, including California, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington."
"If that’s a real thing people are concerned about, the next Democratic platform should focus on how not to let the right control the media, including social media."
>b-b-but muh private company they can do what they want!
If your platform is easy to protray unfavorably, it will be; and these seem to be requirements. Do you disagree there is a virtue signaling aspect to democratic evernmentalism?, that I couldnt point to objectively bad policies that made life worse, passed by real life leftists?
They should run an "outsider" as their next candidate, just like the Reps did with Mr. Trump in 2015. I like the idea of McConaughey as next candidate, but maybe a rapper or other type of "cool" entertainer would be also good in terms of "vibes"...
Culturally, the Dems should focus on only 2 things: abortion rights and defending gay marriage, if the latter becomes necessary. Marijuana legalization might be a winner, too.
To win an election they should of course focus on the economy, which should be easy after Trump decimates it. "A return to sanity on economic policy." or some line like that, which just amounts to ending 90% of the Trump tariffs and maybe appointing a new Fed Chair, should Trump put a loony in that position.
Marijuana may not be the clear winner some think it is. Places that legalized drugs are starting to regret it, and even if marijuana is not much of the problem, the position's popularity is likely to drop. Not to mention recent research showing neurological and other problems from marijuana use.
Gay marriage is also not likely to be a major issue, as Republicans are at best split on the issue and unlikely to make any sweeping changes.
Abortion is still pretty salient, but I don't see it being more salient in the future, or Democrats being able to bank on it more, than they did in 2024. It's an issue that splits the country, not one that has a solid pro-Democrat bend.
As for tariffs, that depends on if Trump dumbs about it and sticks to it. I can see him being dumb, and I can see him sticking to tariffs, but one thing about him is his willingness to drop a topic and move on. I don't see him wrecking the economy with tariffs and then leaving them in place. Notable is that he also put some tariffs in place during his first term and Biden kept them.
"Abortion is still pretty salient, but I don't see it being more salient in the future, or Democrats being able to bank on it more, than they did in 2024. It's an issue that splits the country"
The pro-life consistently loses referendums in states both blue and red.
Sure, but do you think it's going to be more relevant than it was in 2024? It apparently wasn't a big enough issue then to sway the election to Harris, so Democrats need something else to campaign on.
"Ideally, Trump manages to keep the Congressional Republicans so occupied with wacky stuff that they forget about abortion."
The GOP majority is small enough that Congress can't probably do anything on abortion, but the pro-lifers will keep trying to restrict abortion on a national level through the courts.
> abortion rights and defending gay marriage, if the latter becomes necessary.
Wasnt trump for gay marriage before obama? Do you believe abortion as a states rights issue wont be acceptable to most, or that trump will ban it dispite his promise otherwise?
> To win an election they should of course focus on the economy, which should be easy after Trump decimates it.
"my opponent will make a terrible move that I will the capitalize on" may not be an optimizing for victory; it maybe worthwhile to have a backup plan. What if his base feels the economy is better despite the facts saying otherwise?
I'm guessing that not only a documentary, but a feature film will eventually be made about the Zizian cult. It's such a weird, unlikely story and people love movies about cults and murders. I'm curious if people here who know more about it think this is a fair narrative of the events: https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence
The ban links (or at least the first three) go to your comments telling people they're banned, not to the offending comments themselves, although the "return to thread" button shows what you're replying to/banning for.
Yes. My bad. I made the mistake of assuming he confused transgender with transgenic. I should have gone back and listened to the audio — but like a lot of other people I assumed he didn't know what he was talking about. And, even if one is anti-trans, three of those transgender mice studies on Trump's kill list would qualify as basic research that would not necessarily be applicable to transgender humans.
I have colleagues who use mouse models that could be described a "transgender mice". If you find a male/female difference, the next question is why, and a reasonable next step is to do things like give estrogen to male mice and see if they're more like regular male or female mice. But, I think this "transgenic confusion" hypothesis is just a viral speculation with no grounding in what the Trump administration is doing (or, if it was, they've corrected it). I say this because I think we need more truth and less disinformation, even of the kind that comes from "my side" and because I think it's always important to remember that the "other side" is never as dumb as we pretend they are when dunking on them.
That's their list of 6 grants that use "transgender mice". Of those, they are all arguably actually making transgender mice to study transgender healthcare. The last one (which is the biggest budget item) is the worst fit and is the most like what I described above of actually studying male/female differences and I think it just has a "this will inform transgender healthcare too" line thrown in to seem inclusive but you'd want to do this research even if transgender people didn't exist. Another one (which mentions transgenic mice) is clearly about transgender people but with applications elsewhere and it's not 100% clear what the transgenic mice are based just off this summary, but it seems likely that the transgenic part is specifically to make male hormones higher in female mice (but I'm not sure why you need transgenic mice to do that, so it could be something subtler), and so I think it counts.
5/6 right seems like honestly better than I expected. Now, $5 million (spread over multiple years!) isn't really that impressive and hardly strikes me as a woke mind virus-controlled liberal academia that they're trying to spin this into. But, still, it's important to be correct and not to spread misinformation.
Thanks for the clarification. The social media blathersphere was talking 8 billion — not million — and either playing up the transgender mice or mocking Trump for confusing transgenic with transgender. My bad. I couldn't be bothered to listen to his speech to get it from the ass's mouth.
But three of those transgender mice studies on Trump's kill list would qualify as basic research that would not necessarily be applicable to transgender humans. And three of the studies that would be applicable to humans might yield results that could show hormone therapy has downsides.
I still don't think they should be allowed to compete with cis-mice in sporting events.
Also how do you know they're not transgender? Some of them might be! If they ever manage to create an animal model for transgender what would we call it? Trans^2?
Our very smart president (everybody says he’s the smartest we’ve ever had! He’s a genius!) said that we’re wasting billions of dollars on transgender mice in his State of Union speech. All those poor DEI mice are going to lose the jobs when Elon fires them!
Given that their main job is “test subject” it’s probably for the best- at least that way they’ll be happily on the couch if he ever decides to order experiments into his various bleach injection schemes
caveat: There is an unclear limit on queries (I'm in the "plus" tier), so I didn't attempt to ask leading followup questions, which makes some potentially partially correct answers into wrong ones
a) correct
b) partially correct (CuCl4 2- d-d transition wrong, didn't prod due to message limit)
c) wrong, very partial list, which it claims is a full list
d) correct
e) wrong, even the initial slope is wrong
f) wrong, includes liquids with BP > 100C
g) wrong
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: correct "Yes. Light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm falls clearly within the visible spectrum for the human eye, which typically ranges from about 380 nm (violet) to 750 nm (red)."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: FeCl4- ions analysis ok, realized that d-d is spin forbidden, correctly said the LMCT creates the color. (CuCl4)2- got the species, incorrectly moved the d-d transition into the blue "Broad absorption bands around ~400–500 nm due to d–d transitions" when it should have moved them into the near-IR. It _did_ say that LMCT was present, but incorrectly said that d-d also contributes to visible color.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Missing _many_ possibilities - all of the polyene and diyne cases, the bicyclobutane, the tetrahedrane. And it doesn't realize that it has a (very!) partial list, claiming "Here's a concise summary of all hydrocarbons with exactly four carbon atoms:"
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: correct "Conclusion: The Sun primarily loses mass via radiation (photons), with radiation mass-loss significantly outweighing that from the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Bad! Not only does it come up with infinity at the equivalence point, it gets the units wrong for its initial slope calculation and loses the contribution to the slope from increasing volume in the initial slope calculation.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: BAD! At least it didn't include organic compounds, and it did get the elemental gases right, but everything else that could go wrong with a list of inorganic gaseous compounds did go wrong. I haven't counted, but it looks like more than half of the "gases" it listed have boiling or sublimation points above 0C - in one case, SbF5, 149.5C !
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: It (wrongly) gives as its example "tetrafluoroallene (F₂C=C=CF₂)" It correctly says that "The molecule belongs to the D₂d point group" but then wrongly claims that this point group "has no mirror plane" when, in fact, it has two.
Many Thanks! That could be. I'm guessing that a lot of the problem with 4.5 is that, as Altman has said, it isn't a reasoning model, which I'm taking to imply that it does less self-checking of its answers than e.g. o3-mini-high did. That would be consistent with e.g. it not noticing that it got the units wrong in (e), the titration question, even for the initial slope (while o3-mini-high got that right) and not noticing for (g), the S4 question, that the point group (which it _knew_) for the molecule it picked in fact contained mirror planes, and therefore failed the criterion I asked for. I really hope GPT5 does better! (presumably _with_ chain-of-thought)
Why are online comment sections so uniformly terrible? I don't mean the content I mean the interface. Reddit seems to be the only site that actually figured it out. Why isn't there a good open-source clone of that? Or is there?
Honestly it reminds me of version control before Git. I feel like one smart Linus-like person could just figure it out in a month and make everything better for everyone. Does anyone understand why that hasn't happened?
Funny you mention Git, 4Chan is somewhat close to its idea. There is no inherent dependency between comments except by timestamp ordering, and users can create arbitrary dependencies by mentioning the ID of a parent comment. This generalizes Reddit's tree model. This is similar to how Git implements a hierarchical object database where objects reference each other by ID. (But Git's IDs are hashes so de-duplication and tamper-resistance is built-in, while 4Chan's ID are probably just made up sequence numbers.)
Reddit and HackerNews are theoretically "optimal" in the sense that they take the idea of comments to their logical extremes: You can comment on anything, including comments, comments on comments, comments on comments on comments on comments, etc... The drawback, of course, is that the human mind has a finite nesting depth (3 or 5), and in practice many of the child comment trees are "useless" or redundant, taking screen space for no reason from other major, on-topic comment trees.
I have shower-thought for months about using LLMs for this. LLMs ingesting the entirety of the comment section (with all its hierarchical depth, if any) and then spitting out an optimized layout that groups all "related" or "similar" (by topic) comments together. This layout can then serve as a starting point for further modification and customization, a user might ask the UI to group together all comments of the same topic but also similar length and sort by greater length, another user asking the LLMs to censor all comments of length < X and talking about a specific topic (e.g. sub-50-words comments about Trump, overwhelmingly likely to be a drive-by remark). LLMs are not the foundational idea, user control and user customizability is, LLMs just implement a sort of programmatic fluidness that non-programmer users can easily get used to without learning a dozen UI box.
But this will never happen, because online comment sections are terrible because the companies hosting them don't care if they're good, comments are marginal in the vast majority of internet territories (Facebook, tw***er, YouTube, news sites...). Only heavily text-biased sites like Reddit, HackerNews, 4Chan and this forum place a substantial weight on comments, and even then there are countless other priorities for both the hosting company and most of the userbase,
I tried making my own tool that acts as an interface for these comments, but it's currently view-only (for security reasons, and because substack's API is private).
Tell me what issues you have with the current UI and I'll try to push the changes:
Super-cool! Any insight into why Substack is so slow? Is it server, network, CPU? Are they doing something super inefficient with layouts? Displaying text should be super fast, it's really hard to understand how they're bungling it.
there should be an indication, that comments are being loaded, i.e. when i clicked your link, it said something "no comments found", and i thought your webapp was broken so i navigated away. (then i tried again acouple of times and eventually realized, that the loading time is just long)
there should be a way to browse acx using your app. (i clicked on the link on top and got back to the real acxpage outside of your app with no way of coming back to your app)
there should be a "reply on substack" button, that links back to substack, so i can write a reply to a specific comment on the original substack app, where i am logged in.
some personal preferences of mine:
by default long comments should be reduced to a couple of lines and there should be a info about how many lines are hidden. (i decide if i read a long comment based on the replys it got, so I would first look at the length of a comment then at the first couple replys, and only then would i unfold the top comment)
and i would like to give private tags to users, which should be shown next to their name for each of their comment.
We've had multiple good comment techs, going back to threaded Usenet news. Seriously, some of those old time C+curses apps are way faster to use and offer more features than the dynamic loading balls of buggy auctions+analytics masquerading as web commenting systems. Even old SSC pages are a joy compared to Substack comments threads. The current incentives in tech are also not to reuse old stuff that works, and it really doesn't help when there are patent trolls suing people for doing stuff they didn't bother filling patents on, but someone else did.
> We've had multiple good comment techs, going back to threaded Usenet news.
Yup, second this. The main problem is that companies want to pay third-rate devs to import megabytes of javascript libraries to one-off "solve" what should be solved with more performant methods that have been proven in the test of time.
Also, the comment threads aren't optimized for comments - zero significant web properties built in the last 10-15 years are optimized for the putative content they contain, they're optimized for loading ~50+ third party javascripts for the purposes of spyware, data generation, analytics, A/B testing, and engagement.
People who want it will put with a lot of really terrible BS and practices to get to the content, so that gets fully taken advantage of.
Every once in a while, I bat around the idea of trying to write One TRN To Rule Them All, on the premise that trn ("Threaded ReadNews") was the peak of organized forum content, and any useful features made thereafter could be redesigned and hung off a fundamentally trn-ish framework. It would serve as a frontend for any other site out there that responded to HTTP(s) and could be called a forum, leaning on curl and ssh and smart caching and third-party databases any other tool in the toolbox to present the user with a facade that looks like Usenet did back in the early 1990s, right down to the responsiveness.
The catches here are multifold. One: I don't have the spare time. Two: there's not enough money in it to make me want to allocate spare time from other activities. Three: I'm pretty sure every existing forum I tried to do that to would quickly file a C&D. Four: it might be technologically intractable in certain important cases. Five: some major sites change their protocols so frequently that I'd never keep up. Six: by the time the other problems got solved and I *did* start writing it, someone else with more experience would likely write a better one.
Nevertheless, the idea persists. I might try it anyway someday just to have an academic sense of what the specific technical hurdles would be, and record that for anyone else wanting to give it a go.
unz went off the deep end into holocaust denial if i recall, and the whole takimag side of the paleo cons were nuts.
Steve Sailer haunting this place...not everyone forgets you write for vdare, and you were pushing the same junk back in the american conservatives comment section back in the day.
I can't tell if you're aware, but this thread is discussing the *interface*, not the *content*.
At best, you're arguing that the content was so bad that the interface couldn't keep enough people there, but (1) there are still people there and (2) you didn't say anything about what you thought of the interface.
its more important people know who Unz is, and honestly i wouldnt trust a reader of that site to have any reasonable opinion on anything. I don't take lessons on how to write a fantasy novel from Vox Day either.
those guys love to sneak into subcultures by appearing rational then you go read the unfiltered stuff and they aren't. If you hang around subcultures you see them some.
You might be right, FAIK; I visit Unz very, very rarely. But if so, how is that so different from myriad other sites whose members advertise themselves as being the voices of reason, only to kick off their shoes and masks behind closed doors and participate in their own semi-private outgroup-bashing sessions?
The only real potential difference I see here is that Unz might have an unusually good interface, that one could appreciate even while muscling past the content.
they are antisemitic. i mean the tiny value of chat architecture is not going to outweigh the sludge you need to wade through. you can't always abstract things like this. Sometimes it needs to be pointed out that regardless of that, the source really is suspect when it is not hiding it.
Philosophically musing upon the true / necessary / kind comment policy and its different possible combinations.
Can a comment somehow be untrue but necessary? Not sure what that would even entail. Curious if there are any bans on the list that were deemed necessary but untrue and unkind.
Also curious about the kind / untrue / unnecessary portion of the Venn diagram. This combo is perfectly logically coherent, but has a sort of cute “get banned but make it wholesome” energy. Curious if the ban list has any examples of that type also.
I always took the "true" requirement to not imply the opposite. Opinion, estimates, guesses, hypothesis, all don't meet the "true" requirement. They don't have to be known falsehoods to fail the "true" standard. They don't even have to be false.
I understand the goal to be if someone is writing opinion or something else that's not "true" that they should be both necessary and kind. An unkind opinion, even if relevant to the topic and sharing a real view, would get banned. A kind opinion that has nothing to do with the topic would also be banned.
Kind, untrue, unnecessary: "Well said. I award you 100 Internet points." This person clearly does not actually have the authority to represent the Internet in this fashion, and as such you can't even trust their statement that the original was well said.
Untrue but necessary: "Santa only brings toys to good children, so you'd better behave. Otherwise you'll get the Scissorman."
>Also curious about the kind / untrue / unnecessary portion of the Venn diagram.
I think I saw some bans for this on SSC of people who were friendly but frequently steering conversations to their pet topics. "Yes, and speaking of dragons, once again we see evidence for my theory that The Lord of the Rings is a Muslim work..."
The "Untrue" part would apply if you thought the information you were providing was true, but it's not. Naturally Scott can't see into your head to see if you knowingly posted something untrue, but that's why he uses the true/necessary/kind system. It doesn't care whether it was an intentional lie, just whether it was true.
So if you commented something that isn't true, whether you knew it wasn't true or not, but your comment was kind and relevant to the discussion (which is what necessary boils down to, technically no comment on a blog *needs* to happen) then you're in the clear. But if you're posting something untrue and you're being a jerk about it then you're not.
Well necessary comments are comments intended to advance the discussion. So if people are discussing the dangers of microplastics, someone could inadvertently post some inaccurate info about the subject. Maybe they'd read some bad research, or misremembered the outcome of a piece of good research. So their intent would clearly have been to advance the discussion, but in the process they'd posted something untrue.
I think comments which are kind* are much less likely to resort in a ban.
As for kind and untrue, nice little white lies of the sort people tell in person all the time? "Oh, you're beautiful/doing fine", "No, *they're* the crazy ones", &c.
*Nice might be the better word. I would argue that it's almost never kind--truly, meaningfully better in the long run--to say something which is not true.
"Untrue but necessary" might be something like a white lie you tell your kids to get them to behave. In the context of an open thread, it could be something like telling someone who's down in the dumps because of some situation "it'll get better" even though there's no way to know that that's true.
Kind, untrue, and unnecessary would be like spamming every single message in the thread "I love you and hope you have a great day"
Okay, but that would get banned because of spam, not for ideological reasons. You would get banned for that even if it was kind and true. What would theoretically be a comment that's kind but untrue and unnecessary, that could single-handedly piss off Scott enough to warrant a ban? Because I'm drawing a complete blank.
So, take something untrue and unnecessary but kind, make it sound like Josh Hawley or like Trump (or you can probably just get something like that off their Twitter feeds), get yourself banned due to being stylistically offensive to Scott. Easy.
Some people have an impression that Trumpism/MAGA can actually survive the end of Trump, whether his death, or him being out of politics due to term limits. It's an interesting thing to consider, I personally see MAGA as a cult of personality, and think it will therefore implode once the personality is out of the picture, but how do you guys see it?
As a counter to me, I think it's notable that Chavez had a cult of personality, and while I think Maduro doesn't, he did manage to keep the dictatorship going anyway.
Musk seems like the obvious successor, assuming he doesn't flame out in a couple of months like Peter Thiel did the first time. Trump has a knack for making enemies.
The movement will continue for as long as the Democrats elect people who show up to meetings with "I'm Not Listening" signs.
Yes, trump is a flawed man with a knack for marketing. But his campaign didn't run on just pure charisma. It succeeded primarily because he addressed a need that none of his rivals were willing to address.
I don't really think of politicians as hypnotist masterminds. I think of politicians as chemists who beget precipitation. The energy of the campaign must already lie dormant in the political environment to be usefully harvested. Regardless of whether or not trump's cult of personality can hold after he exits, the environmental conditions that lead to his rise will likely linger. And I find that infinitely more interesting than the orange-man himself.
Actually, I think it's a bit of both. Scott Adams came out in favor of Trump in 2015 claiming that Trump had mastered hypnotism and manipulation at a high level, and looking at the results, that really seems to be the case - how else could a billionaire real-estate businessman from NY convince people that he's going to fight for the common man and drain the swamp?
But as you say, there has to be some underlying dissatisfaction to tap into (which may be more or less justified). I suspect the seed for Trump's harvest was sown when Reagan started spreading the idea that the government is the enemy, rather than an ally who needs to be kept honest and on track. This is now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The best outcome I can think of is a spectacular multi-dimensional failure that reminds people that yes, a mostly-competent, mostly-well-meaning, slighly-corrupt government really is soooo much better than a mostly-inept, mostly-malicous, completely-corrupt one. I hope that that, combined with taking Trump himself out of the picture for good, will be enough for a collective "WTF were we thinking?" moment. No guarantee though, and the longer it lasts, the worse the prognosis.
When I say "hypnotist", I'm moreso referring to the cartoonish caricature of hypnotism, rather than NLP. E.g. I'm always puzzled by people who say "if only I could go back in time and assassinate baby Hitler". As if Hitler's cunning puppeteering were the singular cause of WW2/Holocaust/etc; as if he weren't a vessel for the collective subconscious of a certain segment of the German Republic. So we're basically in agreement here. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss for better diction than "hypnotist". I'm open to suggestions.
I'm not really sure I blame Reagan's cynicism though. E.g. ik Carlos follows the bugman. So I expect he knows just as well as I do that "democracy" as it exists in the platonic realm, bears a striking dissimilarity to "democracy" as implemented in meatspace by the USG. Normie-cons have only recently noticed the existence of the Deep State. But allegedly, the dissonance between the platonic realm vs meatspace has existed at least since FDR and the Warren Court. Sure, maybe Reagan sowed distrust. But was he the root cause? or simply the messenger.
> how else could a billionaire real-estate businessman from NY convince people that he's going to fight for the common man and drain the swamp?
To reiterate, I'm aware [0] that Trump is quite adept in the Dark Arts (or alternatively, "the Art of the Deal"). But also, it's more than that. Working-class guys see him as one of their own, despite his networth, because of the class-signifiers. He's got a gold-plated mansion, he watches Professional 'Rastling, and he eats at McDonalds. In contrast, Paris Hilton wouldn't be caught dead with a BigMac.
[EDIT_2:
(I'm pretty damn certain this was in my initial draft of this comment. So I can only assume substack truncated it? Lately, I've noticed Bugstack acting in other weird ways, as well. E.g. my notifications are currently out of chronological order.)
> I hope that that, combined with taking Trump himself out of the picture for good, will be enough for a collective "WTF were we thinking?" moment.
I'm skeptical. imo, it was the Pax Americana of the 1990's that was abnormal. (I'm struggling mightily not to sardonically reference the fukuyama cliche.) "But fance, weren't things kinda normal before the 1990's?" Well for one thing, "the USG asked students to hide under their desk during nuclear drills" doesn't really strike me as normal.]
EDIT_0:
> that reminds people that yes, a mostly-competent, mostly-well-meaning, slighly-corrupt government really is soooo much better than a mostly-inept, mostly-malicous, completely-corrupt one
I think this speaks to the political divide. libs and lefties liked the former status quo of technocracy/meritocracy. The conservatives feel deeply betrayed. As one small example, the fact that the Democratic Party nominated Kamala in a primary "election" that wasn't actually a very *democratic*, represents another small piece of evidence that something has gone deeply wrong. You can come up with all sorts of justifications about how "only the secondary elections are supposed to be democratic", etc. But it won't dispel the cognitive-dissonance. The conservative perspective is "idiot who's trying his best" >>> "competent elites who are corrupt and pure evil".
"E.g. I'm always puzzled by people who say "if only I could go back in time and assassinate baby Hitler". As if Hitler's cunning puppeteering were the singular cause of WW2/Holocaust/etc; as if he weren't a vessel for the collective subconscious of a certain segment of the German Republic."
I think this is a fairly good analogy, but I disagree with your conclusion. I think most people who say that are pretty well aware that Hitler was backed by thousands (and eventually millions) of people who were willing to...y'know...be Nazis. And that those people would have existed even in a timeline where Hitler died prematurely. But them *existing* isn't the problem, at least not the whole problem. There's no guarantee that they would have had the necessary cohesion, organization and luck necessary to seize control of the Republic if Hitler hadn't given the movement the form and direction he did. The Weimar Republic also had communists, liberals, old-guard conservatives like Hindenberg and more: it wasn't obvious in, say, 1925 that one of those factions would end up on top and crush all the others, much less that it would be Nazism specifically. Now granted all that, I think taking your time machine a bit farther back and scrapping the treaty of Versailles and imposing less odious surrender terms on Germany would be *more* likely to prevent the Really Bad Things from happening. But that sounds harder to do than just shooting one guy.
Likewise in the present: I think certainly the conditions for the MAGA movement existed since at least 2010 or so. But it's not at all clear that it's particular brand of "conservatism[1]" would have surged to prominence and taken over the Republican Party in the same time or in the same way without Trump. Even as it was, Trump won neither the primary nor the general election by a landslide: if he'd been nowhere to be found, it's possible that his base would have found some ideologically-similar but less effective person to rally around proceeding to lose one election on another. Or it's possible that the movement wouldn't have found a nucleus at that point at all, and those people would have spend the next few election cycles on the fringes of the party growing increasingly mad and increasingly disconnected from the mainstream. We barely even have to speculate to see what that looks like: it's pretty much exactly what happened with the portion of the left that vocally backed Bernie Sanders. In 10 years they've never managed to get a significant voice in the party and their resulting frustration may have (very debatably) cost Democrats two of the past 3 presidential elections.
Regarding the future: it's possible that the past 10 years will have build enough structure and common knowledge among the MAGA-inclined that they'll stick together as a political force after Trump. It's also possible that they won't. Very difficult to say. Obviously they're not going to disappear, but big-tent coalition-based politics means even pretty large movements can be subordinated by the larger party and largely lose the ability to steer them.
[1] Scare quotes because its so far from anything that usually bears the name.
[N.b. my last comment was mysteriously truncated.]
Yes, this is fair. On one hand, the leader does give form by providing something tangible to nucleate around. (Notice that my choice of analogy in my initial comment was "precipitation".) Hitler didn't even have a true majority. And then you've got Horseshoe Theory claiming that extremists are fungible, to some extent. So yes, Hitler was uniquely-necessary to bring about several particulars of history. Thus, assassinating Hitler might have been extremely useful.
But on the other hand, Nazis were big mad. E.g. the Nazis had a paramilitary org that was willing to throw down in the street. Anytime the negative-energy rises to that level, I feel like chaos in some form is inevitable. Granted, I don't think the typical Trumpist is mad enough to brawl with Antifa yet. But a subset was mad enough to organize Jan 6th, and many more are mad enough cheer on DOGE uprooting parts of the Administrative Branch (yes, you heard me correctly). If Trump hadn't come along to give that anger form, I suspect the anger would have continued to fester and grow, until it was profitable enough for someone else to step up and give their grievances an avatar.
On that note, I'm not sure Trumpism is really comparable to Bernie-ism. Socialism (in general) strikes me as... well, it's certainly alive. But it's old and stagnant. I don't think it's growing [0], and I don't think it's currently a gateway to anything more radical. Whereas (exactly as you say,) the current wave of Populism seems to have existed only since ~2010 [1], and since then grown in both size and extremism.
Also, when I say "I've said it before and I'll say it again", I'm referring to past comments such as [2]. I.e. isn't it *interesting* that Populism seems to have arose simultaneously across Europe? However you explain the rise of Trump, it also has to account for say, Meloni. And isn't it *interesting* that Milei is using similar rhetoric as Trump, despite the pro-immigrant/libertarian policy platform? I often struggle to find analyses which account for these observations (even among MAGA-sympathetic conservatives). More often, people pretend that Trump is a miraculous singleton. If you can empathize with this perspective, maybe you can see why my earlier comments de-emphasize Trump's uniqueness. Every time I see another take that psychoanalyzes Trump and his cult of personality, there's part of me that wants to shout "Guys, isn't that enough? There's things at play that are much more interesting!"
EDIT_1: And while I'm dropping links, I just remembered that I recently read a post by Sawyer which offers a reasonably-thorough rundown [3] of the GAE (Global American Empire). I'm pretty confident that this is what the Populists are really reacting to, though many of them don't seem to have a clear, legible grasp of what they're fighting against. And yes, this is what my information diet looks like, these days. The Overton Window hasn't been paying its epistemic rent.
[0] EDIT_0: well, it's growing in popularity among millennials. But somehow, I feel like any victory for Socialism in the US is going to remain in the Overton Window.
"it's possible that his base would have found some ideologically-similar but less effective person to rally around proceeding to lose one election on another"
I mean... that's exactly what the Tea Party was: a decade of floundering before they found the right figurehead.
I think you're missing the middle 80% or so, who listen to Trump and think "this man is full of crap" but then listen to Harris and think "this woman is full of crap too" and eventually just decide to hold their nose and vote for whoever they think is the lesser evil.
Trump has his rusted-on fans, it's true, but modelling 52% of the country that way is to miss the point. The point is all the people who can look at Trump, see his very obvious flaws, and still decide to vote for him because they (rightly?) perceive that the other side is even worse.
There's nothing at all novel about a rich guy successfully selling himself as a tribune of the people-- FDR managed it in spite of the hoity-toity mid-Atlantic accent.
I think Trump has caused a long term shift in the ideology and the base of the Republican Party which will outlive him. Whether you want to call that "Trumpism/MAGA" is up to you.
If Trump was competent enough to successfully accomplish his goals I would say that it could continue. He's definitely tapping into an ideology which has broad popular support, so if he was able to successfully advance that ideology then I think it would gain serious momentum and blaze a trail that future politicians could follow. However I expect the wheels to come off soon and in spectacular fashion. He's going to trigger a nasty recession and all of his reforms will likely dissolve in a flurry of lawsuits and bureaucractic resistance. I expect him to leave office ignominiously which will essentially destroy the movement. But who knows, politics is strange. Vance seems like a decent leader, maybe he'll be able pick up the pieces.
One thing that I think might persist is the notion that being anti-woke/progressive is politically powerful. Trump tapped into that and enabled some ideological infrastructure to coalesce around it. Whatever else happens to MAGA hopefully that will persist. Maybe the next guy will be able to use it more effectively.
> I personally see MAGA as a cult of personality, and think it will therefore implode once the personality is out of the picture, but how do you guys see it?
I dont see trump as infallible nor anyone else thinks so(see, trump rallys where he's boo`d for vaxxines) but he is a lynch pin of gathering very diverse right wing
Pretty sure we are looking at a cult of personality. The GOP may have trouble finding a replacement as shameless as Trump to carry the torch.
To lie and lie and lie for years knowing you are lying without a qualm of remorse or embarrassment even when it’s common knowledge you are lying is a unique gift.
Add his complete lack of every day ordinary morality or empathy, throw in a dash of feral cunning and a penchant for casual cruelty and you have unique powers of demagoguery.
Unlike all other politicians, who have definitely never lied...
I would actually argue Trump is one of the most honest and transparent presidents in recent times, as long as you correct for his rhetorical style. For example, he is absolutely right (in the context of the point he's making) that one one has even heard of Lesotho.
A majority of Americans don't know where Ukraine is. It's far larger, far more important, and politically relevant right now.
The number of people who read a "decent" daily newspaper must be remarkably low. Google says about 7% of Americans read a daily national newspaper at all, 11% read local papers. Not sure what you mean by "decent."
That's the thing about low brow populism. Most people don't know a thing about Lesotho and never heard of it before. Pretending that there's a real constituency among people who know that kind of thing is trying to ignore reality. That's part of why Trump is president, that he recognized that a majority of the country wasn't represented and offered to represent them. Whether he's succeeding at their goals or cares about them are open questions, but he doesn't doubt they exist. That's a big difference between him and his opponents. He'd be a lot more popular if he wasn't so sleazy and incompetent.
I think many GOP politicians will try very hard to be the successor to Trump. This struggle has the potential to get very ugly if they can't enforce party discipline. Depending on how the next 4 years actually go, I think Vance has the best chance to inherit some portion of the Trump cult of personality.
Do the Republicans have party discipline? Trump seems to have it, by dint of popularity. That is, Republican voters really like him. That's not the same thing to me as party discipline, where party leaders can enforce rules on their members even if the rules are unpopular.
I don’t think Vance has the shamelessness or the ruthlessness to pull those stunts.
It’s fucking incredible the contortions he puts his - and at this point it is *his* party - through. The things they must say that go against their own life long values to stay in his good graces.
An expression of fealty is what he requires.
Trump is very much like six-year-old Anthony Fremont, the kid with god like powers to - literally in Anthony’s case - destroy anyone who crosses him in the old Twilight Zone episode, ‘It’s a Good Life.’
Sure, if something happens to Trump before the end of his term, Vance will become President. But I don't think he'll have anywhere near as much control of the party as Trump has.
Thats true of all successors; if you have a warlord you crowned himself king and very clearly says "my son shall rule" even when its goes well, people will talk and question authority.
Not all successors. For some rulers, their power is pretty much all "the law says we obey this guy", so when he dies all his power goes to whoever the law says to obey now.
The question was clearly about endorsing someone for 2028, not about who becomes President if he dies before 2028.
It's unreasonable to expect Trump to endorse anyone yet. Biden didn't endorse Kamala until she had the nomination in the bag. Obama didn't endorse Biden until he had the nomination in the bag. Even Reagan didn't endorse Bush until May of 1988. Endorsing a successor nearly four years in advance is just a dumb move on anyone's part; the endorsement is supposed to be a reward for loyalty.
Like a lot of strongmen, having a successor is having an alternative is having a competitor. When some banana republic's leader dies there's this huge vacuum because anyone else capable of doing the job has been defenestrated or gotten a helicopter ride. Often the leader deliberately cultivate this precarious scenario, because any outsider who thinks they can liberate the people will be facing a disaster. Too Big(man) To Fail.
If there was a survey the day of the vp announcement that asked "if the 5th assassination attempt of trump succeeds who should be president" if republications said 0% vance; it would be falsified therefore falsifiable.
Team Trump is working very hard to institutionalized Trumpism. I don’t know if four years will be long enough, but it might. Unless we have another complete purge of the bureaucracy the next time a Democrat is elected. I think their chances are pretty good for Trumpism to outlive Trump.
"Trumpism" began in US politics long before Trump showed up (ie, the Tea Party, arguably Reagan), and will likely continue long after he is gone. There are tens of millions of voters in this country who see long standing domestic Federal policy as incompatible with their preferred life choices. That's not going to change.
Like, it's 2028. Republicans have to nominate somebody. If, say, Ron DeSantis or JD Vance doesn't win, who does and why? Will they lose the 2028 election? Maybe, but if so which voting block is going to pivot from Republican to Democrat?
Like, the Republican party is not magically going to disappear when Trump leaves office, barring truly extreme events they will be running a candidate in 2028, 2032, & 2036 who will receive at least 40% of the vote because they are not "extremely hated outgroup". What materially, quantifiably, do you expect to occur?
Romney -> Trump was a massive shift in the Republican party. It seems plausible to me that a similar shift might occur again, even if it's hard to tell in advance what it would look like.
So Trump would overperform a generic Republican candidate? Millions of people will vote for Donald Trump rather than, say, Ron DeSantis?
Because that's not what occurred in 2016 and 2020 (1). In fact, the general idea in Republican politics for most of this period was "Trump has tapped into something new, like immigration being far more unpopular with large chunks of the voters than previously believed. We should find someone who can run on that without his...horrific verbal tics." This was the Trumpism without Trump dream.
It's also not how I model most anti-Trump people viewing Trump. Most of them tend to think of him as a horrible candidate with bad campaigning skills.
Not trying to be contrarian, I was honestly expecting you to point to some internal chaos within the GOP causing splits or other dramatic internal conflict.
Trump overperforms alternatives because his supporters believe he's on their side. Republican voters were wary of DeSantis in 2024 because they weren't sure he was authentic or just playing a game (taking on the obvious mannerisms of Trump instead of like, his goals). That DeSantis thought people would fall for him acting like Trump says he didn't really understand what they wanted.
Vance seems like he's genuine in his real goals. He cares about people like those he grew up with. He's also getting a lot of flack from Democrats/media/establishment elites that brands him the same way Trump has been. He can't go back to the elite now that he's gone so far down his current path. I think that's something Democrats have badly misunderstood. Every criticism they throw at Trump is evidence that Trump has the correct enemies, not that Trump is bad in the way they indicate.
I see it like this: there are a lot of voters who want a stronger stance on immigration, a more isolationist foreign policy, a reduction in federal spending on "wasteful" programs, etc.
However, these are things that the mainstream press, universities, and organizers in both parties are against.
So there's always been a difficult bargain: a politician can pick up a lot of votes if they're willing to enrage these institutions and their own party against them.
After Trump leaves politics, that bargain will still be available for another politician, but it's not clear if anyone will take it.
"a reduction in federal spending on "wasteful" programs"
everyone wants that, almost by definition, and Republicans promising to cut it does not originate with Trump
It doesn't happen because most of what's "wasteful" but hasn't been cut already is more accurately termed "corruption" (and therefore has allies in the government preventing its cuts - and Trump's no exception there, look at all the Musk contracts)
It's not just "corruption". Everyone has different preferences and generally "waste" is just code for "preferences of people other than the current speaker".
I think it's more than that though. Everyone SAYS while they're campaigning that they're going to cut waste, and everyone else knows that they mean other people's preferences. The difference is that most politicians, once they get into office, find it more advantageous to continue already-appropriated spending and push for more spending in areas they care about. AFAIK Trump is the first to actually use the (constitutionally-debatable) power of the executive to cut contracts, fire employees en masse, etc.
A normal politician knows that voters will nod along with "cut waste" in the abstract, but won't be happy if you actually cut stuff. Then there's also the illegal *manner* in which Trump and Musk are doing things. That's two different ways they differ from the norm.
So speaking of people who are possibly banned by now, I figured I'd put this out here since our esteemed host and commenters should be aware of how this blog has touched its reader's lives.
Right after the election there was a thread where in the comments people were discussing how Trump would probably abuse the FBI and other organs of state to get revenge on his enemies.
There was a commenter who popped in, I'm not sure if a regular or a rando, who came in very worked up about how liberals were massive hypocrites to talk about this because they already use the law to crush their enemies; he was very convinced some guy Mr XYZ was being persecuted and spending Christmas in jail instead of with his infant kids.
Then he said something I'm going to think about the rest of my life. As direct a quote as I remember, "When I read people like you, it makes it obvious liberals are people who weren't bullied enough as children. I'm looking forward to seeing you people get what you deserve."
I looked up this martyr Mr XYZ... he was in jail for election interference, in particular targeting ads at Democrats with the wrong election date and instructing people to vote by text. Maybe not the kind of tricks that the high-IQ readers of this blog might fall for, but still, you know, election interference, which is a federal crime.
So I was left with the thought that our brave commenter who was so worked up, either sees nothing wrong with someone putting out these kind of cynical lies, or (more likely imo) read something somewhere that was completely misleading and portrayed Mr XYZ as a martyr to feed the OUTRAGE machine. Either way, his OUTRAGE button was pushed hard enough for him to get him salivating at violence against strangers. Over a cynical liar, a "ratfucker" as Nixon would have called him.
I should mention that like probably many readers of this blog, I was bullied plenty as a kid, and I am a leftist. Probably one of the formative things that pushed me in that direction actually. So his words kind of struck a nerve.
In that moment, it crystallized for me a hard truth: there are people out there who will take joy in my pain, over complete bullshit they read on the Internet. And there's no negotiating with someone who get off on your pain. These people are out there, and there are more and more of them every day. Maybe these people intend to keep their sadism confined to internet posting, but every day I see internet edgelordism bleeding into real life more and more.
So, I did something I never thought I'd do. Two days later after mulling it over I applied for my FOID. Last week, after doing some research and rentals at the range I came home with a Walther PDP handgun. It's very ergonomic.
I hope to God I never have to use it. But, I am increasingly convinced something horrible is coming and I have a feeling I'm going to need it to defend myself or the people I care about. I'm not alone either. I've convinced two of my friends and we've been going to the range together.
So, dear brave commenter, if you're reading this and not banned yet: think carefully how much blood your grievances are worth. I don't intend to fire the first shot, but I deal with life and death in my work every day, and I'm fully prepared to accept what happens if I have to pull the trigger to defend myself. Are you?
If you haven't taken any formal classes yet, I'd like to strongly advise you and your friends do so. First step is making sure trigger discipline becomes the deepest kind of muscle memory, and then going from there. If you can find a range or club which will let you do live draws, that's a price above rubies.
The worst people reside on the Internet, because it's the only community they can reach without leaving the house. There's some jackass who's been trolling another site I read - about videogames, the chillest of subjects - for, like, three years now. One would figure they would get tired after having every comment deleted for three years, but apparently that one-sided negativity is the best thing they have going for them.
Like, that linked commenter is just flat-out telling you he got the shit kicked out of him in school. I highly doubt he's any kind of physical threat.
The Walther PDP is a fine pistol and likely accurate enough for competition if you'd like to try out marksmanship as a hobby. Its also very modular and has excelent machining tolerances, so you can swap a competition barrel and other attachements very easily to it. An excellent fire arm all around.
owning a firearm is foolish though. Men who do are 8 times more likely to kill themselves than non gun owners, and if you have a family the majority of kids killed by firearms are killed in the home and you need to be ironclad to keep all guns locked and unloaded at all times to prevent kids or teens from getting to them.
for self-defense, you will likely never use the gun. its not that common you get a situation where it is the only option left to you and i dont think this readership is forced to have one because they cannot escape from areas with sizable risk where you need it.
honestly getting a gun is more liability than benefit apart from small edge cases most people wont see.
> "for self-defense, you will likely never use the gun. its not that common you get a situation where it is the only option left to you and i dont think this readership is forced to have one because they cannot escape from areas with sizable risk where you need it."
Heeeeeey, boy, are you wrong!
I'm a 5'2" woman and I've used the pistol I've been carrying for 23 years to dissuade robberies by strangers on two separate occasions in two separate states. I didn't point my weapon at my would-be attackers, but I visibly indicated that I had it and was very, very prepared to use it, and they retreated without the encounter escalating to the level of a statistic.
Many gun owners have stories like mine. A guy I dated who caught an intruder breaking into his car on his property and halted a charge with an iron bar by firing into the ground (wouldn't have been my move, but it was effective; the intruder laid down on the ground until the sheriff arrived). My best friend broke up a random parking lot fight which was about to involve vehicular manslaughter. Another friend chased a prowler off her back porch by racking her shotgun at the back door.
Aside from the guy I dated who held his intruder until arrest and then pressed charges, none of these events were ever officially recorded anywhere. Usually it's because the serious crime about to happen never happens, and sometimes it's because either the gunowner or the police officers (or both!) very rightly don't want to potentially punish the would-be victim of a crime by drawing attention to the fact they own a gun.
Then there are the secondary benefits of carrying a deadly force weapon, like the way the gun's threat to *you* makes you more alert to potential threats and the way your body language is informed by a certainty that you *can* defend yourself (in most cases). There were a handful of times over the years where I believe it's likely I was being assessed as a potential victim, but my unusual display of confidence and acute awareness of those watching me shut down temptation before any attempt was made. Solo lions rarely take the risk of going after an adult Cape buffalo who's already looking at them, and human predators are no different when they realize their prey has a good chance of maiming or killing them.
the problem is you can't expect to keep getting lucky that just showing or non-violently using it will happen. if you are ever at a point where you need it to use its the last hope you have to control a situation you should have dealt with in other ways prior.
and unfortunately people aren't always responsible or rational. i mean even police officers deal with people who aren't deterred by it. you can't keep living in the area where your 5-2 self is in danger or walk or be alone like that. that is the only real solution. it sucks but rolling the dice sucks too
Sure, I've gotten "lucky" in that the most likely thing to happen during a threatening encounter has always happened to me (the gun was there but didn't need to be fired). I happened to encounter the most common type of slow-moving, there-were-signs threats. It's always possible that I'll be less lucky and the timing/spacing won't be in my favor.
But who cares?
The point is that I've ALREADY prevented two imminent attacks by carrying a gun, attacks which would have been frightening at best and deadly at worse. And all over the country, uncountable others are doing exactly the same.
> "you can't keep living in the area where your 5-2 self is in danger or walk or be alone like that. that is the only real solution. it sucks but rolling the dice sucks too"
Oh, thank you! So you're offering to purchase me a new home and round the clock armed private security? That's a really wonderful and generous solution! I appreciate you going to the effort!
The statistics this post is based on were compiled in a prolonged period of internal peace in the United States in which the only real threat was violent crime. They are of limited utility if the country does shift into civil unrest or wide-scale political violence (if OP is politically active).
I don't think OP counts as a troll. I have had 5 patients express ideas more extreme than OP's, and none of them are even slightly psychotic. They have high-functioning autism, and/or anxiety and/or depression. Two expect violence in the street, and are becoming preppers. One Jewish man is afraid Jews will be attacked and beaten on his university campus. (To date there have been protests, but no incidents of that sort.). One woman wanted to get her tubes tied because she was afraid of being raped, getting pregnant, and then not being able to get an abortion. And one can't understand how any Democrat could want to do anything other than fight Trumpism in the present era. Also, some acquaintances have asked me whether I think there will be gun battles in the streets. And I know two young couples who are thinking very seriously of moving out of the country because of the political situation.
outdated my ass, my own grandfather was living proof of this. the statistics for increased suicide are not outdated in the slightest and sandy hook was a huge example of how owning guns was a detriment; her kid got access to them.
honestly guns are for killing people and animals and its far less likely that they are used on others because its incredibly rare. you have to be extremely responsible in securing and using them and they are the biggest danger to you and your family since they are always around you.
Another way guns are dangerous: If you pull a gun on someone who also has a weapon, they will of course pull out their weapon too. Then, iff they are more experienced with weapons and/or more toughened to actually using them -- as they almost certainly are -- they will use their weapon on you before you get your head screwed on straight and fire yours. And if the robber or rioter or Right-Winger-of-Doom does not have a gun but is tougher and more used to violent encounters than you are he will yank that gun out of your hand and point it at you.
People on both sides have the capacity to be cruel and dumb as fuck. Here's a story about a Woke event. I heard it from a honest, reliable person who was there. First year grad students in a humanities field are getting to know each other prior to the start of classes. One of them is a Chinese man. His English is good, but he has never been to the US before, only arrived a few days or weeks ago. Another is a thin black woman, born and raised in the US. The Chinese guy compliments the black woman on her thinness, saying something about gracefulness -- the compliment does not come across as flirtatious, just as well-intended but kind of odd. The black woman says angrily that in her culture thinness is unattractive, and that the guy should not be commenting on her appearance without understanding the cultural context. Chinese guy says wow, he's sorry, but after all he had no idea that she would be offended by his comment. Black woman says ignorance is no excuse, he should not have said what he did, and apologizing and explaining does not settle the matter, that's the same bullshit that perpetuates systemic racism. Continues in this vein for a while. The other grad students watch this exchange and nobody says a word.
I have heard many many people on the left make cruel fun of Trump voters. They've joked that a wall should be build around Texas and all the MAGA maggots with their guns should be dumped in and left to self-govern their giant Texas trailer park. I have heard many people on the left wish that Trump would drop dead, or that attempted assassins have had better aim. I have said the same myself.
Buying a gun is going further in that direction. You are better off owning your own meanness, and then learning to manage it.
Just because we’re all the product of fashions, cultural or moralizing, current when we were in school - I really did a double take the first of many times I saw a political sign in the yard of a million-dollar home here, showing Greg Abbott being pushed off a cliff.
i'm reading Indonesia: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani, and in one chapter she talks about the Aceh separatist movement.
like a black lady being mildly cross with you is nothing compared to being forced to swallow your ID card at gunpoint because its out of date, and that was being lucky. Cruelty is people with guns looking for "headaches," and i think people here need to breathe a bit.
Who would you put forward in this scenario as someone who has learned to manage their meanness well? I think the student you spoke of probably learned an important cultural lesson that day, that you do not comment on people's bodies unless you know them well and have their permission, and that doesn't feel like a left-right thing.
The more fundamental principle she was leaning on was that one should do nothing for fear of it being offensive in some context. The problem with this principle is that doing nothing is itself offensive in some contexts. Therefore, anyone is potentially guilty of offense at any time, any place; someone else need merely assert it, whether it's true or not.
The lesson to take from that, in turn, is that there are even deeper interpersonal norms, such as polite silence or apology, that her principles are exploiting for her own gain, and that people should not honor those sorts of principles.
That poor unfortunate newcomer from China will hopefully happen upon that lesson, but it doesn't come naturally. He may indeed simply infer that certain people are just mean. It's certainly easier.
Or, equally probably, he learned a different cultural lesson, and maybe more than one, pick a winner:
women are mean
americans are mean
blacks are mean
etc.
It'd be one thing, totally appropriate, to let him know that this kind of comment is rude, and accept his apology. It's another thing to tear him a new one and tell him he is a terrible human. The first thing may teach him better manners, the second thing may teach him that he might as well throw a Naz..., I mean, Roman salute, people will hate you anyways.
Yep, I hope you're wrong about the outcome there, but I also think it's unfair to expect people who are the target of rude or ignorant comments to respond perfectly in that moment. You mentioned the group of silent bystanders to this conversation, and that jumped out to me as a missed opportunity. I hope someone approached him with some friendly guidance after the incident you witnessed.
You can't expect people to be perfect, but can expect them to be better than this woman was. Consider your own demographics, and some compliment the Chinese guy might have paid you that is, from your point of view, insensitive. Maybe you're Jewish and he says, "I admire the pro-Israel stance American Jews have." Maybe you're a researcher looking for a job in business, and he says "I admire people like you who are motivated only by love of knowledge, and don't care about money." So clearly there is a lot he doesn't get, and you'll probably want him to get that straight. But would you just explain to him what he doesn't get, and caution him against saying that sort of thing to others? Or would you excoriate him at length in front of his new peer group? When he apologizes and explains that there are nuances he didn't know about, would you accept his apology, or tell him he's still not off the hook?
I'm a white guy in a very white city, skinny, well educated, I have a good job, I'm financially secure, I'm a US citizen, I'm straight, cisgender, neurotypical, I don't really have personal familiarity with being the target of daily microaggressions or direct threats or criticisms or unwanted attention based on my appearance or identity.
If someone made one of those backhanded comments to me, about my religious or ethnic identity or career choice, it would probably irk me in the moment but roll off my back pretty quick, because my status associated with the above qualities isn't under threat, and it's generally valued by default as I move through the world.
ONE time I can remember, during a work event, a colleague I barely know made an unwanted comment to me where others could easily overhear, saying that a particular aspect of my body was sexy.
That was probably the closest relevant experience I've had that I can remember. I was shocked and didn't say anything immediately, but in a few minutes when I realized what had happened and kind of confirmed for myself that that was inappropriate, I turned to another colleague and said, "Did you hear what [initial commenter] said to me? That's really weird, right? Why would they say that?"
The person who said the original comment overheard me commenting to the other colleague, and later came up to me to apologize during a break. I said it wasn't a big deal, but that I wasn't really used to receiving that kind of comment about my body, and it seems like a really inappropriate thing to do, especially in a professional setting like where we were both working that day.
In that moment I had the capacity to deal with that comment in a way that I felt was corrective yet respectful -- but still not perfect! I imagine the woman in the original story (which again we are evaluating THIRD-hand) might have had to deal with similar questionable comments about her body on a regular basis over a long period. We have no idea what was going on with her that day, or over the course of her life.
Frankly I'm kind of disgusted that there are more people in this thread coming to the defense of the adult man who made an inappropriate comment rather than the person who was the target of that comment in this case.
The silent bystanders earned no stars here, sure. Unfortunately they almost never do. I second your hope that maybe someone at least try to talk to the poor guy afterwards.
It's impossible to know the subtle norms of another culture without living there. During that same era I had a Chinese grad student patient, and needed to tell him all kinds of stuff about American norms. Don't say 'fuck,' 'fart,' and other crass words around people unless they first use those words themselves (I had to teach him the list of crass words). Don't wear a suit on the first date, and don't give the woman flowers and do not shower her with compliments about her appearance. Hardly anyone expects you to take off your shoes when you enter their office, and if you take them off when no one else does it's a bit weird. It's better to let women go through doors ahead of you -- some old school ones are offended if you don't. Jeez, it was the obvious sensible, humane thing to do. It's ridiculously entitled to get mad at someone's innocent mistake when they've just arrived.
I think people are way more aggressive on the internet than they would be IRL (I've even noticed that phenomenon in myself). Probably not a bad idea to own a gun, if only for insurance against tail risk, but yeah, I don't necessarily infer much about the real world from internet aggression.
I'm worried that this is less and less true the deeper we disappear up our own algo-driven, AI curated buttholes
Pretty soon they're I think going to construct a bubble for everyone that OUTRAGES you and you alone at maximum efficiency without ever needing to interact with another human being at all
Maybe then, once the internet fully transforms into a house of mirrors, we'll get off the internet and start having productive discussions IRL? Perhaps time is just a flat circle
Here on this particular piece of the internet you yourself contributed heat to the divisions among people here. First you describe an enraged, misinformed
right-winger, making no acknowledgement at all that some of the right are civilized and well-informed, then you. announce you’ve got a fucking gun. You have now made it harder for anyone on the right to have a civil exchange with you because you have implied they are all meanie asshole whack jobs and you’ve announced that you’re armed. You, buddy, are the outrage bubble generator in action
> I think people are way more aggressive on the internet than they would be IRL (I've even noticed that phenomenon in myself).
Only to the degree the internet remains uncensored; if german speech laws that hold where insults are outlawed people will both respond to incentives and create incentives.
Alex jones if he hasnt shut up yet will never shut up from soft methods. Its more effective to shadow ban(at least for populations with gun rights) but it has an upper limit.
There this old adage that I learned I about playwriting. “If you bring a gun on stage in the first act, you better make damn sure that it’s used in the second.”
I was sorry you got banned, because I thought your comments were getting more civilized and smarter over time. However, now that you are banned even I object to you coming back so provocatively, with the same name and letters rearranged. Cut it out, for god's sake. Take some time off and then if you want come back, do it with a completely different name, not a nose-thumbing one. You'll have to give up your brand recognition, which will, IMO, be a good thing.
Yeah, even speaking as one of the people who drew a firm line of bluntly telling the guy not to engage with me, I had noticed the same improvement over time and was honestly on the fence about whether the comment in question really justified a ban.
But then you get this post ban behavior that just keeps proving Scott's point one alt trollpost at a time.
I would caution you against accepting the other sides framing of the problem. Spreading paranoia strengthens them, because frightened people are easier to control. I don't know your situation and can't advise you on whether or not to own a firearm, but if your only reason for obtaining one is fear of random violence by sadists, then that probably isn't the right solution.
Remember, they say most of the stuff they say because they are trying to shock you. That's right out of their playbook. That's literally what "trolling" means. They are trying to exercise power over you with provocative language. Treating them with cool contempt is the best revenge.
I'm a semi Trump supporter. I probably would have voted for him, but when I told my daughter that she had a cow. And so for the second presidential election in a row I wrote in Tulsi Gabbard. (That's just a little background for you.) I don't think it's nearly as bad as you think. Instead of listening to rando a-holes on the web, try and get out and talk with the other side. Go out to some place in rural america, hang out some and talk with people there. They are 95% nice people, (sure some a-holes everywhere.) About the gun, I hope you take some lessons on how to use it and be safe with it. In fact gun lessons could be the perfect opportunity to meet some Trump supporters. Good luck and don't panic.
Oh about Trump and Kash Patel and the FBI. This is just my take on things, but I don't expect them to 'go after' their political enemies. Trump talks tough, "Lock her up." But usually doesn't follow through. I read/ heard somewhere that when someone in his last administration suggested they go after Hillary, he said, "no forget it" or something to that effect. I have no idea if that is tru or not. But they didn't go after her.
I find it difficult to be sanguine about this when the deputy Attorney General, I believe, demanded a list of all FBI agents who were involved in any January 6 investigations.. I believe some very high-level FBI people were forced to resign when they tried to get in the way of this. Window dressing?
Oh I assume not window dressing. I don't know any details (nor do I want to know.) but there is plenty of chatter in Trumpland, over the FBI being weaponized against Trump.
I think it's rather dangerous to rest our faith in the American legal system on the whimsy of one man. The mere fact that he *could* plausibly go after them signifies that damage has already been done.
I don't think one man controls our legal system. And yes the damage has been done. But from my perspective the most recent cases of lawfare have been against Trump. He's convicted of twenty some felons you know. :^) (That was meant with sarcasm.)
Yes. I don't think that the President should have an unrestricted power of pardon in the 1st place, but since he does, I don't think Biden felt he had a choice.
> In that moment, it crystallized for me a hard truth: there are people out there who will take joy in my pain, over complete bullshit they read on the Internet. And there's no negotiating with someone who get off on your pain.
Okay, technically speaking, sadists do not get off on your pain specifically, they get off on hurting people. Might seem like semantics, but there's a meaningful difference there, because getting off on other's pain requires empathizing with the victim. Sadists mostly gain satisfaction from dominance through violence, humiliation, and dehumanization. Therefore, psychopaths can be sadists, and sadists can get off on harming things they don't empathize with, such as animals.
There are people who directly get off on other's pain, but very unintuitively, these people are often masochists. I like to call them masochists-by-proxy. Ironically, these people's desires are often MORE fucked up due to the fact that they are much more focused on the pain and suffering the victim is going through.
Okay, completely unrelated tangent aside, you should probably leave the country if possible. This country is a lost cause. One gun is going to do jack squat against the coming flood.
I don't think sadism works as cleanly as you describe. Many of the things you say ring true but many others don't.
For example I don't know how enjoying somebody else's pain requires empathy but enjoying hurting them does not. At least in my experience the "hurting others" part is because of the feeling it makes the other person feel and the reaction it evokes. Which should require at least as much empathy as enjoying pain itself requires.
I'll grant that what sadism means differs wildly between sadists, but that's just more reason to say it's messier than your description.
Because it's a show of dominance. What matters isn't the victims' capacity for emotion, but their level of agency. Beating the shit out if emotionless robots isn't quite as good as the real thing, but it's still pretty good. The important part is that you have an opponent to overcome and humiliate.
Dominance and submission are extremely important tropes in human beings and most warm blooded animals for that matter, and they can be contained in various kinds of sexual play, where you have sadists and masochists working together for mutual pleasure. So I think your construction is rather simplistic.
How long do you think it will take before Scott nabs you again? And I’m curious what joy you get out of reappearing with a different mask. Is it in any way related to the subject that is under discussion? Dominance?
Some people might have been banned, done some reflection upon themselves, made some modifications to their online presence, and reappeared with a different handle. You are making no attempt to conceal yourself, except resolving an anagram, so I find it interesting.
I have found some useful nuggets of thinking and some of your previous comments and have engaged with you before, but there seems to be something going on that’s like throwing acid in people’s faces. That is a very strong simile, but I can’t help it. That’s my nature. I will admit to having a very strong urge to wanting to befriend you. I can’t explain it. But it’s there.
I do not contest that people like this exist and I would call them sadists.
But beating the shit out of emotionless robots - or humans for that matter - does nothing for me, yet in the right circumstances human pain and suffering arouse me.
So my impression is you're describing how some sadist are and say that's the definition, when in reality there's more to sadism and sadist than just that one flavor.
Do you and others talking about "sadists" get that all this is different for people into BDSM? for them, being a sadist or submissive is a sexual kink, not a manifestation of their real attitudes towards other people.
...I don't know why you think that sexual desire can be so neatly cordoned off from the rest of your life. When the desire is strong as it is... it's going to leak through.
But is that because the NPCs are unfeeling, or because they're not even theoretically capable of fighting back? It's equivalent to torturing an inanimate object.
Is PEPFAR a case of Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics?
The US government did a good thing for some africans starting in 2003 and now is held morally and financially responsible to do the good thing for eternity.
I'm not going to take "we can't afford to keep paying for this" seriously as an argument when Trump and the Republicans in Congress are still promising trillions of dollars in tax cuts. If you can afford that, you can afford to fund a thousand PEPFARs.
Asking how long an obligation should run for and if you're obligated to wind it down gracefully is philosophically fun, but it's a complete red herring, because the obligation is *tiny.*
As far as I'm concerned, everyone ITT is missing the point. Yes, Copenhagenism exists because our intuition often assigns blame to volunteers. But no, the reason is not to preserve the continuance of benefits. The reason is to account for downside-risk. I.e. the volunteer implicitly assumes responsibility over the situation *in case the solution backfires*.
E.g. I remember recently watching some clip [0] where the author shared a story about how he was bored in uni one day. So he dug out a pit in a candle and put some oil in the pit, to make the candle's flame bigger. For funsies. Then his roommate(?) walked in, looked at the blaze, and decided to pour water on it, while blithely ignoring the author's repeated protests. The water spread the oil-fire everywhere. Oops! But can you really blame the roommate? He was just trying to increase aggregate utility, after all.
Incidentally, remember that time when Prussia's "Scientific Forestry" ruined the soil? [1]
Incidentally, remember that time when the British Raj tried to fix its cobra problem? [2]
Incidentally, remember that time when Germany let some fiesty Ruskies pass from Switzerland to Russia, in order to destabilize its wartime rival? [3]
Incidentally, remember that time when the CIA funded the Muhajideen during the Cold War, to proxy-fight the Ruskies? [4]
Alas, the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. [5] Many such cases.
[0] (I wanna say it was hoe_math, but I can't find it. But I know it exists.)
Yes, indeed, you have an indefinite responsibility to do good things for the desperately poor and sick. There's not some cut-off beyond which that responsibility ends. This is just as true for the collective as it is for the individual.
I think the point is: if PEPFAR had never been enacted, no one would be this indignant at every president who didn’t enact it, even though they would be in the same moral boat as the current administration. In fact even the last few administrations probably killed roughly a similar number of people by not doubling PEPFAR as the current one did by ending it.
None of that of course is a rebuttal against the claim that eliminating PEPFAR is bad; rather, it’s that it’s not clear why PEPFAR vs no PEPFAR is supposed to be such a critical moral margin that distinguishes good people from moral monsters. That seems less like rationalist utilitarianism and more like conventional moral bias.
If you start 100 government programs, all with stated goals of doing good things, you wind up with, say, 50 that are ineffective, 25 that are actively harmful, 20 that are decent and 5 that are really great. So there is a huge asymmetry between killing one of the 5 and starting a new one, and the more pessimistic you are about the effectiveness of government the more strongly you should object to ending an effective program (and, implicitly, replacing it with an equally expensive average program).
(I don't actually know enough about PEPFAR that you should care about my object level opinion)
Imagine Elon Musk proposed to pay $1,000 a day to maintain a button that, when pressed once a day, prevents any child worldwide from dying of leukemia.
Would you support that proposal?
If we already had the program that, in fact, had been doing this for the last 20 years since it was enacted in 2005, would you support continuing it?
Sure, I just don't see what the value is in that line of reasoning. Human attention is very much a zero-sum game, and the more we worry about the responsibilities of others, the less we are able to live up to our own responsibilities.
I lend my neighbor a 2x4 to hold up his collapsing porch, and he takes it for granted. One day, with no build-up, I say "I'm taking back my 2x4" and yank it out and the porch collapses.
Things were turned off so rapidly, and people given "stop work" orders, that the system had no chance to keep working.
I think at this point, you have to believe that disarray is the objective. I can’t believe that they’re all that stupid so it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It’s hiding in plain sight. A systemic breakdown has been in the discourse on the right for quite a while. Steve Bannon is my best case for that. Steve Bannon still has Trump’s ear. I understand the shock, but I don’t understand the confusion.
Did I give you the impression that I am not "fine" with all this? I am doing my best to remain dispassionate. I find passion clouds my thoughts. So when I can do that I am fine. It's easy for a man my age to slip into nostalgia.
I am not sure what "it" encompasses when you say 'the government shouldn't be doing 'it'.
I personally think that ending PEPFAR is a tragedy, and I like that my tax dollars were essentially going to an incredibly efficient charity without me having to actually put in the time and effort to validate that charity.
But separate from that, a lot of folks who like PEPFAR -- and USAID in general -- actually like it for selfish USA-first reasons. These programs are fantastic for getting US policy goals accomplished around the world without the implicit or explicit threat of military intervention.
People seem to forget that we found Bin Laden because of a USAID hepC vaccine drive in Pakistan. A bunch of people got vaccinated AND we got Bin Laden. This is great!
PEPFAR is having your cake and eating it too -- you can do great things for the world AND make yourself better off.
"Who is responsible for preventing an evil? Those who can." Yes, once we agreed to provide the infrastructure upon which innocent people depend upon for their lives, we become responsible for those people. If we want some other actor or process to take over from, it's on us to find that and put them in place before abandoning them.
It's interesting to look at this from a US legal perspective. Let's say I provide some service to my neighbor for free. This service allows them to survive. It doesn't really matter what the service is, let's say they are paralyzed and can't move, so I've been delivering and preparing food for her every day. One day I simply stop, without warning her or providing for any other alternative. Consequently she dies. Would the courts hold me legally liable for her death? I think the probably would. Probably some form of negligent manslaughter.
There might have been a morally acceptable way to cease providing this aid, but is this it?
Certainly looks like it to me; like ... internationally (and to be clear I am not speaking to our host, who is wanting his country's policies to follow his preferences, and I'm not going to fault that), the correct response at some level is to thank the US for all the lives it has saved through its contributions of billions of dollars, and to look for somebody else to fill in.
Instead it's part of a broad thing where there are claims the US is going to lose all this good will ... and I don't see any good will there, certainly not from the people claiming we're going to lose it, and if doing a good deed is only good for good will in the calendar year in which it is done, certainly I don't see any point in making maintenance payments on this "good will".
(1) Good will in terms of gratitude is admittedly fleeting, but it becomes more so when you abandon the field mid-battle. Whatever levels of gratitude the US currently enjoys (enjoyed?) from France and Britain with respect to intervention in WW2, I think it's safe to say that if we had backed out in late 1943 we'd have received *considerably* less of it. It would have been nothing short of farcical to leave them to their own devices and expect them to shrug and say "well in fairness the only thing we can do is thank you for fighting with us thus far, so fare thee well and enjoy our gratitude."
Given the nature of how we are winding down, abruptly out of nowhere and with countries still dependent on the assistance in question, I wouldn't take it as a barometer for how "good will" necessarily functions in all ending partnerships. A decision to sunset the program over a period of years, for example, might have been very differently received.
(2) Even if good will by any measure is fleeting as an international-relations bargaining chip, *leverage* is not. If this program goes from being US-funded to China-funded, it will be one more thing for African nations to weigh on the China side of the scales, rather than the US side, when our competitive interests are pushing them in opposite directions.
That's fair, but leverage can be used for reasons other than straightforward, dirtyhanded imperialism.
For example:
- International organized crime gangs in country A are hitting elderly retirees in country B with a variety of social engineering scams to steal their assets. Country B sure would appreciate some cooperation from country A's law enforcement in putting a stop to it. "Leverage," crude as it is, probably helps.
- Country B cares about public health practices in Country A, because diseases cross borders. "Leverage," crude as it is, probably helps.
- As previous example, but with climate change, or overfishing, etc.
I'm open to argument that benefits such as these may not be *worth* the cost of a program like PEPFAR, just throwing out there that they exist.
... where Nigeria and Kenya have (or had in 2023) pretty high net favorable ratings for the US. They were at +54 and +49, respectively, which puts them:
- Behind Poland (+89 damn they really liked us in 2023, bet that's over) and Israel (+75)
- A little behind South Korea (+57)
- Just ahead of Japan (+48)
- Above Canada (+19) and the other listed European countries (highest Italy at +23)
Although it's also true that MOST countries listed had a more favorable than unfavorable view and the median was +29, which again I would say represents a lot of global goodwill.
Well, what's a normal, default favorability rating? What would the US ratings be if they did nothing at all? I think you're assuming +0, but it's not clear to me that would be the case.
China is throwing billions of dollars into building African infrastructure in return for access to minerals. My South African friends had less love for them after dealing with them, though. The African honeymoon for China may wear off.
Not really. The true Copenhagen Interpretation says "You got involved with this problem, so from now on we treat it like you caused it." Whether or not you agree about PEPFAR, the argument there is merely "The good thing you've been doing hasn't stopped being good, so it's good for you to go on doing it."
I don't get the impression that attitudes are generally "It's good for you to go on doing it", but rather "It's bad if you stop and you'll be responsible for everyone who dies as a result."
In theory the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is exactly this instinct misfiring.
Since if you have the infrastructure set up to help in *some* way, surely it would not be *too* hard to do other good things right?
But it's a misfire because the obligations part of the brain is explicitly set to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits (because the obligation drive is mostly trained on being a reliable promise deliverer, and since honest optimism is desirable in a trade partner, there's incentive to be deluded about success). I think this is upstream of facts like "people are scope insensitive" or "people are interested in something that's none of their direct business".
I don't know if this explanation is too cynical, but it feels more load bearing than just saying "people are bad and should feel bad", which is what I *feel*.
Could those bans link to the comment just *above* the one that got banned? Right now I can only see the actual banned comment by hitting "Return to thread" and having to wait for the whole page to load (very slow). This would require a little scrolling to find the ban announcement, but would (hopefully) skip the slow page load.
If substack is still taking requests, a "show parent" or "show this thread from the top level comment" feature would be very useful--not only for this use case but also in general.
Tangentially related to the job application fee discussion in the recent links post: now that AI-generated essays can be produced at the click of a button, can we finally get rid of letters of recommendation? I'm thinking primarily of rec letters for college applications (I'm a high school teacher), but I guess this would apply to other stuff too. I can perhaps see how they might be useful for someone applying to grad school (the grad school department may be familiar with your professor who's writing the application), but as a high school teacher, even if I write a bunch of letters over the years for kids applying to the same college, the rec letters probably get read by different admissions officers (if they get read at all). So it's not as if I build up a useful reputation as someone who makes credible recommendations.
I'm a little disappointed that the teachers unions didn't push for this as an equity move post-2020. The poor kid at the inner-city public school probably has teachers who are more overworked, and a much worse student-to-counselor ratio than the kid in the posh suburban school or rich private school. Unfortunately, the left spent all their time talking about how standardized tests are racist (but notice how a lot of universities are starting to use SAT/ACT again post-COVID). They didn't stop to realize that basically everything else in the application process is more racist/classist: the poor kids are probably too busy taking care of siblings or working at McDonald's to start their own non-profit or captain the soccer team or play trombone in the marching band.
There are obviously all kinds of problems in the college application process, and I can't hope to fix all of them, but it seems to me that so little value is derived from letters of recommendation that you could get rid of them and lose very little in the process.
I imagine that letters of recommendation aren't really for the 95% of kids who show up with a letter from a random school teacher, they're for the 5% kids who show up with a letter from someone actually impressive.
But since those 5% of kids are going to do the LoR thing, the other 95% feel obliged to do it as well even if those letters are nigh worthless.
The 95% feel obliged to do it because it's required to apply at most schools.
... but why? Why do admissions counselors put themselves through reading thousands of same-y generic letters from nobodies every year? I imagine it's less about the letters themselves and more about the selection effect of requiring them. If a student can get three letters of recommendation, it means they endeared themselves to at least three authority figures. It's a proof of basic social competency and affability that's hard to fake.
I want to quibble when you mention most letter-writers aren't "actually impressive." Being a public school teacher is actually impressive! But you have a point that elite admissions officers don't see it that way.
Asking for help and ideas: how do I buy some time from a superforecasting team to answer a question for me?
I'm trying to weigh up factors in moving for work, and with the country coming apart at the seams would like a transparent audit able steerable process that emits a probability distribution of changes in political, criminal, nuisance crime rates in the geographic area and time I'm looking at. (American Northeast Corridor in the next 5-10 years.)
I've already tried cold-DMing the Sentinel blog, no dice. Are there routine historical reports I can crib from and rerun their methods to get a forecast?
I've read that Starbucks does such a good job of researching this sort of thing that you can safely choose towns to live in based on whether they have a Starbucks. I'm not sure whether that's true, but it might be worth investigating to see whether it is.
Relevant to the Pro-PEPFAR protest: I am from South Africa, a country with about a 14% HIV prevalence rate (yes, you read that right). About 20% our HIV program is funded through PEPFAR.
Our HIV program has been very effective in reducing transmission rates, and keeping HIV positive people healthy. Both outcomes are at risk with these funding cuts.
If you are American and don't care about the people who will be affected, you might care about the loss of good will and the associated soft power. These dollars must be among the most cost effective ever spent by the US on the African continent, both in terms of health outcomes and good will generated.
If any of these things seem important to you, and you are American, please consider adding your voice to the chorus of people calling for this not to be canned.
>you might care about the loss of good will and the associated soft power.
As a cynic I have to ask: what are some examples of that good will leading to concrete benefits for the US in Africa? I don't know much about our interests there, has this led to anything tangible?
Good will doesn't lead to concrete, tangible benefits, at least that's not the point of it, but tangible benefits are not the only kind. Good will toward others is supposed to lead to good will back at us, and that's fine, but the specific issue here is good will toward the powerless, who are not in a position to do us as much good as we do to them. Similar considerations apply to the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and children. They can't return the favor, so it's unreasonable to expect them to.
Then why do it? For most people, it's to validate our self image as good, generous people. This protects the ego, elevates self-esteem, and promotes our mental health.
One other benefit is that it's more likely other powerful people will trust us, if we value that. The more that we are seen as good, generous people, the more likely we are to develop constructive relationships with people who might not otherwise trust us. I daresay Europeans have a better view of America as a result of our charitable activities in Africa. 'Course, not everyone values Europe's esteem.
No one set of relationships are conducted in isolation. Ultimately human relationships are a system, and future outputs are sensitively dependent upon current outputs. Change what is working, and you risk the unknown.
A bit late to the reply (I'm in a very non-US timezone). Other commenters have attempted to provide concrete answers to your question. You seem unpersuaded.
I do believe that there are concrete, practical, and quantifiable benefits to nations that accrue from good will/foreign aid. I also believe that this is not the appropriate forum to convince someone of this if they have a strong bias towards not believing that. But if you do feel that way, at least note that basically everyone who studies these things disagree with you; this should give you pause ('reason to update your priors' in rationalist speak ). There is also the fact that HIV/AIDS is also a global health risk, that requires a coordinated global response.
In addition there are also GENERAL arguments in favor of various forms of charity; some of them political, others religious or philosophical. Scott has shared various version of these on this very blog.
And finally, a meta answer for you - it is obvious to me that it is better to be liked than disliked. Soft power accrues downstream from this.
Look I'm open to being persuaded, that's why I'm asking.
>basically everyone who studies these things disagree with you
Given the recent history of intellectual dishonesty and politically-correct groupthink in this country's institutions, that's not very persuasive. There are a lot of dollars involved and a lot of people and institutions with their fingers in the pie, so I don't really trust the consensus. This isn't hard science it's soft politics. As far as I'm concerned, everyone in that sphere is a motivated reasoner until proven otherwise.
>In addition there are also GENERAL arguments in favor of various forms of charity; some of them political, others religious or philosophical. Scott has shared various version of these on this very blog.
There are general arguments against charity as well, and in my view they're much stronger. If you've been around here long enough you'll be aware that I regularly challenge the rationality of EA and I have yet to encounter a robust reply. In my view, institutional charity is a deadweight loss of value to the world unless there is sufficient relational compensation. I'm attempting to understand the potential value of that compensation w/r/t sub-Saharan Africa. I currently see very little.
>it is obvious to me that it is better to be liked than disliked.
To paraphrase Plato who was paraphrasing Socrates, it's equally obvious to me that we should only care about the opinions of the wise. It's pointless to chase the good will of low value people.
The replies I've gotten in this thread have slightly strengthened my existing priors. High confidence coupled with weak generalized arguments just pattern-match to motivated reasoning for me. It feels good to support charity so people support it. If I immediately got 5 intelligent realpolitik analyses that told me things I didn't know I'd be much more likely to reevaluate my thinking. But I didn't and I suspect I'm not likely to.
As far as I can tell South Africa has been getting increasingly friendly with China and the US rudely going back on previous commitments without even the grace to say sorry is making China look like the better bet. Unlike the US, China has invested in infrastructure all over Africa, and now the US has yanked the only tangible way they were assisting, and done so in a way that causes maximum distrust and increases Chinese influence. Why is Trump trying to make China great again?
I think China is creating a large loyal consumer market for its exports in the long term by trying to improve African prospects. Africa is currently on track to contain about half of the world's population within my lifetime. If the US isn't interested in serving this market then I think something has gone very wrong with the goals of the US elite.
Agree 100%. If the current administration is serious about re-onshoring (is that a word?) US manufacturing, then surely it needs export markets. There are also serious concerns about the influence of China from those who care about democratic ideals.
Ok but what are the actual stakes? What are our rational interests there? Natural resources is one. Are there others? Do we currently have any sweetheart mining deals that are downstream of soft power? Is China's involvement there likely to disrupt our access to anything we care about? AFAIK we don't have any significant military presence there and don't rely on them for either manufactured goods or consumer markets. There is no military there that we care about allying with. Why do we have a reason to project soft power there?
FWIW you could easily look this up using tools like ChatGPT.
Three answers off the top of my head:
- you already talked about natural resources, but this is no small thing. We are highly dependent on metals coming out of Africa both for economic prosperity (it's cheaper) and for strategic reasons (if we go to war with Russia/China, we need to make sure we have alternate lines for these things). Africa also has some amount of oil/gas exports and iirc a fair bit of agricultural exports (e.g. coffee, cocoa)
- counterterrorism and general security -- having goodwill and softpower projection among African nations makes it significantly easier to police terrorist groups _before_ they get to us. It's easy to just wave your hand and say 'pshh whats a warlord in Somalia going to do to the US, there's a full ocean in between!' except, you know, if you lived through 2001. Fighting wars in other people's land is better than fighting them in your own land, and it helps a lot if you can have governments that are willing to help you do so. (Similar argument towards bio-threats like ebola)
- you don't seem the type to care about this, but i'll say it nonetheless -- African nations are obviously developing, and many of them want to use forms of environmentally hazardous shortcuts to quickly speed their development. Think mass coal industrialization, slash and burn, etc. These effects are obviously global, and will of course impact the US. Exerting softpower to prevent this (and to help them develop clean alternatives like solar) is a win
In general, I think you are massively discounting how difficult a billion people on the other side of the world could make your life if they really wanted to.
"In general, I think you are massively discounting how difficult a billion people on the other side of the world could make your life if they really wanted to."
Or if they just didn't care to *not* make your life difficult and a geopolitical rival was nudging them in that direction.
>We are highly dependent on metals coming out of Africa
Agreed but why do we need softpower projections to buy those? Doesn't money work just fine? Are we currently getting access we otherwise wouldn't because of PREPFAR?
> counterterrorism and general security
Yeah we have a military base in Djibouti. I don't think that's going away because of USAID. I'm sure if we want to go terrorist hunting in, I don't know, Burundi that there are lots of ways to wire $1m to the president's Swiss bank account that don't depend on USAID.
> African nations are obviously developing, and many of them want to use forms of environmentally hazardous shortcuts to quickly speed their development.
I'm skeptical that charity moves the needle there. A program that sends $100m per year to local charities isn't going to stand in the way of some crazy slash-and-burn development scheme that will pump billions into the economy. The scales just don't match up.
My general perspective is that countries generally follow their self-interest and the US has many tools to bend that self-interest in its favor. Charity doesn't seem like a particularly essential tool in that arsenal. That's why I'm asking for specific things that, say, PREPFAR gets us. The CIA using it to find Bin Laden is an example of things I'm interested in.
>I think you are massively discounting how difficult a billion people on the other side of the world could make your life if they really wanted to.
I'm inclined to think that you're a) over-estimating how much they would want to and b) under-estimating what other avenues we have of dissuading them if they did. We spend nearly a trillion a year on our military. I just find it implausible that the US would allow any significant strategic interest to depend on some low-rent charity program.
You asked for reasons why the US may have interests in a geopolitical region, and it seems like you mostly agree with those reasons. Great!
If you agree that there are valid reasons for the US to want to project power in that region, the next step is to think through the various ways the US could do that.
There are a bunch! And, as you correctly point out, they are all _more or less interchangeable_ in terms of achieving our short term strategic goals. You mention a few:
- military force
- money
- charity
Where they aren't interchangeable is in their longevity and in their cost.
I'll be honest with you: there is basically nothing that pepfar does to advance any particular US interests that is unique to pepfar. In fact, you don't need anything other than big piles of nukes and you can get any particular thing that you want done.
What makes pepfar and other charitable aid unique is that they create cycles of goodwill that allow you to solve today's problem AND tomorrow's problem AND the day after's problem, in an extremely cost efficient way. (I assure you, pepfar is significantly cheaper than the cost of putting boots on the ground in every country that we want influence in, especially if those countries hate us)
And, even better, you help people while doing it!
But even if there was literally no long term benefit to doing so, I think that if you could spend $1M to bribe the president of Burundi, or $1M to provide AIDS medication, and they both accomplish the same goal, it's acceptable to think a tiny little bit about ethics here and do the latter on principle.
Which brings me to your last point: you're being unfairly weasley about the word "depend". The US 'depends' on USAID to get things done as a first line of action. It is the cheapest way to get things done, it helps people, its great! And most of the time it seems to work pretty well! And then sometimes it doesnt. So in those cases, the US falls back to (roughly in order) diplomatic pressure, financial pressure, and military pressure. Each of these support the others, but the US doesnt "depend" on one of them as an end all be all. This is basic carrot/stick concepts.
You point out yourself the Bin Laden example. We got bin laden through a combination of military pressure, sanctions, diplomatic intel gathering, and, finally, charitable aid. Except everything is like that, all the time. It's difficult to unentangle, for e.g., how much more effective our counterterror ops are in Sudan because the Sudanese government is willing to help us out thanks to our funding of their anti-malaria programs, or whatever
I'm open to hearing an argument like "well, actually, pepfar costs way more than the cost of bribing + the cost of boots on the ground" if that's what you believe, but you'd need like...at least some evidence of this.
@Scott a humble request: can we bring back no culture war open threads?
There's a thread below on things that people miss from the SSC days, and one thing that I personally remember fondly was the no culture war threads. I felt like it allowed the community to really bring their other interests to the forum. And that in turn made the culture war threads feel less like "I am being attacked by my enemy" and more like "we are working together to resolve disagreements between friends"
I think that's a perfectly fair request, I do wonder if part of the problem is that its harder to implement fairly than it used to be. It used to be a lot clearer where the culture wars ended, but then they kind of ate everything. Depending on who you ask, people will blame Liberals or Conservatives. My two cents is that liberals were the ones who tried to turn the entire internet into one big culture war, but the battle lines they were drawing were around things like norms in language, gender identity, sexism, racism. So pretty easy to shunt off into a side space. But now the President of the United States is actively pushing an ideological agenda in specific response to supposed mainstream liberal dominance of culture, so its hard to figure out how to talk about any current news or events without circling back to that. Even Scott, who seems to have shied away from talking about politics as much as possible, is talking about them a lot more these days.
Scott's former [0] blog SSC used to have a certain rule. The rule was "no Culture Wars in the Open Threads". The term "Culture War" basically means contemporary topics that are highly-controversial and politically-charged. E.g. Trump, abortion, gunrights, covid, gay marriage, etc all fall under the umbrella of the Culture War. I'm sure you can think of others. I think the subreddit "The Motte" [1][2][3] was created by fans of Scott to basically siphon away all the Culture War stuff (though personally, I don't use reddit). Also, you could still discuss Culture War stuff under Scott's dedicated essays (assuming it was actually related to the topic).
The rationale is "politics is the mind-killer" [4]. Thus, political discussions commonly turn sardonic and nasty. Also, Culture War topics tend to drown out the other topics, which tends to get stale after a while.
----
[0] before substack, there was SlateStarCodex. Before that, there was LessWrong (as yvain). Before that, there was livejournal and/or raikoth(dot)net(?) (this was before my time, so the timeline gets fuzzy here).
[2] From "motte-&-bailey maneuver". AKA rhetorical bait-&-switch. Scott didn't create this term, but he helped popularize it. Original post in citation_3.
>I think the subreddit "The Motte" [1][2][3] was created by fans of Scott to basically siphon away all the Culture War stuff (though personally, I don't use reddit).
Several errors here.
First error: The sequence of events is:
1) SSC subreddit made a Culture War thread to serve as a containment zone for the CW.
2) The Sneer Club, the people behind RationalWiki, conducted a harassment campaign against Scott in retaliation for said Culture War thread not being politically censored in the way they'd like.
3) Scott caved in and got rid of the Culture War thread. Several regulars formed a subreddit called TheMotte to preserve it.
4) Reddit began ordering TheMotte's admins to politically censor their subreddit, which said admins didn't want to do, so it left Reddit for its own site.
Second error: Due to #4, the correct current URL for TheMotte is themotte.org; the subreddit is locked. It's an okay place, although it's gotten a bit low on new members since leaving Reddit.
Third error: Scott's LiveJournal, under the name squid314, was shortly before and indeed only shut down for good *during* SSC (specifically, it was shut down because it was linked to his real name and prospective employers kept finding it and objecting to psychiatrists having blogs). IIRC Scott joined LessWrong before that.
Noooo, don't do that. If people don't want to read culture war and political discussions, they can collapse those threads. It's one of the few things Substack does really well!
Please yes, ban all culture war and politics discussion!
Open threads went from 1/3 politics, to 2/3, and now it's 80%+.
It's soooooo boring, and such a waste of "bringing a bunch of smart people together to exchange ideas."
There is zero leverage to being smart and having a political opinion, unlike nearly every other area. The amount of "minds changed" is miniscule, and prospectively going down on a weekly basis as everyone polarizes more. In return, you basically ruin Open Threads, and make them as low quality as all the rest of the internet.
It's all heat and zero light, now.
All the rest of the internet is politics! Crap it up out there, not here!
I'm assuming what's meant is "{no culture war} open threads" rather than "no {{culture war} open threads}".
Given that, and as a moderator myself, I can understand wanting them - certain topics just expand to fill the available space, and choke everything else off like an invasive weed. One can alternatively set aside space for those topics that get so much attention, while having a separate space where those topics are aggressively culled, and a lot more topics thus get some room to grow.
And if that's the principle, then the appropriate principle is probably "I will cut off any topics if they appear to be filling up a great deal of the OTs, forever". This allows for some topic that's just really interesting, but will only last a week, like an election or a weird plane crash. It also controls topics like wars, AI doom, etc.
A different way to tackle it is if you think a topic could be interesting, but empirically just turns into yelling matches and impromptu sick burn competitions.
I personally prefer to be able to talk about CW topics *provided* there are norms in place to keep them from turning into yelling matches. We rats have some (steelmanning, tabooing your words, etc.). These might be good times to discuss how to discuss CW topics.
Incidentally, I also support the owner's right to not specify all the rules ahead of time, lest they be gamed. (I've referred to this elsewhere as the Forum Incompleteness Theorem (FIT).)
This isn't great for democracies of law-abiding readers, of course, but such rules aren't really meant for them. Such people largely police themselves, and are generally pleasant company.
I feel like the worst problem is the "running commentary" aspect where someone starts a top level thread to discuss every "here's what Trump did today" story. If there were some way to ban those then that might be a good start.
I've noticed a lot of the trouble seems to be breaking the "no news that's less than a week old" rule. I don't mind in-depth conversations about Trump, but the "Trump just did this" makes it feel more like Twitter than SSC. Is that even a rule anymore, or did that die with the old blog?
The past few weeks have featured some world historic events, and I liked being able to read some opinions about them here in near real time. It's hard to find even somewhat intelligent political discussions by strangers on Twitter. But maybe I'm in the minority in wanting to read that here.
I said this elsewhere but yeah, I don't know where to draw the lines. Also, compared to everywhere else I've been on Substack, people here seem generally better about restraining themselves. So there's a lot of talk about ideological stuff, because its hard to talk about current events without it, but its not getting super heated, and people are still talking about other things.
I mostly collapse threads the minute I see that they're culture war topics, and I'm doing a lot of collapsing these days. What about just having one open thread a month be culture war free?
And, Scott, while I have your attention: Anomie is posting again as of this thread, under a name that's just a rearrangement of the letters in Anomie (Eon Aim). Can you nix this? It's just provocative, and in fact the current posts are on brand for spicy nihilism. If the person wants to come right back under a truly new name, they might be motivated to change their style so has to keep posting. But Anomie now has brand recognition, and coming back with an easily recognizable variant of the brand is going to guarantee us all an eon of provocative nihilism.
Agreed. I reported many of anomie's comments in previous threads, for largely the same reason. I have maybe a little sympathy (ISTR some clinical depression being cited weeks ago), but not at the expense of depressing everyone else in the thread.
Yeah... No, it's fine. I've been off of my anti-depressants for a while now, I don't really feel like participating much anymore. You guys have fun now. Goodbye.
semi serious: you could plausibly set up a little LLM bot that reads the replies from your inbox and flags when things get culture-war-y. Wouldn't even be that expensive with token costs being what they are
I don't personally think you need to do a ton of enforcing -- the community self enforcement was sufficient to make the experience a lot more pleasant, even if a few culture war topics did leak through
Keep in mind that the intent isn't to censor. There's a difference between controlling and curating. The goal is to have rich, lively discussion. That's hard when every other comment is "Did you see what Trump did today?"
So like a no politics thread? That might be nice, but there were always people ignoring the rule... which is annoying. I guess if you had to say something political you could go back to the previous weeks open thread. (Which isn't a great, given how threads work on substack.)
It needs a better definition. If discussing Trump is a culture war, or Ukraine or immigration or Musk and DOGE are considered cultural then what can be discussed? I mean the PepFar decision is downstream of culture wars.
Command and Conquer Generals (and Zero Hour) is the best RTS ever made
The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz is a fascinating book which contains many delightful examples of how food shapes culture, while also pointing out how easy and important it is to eat fermented foods (decline of fermentation is pretty obviously the main cause of a lot of first world health problems, especially autoimmune/GI conditions like Crohn's and gluten intolerance)
I love early Data Romance (Arms, their covers of Clap Hands, Be Quiet and Drive, and If I'm Going), and it'll never stop being sad that they got out of the business so early. Anybody have something similar?
I've been rereading War and Peace, and it's interesting to see how cultural stereotypes have changed...
Actually, I did have somebody point out to me that I'm a Weak AI per the constraints of the Chinese Room.
Met a girl through a text-only app. She would frequently send strings of emoji, rather than just one at a time, and I was fascinated by this: what a creative way to convey nuanced messages! It was one of the main things which attracted me to her so strongly.
When we finally met in person, I brought it up, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I showed her our text conversations and she became even more confused; she showed me her side of things, and I learned that not only had she been sending single emojis the whole time, but the ones I was seeing usually had nothing to do with the ones she was sending.
Turns out I didn't have the advanced emoji pack installed. I'd been reading all this meaning in what turned out to be noise. I told this story recently to a friend, who suggested that the base emojis were 8-bit, but the packs were 32-bit, so my phone was interpreting one of hers as a string of four (essentially random) ones.
Yeah, those are the popular ones, so you're not alone in this opinion. I also prefer Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 to 2 (the coaster design process was much easier with 3D graphics, where I could see what I was doing).
Anyway, Generals to me takes the cake on the basis of sound design alone, though I guess it's still competing with "We will bury them" and the Hell March.
Anything in particular about those entries which speaks to you?
I think the biggest difference is the atmosphere. RA2 was goofy and over the top but it had this nostalgic cold war energy. And Tib Sun was a dystopian sci-fi adventure. Generals was just kind of like current times, but if an ISIS-like group actually created a Caliphate and declared war on the world. And Zero Hour was specifically changed to pander to China in the campaign because they banned the first game over depicting a successful nuclear attack on Beijing.
Not to mention Generals was the first and only game in the entire franchise not to feature live action scenes. It just had lame voice overs on the mission intro screens. Compare that to Tiberian Sun, it had James Earl Jones!
First review I clicked on had a comparison to folk music. This is an interesting perspective on something I don't consider much (I am acutely aware of smells around me, but haven't worn cologne since childhood).
What I like most about Luca is that he's the latest promoter of an alternate theory of how smell works. Based not on shape, but on the vibrational frequency of molecules.
No, I mean things like how the Mongols fermented milk in, among other things, (bladders? Stomachs?). They'd hang the bags outside their tents, next to a wooden bat; it was expected that a visitor to the tent would give a few good whacks to agitate things before entering. I suppose it also served as a doorbell too.
Don't worry, just a cheap joke on my part. Yes, the Mongol culture is of course fascinating, and how their way of life on the steppe and the limited window that world history gave them enabled them to build an empire on horseback.
So you aren't reading the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, I take it? People usually claim it is far superior to others, but some say some poetry and warmth to the sentences is lost in it. I've only read P&V but wonder if I'm missing something. I've only read earlier translations of AK and prefer it to W&P, but maybe it's just the other translators that I prefer?
I think Anna Karenina is a better novel. My all time favorite. I think Tolstoy improved as a writer between the two books.
i’ve lost count of the times I’ve read AK. It’s usually this time of year that i pull it off the shelf. Something about the late winter light on the snow in my front yard puts me in mind of troikas
Any passages which stand out in your memory? I think I was most emotionally impacted by the scene where (I guess spoilers on a 200-year-old book) Prince Andrew returns home unexpectedly and sees his wife, briefly, twice.
I know this is a semi-joke but the penal code was not public knowledge in the Soviet Union. According to Solzhenitsyn you could ask to see a copy from the local authorities. But this would immediately place you under suspicion, as the thinking went that the only people who would do this were either criminals looking to cover their ass or someone trying to figure out a loophole to violate the spirit of the law.
I'm not relying on Solzhenitsyn here but actual people I know (I myself was too young when I lived in the Soviet Union). For example, the functionaries dealing with churches (these as problematic institutions had to be dealt with and regulated) sometimes wrote letters to their bosses complaining that their 'clients' (the church people) were not able to make rational decisions in the situation where they couldn't see the laws regarding religious activities. My dad somehow found out that the citizens of 'winning nations' (the winning side of WWII) could, by the law, freely move from Eastern Berlin to Western Berlin and back. He thought this could not be true for Soviet citizens, but tried anyway; showed his passport at the gate and got through! He walked around in a Western city when nobody would have found it possible without special allowance documents. Maybe the Eastern Germans always knew that - someone must have tried - but in the core Soviet Union, people didn't know. (This was in the late eighties, maybe in the seventies he would've been arrested for that, idk).
No, I was serious. He's a deeply unreliable source. Gifted fiction author, don't get me wrong, but he was a committed ideologue who didn't let the truth get in the way of his ideological crusades.
For starters, he claimed that 60 million died in the Soviet Union's penal system. Utterly bonkers. For the year 1953, he claimed 25 million people were in gulag, when the real number was 10% of that. But his most audacious claim was that Stalin killed over 100 million Soviets.
That's just for starters. Take Solzhy’s Red Wheel series, which is fictional but supposedly the product of extensive research. Just as with Moby Dick, there are several nonfiction essays in this series, explaining the political and Civic situation in Russia shortly before the Revolution. In these essays, Solzhy offers a comprehensively whitewashed picture of Tsarist rule. Tsar Nicholas and the Romanovs were running the war effort in 1917 with a perfectly matched combination of corruption and incompetency. The level of waste and fraud was so staggering that the Romanovs found themselves hated through all levels of society, even by political moderates. not only does Solzhy elide this, he actively lies about the facts.
>But his most audacious claim was that Stalin killed over 100 million Soviets.
Huh, I'd always used that figure too. This comment made me look it up and realize it's false. Thanks! Had no idea. It's really sort of amazing how complete nonsense can percolate into the collective unconscious. Still "only" killing ~10 million or whatever is still a terrible indictment. At least it's directionally correct.
This one is a bit of a stretch, but if any of you is working in Berlin, please consider participating in my anonymous salary trends survey that I am now running for the third year in a row: https://handpickedberlin.com/salaries/2025-03/ I am hoping to reach 1,300 responses this year.
Can someone please tell me how to like comments in ACX? I keep getting notifications that someone liked my comment, and I have no idea how they're doing it because I don't see any like button on comments here. ACX is the only Substack that doesn't seem to let me like comments. What gives?
Download the Substack app. That’s where you find the like buttons.
EDIT: if you click on the three little horizontal bars at the top right of the web interface and click on activity, you will see where you can like a comment
The Substack (Android) app still exposes the 'Like' feature even if the feature is disabled in the browser. I've been assuming that's how most people end up using it.
Scott disabled likes but I'm very sure the relevant Substack feature just doesn't show the button or the count; not prevent the relevant 'backend' feature(s) from working at all. Substack also seems to do quite a lot 'browser side' so the 'disable like' feature itself might not work perfectly, which might be how some 'users' (e.g. people OR bots) can like comments anyways, beyond any kind of 'server side hack' that I expect is very easy to do as well.
Aside from the rest, there's a dopamine hit from getting like notifications and this has been well-proven to be addictive. Hence, removing it to make ACX less Out to Get You than most social media.
It doesn't even work well for reddit. Early in the site's history, somebody wrote up a post detailing how the algorithm gives a huge advantage to short, easily-digested content, and warned that, unless fixed, this would cause the site to drift towards vapid memes and shallow, repetitive comments.
I think if you comment and then get an email notification that someone has replied, you can maybe like from the page linked to in the email. There might also be ways to do it in the app.
I'm not able to do so in my email, I don't have the app so I can't try that. I'm not really trying to get around it anyway, was just wondering how other people were doing it.
What's the situation with PMI (president's malaria initiative)? All the press has been about PEPFAR but I'm assuming PMI faces the same funding cuts -- did Rubio exempt them too, and is Musk also illegally preventing that order?
This memo by a USAID official who was fired by the Trump admin after publishing the memo estimates that cuts to anti-malarial programs could result in as many as 166,000 additional deaths annually- that's more deaths per year than the Against Malaria Foundation has averted in it's entire history https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/2dbddd9a823b8824/168a9032-full.pdf which is just... fuck. Be sure to call your representative and senators to ask them to restore PMI, because that's kind of all we can do.
> did you know that the ancient Chinese kept the laws secret, lest people search too hard for loopholes?
"Some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available. That does not seem to have actually been done"
Earlier he mentions how the Confucianists warned that an available written law code would result in rules-lawyering, but they were defeated by the opposing legalists of the Chi'in dynasty the first to unite all of China.
Not sure why 10 prompted a ban. It objects to language that it sees as treating the condition as inherent or biological, rather than something psychological and subject to social conditioning. Whether or not you agree with the message, I’m not sure why you’d ban a user for it.
The ban for 19 also seems debatable. It makes the point that the vast majority of members of a certain group aren’t sufficiently passionate about their cause to initiate a civil war. Seems obviously true. It described the group as a whole, without the qualifier “vast majority,” but the meaning seems obvious in context of (correctly) rejecting the likelihood of mass political violence.
The ban for 14 is also interesting. It hopes that various politicians get cancer, which is rude, but hardly seems like the end of the world, as many politicians genuinely are evil.
It’s weird that that merited a ban, while threads full of people celebrating the murder of a CEO, hoping for mass murder of insurance workers, and wondering what they could do to personally support the murderer apparently didn’t warrant any bans.
Maybe you’re working in reverse chronological order and will get to banning those, eventually, but even so, this ban seems somewhat questionable (even though probably little would be lost in banning that user).
I think it's weird in a good way. I didn't really like any of the comments you shared but they did not seem significantly worse than the bottom quartile of posters here.
Like, it's not weird because anyone is saying "Hey, that post was great and I liked it, it really added to discourse." It's more like...if the FBI arrested someone for smoking weed in Cali. And you're like, "Oh yeah, that's still a federal crime. Weird though."
I dunno, semi-random and capricious punishment of generalized bad behavior is probably the most efficient way to maximize the quality of discourse while also maximizing time to play with small, adorable children.
I seem to recall this being more or less the principle behind the "reign of terror" moderation era for SSC. It seemed to work out well then, and I fully support Scott if he wants to return to it either directionally or entirely.
>Maybe you’re working in reverse chronological order and will get to banning those, eventually, but even so, this ban seems somewhat questionable (even though probably little would be lost in banning that user).
Did you report the comments you're wondering about the lack of bans for? I'm pretty sure Scott doesn't actually read through every comment on his Substack, except for the top-level ones.
I think the problem with 19 is that it said leftists “will capitulate the moment people start getting shot.” That isn’t saying that leftists won’t initiate a civil war, it seems to be advocating initiating a white terror of shooting leftists. Just saying that people won’t start a war isn’t offensive, many people on the left are pacifists and would agree with that self-conception.
Even a cursory examination of the history of liberalism/leftism reveals that members of these groups are perfectly capable of risking their lives and fighting wars. Including recent history.
> The ban for 14 is also interesting. It hopes that various politicians get cancer, which is rude, but hardly seems like the end of the world, as many politicians genuinely are evil.
10 makes a claim (above) with no citation but with very emotive language ("you're destorying [sic] innocent children's lives"). It's not a bloodless objection to terminology.
The ban for 19 seems very unfair. I don't agree with anything Anomie says but that was a fairly tame comment from someone who's been consistently contributing to ACX comments for a while. I would like to see Scott undo that.
10 is harsh but a temp ban would be fair IMO, it's bad when people make controversial statements about transgenderism without giving any argument and then blame individual users for "destroying kids lives." Blaming commenters for social problems is just too uncivil for ACX; like if someone told a ACX Trumpist that he (the user) was destroying kids lives because Trump's cutting foreign aid, that'd be temp bannable too.
14's ban is perfectly fair, wishing painful death on politicians is bad enough but doing so in a low effort way is unforgivable.
I thought the Anomie ban was a bit unfair. He could chill a little but I kinda like his nihilistic comments and that particular comment wasn't thaaaat inflammatory or untruthful.
Anomie had been posting edgy fluff for months. Every thread brought yet another round of "I don't value human life, the world is ending, I will enjoy watching you all die". I think I'd reported six or seven Anomie comments, and I don't go out of my way to find things which make me want to report people.
It appears that Scott correctly thinks it's not worth his time and emotional energy to go through all these users' comment histories to build a rock-solid case for every single one.
I would ask for ban reversal as well myself. At first I got wound up about anomie's comments, but he constantly did the edgy nihilist bit so I got used to that, and I don't mind it now.
I think anomie has a genuinely nihilist outlook. I didn’t engage with him much but he was never personally rude or sarcastic. I’d like to see the ban reversed myself.
Anomie consistently makes whatever the edgiest possible point is in context, with no concern for "truth", let alone any sort of sincere belief system. Strongly agree with the ban.
Seconded. Their posts felt much more like trolling for responses than for truth seeking, and consistently made my experience of the larger acx community worse (ironically, the prolificness that OP refers to made this much worse for me)
idk if scott does this with his bans, but I wonder if sometimes there are just some commenters who don't have anything particularly egregious but are just, like, making the place worse, and so end up getting pinned for a lesser evil. I can think of a few off the top of my head, and I probably fit in this category sometimes.
It's a bit like martin shkreli getting convicted for securities fraud. Like, yea, legally he was convicted for fraud, but really he was convicted because he just pissed everyone else off.
"Their posts felt much more like trolling for responses than for truth seeking" They've responded with reasonable points the few times I've engaged with them. Just to give my impression.
I don't think the ban of 10 is fair. In context the poster they are replying to seems to be saying, "transition children to prevent suicide - no citation." The reply that got banned is just saying, "transitioning children ruins lives / cause suicides - no citation"
Given that basically every country (including ones vastly more pro LGBT with better healthcare, e.g., Europe) is moving to ban transitioning minors, the second comment seems the one less needing of a citation!
To quote Scott, "beware of isolated demands for rigor."
Comment 1: "holding position X would not be morally justified"
Comment 2: "You, the person saying that, are doing bad things in the world and ruining children's lives."
You, le raz, might not care about the difference between making a general statement and a specific, personal accusation. But as Scott clearly does (and its his space) you should at least be able to *recognize* the difference. One of those comments was talking about a general attitude that some people might hold. The other was accusing someone specific of doing bad things.
While we're talking about "isolated demands for rigor," we should perhaps make critical examination of this statement:
"Given that basically every country (including ones vastly more pro LGBT with better healthcare, e.g., Europe) is moving to ban transitioning minors,"
Even if we let "basically every country" pass as obvious hyperbole, this seems like a pretty out-there statement. Some countries are deciding that certain specific medical interventions are contraindicated for minors with gender dysphoria. But such medical interventions have (to my understanding) always been somewhat fringe: the much more widespread practice is social transitioning (while leaving minors to seek medical intervention--if they still want it--when they come of legal age). If you're only talking about some fraction of medical interventions you should say that. If your claim is that "basically every country" is moving to ban social transitioning for minors as well, that is an *extremely* extraordinary claim and you should certainly provide evidence.
I generally try and move away from this debate but… the argument amongst trans advocates that there be nothing but trans affirmative care even for minors does in fact make diagnosis of gender dysphoria obligatory, and often medical intervention necessary.
To me, your characterization of 1 and 2 seem similar. If you say "holding position x is indefensible" then you are implying that people who hold position x are immoral (and likely doing harm in holding, acting on or spreading such an immoral view).
I would also add that comment 1 writes that the indefensible claim is "[people] think that fighting wokeness is more important than actually helping minorities, women, etc."
I think their words implicitly horribly tar and strawman people who care about "fighting wokeness." I think many people who are anti-woke care very deeply about minorities women, etc... and feel that wokeness *is* virtue signalling that actively harms those it claims to help (e.g., there is evidence that defund the police lead to worse outcomes for impoverished communities and higher crime rates). As such, I can see why the banned party would get defensive, see themselves as being personally attacked, and want to respond in kind.
To be clear, to me, comment 1 is implying that people who care about fighting wokeness are harming minorities.
Tbh, you and scott may well have a far better sense of the exchange, I've only read it after seeing the ban notification, and many of the comments have been deleted, but I see the text I've quoted as quite inflammatory, and without the context of all the deleted comments (which could easily tip the balance into making the ban justified), the ban seems disproportionate.
I believe it extremely obvious I was not talking about social transitioning. As you say, that would be a ridiculous and extraordinary claim.
For one, I'm not even sure the phrase "ban social conditioning" even makes sense. It's would be incredibly hard to define, and (luckily) incredibly hard to police, and (luckily) I believe way way outside of the western zeitgeist
An no, it's not hyperbolic at all regarding medical transitioning. I believe it factual. Correct me if I am wrong, but support for LGBTQ is mainly found in the west (as opposed to the Middle East, Asia, Africa). As such, I believe, the majority of non-European non-American countries do not support medical transitioning minors, meanwhile, Europe + UK has outlawed it.
Basically (as I understand it) it is uncontroversial the world over that transitioning minors is a bad idea (e.g., the UK NICE government organisation + the EU regulation conclusively decided, and much of elsewhere it was never even considered). It is just the USA that has this strange controversy around it. And in the USA, no it is not fringe, it is a weirdly contested issue, despite transitioning minors being (extremely fringe / moving to outlawed) everywhere else
We are at 6 players. I’ll give it another day and then I’ll open the game up to anyone on backstabbr to join as number 7. Unless we hit quorum before then of course.
"Prof Penadés' said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicating his research.
"It's not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one," he said.
"It's that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.
"And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we're now working on that.""
Dr. Penadés gave the AI a prompt and it came up with four hypothesis, one which the researchers could not come up with. Is that not proof of original thought?
I am quite confused by this article. The way I understand it is that the team solved a novel problem over 10 years, but didn't publish yet and didn't talk about it on the internet, so it couldn't have been in the public AI training data. Then they gave the same problem to the AI tool, and it then provided a number of promising hypotheses, one of which was the same the team based their work on.
Then comes the confusing part. The article states that the problem "has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool." and the AI "reached the same conclusion in 48 hours". Then it goes on to clarify that the AI only provided the same starting hypothesis that the team spent years working out. While that's not nothing, it is far from doing the entire body of work.
>Prof Penadés' said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicating his research.
>
>"It's not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one," he said.
>
>"It's that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.
Maybe that's just me, but "replicating" research is not the same as "providing a hypothesis", or even several.
Also, there is a major confounding factor here: The reasearch is all but finished already, which creates at least two possible problems.
>"I wrote an email to Google to say, 'you have access to my computer, is that right?'", he added.
>
>The tech giant confirmed it had not.
First problem: If the tool is running locally on the researcher's computer(s), what it can or can't do is Google's word; the responder might have been confused or ignorant about the tool's abilities[1]. In essence, do it again on a clean machine.
Second problem: Looking at the overview of how "co-scientist" works [2], it seems the researcher doesn't just type in "hey google, how do I fight superbugs?", but has to configure the assistant with "preferences, experiment constraints, and other attribute". So it seems there's a chance that the researchers unwittingly fed the assistant with things they couldn't have known without doing the work themselves.
[1] Back in the day, Google's promise about its Streetview cars not collecting WiFi data (literally wardriving) was also incorrect, later excused with a development feature left active in production. These things happen; they may not have been malicious, but they happen.
It’s definitely not proof of original thought, because we can’t agree on what “thought” is.
It is proof that this is a very useful tool.
And I suspect that some day it will help us understand the many different things we call “thought” a lot better, by seeing which are well-emulated by raw neural nets, which by “chain of thought” text generation, and which by various other things. And maybe at the end we will accept that many of these things along the day do really deserve the term “thought”.
For what it’s worth, I agree with Turing on this. As long as you can keep having conversations and they keep serving your purposes, that’s all that matters. With some humans, those purposes include collectively solving math problems together, with others it’s friendship, and with others it’s just getting your paperwork approved. Some people use “thinking” for some of the steps that go on in some of those activities.
I tend to agree with this, while noting the caveat of "as long as". A real person will keep having conversations (until sleep or coma or dementia or death); an AI will keep having conversations until it starts malfunctioning.
To me, this turns out to be the key concern people have. We have a much easier time telling when a person has stopped serving the purpose of a conversationalist than we do for an AI, because an AI will continue to appear intelligent past the point that it's saying reliable things. This is fine if we're looking for a simulation of an imperfect narrator; it's less fine if we're consulting that AI for advice on a business decision (which seems to be the aim in the long run).
Imagine you're a maximally malicious actor who becomes President of the United States. Your goal is to decrease overall utility as much as possible. You can't do anything illegal, either under US law or widely recognized international law (e.g can't invade countries). Your party has a supermajority in both houses and are able to pass whatever legislation you want, but don't have enough states to ratify Constitutional amendments. You don't have to care in the slightest about public opinion. What do you do?
(this isn't a commentary on Trump or anything, just a thought experiment)
(seriously please don't mention Trump I'm so tired of him)
Escalate great power conflict with Russia and China as much as possible, while eroding diplomatic safeguards and contacts, until you blunder into an accidental nuclear war (presuming an intentional first strike is illegal).
I’m surprised so few people are gwilling bing foreign policy examples, which to me seems like the ‘easiest’ area in which to cause enormous harm. One needn’t invade other countries to start wars. The US could engage in aggressive but legal provocations, like stationing and mobilizing US troops as close as possible.to rival countries while also imposing embargoes on them. Do this while also gutting defense spending, signaling maximal aggression and minimal preparedness for war. The president could also support powerful countries’ territorial claims against weaker ones, or if that violates international law, just signal that he would do nothing whatsoever to punish an aggressor country if it were to attack a weaker neighbor.
I think one could definitely lay the ground work for WW3 without technically breaking any laws.
Most of what one might want to do is probably already found in the Simple Sabotage Manual. Most of it is (I think) perfectly legal, and doesn't even really require giving any orders.
The only real utility left in American government comes when the imperial presidency, bloated with executive power, manages to push something through despite institutional gridlock. The legislative branch has been so hollowed out by polarization, corporate influence, and procedural dysfunction that major governance increasingly depends on executive orders, regulatory agencies, and emergency powers.
Take, for instance, Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts. While Congress was utterly incapable of passing meaningful relief, Biden attempted to leverage executive authority under the HEROES Act to wipe out some debt. The Supreme Court struck it down, showing the limits of even the executive's overreach, but the point remains: if something big is to happen in post-1994 Washington, it's usually because the president finds a way to do it unilaterally. Obama’s DACA program was another case where Congress’s failure to pass immigration reform led to an executive workaround. Trump, for his part, governed largely through executive orders and emergency declarations, from border wall funding to pandemic response, because Congress couldn’t get anything done.
A "libertopian" vision of returning to strict constitutional principles, where the executive defers to Congress and states for governance, would be the easiest, most legal way to guarantee disaster. Imagine a scenario where the president voluntarily relinquishes much of their modern power, promising to act only as a co-equal branch as envisioned in the 18th century, along with some "common sense" amendments to rein in the remaining unchecked powers like pardons etc. Congress would then need to pass laws on everything from climate policy to economic stimulus, foreign policy, and crisis response. Given the levels of dysfunction that have prevailed in the American legislature my entire life, I can't imagine a more effective way to decrease utility in American under the provisions given.
I would grant US citizenship to everyone in the world. Would this lead to civil war, a coup or just the US turning into a developing country? Who knows, but surely something horrible and interesting would happen.
Everyone wants to enjoy Pax Americana, and no one wants to pay for it. That all changes with the new policy of birthright citizenship for all, which will build a bridge to Mexico and make the Mexicans pay for it.
Add more states? There's no minimum number of people per state, so you just add states with three people each (two Senators and one Representative) until you can amend the Constitution and do whatever you want.
Mess with the definitions of time via executive order.
Make a year last a century or a day. Or keep randomly flipping between the two definitions. Reset the calendar so we start again at year 1.
Rename all the months. Rename all the weekdays to the same name. Add or remove hours to the day.
That's all guaranteed to cause chaos and ruin contracts. Nobody would know when they need to make mortgage payments or deliver goods or anything like that.
At that point, the President would be removed from office, either by his own cabinet through the invocation of the 25th Amendment, or by the Senate through impeachment. It would be manifestly obvious that he or she was mentally ill and committed to hurting the national interest. No elaborate justification for removal would be needed.
How many nuclear reactors are still running in the U.S.? How good are the safety features? Doing things like cutting off water supplies or detaining key personnel to deliberately cause meltdowns seems like it could do some pretty widespread damage if it was done right.
In a similar vein, sending a bunch of ships all over the globe with deliberately volatile or dangerous cargo combinations and kneecapped safety precautions could cause a lot of damage that might qualify as "accidental" individually, while still happening reliably by dint of sheer numbers. Bonus points if you can get debilitating and difficult-to-clear wrecks and spills to hit the Panama and Suez canals, and major foreign harbors. You'd need good coordination, though: it probably wouldn't take very many incidents before other nations started turning your ships away at the edges of their territorial waters.
OK, weird thought: I'm sure *issuing orders* to attack other nations would violate international law. But is there anything preventing you from simply deceiving your own personnel *without* actually issuing orders? Like, sending a series of fake communications to various warships and submarines and overseas military bases, feeding each of them a scenario in which a foreign adversary has suddenly attacked, the chain of command is in shambles and they need to act on their own initiative? If even a fraction of them took the bait you could probably cause a lot of chaos very quickly.
My understanding is almost all (maybe all) reactors in the US (and the west in general) are either incapable of non-deliberate meltdowns or have a containment structure around them that would make a worst case scenario have minimal impact outside of losing a reactor and having to maintain the containment structure permanently.
And yes, to address your specific points, our power plants have many redundant safeguards, from complex computer systems down to simple electromechanical switches, all waiting to drop the control rods and SCRAM in a fraction of a second. We also build containment buildings around our reactors.
Fukushima gives a pretty good example of how a worst-case scenario looks for a non-RBMK (Chernobyl) reactor. You'd need decades of basically deliberate neglect, and from my time in and around nuclear plants, I can tell you you'd need to overturn a lot of regulations (many imposed by INPO, which is not a government agency) and somehow toss out a pretty firmly established safety culture to get even a Fukushima in this country.
Worth noting that the nuclear plants I saw (SONGS in California and Palo Verde in Arizona) had made modifications in response to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, &c., so you'd actually need to do even *worse* than the Japanese did to get even the smallest release of radiation to the public.
I've worked in the facilities, studied the drawings as part of my training, and even if you gave me a team of people, the most I could do to a nuclear plant in the US would be to trip the automatic safeties. It's not even close.
To go Full Fukushima, you also need a 9.0 earthquake and associated tsunami or the equivalent, to destroy all the backup systems at once. And if you've got that, then the meltdown is about 0.1% of your problem. Well, OK, 0.1% of your material and loss-of-life problem; it will still be 90% of your PR problem.
Three Mile Island is the reference case for a meltdown without any other affiliated catastrophes, and it's basically a nothingburger for everyone except the plant's owners (who are out an expensive power plant) and their PR team (because obvious).
I disagree about your first point: Chernobyl showed that man-made disasters are plenty sufficient IFF you take away safety culture in engineering, administration, and operation.
Conversely, I think we could survive a natural disaster of the same magnitude as the one which fit Fukushima, because we do have that culture of keeping ourselves honest and being open in communication.
Agree that it's notable that TMI is the absolute worst commercial nuclear disaster in US history and resulted in, within a rounding error, zero harm. Reading the sequence of events at Browns Ferry a couple decades prior, it seems like things are headed for disaster, but even in those cowboy days, we were able to handle things without causing harm.
Chernobyl proved that if you try to build atom bomb factories on the cheap, you're courting disaster. See also windscale. The features that made Chernobyl a bigger catastrophe than e.g. Three Mile Island, were entirely due to its intended use as a plutonium breeder reactor. Don't do that (or pay to do it right), and you take Chernobyl off the table.
My understanding was that Fukushima even had some deliberately bad design decisions (primarily with the backup generator placement) so that if America went to war with Japan America could knock it out.
I don't know anything about that. Their main problem was the door to the room which contained the switchgear for emergency power. The room was below water level and was supposed to be water-tight, but it seems nobody wanted to blow the whistle too hard that the door never passed water tightness tests.
The sea wall was designed to exceed the highest wave they expected to hit the area. Later studies determined a taller potential wave, but they never got around to upgrading the wall.
When the wave hit, nobody put out a distress call. The US could've had a portable generator on-site in less than a day, and I'm sure the Japanese have a domestic force for responding to events like this, but again, it seems nobody wanted to blow the whistle, so you end up with old men carrying plastic buckets down to the beach to get cooling water onto the spent fuel pile. Senseless waste of life.
While I agree with your comment, did anyone actually die as a result of radiation exposure? The wikipedia article claims one possible cancer fatality four years later. As far as I can tell the upheaval of evacuating thousands of old people from their homes for an extended period was probably more harmful on net.
Looking a bit deeper it seems it might have been a canard I'd been told around the time and never questioned much deeper. It seems the generator placement was according to the General Electric manual for the reactor but the General Electric engineers told TEPCO to ignore that section of the manual and place the generators in a better location which TEPCO ignored.
One thing I'd like to notice regarding solutions is that while (by hypothesis) your party will stay united behind you, so you can keep passing laws even as opinion turns against you, the power to pass laws isn't the same as the power to make people obey. Obviously most people will obey most laws by default, but everyone has limits.
I'd expect some of the more obviously extended and malicious plans to provoke *a lot* of disobedience. Not just from the citizenry, but from the actual people enforcing the law. Part of what makes the challenge interesting (at least to me) is the question "how do you get people to be complicit in their own destruction?" Which is to say, plans in which the average citizen (or law enforcement official) won't see the Bad Stuff coming seem much more likely to succeed than plans which require multiple slow, obviously-harmful steps to produce their desired intent.
Pass a law to tax all income over $47,000 at 100%, combined with a $47,000 basic income. Meanwhile drop the capital gains and corporate taxes to 0% (while reclassifying all dividends to "ordinary", so they get taxed at the 100% rate), and also eliminate all regulation on corporate spending - if corporations want to buy a house and servants and regular meals for their CEO, or even all their employees, nobody is going to stop them. Also, we're abolishing labor unions.
Since corporations can't realistically pay their employees in cash, only stocks and benefits, I expect a merchant-feudal system to quickly arise among the employed, while the unemployed, who will quickly outnumber them, live meager forcefully-unproductive lives, which slowly spiral downward as inflation takes hold and their fixed incomes fail to keep up.
We also build vast densely-packed "planned communities" for all of those people to live in, with all the amenities - food, television, internet - for the low low price of $47,000 a year. They don't have to last very long, just through my term, so we can cut a few corners on construction. The goal is just to concentrate as many people as possible in as small an area as possible. Ideally we place some of these "planned communities" around five miles away from all the various corporate enclaves popping up.
Wait until the last six months of my term, and then end the basic income.
Deploy the national guard to put down the riots. Then send them into just one or two of the corporate enclaves and take into custody all the men and most of the women (leave some of the women and children); we'll only hold them for a little while, but in the meantime will make sure that the rioters know the enclaves have been emptied and are basically undefended except for some of those rich women and their wealthy spoiled children.
Premise 1: Congress has near-plenary authority to tax "income from whatever source derived" as well as to impose tariffs, excises, and the like on commerce. Under established domestic and international law, this power can be applied to foreigners living and working in the US, Americans living inside or outside the US, businesses operating in the US, and commerce within the US or crossing American border. The only real constitutional limit is that "direct taxes" (head taxes, property taxes, etc) other than income taxes need to be apportioned between states according to census population. There are some other limits under international law from free trade agreements and tax treaties designed to protect expatriates and multinational businesses from double taxation.
Premise 2: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
The course of action implied by this would be to raise taxes to confiscatory levels and impose them as broadly as existing treaties allow, with the intent of utterly ruining any legitimate commercial activity involving the US.
1: Pardon literally every criminal. All of them. If they get arrested again, pardon them again.
2. Triple our nuclear weapons stockpiles and offer to sell nukes at low prices to volatile countries like Iran or Syria.
3. Withdraw from the Biological Weapons Convention (we can actually do that!) and engineer a super-virus, which we can't legally use without being provoked but still raises x-risk.
4. Cut PEPFAR completely and threaten to tariff into oblivion any country that tries to step in and fill the gap.
5. T̵h̵e̵r̵e̵'̵s̵ ̵n̵o̵ ̵i̵n̵t̵e̵r̵n̵a̵t̵i̵o̵n̵a̵l̵ ̵l̵a̵w̵s̵ ̵o̵n̵ ̵a̵n̵i̵m̵a̵l̵ ̵c̵r̵u̵e̵l̵t̵y̵,̵ ̵s̵o̵ ̵b̵y̵ ̵c̵h̵a̵n̵g̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵U̵S̵ ̵f̵e̵d̵e̵r̵a̵l̵ ̵l̵a̵w̵ ̵w̵e̵ ̵c̵a̵n̵ ̵m̵a̵x̵i̵m̵i̵z̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵a̵t̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ ̵j̵u̵s̵t̵ ̵s̵p̵e̵n̵d̵ ̵t̵r̵i̵l̵l̵i̵o̵n̵s̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵d̵o̵l̵l̵a̵r̵s̵ ̵o̵n̵ ̵b̵u̵i̵l̵d̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵t̵o̵r̵t̵u̵r̵e̵ ̵c̵h̵a̵m̵b̵e̵r̵s̵ ̵f̵o̵r̵ ̵s̵m̵a̵l̵l̵ ̵a̵n̵i̵m̵a̵l̵s̵.̵ ̵[EDIT: just occurred to me that it kinda defeats the point of saying you have to follow US law if you can change it, so scratch the torture chamber idea. I guess we'll just have to stick with subsidizing factory farms instead, which to be fair aren't far off from torture chambers anyway]
Pretty sure that's not legal under international law. It is probably the quickest way to destroy the world though, and under US law legally can't be disobeyed by the people carrying out the strikes (realistically ofc they would refuse and the 25th amendment would be invoked.)
> ...and under US law legally can't be disobeyed by the people carrying out the strikes (realistically ofc they would refuse and the 25th amendment would be invoked.)
You have US law backwards. You're correct that they would refuse but the refusal wouldn't be illegal, not refusing would be. The President deciding to order a nuclear strike against countries that the US isn't at war with (or covered by some other use of force authorization) and are not an imminent danger requiring immediate response is an illegal order and members of the military are specifically required and trained not to obey illegal orders.
Nuclear command and control is an interesting case both because of their destructive potential and the need to be able to rapidly respond in a decapitation strike scenario (the book literally named "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser is a good overview) but even crews at the point of sale, so to speak, are going to have clarifying questions if suddenly ordered to glass London, Paris, etc. But the order won't ever make it to them as the President can't ring them up directly and everyone involved higher up would, as you note, refuse.
Under international law, is the US allowed to _donate_ the nuclear weapons - say to assorted terrorist groups? Preference given to groups that itch to blow up particularly heavily populated cities?
It's more difficult to say whether we can give nukes to states. Currently under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, we cannot; no nuclear state is permitted to give nukes or help other states acquire nukes at all, ever. We could withdraw from that treaty; I'm not sure whether it's still technically legal after withdrawing to give nukes to a volatile state like Iran or Syria. I asked Grok (tried Claude at first but it's too scared to say anything about such a negative sounding scenario) and it had this to say:
"If the US withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), it would no longer be legally bound by its specific obligations, including Article I’s prohibition on transferring nuclear weapons to "any recipient whatsoever." The NPT allows withdrawal under Article X, requiring a state to give three months’ notice and cite "extraordinary events" jeopardizing its supreme interests. So, yes, technically, post-withdrawal, the US could give nuclear weapons to other states without violating the NPT—since it wouldn’t apply anymore.
However, international law isn’t just the NPT. Other frameworks and principles would still complicate this. The UN Charter, which the US can’t realistically exit without upending its global position, includes Article 2(4)’s ban on the threat or use of force against states’ territorial integrity or political independence. Sharing nuclear weapons with a state could be seen as enabling aggression, depending on the recipient and context—say, arming a volatile ally against a rival. The US could counterclaim self-defense under Article 51 if it argued the transfer preempted an imminent threat, but that’s a high bar and easily contested.
Customary international law, binding even without treaties, also frowns on proliferation. The NPT’s norms—non-transfer, non-acquisition—reflect a widespread state practice and opinio juris (sense of legal obligation) that’s arguably crystallized into custom. Transferring nukes could breach this, though enforcement is murky: no automatic penalties, just potential ICJ cases or countermeasures by other states, both of which require political momentum.
UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (2004), binding under Chapter VII, further mandates preventing weapons of mass destruction from reaching non-state actors, but it’s less explicit about state-to-state transfers. If the recipient state then passed them to terrorists, the US could be indirectly liable for not ensuring safeguards—though proving intent or negligence would be a legal mess.
Post-withdrawal, practical limits would dominate. Giving nukes to, say, a stable ally like Japan might dodge legal blowback but spark a proliferation cascade—think South Korea, then China arming others. Arming an unstable state like North Korea (hypothetically) would invite sanctions, condemnation, or worse. The 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, still binding on the US unless it withdrew there too, requires preventing misuse of nuclear material, which could be stretched to cover reckless transfers."
I am way too tired to figure out what that means or whether it is technically legal after withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty to give other states nukes, but maybe that'll be of some help to you.
That and basically starting fights with all our historical allies. There was a lot of goodwill due to cultural similarity and shared history with Canada and Europe that is going to be very hard to rebuild.
Does anyone have any useful feedback on IFS or Internal Family Systems therapy? My therapist suggested it to me and my take was "let's try it, sounds dumb, things that sound dumb sometimes work."
I've done it with my therapist. It can be powerful if done well, and has failure modes if done poorly. If you trust your therapist, I'd recommend giving it a shot.
I don't know what constitutes useful feedback. It's not clear what you're looking for.
Broadly, IFS is one of several approaches to dealing with your reactive self, your shadow self, whatever you want to call it. I see it as an organizational device -- it can help you categorize and understand your experiences, leveraging things that seem to be innate. For example, IFS depends on viewing discrete events as a narrative, which is something you do anyway (likely without noticing). You (we, everyone) also have a tendency to take the few things you know about a person and construct a full personality; you turn that tendency inward, and you can learn to know yourself as distinct persons or "parts" -- and then "you" (the "Self" that's in the center of it all) can engage with (soothe, persuade, cajole, recruit) those parts. One of my internal metaphors is that you are lining up the huskies to pull the sleigh in one direction.
I haven't done formal IFS. But in talking with those that have, I can see that some of my internal (shadow) work accomplishes the same goals: creating loving, compassionate spaces for aspects of experience that we have a tendency to reject. (Kind of like, you don't yell at a crying baby, you hold it.)
The pitfall I've seen is reification of narrative and parts. As noted above, we bind discrete experiences into narratives (including parts/personalities). But the bound things aren't real; they are mental devices that help to navigate the world. There might come a point where the mental device no longer fits with experience, and yet you might continue to add to what becomes a baroque narrative, keeping you stuck in a half-healed state. Maybe an analogy is leaving a cast on too long. Yes, the bone is healed, but you're still disabled by the cast and by the weakened soft tissue. Just as there comes a time to remove the cast and get some physical therapy, there comes a time to release a narrative, freeing you to be open to experiences and the possibility of a new narrative.
I mostly know about IFS from Scott's review of "The Others Within Us". My main takeaway from is was that IFS occasionally leads its practicioners to conclude that their patient are literally possessed by demons, which sounds like a failure mode to me.
If you can successfully "exorcise" those "demons", you could theoretically induce permanent psychological changes. I mean, this is more just brainwashing than therapy, but if it works, it works.
Hm yeah. I was going to say 'at worst, it sounds like you get to roleplay various internal motivations and dump out some internal monologue, which could be useful' ... but it does seem like there might be more radical possible downsides
I believe it's traditional to do some combination of overindulging at the bar and buffet, then embarrass oneself with obvious social faux pas and unintentional class-revealing slips, to generally make the paying members feel like they're getting good value from keeping the riff raff out.
> So I guess we should be making fun of polyamory?
Yeah, also we should skewer AI risk and be vocally pro-school.
"My computer is so dumb it routinely crashes, loses files, forgets years-long wifi passwords, pops up dumb dialogue menus for no reason, and forces me to update when I don't want to - and you guys are *worried* that they're going to get smarter?? Lol, nerds."
"Schools are great, what do you mean it's all wasted time and homework? What we really need to do is cut funding for gifted and talented programs so we can extend the school day so I can pick them up later. Also we could spend more on sports that way."
a) Can you imagine having a conversation with somebody in your head (not hallucinating one, but rather imagining one, or having a conversation with an imagined version of a real person)?
b) How close is it to what a real conversation with that person would be like?
c) Can you do the same with a fictional character? With somebody who you don't know particularly well?
This is typically how I think. The conversation I am having in my head is usually with myself, but often enough it's some other person, real or fictional, that I make up in my head. Right now, I am thinking these words I type inside my head, as if I was speaking aloud (which I am not).
I'm not sure what you mean by "how close". If you mean does if feel like I'm having a conversation with someone, yes it does. Sometimes I'm even surprised by the responses.
Yes, it doesn't matter if the person is real or not. In fact, I sometimes have internal conversations with fictional characters I have made up for the work I am writing on at the time. Those lead to some interesting insights...
If the conversation is taking place in your head, then by definition, it is a fictional character, even if it looks like your mother.
I do this all the time. There is a whole cast of characters I have conversations with. I think it’s an essential skill if you are a fiction writer or a playwright.
I regularly do that. How close is it to a real conversation with the real person? Not at all, since the imaginary conversations allow me to monologue, engage in l'esprit d'escalier, and have all my points be winning ones (of course) which convince the other party to come around to my point of view.
That's the whole point of imaginary conversations: real ones don't follow the neat script you have laid out in your head.
Wait, you always win the arguments you have in your head? I talk to myself so much I don't even notice a lot of the time unless somebody comments on it, but I do find myself changing my mind based on these conversations.
Mostly, but that's because I only engage in conversations with the imaginary interlocutor when I'm upset/energised about something and feel like "no, *I* am in the right here". It's a lot easier (and more polite) to have the last word when talking to myself than doing it with a real person.
The closest thing I have to internal conversations is unfocused monologues. Like for example, if I'm ranting about a subject in my head, I'll sometimes imagine likely responses and then argue against them, but it could only loosely be considered a conversation, even apart from the inherently unfocused nature of thought.
I guess I should have also asked, given that people keep volunteering it:
d) Why do you do this?
e) How much time do you spend in imagined conversations?
My own answers:
a) Yes
b) Depends on how deep the conversation goes; if I'm imagining talking with somebody at work, it's pretty true to how it actually goes since it's mostly small talk, less so for, say, my family. It also depends on the person; some people are pretty predictable (but not 100%), others I have a hard time figuring out what they would say besides some mannerisms
c) It feels weird to talk to actual fictional characters or people who I don't know well, but I can. I can definitely have a conversation with a hypothetical person though, for some reason.
d) To prep for important conversations, to think about hypothetical scenarios, because I can get better thoughts in some scenarios if I imagine talking with somebody about it. It's usually not because I want to change the past.
e) Usually it's when I'm running/biking or when getting ready to go to sleep- so a decent amount of time but I also think without having conversations a lot.
I wonder what the range of reports as to how close this is to a real conversation means. Do people who write or read more fiction perceive it as closer? Does it have some correlation with neurodivergence?
b) no because it's always me saying things I wish I had said/could say
c) no to the first question, yes to the second question if despite my not knowing them well we ever had a conversation that I wish had gone differently
(a) Yes, fairly vividly; I can mentally "hear" their tone and each word.
(b) I can make it like a real conversation if I tried, but typically most of my imaginary conversations involving people I know are arguments that my imaginary interlocutor eventually concedes, which basically never happens in real life because people never admit when they're wrong!
(c) Yes, but I never do so because I'm not particularly into fiction. I do often imagine conversations with famous figures that I've never met IRL, e.g advising the President to do this or that.
I imagine conversations a lot. I don’t know if I imagine them audiovisually or just textually. I don’t think they represent what the person would say all that well - they better represent what seems poetically appropriate to me for the person to say. (In my imagination they usually argue with me a lot more and I come up with reasons for what I’m saying, but in person they just say “sure go ahead” after I say the first line.)
Oh for the gift of such a silver tongue, or, I guess, friends too busy to argue with nearly every single sentence I say or write. Why poetically appropriate, rather than maximally likely? My interlocutors have the uncanny ability to focus on all the weakest parts of my arguments, no poetry involved unfortunately.
But that’s like saying that everybody in my dreams is me. They are, and they aren’t. They are because they are from my imagination, they aren’t because they don’t appear in my dream as me. That would be a very specific and weird nightmare - a town full of me.
I don’t think anybody is denying that. But in my head and the head of people who do this - and judging by literature that’s a lot - we don’t have conversations with ourselves representing ourselves in our head. Instead another person - voiced by us for sure is in there. It’s odd that you see only yourself in dreams
I am coming back to this, because I am not sure what you mean. Did I give the impression that my dreams are only populated by “clones” of myself (meaning they all look like me?)
I thought I made a post on open thread 371, but now I'm unable to find it. Are posts ever silently deleted? I'm not sure what was controversial about it. I was even trying to "admit I was partially in the wrong" for a prior post in 370.
Posts are't silently deleted ever, AFAIK. It s very hard to find one buried in a huge thread though. You can search for yout name or a distinctive word in your post using CMD-F. Before you search you should make sure no threads on the page are collapsed, though, because they aren't included in the search if they are
I couldn't find it before with CMD-F, and it was a top-level comment :-/.
If it's deep in a thread it won't be searchable at the level. You might have to expand it several times. If not, I'd advise going to your activity tab under your user name, finding the post you replied to in that thread and start going deeper until you find the correct reply or a deleted message.
Also, am I remembering right that you work AI Alignment? (If so, I have a
small question for you.)
I do not work AI alignment, just lurk lesswrong and skim a couple of papers. I can answer but I can't promise it'll be good.
Oh, it's not a deep AI question at all, it's a practical one! I've gotten somebody I know interested in working on AI alignment. His degree and technical skills sound (to my non-tech ears, anyhow) approximately right, & he's now job-hunting because he thinks his present job is only very indirectly helpful to the world. So I sent him to the 80,000 Hours job board, where you can find a bunch of Alignment jobs. 5 or 6 came up when I searched there. I was just wondering if that's an adequate way to search for AI alignment jobs, or if there was some other place he should also be looking.
He might want to post/search on the alignment forum.
Off the top of my head:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uKPtCoDesfawNfyJg/how-to-become-an-ai-safety-researcher
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/5rsa37pBjo4Cf9fkE/a-newcomer-s-guide-to-the-technical-ai-safety-field
https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Yp2vYb4zHXEeoTkJc/welcome-and-faq
You should consider the above resources as the results of a brief, kinda low quality search over my AI alignment knowledge rather than something comprehensive (with medium quality being "spend a weekend or afternoon collating everything" and high "cross reference and follow up on results of recommending those resources")
By deep in the thread, do you mean the depth where the rest of
the thread is continued on a separate page?
Yup. Looks like I'm missing the word "top" in my first sentence. (Won't be searchable at the top level)
The Diplomacy game is live. First adjudication in a week, then every two days.
Whats a good source for the state of the art *evolutionary* machine learning algorithms(i.e. not backprop/calculus)
We had a check on the table made out to my wife. I asked her about it, then I took it to my wife to sign it. After that, I brought it back to the table to get my phone so I could scan it in.
I open the Android app drawer. At the top are 4 apps. I think the most used or most recent, I've never figured it out.
My banking app was there as one of the 4. I hadn't opened it in weeks.
And it's not like this is a Friday thing. It was an unexpected check we've had sitting around for a while.
It was the app I picked up my phone to use. But it couldn't have known that. But it knew,
Put your phone in a sack with a brick and cast it into the sea.
Great, now it's gonna be looking for deals on boats.
Years ago a guy working in app security told me his company didn’t allow android phones into the office. BlackBerry or iPhone were the only two brands allowed.
Have an iPhone, have definitely had analogous experiences. I generally assume my phone is eavesdropping on me.
Your phone had probably just been eavesdropping on the conversation between you and your wife. It was just trying to be helpful. Nothing to worry about. (this is one of those times where i wonder if i should add I’m just kidding)
We observe as well that if we're talking about some random thing, my wife starts getting ads for exactly this thing on her phone. Is the phone eavesdropping, or is this some sort of frequency illusion?
Could one of you have done a Google search for something that you were talking about? If I search for say ‘hiking boots’ my wife and i will see targeted ads for hiking boots in our shared newspaper subscriptions.
No, we were just discussing something like e.g. getting a new garden shed, and then an hour later she sees these ads for sheds in the Facebook or Amazon app. But as I said, I don't know how many ads she gets for all kinds of things, so it could be some sort of cognitive bias.
Are people aware that next weekend is the 10 year anniversary of HPMOR, and there's meetups in many cities in celebration?
That are open to anyone that wants to come? :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LBs8RRQzHApvj5pvq/hpmor-anniversary-guide
I wasn't able to find where the meet-up details are.
They're here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tWpRpQKLAr6HqtAgL/hpmor-anniversary-parties-coordination-resources-and
and also here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xI65Jon_bmdY1Hv8zmEXdM6Wjm0eBXF5n8d2lscSf9I/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you!
I'm surprised there are still dedicated enough fans of the story to have meetups.
HPMOR *still* refers about 20% of new users to LessWrong, putting it in the same weight class as ACX.
There is probably some difference between an HPMOR meetup and a LessWrong meetup, though I continue to be confused at the venn diagram overlaps in this community.
Jack Voraces, a professional narrator and voice actor, did a free audiobook reading of HPMOR that he released as a serialized podcast. He started it in 2021, finished it this past summer, and has continued the podcast with a reading of a sequel fic, Significant Figures by Alexander Davies.
The podcast seems to have gotten a fair number of people interested in HPMOR again, at least to judge by activity on the fan subreddit.
I'd accidentally posted an incomplete version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRwfgskxGto&t=2s
A talk by Matt Arnold. This isn't a complete summary, but I think it covers the major points. I've left out the names of specific cults. I think one of the basic themes is that ordinary life is worthy of respect.
Cults amplify traits that healthy groups need. Groups need some money to keep going, but they shouldn't extract as much as possible from their members. Groups need friendships and connections among their members, but they shouldn't be the only source of relationships.
What does nihilism mean? I think it means the belief that there's no truth and no values, but I'm not sure.
Feelings are emphasized over thinking in bad groups.
There is no cult-proof ideology
David Chapman-- Cults offer "the illusion of complete certainty, understanding, and control"
Bad sign: A system where no one is good enough at achieving the goals of the group.
Don't let not being a good enough polyamorist make you miserable.
Coming alive should be the first priority.
Wow factor-- an impressive idea isn't necessarily true.
Have some people in your life with low openness to new ideas. People who can say, "That's fuckin' weird". [This doesn't address the possibility that in some societies, the mainstream is a cult.]
People should not feel an obligation to save the world. And sometimes it's combined with hopelessness.
In general, not feeling permitted to take care of yourself is a bad sign.
Don't let too many people who need the group for a sense of purpose into the group. They will make the group into a toxic perfection spiral.
Eternalism-- "it's this or nothing".
It's important for a group to permit challenges to ideas-- don't be supportive to everyone about every idea they have. Epistemic hygiene is needed.
Don't just say "It's complicated". Say "it's complicated in this way".
Is it safe to have the concept of infohazard? Perhaps the concept of infofragility is more useful.
Don't be extremely pro-woo or anti-woo. Aim for being able to use all the mental tools.
You will find what you look for. If you believe there's a pattern in history, you will find it, and if you believe your mind has certain elements, your mind will obligingly create them for you.
Ada Palmer as a good historian who looks for what's ambiguous in history rather than simple lessons.
Ideas from whatever source are more like spores-- starters for new ideas rather than things which are reliably transmitted.
On the subject of secret laws, and procedures for establishing trust among highly skilled deceivers: https://palelights.com/2025/03/07/chapter-78/
Still banned from ACXD. Still barred from ACN due to the Zizians. Anywho. Experienced a brief spat of homelessness, which "encouraged" my family to seek therapy with me. Any tips regarding how I should approach it? I know aggressively truth seeking will just engender conflict, but I'm unsure how these things generally work. My first appointment is on Tuesday, so if anyone has tips on how this werks that would be swell.
The only thing I could tell you, and I have been in a lot of therapy over my life, is to try and represent yourself, truthfully; your own feelings, your own thoughts. Those you’re entitled to, and might find some relief in getting them out there in a neutral setting where there is someone to monitor.
Whats a culturally possible(without an *cough* overthrow) but optimized to win democratic party platform for 2028... or 2036?
How do you fly your private jets to European conferences to then ban straws because its polls well with your base* (poll was actually done on insane far left group and they were lying); while connecting with the average voter? How do you talk about democractic ideals then pushing bernie out.... again? How do you claim jk roweling is far right then convince actual centrists to accept your frame of reference?
It's pretty easy (for either party) to come up with an election-winning platform, just be public-minded centrists.
The problem is that the people whose cooperation you'll need are not interested in being public-minded centrists. You don't go into politics, or donate millions of dollars to politics, because you're interested in serving the agenda of Joe Median in Mediansburg OH, you do it because you want to serve your own agenda, whether that's political extremism, ingroup preference or just plain old self-interest.
The question of politics then becomes not how can you give the people what they want, but how can you triangulate between giving the people what they want and giving your allies what they want.
All they have to do is back off the woke nonsense. Understand that most of the country is white and that they're not evil. Understand that most people view trans as mental illness and won't tolerate having it normalized. Just back off the social justice and moderates will flock. If they'd just nominated Hillary last time I would've sprinted to the polls to vote for her. All most people want is someone competent and sane.
They could try running as the high-class party without another unlikeable "her turn" candidate. I made some suggestions here:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-democrats-use
Go back to the days when it was the party of the working class, but I don't know if that's possible. They nailed their colours to the mast on abortion, trans rights, etc. and now they have a tiny but extremely vocal minority tail that is wagging the dog. I don't believe there is, for example, such a thing as "abortion rights" but if they could row back to "safe, legal and rare" they'd meet a lot more of the country (except they can't because apparently "rare" is abortion shaming people who had abortions and it should be abortion for everyone all the time).
Gavin Newsom is giving some signs of preparing for 2028 with what he's been saying recently, but the problem there is that he is so transparently doing whatever the heck it takes out of expediency not principle that they'll run into the worst of both worlds; the very left to left of centre who will not vote for this kind of naked opportunistic flip-flopping so they lose a chunk of Democratic party voters, plus they won't pick up right of centre voters who know their guy is just doing the "these are my principles and if you don't like them, I have others!" bit.
Also, be sure to change the water coolers or the air conditioning filters or whatever the heck it was in the building that made them think running a candidate on endorsements from *the Cheneys* was a good idea. That's the kind of galaxy-brained take that made me go "what the flibberin' hell is this?"
EDIT: Seriously. "The GOP Great Satan himself says vote for Kamala"? Who thought that was a good idea? See, this is why drugs should not be legalised.
>They nailed their colours to the mast on abortion, trans rights, etc. and now they have a tiny but extremely vocal minority tail that is wagging the dog. I don't believe there is, for example, such a thing as "abortion rights" but if they could row back to "safe, legal and rare" they'd meet a lot more of the country (except they can't because apparently "rare" is abortion shaming people who had abortions and it should be abortion for everyone all the time).
The pro-choice side wins abortion referendums most of the time even in red states. This "abortion for everyone all the time" messaging would indeed hurt the Democrats, fortunately for them it doesn't exist outside the heads of conservatives. Look at how while it's practically law that every new TV show has to have at least one gay character, people on TV almost never get abortions.
> if they could row back to "safe, legal and rare" they'd meet a lot more of the country
Im not sure thats possible; the right wing is happily educating the new black voters about demographics paranoia and planned parenthood founding, the internet has back logs of women who have had dozens of abortions existing and being .... well morally disgusting in other ways.
"Im not sure thats possible; the right wing is happily educating the new black voters about demographics paranoia and planned parenthood founding"
They've been doing that for 30 years with nothing to show for it.
"the internet has back logs of women who have had dozens of abortions existing and being .... well morally disgusting in other ways."
Never heard of that. There's a catch-22 where anti-abortion people don't want to portray abortion patients sympathetically but also don't want to portray them poorly lest people ask if maybe it's a good thing they aren't having kids or are having fewer kids.
> They've been doing that for 30 years with nothing to show for it.
Its different when you agree with a person, and demographics is becoming a bigger issue, chinas one child policy will start hitting the wall and *everyone* on earth should notice not only those who understand compound interest.
> Never heard of that.
As much fun as it is to point out yet another example of "the left debates with a strawman right, while the right wing knows the left inside and out from having thier views pushed everywhere all the time", I think this is a blunt fact, radical feminists who talk proudly about their 12th abortion disgust me and I only needed 1 example to find hate.
Video of a circumcision, botched trans surgreys on children, rape cases being buried for racial reasons, criticisms of European criminals getting longer sentences then the criminal themselves, ovisous fake trans rapist going to a female prision; 1 example a name, face, picture and your never getting me back to be "moderate" with current talking points.
Such evidence is usually kept off search engines and many are gore so even parts of 4chan swing the ban hammer hard. I know your not aware of them, but they were never not effect my opinion. Blunt political facts and disgust; the "safe legal rare" medecial freedom compromise isnt on the table for me anymore because I simply dont believe the left to keep its word, if you want abortion for when it matters maybe talk about criminalizing gross over use.
Blunt fact: if your unable to humor the idea that Ive seen a view of someone proud of their 12th abortion and willing to say "if that happened it be bad"; I wont care what you say on the topic and it will make the left weaker.
It's true that declining fertility, absent AGI, will become a bigger issue in the future. The problem with promoting abortion bans as a solution is that, notwithstanding dysgenics, we're trying that now and it doesn't work. Very odd about anti-abortion people, they won this great victory three years ago, got rid of Roe, but now they just keep talking like "ban abortion" is a theoretical future thing.
>As much fun as it is to point out yet another example of "the left debates with a strawman right, while the right wing knows the left inside and out from having thier views pushed everywhere all the time"
My power level is higher than you think.
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/that-time-i-went-to-the-white-nationalist
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/another-whynat-meeting
Think of this as the next political era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_States
Suppose everyone agrees that the GOP has reorganized in a way that took a key faction away from Democrats. This suggests an underlying belief that parties are to be visualized as coalitions of factions, where any faction with significant voting power is on one side or the other, and any given individual is mostly in one faction - where that faction goes, that individual will go, and while that individual could change factions (e.g. civil rights advocate deciding her main concern is now foreign wars), change happens slowly and marginally - one can see signs of it at least a year in advance, and it's not the case that an entire faction's members suddenly decide they're all goldbugs or something.
Given that framework, the easiest, most be-like-water strategy I see for Democrats is to start by ruling out certain possibilities. The primary option to avoid: trying to turn the clock back to 2008. Whatever they lost, they're not likely to get back in exactly that form. That means blue collar people who went to Trump for blue collar reasons aren't going to about-face and head back to Democrats for those same reasons. People who hated Biden's response to COVID aren't going to flock back to Democrats if Democrats declare lockdowns and face masks are even lamer than Trump says they are and vaccines are even more dangerous than RFK Jr. has been arguing. (Indeed, this won't even be relevant if there isn't another pandemic for four years.) People who were fed up with the riots and hostile workplaces produced by wokism and DEI aren't going to even grudgingly decide the Democrats were right all along, let alone convert into fervent supporters.
Another strategy to avoid are changes on the persistent issues like abortion, gun control, EPA- and FDA-style regulation, macroeconomics, and so on. The battle lines on those have been drawn and reinforced and lined with wire and mines for decades, and more importantly, have settled roughly 50-50; I don't think Democrats can suddenly peel off voters by changing their stance on these issues faster than they'd lose voters for appearing to have let down their traditional side.
So what's left? Well, the Democrats might not get blue collars and Latinos and immigration reformers and vaccine mandate opponents that they lost. But they *might* get voters from around the back. Visually, imagine GOP/Dem as a sort of yin-yang; the movement that brought us Trump made a push around the wheel on one side. The Dems won't make much headway on that front. Instead, they push on the other side of the wheel, where Rep attention hasn't been as focused. In some cases, they get back the same individuals! It's just that the voter that went to the GOP for immigration reasons won't flip back to Dem for immigration reasons, but will flip for, say, environmental reasons or foreign policy reasons or something else.
This might require waiting for a crisis and being prepared to use it to make a point. For example, if Dems were to quietly fortify state emergency rescue efforts, only to have a major hurricane or quake or wildfire hit, and they keep their eye on the ball, they now look like the party of emergency preparedness. What was different? "We identified certain key services that could be better run locally, and coupled them with a network we funded to quickly shunt critical resources from neighboring localities to keep price gouging down." Crime wave? "We began an initiative at the state level to address gang warfare in a novel way, making it easier to disperse gangs before they form serious threats."
Some things don't have to wait for a crisis. "We conducted an overhaul of existing law at state levels to expedite the release of non-violent inmates and clear prison space for violent offenders, while comprehensively helping new releases to rehabilitate and re-enter civilian society." Health care? "We revisited the issue, and noticed that the one issue where the dollar did the most good was heart disease prevention. Two-pronged approach: research into new procedures for addressing heart issues, and prevention to make it easy for people to avoid heart disease in the first place."
The overall theme here is to change the game. Don't push back against the Republican success of the week or even initiative of the week; instead, find a new game. There are plenty. It's just that they require visiting territory that isn't getting much attention right now.
In times of great confusion the promise of certainty is very compelling. Trump exudes certainty, and when he says “Only I can fix this, and I can,” it is very seductive. There is a long history in America of the saga of the Lone Ranger riding into town and sorting things out. It is a new era, and the Democratic Party is going to be in the weeds until such time as there’s a train wreck so to speak. The train wreck will almost certainly come, because train wrecks always come, but until then it’s High Noon and Trump is Gary Cooper.
do you work as an analyst?
Not at the moment. I develop software. Why do you ask?
Seemed guarded and defensible; final.
"The economy is bad" is all they would need, if true.
But if it is really, really, really bad, there won't be much at stake for them to win.
>How do you fly your private jets to European conferences to then ban straws because its polls well with your base*
I dunno, how do you give billionaires a trillion-dollar tax cut and cut social programs to pay for it, because that polls well with the working class (poll was actually done on insane far-right group who thinks that social programs only go to illegal immigrants)?
Perhaps the key is not describing your opponent's platform in the most insanely uncharitable way possible.
I believe any tax cuts poll better then straw bans.
The court of public opinion won't treat your platform charitably, so preemptively engage with poor framing.
No, I mean *you* might be less confused about how the Democrats can have a marketable platform if you didn't pretend that plastic straws are a central plank of their platform.
(Assuming, of course, that you actually asked your question out of genuine curiosity and not simply to snipe at the things you don't like about Democrats.)
The marketable platform is pretty simple. "Donald Trump is setting the economy on fire so his billionaire friends can get even richer. We don't want that to happen."
> The marketable platform is pretty simple. "Donald Trump is setting the economy on fire so his billionaire friends can get even richer. We don't want that to happen."
Except people are just going to extrapolate the unsaid last line of the platform: "We want _our_ billionaire friends to get richer instead"
I don't think the Dems will have any success convincing the median voter that the Dems are good and the the Republicans are evil. The Dems all believe it themselves, which is part of the problem, but that's not a message which resonates with the people in the middle who think (quite justifiably) that both parties are overall pretty similar.
That guy is asking how the Dems can win next time, which means he's likely on their side and wants it to happen, which means he's not being uncharitable to an opponent's platform at all. He's being clear eyed about how they behave and how they're perceived.
He's wrong, obviously, if he wants the dirty dirty lefties to win, but he's not confused at all.
I don't know if I want the dirty dirty lefties to win, but there must be some normal Democrats out there, surely? EDIT: Depends on the dirty dirty lefty in question; I'd have some sympathy towards Syndicalism but not the DSA type of "help, we are all white middle-class college graduates here, where are the real proletariat members, comrades?" problem.
I've been told before that the DNC is largely irrelevant and I hope to hell that's true, because things like this are what you'd expect as a parody from very conservative Youtuber channels, but it's real: "we need gender balance by our regulations so you have to vote for one man, one woman, and one person of any gender".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6VFNpsxFsM
If they could corral all these people off in their own little committee to do things and then the rest of the party with the normal people ignore all that and do the real stuff, that might be a huge help.
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats.
- Noam Chomsky, 2012
The only way for real change is for at least one party to boot business out. But that will become harder over time because wealth and power are accumulating at the top, so what do you do if practically the entirety of both parties represents business interest, and your political system marginalizes third parties into irrelevance?
Realistically, the only ways for a reset in such a tightly closed system is going to be a bang or a whimper: violence or terminal decline. It would be far from either the first or last time in history.
Have you considered running candidates inside one party on your socialistic platform?
I'm mostly wondering if the democrats survive and replaced by some hybrid of greens and libertarians. Unlikely, but I think something has to change the lefts engery feels super low and money comes from believing it's 50 50
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties
While it's commendable that you cite a source, do you also have an argument that goes along with it?
I did as much work as you did.
"Both parties are corporatist" okay cool.
But people under 25 don't really vote so we need to work on actual strategies to win elections.
You answered your own question then. If the under-25s don't vote, and the over-25s also become more numerous thanks to demographics, you make politics for the over-25s, and do it better than the other party. That means corporatist politics from both sides, with a dash of scapegoating brown and yellow people for when too many over-25s start contemplating they might not be temporarily embarrassed millionaires after all.
I had heard of Shoe0nHead but never seen anything by her, and then I stumbled across this video and crikey, I mostly agree with her!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkd7j9kPb4c
So there are people who have some idea of what went wrong and where they should go (but sorry not the Bernie wing, that's never going to win elections), but will they be listened to, or will the party and supporters continue with "it is the fault of the people" even harder?
The Solution by Bertolt Brecht
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
I find the lack of Star Wars in this article disturbing.
To secure the Dem vote in 2028, probably run on the Supreme Court. It's the #3 issue for Democrats by importance (1). Specifically, the Court is roughly 6-3 conservative at this point. In 2028, Thomas will be ~80 and Alito will be ~76. Sotomayer will also be ~72 with diabetes. It's very likely that the 2028-2032 president will be able to replace at least one justice. More importantly, it's very easy, measurable, and plausible that the Democrats can do this. Like, improving the economy, always #1 issue, or fixing climate change are big, difficult issues that an administration could totally "work on" for 4-8 years without achieving anything.
That's kinda also the problem with winning over some Republican voters. The top things that Republicans care about and Dems don't, the kind of things you can bend on, are violent crime and immigration. It would be great if Dems could pivot on these but who would believe it? The Democratic "brand" has been pretty solidified on these things for decades and that's not gonna flip any time soon. Imagine Kamala's "I'm not woke, I'm tough on immigration" pivot. It was probably the right move but it was also laughable and the American electorate is dumb but they're not that dumb.
That leaves foreign policy or the economy as the area where there looks like a gap. That's tough though. Economy is by far the #1 issues for Republicans but making the economy good is also, like, really hard and it's not clear what should be done. It's just not a thing president's really have a lot of control over. As for foreign policy...I dunno, I think there's room to pivot but people are also losing their mind over Ukraine. It's starting to feel like certain cultural issues where the Democrats, for internal reasons, just can't pivot.
(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/
Yeah, it's hard for me to be very sympathetic towards "oh no the Supreme Court is chock-full of partisans!" when, so long as the partisans were liberals to left, it was just fine and dandy to have it be chock-full of them and any objectors just had to shut up because them's the rules. now this is the law of the land, checkmate bigots.
Funny how principles get dragged out from the top of the wardrobe and dusted off when it's the *other* lot in power who are now using the tools to get what they want which you used to get what you wanted when you were in power. (This applies to whether it's Tweedledee or Tweedledum in power).
If Alito and Thomas don't retire during Trump's term that would be very dumb. Similarly dumb to RBG not retiring before Obama left office.
Sotomayer will hold on for four years if it's even remotely possible. She would probably do the same for the next four years at least if another Republican is elected in 2028.
Has there been a party platform that ran on the deaths of judges? That should effect every year, but the election ads "our 9th oligarch will *DIE*, vote democrate so the right people can be made judges for life" may remind people of death or whatever reason it doesn't seem ran on.
"Tough on crime" democrates was totally a thing, Biden was a raging racist in the 70s, by modern standards, could just.... regress just a little. It be hard, but maybe possible to go tough on crime if you discarded the woke.
Regressing means getting progressive staffers who are standing in the way to stand down. Every mealy mouthed centrist posting their grand vision for the next Bill Clinton never articulates a plan of action for accomplishing that step.
Kamala Harris can't pretend to be tough on immigration but the party doesn't need to run Harris in 2028. Yeah, she's the plurality choice now, but that's just name recognition + long way away.
Oh, sorry if this was unclear, but this isn't a Kamala specific problem. Like, can Pete Buttigeig run as strict on immigration? Yeah. Are 47 year-old white hunters in the Midwest going to believe him? Gavin Newsom could run as tough on crime but are Hispanic voters in Nevada and Arizona going to believe him?
Like, the party's candidate gets judged in part by the reputation of their party, not just on their own stance. Which Democratic candidate is credible enough that they could convince swing voters in swing states that they are credibly different? That's not impossible but it's not easy.
Can they run on it? Yes, absolutely. Both Buttigieg and Newsom are carefully putting out more 'centrist' positions at the moment. Can they pull it off? Very doubtful, it's too much of an insult to the voters' intelligence (though Buttigieg does have the advantage that he can credibly point to accusations that he wasn't gay enough/the wrong kind of gay and so his moderate views on LGBT (especially the T) issues is genuine).
Is “fly your private jets to European conferences to then ban straws” a real thing? When I google “ban straws” all I see are articles about Trump banning paper straws from the federal government.
Is the issue that some Democratic donor once flew a private jet to a European conference, and then an entirely unrelated Democratic city council somewhere consisting of middle-class people who will never see a private jet in their life passed a ban on plastic straws? Then some right-wing influencer blew it up?
If that’s a real thing people are concerned about, the next Democratic platform should focus on how not to let the right control the media, including social media.
It's a turn of phrase deliberately conflating two issues for humourous and rhetorical effect.
The version I've heard more often is "flying your private jet to a conference to talk about climate change", which is a real thing that happens every year (there's many more conferences about climate change than plastic straws after all).
"Several US states have banned single-use plastic straws, including California, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington."
https://impastastraws.com/blogs/plastic-straw-bans-101/which-states-in-us-have-banned-plastic-straws
"If that’s a real thing people are concerned about, the next Democratic platform should focus on how not to let the right control the media, including social media."
>b-b-but muh private company they can do what they want!
If your platform is easy to protray unfavorably, it will be; and these seem to be requirements. Do you disagree there is a virtue signaling aspect to democratic evernmentalism?, that I couldnt point to objectively bad policies that made life worse, passed by real life leftists?
I'd be surprised if I needed two hands to count the number of votes lost nationwide in the 2024 Presidential race because of the plastic straw "ban".
It can be a symptom of the real problem, though.
> the next Democratic platform should focus on how not to let the right control the media, including social media
Oh brother here we go again.
Why is "ban" in scare quotes? You're aware they literally banned plastic straws in many states, right?
NJ? I just got one here yesterday, and not for the first time. Something is missing.
They should run an "outsider" as their next candidate, just like the Reps did with Mr. Trump in 2015. I like the idea of McConaughey as next candidate, but maybe a rapper or other type of "cool" entertainer would be also good in terms of "vibes"...
I’d only vote for McConaughey if he assumed the character of Rust Cohle (Season 1 of True Detective). None of that Magic Mike crap for me, thank you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Cohle
Culturally, the Dems should focus on only 2 things: abortion rights and defending gay marriage, if the latter becomes necessary. Marijuana legalization might be a winner, too.
To win an election they should of course focus on the economy, which should be easy after Trump decimates it. "A return to sanity on economic policy." or some line like that, which just amounts to ending 90% of the Trump tariffs and maybe appointing a new Fed Chair, should Trump put a loony in that position.
Marijuana may not be the clear winner some think it is. Places that legalized drugs are starting to regret it, and even if marijuana is not much of the problem, the position's popularity is likely to drop. Not to mention recent research showing neurological and other problems from marijuana use.
Gay marriage is also not likely to be a major issue, as Republicans are at best split on the issue and unlikely to make any sweeping changes.
Abortion is still pretty salient, but I don't see it being more salient in the future, or Democrats being able to bank on it more, than they did in 2024. It's an issue that splits the country, not one that has a solid pro-Democrat bend.
As for tariffs, that depends on if Trump dumbs about it and sticks to it. I can see him being dumb, and I can see him sticking to tariffs, but one thing about him is his willingness to drop a topic and move on. I don't see him wrecking the economy with tariffs and then leaving them in place. Notable is that he also put some tariffs in place during his first term and Biden kept them.
"Abortion is still pretty salient, but I don't see it being more salient in the future, or Democrats being able to bank on it more, than they did in 2024. It's an issue that splits the country"
The pro-life consistently loses referendums in states both blue and red.
Sure, but do you think it's going to be more relevant than it was in 2024? It apparently wasn't a big enough issue then to sway the election to Harris, so Democrats need something else to campaign on.
I see abortion as becoming much less salient at the Federal level, as people get accustomed to the idea that it's a state issue now.
That's if the Republicans can resist the temptation to try anything dumb at the Federal level.
Ideally, Trump manages to keep the Congressional Republicans so occupied with wacky stuff that they forget about abortion.
"Ideally, Trump manages to keep the Congressional Republicans so occupied with wacky stuff that they forget about abortion."
The GOP majority is small enough that Congress can't probably do anything on abortion, but the pro-lifers will keep trying to restrict abortion on a national level through the courts.
> abortion rights and defending gay marriage, if the latter becomes necessary.
Wasnt trump for gay marriage before obama? Do you believe abortion as a states rights issue wont be acceptable to most, or that trump will ban it dispite his promise otherwise?
> To win an election they should of course focus on the economy, which should be easy after Trump decimates it.
"my opponent will make a terrible move that I will the capitalize on" may not be an optimizing for victory; it maybe worthwhile to have a backup plan. What if his base feels the economy is better despite the facts saying otherwise?
The US federal govt has a request for information on AI policy open until March 15 (which is nine days from when I've posted this comment): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/06/2025-02305/request-for-information-on-the-development-of-an-artificial-intelligence-ai-action-plan
I'm guessing that not only a documentary, but a feature film will eventually be made about the Zizian cult. It's such a weird, unlikely story and people love movies about cults and murders. I'm curious if people here who know more about it think this is a fair narrative of the events: https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence
Most of the Zizians are still on the loose though, so I'm pretty doubtful about this in the near term
The ban links (or at least the first three) go to your comments telling people they're banned, not to the offending comments themselves, although the "return to thread" button shows what you're replying to/banning for.
Waaaay down at the bottom someone collated all the ban posts.
Yeah, that comment is here : https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-3715?r=f8y5z&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=98327657
oh buh, serves me right for not reading the thread first
found it, my bad, thanks
"Substack seems to have messed this up somehow and made it impossible to link to the relevant comments"
Public service announcement: transgenic mice are not transgender mice. We now return your regularly scheduled open thread discussion.
Apparently Trump was legitimate in referring to Transgender mice (https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/03/fact-check-did-trump-mistake-transgenic-mice-for-transgender-rodents-what-we-know.html)
But, tbh, I don't see a problem with scientists studying either...
Yes. My bad. I made the mistake of assuming he confused transgender with transgenic. I should have gone back and listened to the audio — but like a lot of other people I assumed he didn't know what he was talking about. And, even if one is anti-trans, three of those transgender mice studies on Trump's kill list would qualify as basic research that would not necessarily be applicable to transgender humans.
They're turning the mice woolly!
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/05/science/video/mammoth-like-mice-colossal-biosciences-ldn-digvid
I have colleagues who use mouse models that could be described a "transgender mice". If you find a male/female difference, the next question is why, and a reasonable next step is to do things like give estrogen to male mice and see if they're more like regular male or female mice. But, I think this "transgenic confusion" hypothesis is just a viral speculation with no grounding in what the Trump administration is doing (or, if it was, they've corrected it). I say this because I think we need more truth and less disinformation, even of the kind that comes from "my side" and because I think it's always important to remember that the "other side" is never as dumb as we pretend they are when dunking on them.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-on-transgender-animal-experiments/
That's their list of 6 grants that use "transgender mice". Of those, they are all arguably actually making transgender mice to study transgender healthcare. The last one (which is the biggest budget item) is the worst fit and is the most like what I described above of actually studying male/female differences and I think it just has a "this will inform transgender healthcare too" line thrown in to seem inclusive but you'd want to do this research even if transgender people didn't exist. Another one (which mentions transgenic mice) is clearly about transgender people but with applications elsewhere and it's not 100% clear what the transgenic mice are based just off this summary, but it seems likely that the transgenic part is specifically to make male hormones higher in female mice (but I'm not sure why you need transgenic mice to do that, so it could be something subtler), and so I think it counts.
5/6 right seems like honestly better than I expected. Now, $5 million (spread over multiple years!) isn't really that impressive and hardly strikes me as a woke mind virus-controlled liberal academia that they're trying to spin this into. But, still, it's important to be correct and not to spread misinformation.
Thanks for the clarification. The social media blathersphere was talking 8 billion — not million — and either playing up the transgender mice or mocking Trump for confusing transgenic with transgender. My bad. I couldn't be bothered to listen to his speech to get it from the ass's mouth.
But three of those transgender mice studies on Trump's kill list would qualify as basic research that would not necessarily be applicable to transgender humans. And three of the studies that would be applicable to humans might yield results that could show hormone therapy has downsides.
I still don't think they should be allowed to compete with cis-mice in sporting events.
Also how do you know they're not transgender? Some of them might be! If they ever manage to create an animal model for transgender what would we call it? Trans^2?
I never thought of it that way. Trans male mice have an unfair advantage over cis female mice on the cage wheels and maze events!
But are they specialer than the plain trans ones?
Which science program got cut this time?
Our very smart president (everybody says he’s the smartest we’ve ever had! He’s a genius!) said that we’re wasting billions of dollars on transgender mice in his State of Union speech. All those poor DEI mice are going to lose the jobs when Elon fires them!
Given that their main job is “test subject” it’s probably for the best- at least that way they’ll be happily on the couch if he ever decides to order experiments into his various bleach injection schemes
tl;dr: ChatGPT 4.5 "research preview" 03/06/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 1 partially correct, 4 wrong
caveat: There is an unclear limit on queries (I'm in the "plus" tier), so I didn't attempt to ask leading followup questions, which makes some potentially partially correct answers into wrong ones
a) correct
b) partially correct (CuCl4 2- d-d transition wrong, didn't prod due to message limit)
c) wrong, very partial list, which it claims is a full list
d) correct
e) wrong, even the initial slope is wrong
f) wrong, includes liquids with BP > 100C
g) wrong
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: correct "Yes. Light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm falls clearly within the visible spectrum for the human eye, which typically ranges from about 380 nm (violet) to 750 nm (red)."
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca181a-a8e4-8006-b00d-9e6f6eee12e4
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: FeCl4- ions analysis ok, realized that d-d is spin forbidden, correctly said the LMCT creates the color. (CuCl4)2- got the species, incorrectly moved the d-d transition into the blue "Broad absorption bands around ~400–500 nm due to d–d transitions" when it should have moved them into the near-IR. It _did_ say that LMCT was present, but incorrectly said that d-d also contributes to visible color.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca093e-8a60-8006-a8da-280667b1218d
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Missing _many_ possibilities - all of the polyene and diyne cases, the bicyclobutane, the tetrahedrane. And it doesn't realize that it has a (very!) partial list, claiming "Here's a concise summary of all hydrocarbons with exactly four carbon atoms:"
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca0b36-0800-8006-a27d-9a178c970b0d
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: correct "Conclusion: The Sun primarily loses mass via radiation (photons), with radiation mass-loss significantly outweighing that from the solar wind."
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca1a2a-3110-8006-8839-fc4a8dd39a3e
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Bad! Not only does it come up with infinity at the equivalence point, it gets the units wrong for its initial slope calculation and loses the contribution to the slope from increasing volume in the initial slope calculation.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca0fa1-8f54-8006-8f94-6e2de7166947
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: BAD! At least it didn't include organic compounds, and it did get the elemental gases right, but everything else that could go wrong with a list of inorganic gaseous compounds did go wrong. I haven't counted, but it looks like more than half of the "gases" it listed have boiling or sublimation points above 0C - in one case, SbF5, 149.5C !
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca1424-70b8-8006-9cd6-12e64046b864
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: It (wrongly) gives as its example "tetrafluoroallene (F₂C=C=CF₂)" It correctly says that "The molecule belongs to the D₂d point group" but then wrongly claims that this point group "has no mirror plane" when, in fact, it has two.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ca1692-3144-8006-aff7-8785e0b1b6ba
My subjective feeling is that the bullshit factor is higher but more subtle in 4.5 than it was in previous versions.
Many Thanks! That could be. I'm guessing that a lot of the problem with 4.5 is that, as Altman has said, it isn't a reasoning model, which I'm taking to imply that it does less self-checking of its answers than e.g. o3-mini-high did. That would be consistent with e.g. it not noticing that it got the units wrong in (e), the titration question, even for the initial slope (while o3-mini-high got that right) and not noticing for (g), the S4 question, that the point group (which it _knew_) for the molecule it picked in fact contained mirror planes, and therefore failed the criterion I asked for. I really hope GPT5 does better! (presumably _with_ chain-of-thought)
Why are online comment sections so uniformly terrible? I don't mean the content I mean the interface. Reddit seems to be the only site that actually figured it out. Why isn't there a good open-source clone of that? Or is there?
Honestly it reminds me of version control before Git. I feel like one smart Linus-like person could just figure it out in a month and make everything better for everyone. Does anyone understand why that hasn't happened?
Funny you mention Git, 4Chan is somewhat close to its idea. There is no inherent dependency between comments except by timestamp ordering, and users can create arbitrary dependencies by mentioning the ID of a parent comment. This generalizes Reddit's tree model. This is similar to how Git implements a hierarchical object database where objects reference each other by ID. (But Git's IDs are hashes so de-duplication and tamper-resistance is built-in, while 4Chan's ID are probably just made up sequence numbers.)
Reddit and HackerNews are theoretically "optimal" in the sense that they take the idea of comments to their logical extremes: You can comment on anything, including comments, comments on comments, comments on comments on comments on comments, etc... The drawback, of course, is that the human mind has a finite nesting depth (3 or 5), and in practice many of the child comment trees are "useless" or redundant, taking screen space for no reason from other major, on-topic comment trees.
I have shower-thought for months about using LLMs for this. LLMs ingesting the entirety of the comment section (with all its hierarchical depth, if any) and then spitting out an optimized layout that groups all "related" or "similar" (by topic) comments together. This layout can then serve as a starting point for further modification and customization, a user might ask the UI to group together all comments of the same topic but also similar length and sort by greater length, another user asking the LLMs to censor all comments of length < X and talking about a specific topic (e.g. sub-50-words comments about Trump, overwhelmingly likely to be a drive-by remark). LLMs are not the foundational idea, user control and user customizability is, LLMs just implement a sort of programmatic fluidness that non-programmer users can easily get used to without learning a dozen UI box.
But this will never happen, because online comment sections are terrible because the companies hosting them don't care if they're good, comments are marginal in the vast majority of internet territories (Facebook, tw***er, YouTube, news sites...). Only heavily text-biased sites like Reddit, HackerNews, 4Chan and this forum place a substantial weight on comments, and even then there are countless other priorities for both the hosting company and most of the userbase,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) is an open-source alternative to reddit.
what was wr
I tried making my own tool that acts as an interface for these comments, but it's currently view-only (for security reasons, and because substack's API is private).
Tell me what issues you have with the current UI and I'll try to push the changes:
https://substack-production.up.railway.app/article/comments/?url=https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-3715
Super-cool! Any insight into why Substack is so slow? Is it server, network, CPU? Are they doing something super inefficient with layouts? Displaying text should be super fast, it's really hard to understand how they're bungling it.
there should be an indication, that comments are being loaded, i.e. when i clicked your link, it said something "no comments found", and i thought your webapp was broken so i navigated away. (then i tried again acouple of times and eventually realized, that the loading time is just long)
there should be a way to browse acx using your app. (i clicked on the link on top and got back to the real acxpage outside of your app with no way of coming back to your app)
there should be a "reply on substack" button, that links back to substack, so i can write a reply to a specific comment on the original substack app, where i am logged in.
some personal preferences of mine:
by default long comments should be reduced to a couple of lines and there should be a info about how many lines are hidden. (i decide if i read a long comment based on the replys it got, so I would first look at the length of a comment then at the first couple replys, and only then would i unfold the top comment)
and i would like to give private tags to users, which should be shown next to their name for each of their comment.
I think reddit is probably the only one used by the people who write it
We've had multiple good comment techs, going back to threaded Usenet news. Seriously, some of those old time C+curses apps are way faster to use and offer more features than the dynamic loading balls of buggy auctions+analytics masquerading as web commenting systems. Even old SSC pages are a joy compared to Substack comments threads. The current incentives in tech are also not to reuse old stuff that works, and it really doesn't help when there are patent trolls suing people for doing stuff they didn't bother filling patents on, but someone else did.
> We've had multiple good comment techs, going back to threaded Usenet news.
Yup, second this. The main problem is that companies want to pay third-rate devs to import megabytes of javascript libraries to one-off "solve" what should be solved with more performant methods that have been proven in the test of time.
Also, the comment threads aren't optimized for comments - zero significant web properties built in the last 10-15 years are optimized for the putative content they contain, they're optimized for loading ~50+ third party javascripts for the purposes of spyware, data generation, analytics, A/B testing, and engagement.
People who want it will put with a lot of really terrible BS and practices to get to the content, so that gets fully taken advantage of.
Every once in a while, I bat around the idea of trying to write One TRN To Rule Them All, on the premise that trn ("Threaded ReadNews") was the peak of organized forum content, and any useful features made thereafter could be redesigned and hung off a fundamentally trn-ish framework. It would serve as a frontend for any other site out there that responded to HTTP(s) and could be called a forum, leaning on curl and ssh and smart caching and third-party databases any other tool in the toolbox to present the user with a facade that looks like Usenet did back in the early 1990s, right down to the responsiveness.
The catches here are multifold. One: I don't have the spare time. Two: there's not enough money in it to make me want to allocate spare time from other activities. Three: I'm pretty sure every existing forum I tried to do that to would quickly file a C&D. Four: it might be technologically intractable in certain important cases. Five: some major sites change their protocols so frequently that I'd never keep up. Six: by the time the other problems got solved and I *did* start writing it, someone else with more experience would likely write a better one.
Nevertheless, the idea persists. I might try it anyway someday just to have an academic sense of what the specific technical hurdles would be, and record that for anyone else wanting to give it a go.
Ron Unz is the Linus in this story—unz.com has a good one with excellent search and other boons.
unz went off the deep end into holocaust denial if i recall, and the whole takimag side of the paleo cons were nuts.
Steve Sailer haunting this place...not everyone forgets you write for vdare, and you were pushing the same junk back in the american conservatives comment section back in the day.
I can't tell if you're aware, but this thread is discussing the *interface*, not the *content*.
At best, you're arguing that the content was so bad that the interface couldn't keep enough people there, but (1) there are still people there and (2) you didn't say anything about what you thought of the interface.
its more important people know who Unz is, and honestly i wouldnt trust a reader of that site to have any reasonable opinion on anything. I don't take lessons on how to write a fantasy novel from Vox Day either.
those guys love to sneak into subcultures by appearing rational then you go read the unfiltered stuff and they aren't. If you hang around subcultures you see them some.
You might be right, FAIK; I visit Unz very, very rarely. But if so, how is that so different from myriad other sites whose members advertise themselves as being the voices of reason, only to kick off their shoes and masks behind closed doors and participate in their own semi-private outgroup-bashing sessions?
The only real potential difference I see here is that Unz might have an unusually good interface, that one could appreciate even while muscling past the content.
they are antisemitic. i mean the tiny value of chat architecture is not going to outweigh the sludge you need to wade through. you can't always abstract things like this. Sometimes it needs to be pointed out that regardless of that, the source really is suspect when it is not hiding it.
Is it open source?
Philosophically musing upon the true / necessary / kind comment policy and its different possible combinations.
Can a comment somehow be untrue but necessary? Not sure what that would even entail. Curious if there are any bans on the list that were deemed necessary but untrue and unkind.
Also curious about the kind / untrue / unnecessary portion of the Venn diagram. This combo is perfectly logically coherent, but has a sort of cute “get banned but make it wholesome” energy. Curious if the ban list has any examples of that type also.
"Many people would be devastated if you killed yourself, and you shouldn't do it," seems like a good UT/N/K candidate.
I always took the "true" requirement to not imply the opposite. Opinion, estimates, guesses, hypothesis, all don't meet the "true" requirement. They don't have to be known falsehoods to fail the "true" standard. They don't even have to be false.
I understand the goal to be if someone is writing opinion or something else that's not "true" that they should be both necessary and kind. An unkind opinion, even if relevant to the topic and sharing a real view, would get banned. A kind opinion that has nothing to do with the topic would also be banned.
Kind, untrue, unnecessary: "Well said. I award you 100 Internet points." This person clearly does not actually have the authority to represent the Internet in this fashion, and as such you can't even trust their statement that the original was well said.
Untrue but necessary: "Santa only brings toys to good children, so you'd better behave. Otherwise you'll get the Scissorman."
Humor can be untrue and involve absurdities, but it serves a social purpose when deployed correctly to reduce interpersonal tensions.
>Also curious about the kind / untrue / unnecessary portion of the Venn diagram.
I think I saw some bans for this on SSC of people who were friendly but frequently steering conversations to their pet topics. "Yes, and speaking of dragons, once again we see evidence for my theory that The Lord of the Rings is a Muslim work..."
perhaps untrue, but kind and necessary: "You better get yer act to get together, young man. Or yer gonna be living in a van, Down, By, The River." [0]
Also, "true/necessary/kind" was the formal rule on SSC. But in practice, the rule seems to be "bring light, not heat".
[0] https://youtu.be/Xv2VIEY9-A8?si=ah4plZiehkaASqSJ&t=96
The "Untrue" part would apply if you thought the information you were providing was true, but it's not. Naturally Scott can't see into your head to see if you knowingly posted something untrue, but that's why he uses the true/necessary/kind system. It doesn't care whether it was an intentional lie, just whether it was true.
So if you commented something that isn't true, whether you knew it wasn't true or not, but your comment was kind and relevant to the discussion (which is what necessary boils down to, technically no comment on a blog *needs* to happen) then you're in the clear. But if you're posting something untrue and you're being a jerk about it then you're not.
"Electrons in an atom are small particles that orbit the nucleus".
> Can a comment somehow be untrue but necessary?
An argument no one will believe that the deconstruction will create a important paradigm of thought
Well necessary comments are comments intended to advance the discussion. So if people are discussing the dangers of microplastics, someone could inadvertently post some inaccurate info about the subject. Maybe they'd read some bad research, or misremembered the outcome of a piece of good research. So their intent would clearly have been to advance the discussion, but in the process they'd posted something untrue.
I think comments which are kind* are much less likely to resort in a ban.
As for kind and untrue, nice little white lies of the sort people tell in person all the time? "Oh, you're beautiful/doing fine", "No, *they're* the crazy ones", &c.
*Nice might be the better word. I would argue that it's almost never kind--truly, meaningfully better in the long run--to say something which is not true.
almost never
"Untrue but necessary" might be something like a white lie you tell your kids to get them to behave. In the context of an open thread, it could be something like telling someone who's down in the dumps because of some situation "it'll get better" even though there's no way to know that that's true.
Kind, untrue, and unnecessary would be like spamming every single message in the thread "I love you and hope you have a great day"
Okay, but that would get banned because of spam, not for ideological reasons. You would get banned for that even if it was kind and true. What would theoretically be a comment that's kind but untrue and unnecessary, that could single-handedly piss off Scott enough to warrant a ban? Because I'm drawing a complete blank.
I know exactly what that would be! Here's Scott saying that he'd ban someone who posted here the way Josh Hawley talks on Twitter: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-161
So, take something untrue and unnecessary but kind, make it sound like Josh Hawley or like Trump (or you can probably just get something like that off their Twitter feeds), get yourself banned due to being stylistically offensive to Scott. Easy.
Some people have an impression that Trumpism/MAGA can actually survive the end of Trump, whether his death, or him being out of politics due to term limits. It's an interesting thing to consider, I personally see MAGA as a cult of personality, and think it will therefore implode once the personality is out of the picture, but how do you guys see it?
As a counter to me, I think it's notable that Chavez had a cult of personality, and while I think Maduro doesn't, he did manage to keep the dictatorship going anyway.
It depends on what you mean by 'survive'.
As a distinct voting bloc with a vibe attached, and a rotating cast of standard bearers? Yes.
As a dominant force among low-information swing voters capable of winning national elections? I personally doubt it.
Musk seems like the obvious successor, assuming he doesn't flame out in a couple of months like Peter Thiel did the first time. Trump has a knack for making enemies.
The movement will continue for as long as the Democrats elect people who show up to meetings with "I'm Not Listening" signs.
The same requirement that saved from an Arnold Schwarzenegger candidacy makes it imposible.
I’d take President Terminator over the current infestation of the White House any day.
< the current infestation of the White House
Yeah, Thug and Chud.
in a heartbeat.
Musk can’t be elected President.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
Yes, trump is a flawed man with a knack for marketing. But his campaign didn't run on just pure charisma. It succeeded primarily because he addressed a need that none of his rivals were willing to address.
I don't really think of politicians as hypnotist masterminds. I think of politicians as chemists who beget precipitation. The energy of the campaign must already lie dormant in the political environment to be usefully harvested. Regardless of whether or not trump's cult of personality can hold after he exits, the environmental conditions that lead to his rise will likely linger. And I find that infinitely more interesting than the orange-man himself.
Actually, I think it's a bit of both. Scott Adams came out in favor of Trump in 2015 claiming that Trump had mastered hypnotism and manipulation at a high level, and looking at the results, that really seems to be the case - how else could a billionaire real-estate businessman from NY convince people that he's going to fight for the common man and drain the swamp?
But as you say, there has to be some underlying dissatisfaction to tap into (which may be more or less justified). I suspect the seed for Trump's harvest was sown when Reagan started spreading the idea that the government is the enemy, rather than an ally who needs to be kept honest and on track. This is now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The best outcome I can think of is a spectacular multi-dimensional failure that reminds people that yes, a mostly-competent, mostly-well-meaning, slighly-corrupt government really is soooo much better than a mostly-inept, mostly-malicous, completely-corrupt one. I hope that that, combined with taking Trump himself out of the picture for good, will be enough for a collective "WTF were we thinking?" moment. No guarantee though, and the longer it lasts, the worse the prognosis.
When I say "hypnotist", I'm moreso referring to the cartoonish caricature of hypnotism, rather than NLP. E.g. I'm always puzzled by people who say "if only I could go back in time and assassinate baby Hitler". As if Hitler's cunning puppeteering were the singular cause of WW2/Holocaust/etc; as if he weren't a vessel for the collective subconscious of a certain segment of the German Republic. So we're basically in agreement here. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss for better diction than "hypnotist". I'm open to suggestions.
I'm not really sure I blame Reagan's cynicism though. E.g. ik Carlos follows the bugman. So I expect he knows just as well as I do that "democracy" as it exists in the platonic realm, bears a striking dissimilarity to "democracy" as implemented in meatspace by the USG. Normie-cons have only recently noticed the existence of the Deep State. But allegedly, the dissonance between the platonic realm vs meatspace has existed at least since FDR and the Warren Court. Sure, maybe Reagan sowed distrust. But was he the root cause? or simply the messenger.
> how else could a billionaire real-estate businessman from NY convince people that he's going to fight for the common man and drain the swamp?
To reiterate, I'm aware [0] that Trump is quite adept in the Dark Arts (or alternatively, "the Art of the Deal"). But also, it's more than that. Working-class guys see him as one of their own, despite his networth, because of the class-signifiers. He's got a gold-plated mansion, he watches Professional 'Rastling, and he eats at McDonalds. In contrast, Paris Hilton wouldn't be caught dead with a BigMac.
[EDIT_2:
(I'm pretty damn certain this was in my initial draft of this comment. So I can only assume substack truncated it? Lately, I've noticed Bugstack acting in other weird ways, as well. E.g. my notifications are currently out of chronological order.)
> I hope that that, combined with taking Trump himself out of the picture for good, will be enough for a collective "WTF were we thinking?" moment.
I'm skeptical. imo, it was the Pax Americana of the 1990's that was abnormal. (I'm struggling mightily not to sardonically reference the fukuyama cliche.) "But fance, weren't things kinda normal before the 1990's?" Well for one thing, "the USG asked students to hide under their desk during nuclear drills" doesn't really strike me as normal.]
EDIT_0:
> that reminds people that yes, a mostly-competent, mostly-well-meaning, slighly-corrupt government really is soooo much better than a mostly-inept, mostly-malicous, completely-corrupt one
I think this speaks to the political divide. libs and lefties liked the former status quo of technocracy/meritocracy. The conservatives feel deeply betrayed. As one small example, the fact that the Democratic Party nominated Kamala in a primary "election" that wasn't actually a very *democratic*, represents another small piece of evidence that something has gone deeply wrong. You can come up with all sorts of justifications about how "only the secondary elections are supposed to be democratic", etc. But it won't dispel the cognitive-dissonance. The conservative perspective is "idiot who's trying his best" >>> "competent elites who are corrupt and pure evil".
EDIT_1: forgot to share link.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aFo_BV-UzI
"E.g. I'm always puzzled by people who say "if only I could go back in time and assassinate baby Hitler". As if Hitler's cunning puppeteering were the singular cause of WW2/Holocaust/etc; as if he weren't a vessel for the collective subconscious of a certain segment of the German Republic."
I think this is a fairly good analogy, but I disagree with your conclusion. I think most people who say that are pretty well aware that Hitler was backed by thousands (and eventually millions) of people who were willing to...y'know...be Nazis. And that those people would have existed even in a timeline where Hitler died prematurely. But them *existing* isn't the problem, at least not the whole problem. There's no guarantee that they would have had the necessary cohesion, organization and luck necessary to seize control of the Republic if Hitler hadn't given the movement the form and direction he did. The Weimar Republic also had communists, liberals, old-guard conservatives like Hindenberg and more: it wasn't obvious in, say, 1925 that one of those factions would end up on top and crush all the others, much less that it would be Nazism specifically. Now granted all that, I think taking your time machine a bit farther back and scrapping the treaty of Versailles and imposing less odious surrender terms on Germany would be *more* likely to prevent the Really Bad Things from happening. But that sounds harder to do than just shooting one guy.
Likewise in the present: I think certainly the conditions for the MAGA movement existed since at least 2010 or so. But it's not at all clear that it's particular brand of "conservatism[1]" would have surged to prominence and taken over the Republican Party in the same time or in the same way without Trump. Even as it was, Trump won neither the primary nor the general election by a landslide: if he'd been nowhere to be found, it's possible that his base would have found some ideologically-similar but less effective person to rally around proceeding to lose one election on another. Or it's possible that the movement wouldn't have found a nucleus at that point at all, and those people would have spend the next few election cycles on the fringes of the party growing increasingly mad and increasingly disconnected from the mainstream. We barely even have to speculate to see what that looks like: it's pretty much exactly what happened with the portion of the left that vocally backed Bernie Sanders. In 10 years they've never managed to get a significant voice in the party and their resulting frustration may have (very debatably) cost Democrats two of the past 3 presidential elections.
Regarding the future: it's possible that the past 10 years will have build enough structure and common knowledge among the MAGA-inclined that they'll stick together as a political force after Trump. It's also possible that they won't. Very difficult to say. Obviously they're not going to disappear, but big-tent coalition-based politics means even pretty large movements can be subordinated by the larger party and largely lose the ability to steer them.
[1] Scare quotes because its so far from anything that usually bears the name.
[N.b. my last comment was mysteriously truncated.]
Yes, this is fair. On one hand, the leader does give form by providing something tangible to nucleate around. (Notice that my choice of analogy in my initial comment was "precipitation".) Hitler didn't even have a true majority. And then you've got Horseshoe Theory claiming that extremists are fungible, to some extent. So yes, Hitler was uniquely-necessary to bring about several particulars of history. Thus, assassinating Hitler might have been extremely useful.
But on the other hand, Nazis were big mad. E.g. the Nazis had a paramilitary org that was willing to throw down in the street. Anytime the negative-energy rises to that level, I feel like chaos in some form is inevitable. Granted, I don't think the typical Trumpist is mad enough to brawl with Antifa yet. But a subset was mad enough to organize Jan 6th, and many more are mad enough cheer on DOGE uprooting parts of the Administrative Branch (yes, you heard me correctly). If Trump hadn't come along to give that anger form, I suspect the anger would have continued to fester and grow, until it was profitable enough for someone else to step up and give their grievances an avatar.
On that note, I'm not sure Trumpism is really comparable to Bernie-ism. Socialism (in general) strikes me as... well, it's certainly alive. But it's old and stagnant. I don't think it's growing [0], and I don't think it's currently a gateway to anything more radical. Whereas (exactly as you say,) the current wave of Populism seems to have existed only since ~2010 [1], and since then grown in both size and extremism.
Also, when I say "I've said it before and I'll say it again", I'm referring to past comments such as [2]. I.e. isn't it *interesting* that Populism seems to have arose simultaneously across Europe? However you explain the rise of Trump, it also has to account for say, Meloni. And isn't it *interesting* that Milei is using similar rhetoric as Trump, despite the pro-immigrant/libertarian policy platform? I often struggle to find analyses which account for these observations (even among MAGA-sympathetic conservatives). More often, people pretend that Trump is a miraculous singleton. If you can empathize with this perspective, maybe you can see why my earlier comments de-emphasize Trump's uniqueness. Every time I see another take that psychoanalyzes Trump and his cult of personality, there's part of me that wants to shout "Guys, isn't that enough? There's things at play that are much more interesting!"
EDIT_1: And while I'm dropping links, I just remembered that I recently read a post by Sawyer which offers a reasonably-thorough rundown [3] of the GAE (Global American Empire). I'm pretty confident that this is what the Populists are really reacting to, though many of them don't seem to have a clear, legible grasp of what they're fighting against. And yes, this is what my information diet looks like, these days. The Overton Window hasn't been paying its epistemic rent.
[0] EDIT_0: well, it's growing in popularity among millennials. But somehow, I feel like any victory for Socialism in the US is going to remain in the Overton Window.
[1] https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-prophet-of-the-revolt
[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-353/comment/75244871
[3] https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/lifting-the-veil
"it's possible that his base would have found some ideologically-similar but less effective person to rally around proceeding to lose one election on another"
I mean... that's exactly what the Tea Party was: a decade of floundering before they found the right figurehead.
> Scott Adams came out in favor of Trump in 2015 claiming that Trump had mastered hypnotism and manipulation at a high level
It seems like it has to be something like that but it only works on half the country.
The unsusceptible listen to him for a few minutes and think “This man is full of crap.”
The other half listen to him for a few minutes and think “Yes, yes, this is the real deal!”
This would explain everything.
I think you're missing the middle 80% or so, who listen to Trump and think "this man is full of crap" but then listen to Harris and think "this woman is full of crap too" and eventually just decide to hold their nose and vote for whoever they think is the lesser evil.
Trump has his rusted-on fans, it's true, but modelling 52% of the country that way is to miss the point. The point is all the people who can look at Trump, see his very obvious flaws, and still decide to vote for him because they (rightly?) perceive that the other side is even worse.
There's nothing at all novel about a rich guy successfully selling himself as a tribune of the people-- FDR managed it in spite of the hoity-toity mid-Atlantic accent.
I think Trump has caused a long term shift in the ideology and the base of the Republican Party which will outlive him. Whether you want to call that "Trumpism/MAGA" is up to you.
If Trump was competent enough to successfully accomplish his goals I would say that it could continue. He's definitely tapping into an ideology which has broad popular support, so if he was able to successfully advance that ideology then I think it would gain serious momentum and blaze a trail that future politicians could follow. However I expect the wheels to come off soon and in spectacular fashion. He's going to trigger a nasty recession and all of his reforms will likely dissolve in a flurry of lawsuits and bureaucractic resistance. I expect him to leave office ignominiously which will essentially destroy the movement. But who knows, politics is strange. Vance seems like a decent leader, maybe he'll be able pick up the pieces.
One thing that I think might persist is the notion that being anti-woke/progressive is politically powerful. Trump tapped into that and enabled some ideological infrastructure to coalesce around it. Whatever else happens to MAGA hopefully that will persist. Maybe the next guy will be able to use it more effectively.
> I personally see MAGA as a cult of personality, and think it will therefore implode once the personality is out of the picture, but how do you guys see it?
I dont see trump as infallible nor anyone else thinks so(see, trump rallys where he's boo`d for vaxxines) but he is a lynch pin of gathering very diverse right wing
Pretty sure we are looking at a cult of personality. The GOP may have trouble finding a replacement as shameless as Trump to carry the torch.
To lie and lie and lie for years knowing you are lying without a qualm of remorse or embarrassment even when it’s common knowledge you are lying is a unique gift.
Add his complete lack of every day ordinary morality or empathy, throw in a dash of feral cunning and a penchant for casual cruelty and you have unique powers of demagoguery.
His shamelessness is truly his superpower though.
I'm pretty sure Trump doesn't just lie. He tries different lies to find out which ones are popular with his audience.
Unlike all other politicians, who have definitely never lied...
I would actually argue Trump is one of the most honest and transparent presidents in recent times, as long as you correct for his rhetorical style. For example, he is absolutely right (in the context of the point he's making) that one one has even heard of Lesotho.
Anyone who reads a decent daily newspaper has heard of Lesotho. It is well known enough to be the model for Wakanda, apparently.
A majority of Americans don't know where Ukraine is. It's far larger, far more important, and politically relevant right now.
The number of people who read a "decent" daily newspaper must be remarkably low. Google says about 7% of Americans read a daily national newspaper at all, 11% read local papers. Not sure what you mean by "decent."
That's the thing about low brow populism. Most people don't know a thing about Lesotho and never heard of it before. Pretending that there's a real constituency among people who know that kind of thing is trying to ignore reality. That's part of why Trump is president, that he recognized that a majority of the country wasn't represented and offered to represent them. Whether he's succeeding at their goals or cares about them are open questions, but he doesn't doubt they exist. That's a big difference between him and his opponents. He'd be a lot more popular if he wasn't so sleazy and incompetent.
We aren’t going to agree on this.
I think many GOP politicians will try very hard to be the successor to Trump. This struggle has the potential to get very ugly if they can't enforce party discipline. Depending on how the next 4 years actually go, I think Vance has the best chance to inherit some portion of the Trump cult of personality.
Do the Republicans have party discipline? Trump seems to have it, by dint of popularity. That is, Republican voters really like him. That's not the same thing to me as party discipline, where party leaders can enforce rules on their members even if the rules are unpopular.
Do you think Trump could name a successor?
In lack of successor, do you think Vance has the guts to have his enemies in the Republican Party fall out windows?
I don’t think Vance has the shamelessness or the ruthlessness to pull those stunts.
It’s fucking incredible the contortions he puts his - and at this point it is *his* party - through. The things they must say that go against their own life long values to stay in his good graces.
An expression of fealty is what he requires.
Trump is very much like six-year-old Anthony Fremont, the kid with god like powers to - literally in Anthony’s case - destroy anyone who crosses him in the old Twilight Zone episode, ‘It’s a Good Life.’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone)
> Do you think Trump could name a successor?
he did, pretty quickly after the assassition attempt, thats what a vice president is
Sure, if something happens to Trump before the end of his term, Vance will become President. But I don't think he'll have anywhere near as much control of the party as Trump has.
Thats true of all successors; if you have a warlord you crowned himself king and very clearly says "my son shall rule" even when its goes well, people will talk and question authority.
Not all successors. For some rulers, their power is pretty much all "the law says we obey this guy", so when he dies all his power goes to whoever the law says to obey now.
When explicitly asked if he saw JD Vance as his successor, he said "no".
https://people.com/donald-trump-asked-if-he-views-jd-vance-as-his-successor-his-answer-raises-eyebrows-8789630
....how incredibly dumb on his part; its even less debatable after being president and theres a defined order of the process
The question was clearly about endorsing someone for 2028, not about who becomes President if he dies before 2028.
It's unreasonable to expect Trump to endorse anyone yet. Biden didn't endorse Kamala until she had the nomination in the bag. Obama didn't endorse Biden until he had the nomination in the bag. Even Reagan didn't endorse Bush until May of 1988. Endorsing a successor nearly four years in advance is just a dumb move on anyone's part; the endorsement is supposed to be a reward for loyalty.
Like a lot of strongmen, having a successor is having an alternative is having a competitor. When some banana republic's leader dies there's this huge vacuum because anyone else capable of doing the job has been defenestrated or gotten a helicopter ride. Often the leader deliberately cultivate this precarious scenario, because any outsider who thinks they can liberate the people will be facing a disaster. Too Big(man) To Fail.
That's not falsifiable. He has to have a VP, and declared the same time he would have been declared sans assassin.
If there was a survey the day of the vp announcement that asked "if the 5th assassination attempt of trump succeeds who should be president" if republications said 0% vance; it would be falsified therefore falsifiable.
Team Trump is working very hard to institutionalized Trumpism. I don’t know if four years will be long enough, but it might. Unless we have another complete purge of the bureaucracy the next time a Democrat is elected. I think their chances are pretty good for Trumpism to outlive Trump.
"Trumpism" began in US politics long before Trump showed up (ie, the Tea Party, arguably Reagan), and will likely continue long after he is gone. There are tens of millions of voters in this country who see long standing domestic Federal policy as incompatible with their preferred life choices. That's not going to change.
It should be noted that even the slogan "Make America Great Again" was initially coined by Reagan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again
What do you mean by implode?
Like, it's 2028. Republicans have to nominate somebody. If, say, Ron DeSantis or JD Vance doesn't win, who does and why? Will they lose the 2028 election? Maybe, but if so which voting block is going to pivot from Republican to Democrat?
Like, the Republican party is not magically going to disappear when Trump leaves office, barring truly extreme events they will be running a candidate in 2028, 2032, & 2036 who will receive at least 40% of the vote because they are not "extremely hated outgroup". What materially, quantifiably, do you expect to occur?
Romney -> Trump was a massive shift in the Republican party. It seems plausible to me that a similar shift might occur again, even if it's hard to tell in advance what it would look like.
Lose a lot of voters and fail to rally the base essentially. A bad leader can do a lot of damage (see: Kamala).
So Trump would overperform a generic Republican candidate? Millions of people will vote for Donald Trump rather than, say, Ron DeSantis?
Because that's not what occurred in 2016 and 2020 (1). In fact, the general idea in Republican politics for most of this period was "Trump has tapped into something new, like immigration being far more unpopular with large chunks of the voters than previously believed. We should find someone who can run on that without his...horrific verbal tics." This was the Trumpism without Trump dream.
It's also not how I model most anti-Trump people viewing Trump. Most of them tend to think of him as a horrible candidate with bad campaigning skills.
Not trying to be contrarian, I was honestly expecting you to point to some internal chaos within the GOP causing splits or other dramatic internal conflict.
(1) https://rollcall.com/2021/01/21/trump-underperformed-average-gop-candidate-in-key-states/
Trump overperforms alternatives because his supporters believe he's on their side. Republican voters were wary of DeSantis in 2024 because they weren't sure he was authentic or just playing a game (taking on the obvious mannerisms of Trump instead of like, his goals). That DeSantis thought people would fall for him acting like Trump says he didn't really understand what they wanted.
Vance seems like he's genuine in his real goals. He cares about people like those he grew up with. He's also getting a lot of flack from Democrats/media/establishment elites that brands him the same way Trump has been. He can't go back to the elite now that he's gone so far down his current path. I think that's something Democrats have badly misunderstood. Every criticism they throw at Trump is evidence that Trump has the correct enemies, not that Trump is bad in the way they indicate.
I see it like this: there are a lot of voters who want a stronger stance on immigration, a more isolationist foreign policy, a reduction in federal spending on "wasteful" programs, etc.
However, these are things that the mainstream press, universities, and organizers in both parties are against.
So there's always been a difficult bargain: a politician can pick up a lot of votes if they're willing to enrage these institutions and their own party against them.
After Trump leaves politics, that bargain will still be available for another politician, but it's not clear if anyone will take it.
"a reduction in federal spending on "wasteful" programs"
everyone wants that, almost by definition, and Republicans promising to cut it does not originate with Trump
It doesn't happen because most of what's "wasteful" but hasn't been cut already is more accurately termed "corruption" (and therefore has allies in the government preventing its cuts - and Trump's no exception there, look at all the Musk contracts)
It's not just "corruption". Everyone has different preferences and generally "waste" is just code for "preferences of people other than the current speaker".
I think it's more than that though. Everyone SAYS while they're campaigning that they're going to cut waste, and everyone else knows that they mean other people's preferences. The difference is that most politicians, once they get into office, find it more advantageous to continue already-appropriated spending and push for more spending in areas they care about. AFAIK Trump is the first to actually use the (constitutionally-debatable) power of the executive to cut contracts, fire employees en masse, etc.
A normal politician knows that voters will nod along with "cut waste" in the abstract, but won't be happy if you actually cut stuff. Then there's also the illegal *manner* in which Trump and Musk are doing things. That's two different ways they differ from the norm.
Sounds like Trump is very abnormal!
Speaking of the protest, I wrote a call to charity-giving in response to the USAID cuts - https://patclaude.substack.com/p/the-doge-offset
So speaking of people who are possibly banned by now, I figured I'd put this out here since our esteemed host and commenters should be aware of how this blog has touched its reader's lives.
Right after the election there was a thread where in the comments people were discussing how Trump would probably abuse the FBI and other organs of state to get revenge on his enemies.
There was a commenter who popped in, I'm not sure if a regular or a rando, who came in very worked up about how liberals were massive hypocrites to talk about this because they already use the law to crush their enemies; he was very convinced some guy Mr XYZ was being persecuted and spending Christmas in jail instead of with his infant kids.
Then he said something I'm going to think about the rest of my life. As direct a quote as I remember, "When I read people like you, it makes it obvious liberals are people who weren't bullied enough as children. I'm looking forward to seeing you people get what you deserve."
I looked up this martyr Mr XYZ... he was in jail for election interference, in particular targeting ads at Democrats with the wrong election date and instructing people to vote by text. Maybe not the kind of tricks that the high-IQ readers of this blog might fall for, but still, you know, election interference, which is a federal crime.
So I was left with the thought that our brave commenter who was so worked up, either sees nothing wrong with someone putting out these kind of cynical lies, or (more likely imo) read something somewhere that was completely misleading and portrayed Mr XYZ as a martyr to feed the OUTRAGE machine. Either way, his OUTRAGE button was pushed hard enough for him to get him salivating at violence against strangers. Over a cynical liar, a "ratfucker" as Nixon would have called him.
I should mention that like probably many readers of this blog, I was bullied plenty as a kid, and I am a leftist. Probably one of the formative things that pushed me in that direction actually. So his words kind of struck a nerve.
In that moment, it crystallized for me a hard truth: there are people out there who will take joy in my pain, over complete bullshit they read on the Internet. And there's no negotiating with someone who get off on your pain. These people are out there, and there are more and more of them every day. Maybe these people intend to keep their sadism confined to internet posting, but every day I see internet edgelordism bleeding into real life more and more.
So, I did something I never thought I'd do. Two days later after mulling it over I applied for my FOID. Last week, after doing some research and rentals at the range I came home with a Walther PDP handgun. It's very ergonomic.
I hope to God I never have to use it. But, I am increasingly convinced something horrible is coming and I have a feeling I'm going to need it to defend myself or the people I care about. I'm not alone either. I've convinced two of my friends and we've been going to the range together.
So, dear brave commenter, if you're reading this and not banned yet: think carefully how much blood your grievances are worth. I don't intend to fire the first shot, but I deal with life and death in my work every day, and I'm fully prepared to accept what happens if I have to pull the trigger to defend myself. Are you?
Peace and Love,
Marcion
Congrats on getting a lethal self-defense tool!
If you haven't taken any formal classes yet, I'd like to strongly advise you and your friends do so. First step is making sure trigger discipline becomes the deepest kind of muscle memory, and then going from there. If you can find a range or club which will let you do live draws, that's a price above rubies.
The worst people reside on the Internet, because it's the only community they can reach without leaving the house. There's some jackass who's been trolling another site I read - about videogames, the chillest of subjects - for, like, three years now. One would figure they would get tired after having every comment deleted for three years, but apparently that one-sided negativity is the best thing they have going for them.
Like, that linked commenter is just flat-out telling you he got the shit kicked out of him in school. I highly doubt he's any kind of physical threat.
The Walther PDP is a fine pistol and likely accurate enough for competition if you'd like to try out marksmanship as a hobby. Its also very modular and has excelent machining tolerances, so you can swap a competition barrel and other attachements very easily to it. An excellent fire arm all around.
owning a firearm is foolish though. Men who do are 8 times more likely to kill themselves than non gun owners, and if you have a family the majority of kids killed by firearms are killed in the home and you need to be ironclad to keep all guns locked and unloaded at all times to prevent kids or teens from getting to them.
for self-defense, you will likely never use the gun. its not that common you get a situation where it is the only option left to you and i dont think this readership is forced to have one because they cannot escape from areas with sizable risk where you need it.
honestly getting a gun is more liability than benefit apart from small edge cases most people wont see.
> "for self-defense, you will likely never use the gun. its not that common you get a situation where it is the only option left to you and i dont think this readership is forced to have one because they cannot escape from areas with sizable risk where you need it."
Heeeeeey, boy, are you wrong!
I'm a 5'2" woman and I've used the pistol I've been carrying for 23 years to dissuade robberies by strangers on two separate occasions in two separate states. I didn't point my weapon at my would-be attackers, but I visibly indicated that I had it and was very, very prepared to use it, and they retreated without the encounter escalating to the level of a statistic.
Many gun owners have stories like mine. A guy I dated who caught an intruder breaking into his car on his property and halted a charge with an iron bar by firing into the ground (wouldn't have been my move, but it was effective; the intruder laid down on the ground until the sheriff arrived). My best friend broke up a random parking lot fight which was about to involve vehicular manslaughter. Another friend chased a prowler off her back porch by racking her shotgun at the back door.
Aside from the guy I dated who held his intruder until arrest and then pressed charges, none of these events were ever officially recorded anywhere. Usually it's because the serious crime about to happen never happens, and sometimes it's because either the gunowner or the police officers (or both!) very rightly don't want to potentially punish the would-be victim of a crime by drawing attention to the fact they own a gun.
Then there are the secondary benefits of carrying a deadly force weapon, like the way the gun's threat to *you* makes you more alert to potential threats and the way your body language is informed by a certainty that you *can* defend yourself (in most cases). There were a handful of times over the years where I believe it's likely I was being assessed as a potential victim, but my unusual display of confidence and acute awareness of those watching me shut down temptation before any attempt was made. Solo lions rarely take the risk of going after an adult Cape buffalo who's already looking at them, and human predators are no different when they realize their prey has a good chance of maiming or killing them.
the problem is you can't expect to keep getting lucky that just showing or non-violently using it will happen. if you are ever at a point where you need it to use its the last hope you have to control a situation you should have dealt with in other ways prior.
and unfortunately people aren't always responsible or rational. i mean even police officers deal with people who aren't deterred by it. you can't keep living in the area where your 5-2 self is in danger or walk or be alone like that. that is the only real solution. it sucks but rolling the dice sucks too
And your arguments are based on...what?
Sure, I've gotten "lucky" in that the most likely thing to happen during a threatening encounter has always happened to me (the gun was there but didn't need to be fired). I happened to encounter the most common type of slow-moving, there-were-signs threats. It's always possible that I'll be less lucky and the timing/spacing won't be in my favor.
But who cares?
The point is that I've ALREADY prevented two imminent attacks by carrying a gun, attacks which would have been frightening at best and deadly at worse. And all over the country, uncountable others are doing exactly the same.
> "you can't keep living in the area where your 5-2 self is in danger or walk or be alone like that. that is the only real solution. it sucks but rolling the dice sucks too"
Oh, thank you! So you're offering to purchase me a new home and round the clock armed private security? That's a really wonderful and generous solution! I appreciate you going to the effort!
The statistics this post is based on were compiled in a prolonged period of internal peace in the United States in which the only real threat was violent crime. They are of limited utility if the country does shift into civil unrest or wide-scale political violence (if OP is politically active).
If I want to kill myself why shouldn’t I have the right tool at hand?
Please don't feed the troll.
I don't think OP counts as a troll. I have had 5 patients express ideas more extreme than OP's, and none of them are even slightly psychotic. They have high-functioning autism, and/or anxiety and/or depression. Two expect violence in the street, and are becoming preppers. One Jewish man is afraid Jews will be attacked and beaten on his university campus. (To date there have been protests, but no incidents of that sort.). One woman wanted to get her tubes tied because she was afraid of being raped, getting pregnant, and then not being able to get an abortion. And one can't understand how any Democrat could want to do anything other than fight Trumpism in the present era. Also, some acquaintances have asked me whether I think there will be gun battles in the streets. And I know two young couples who are thinking very seriously of moving out of the country because of the political situation.
The OP is not a troll. But the guy responding with a drive-by of outdated canned arguments against gun ownership almost certainly is.
outdated my ass, my own grandfather was living proof of this. the statistics for increased suicide are not outdated in the slightest and sandy hook was a huge example of how owning guns was a detriment; her kid got access to them.
honestly guns are for killing people and animals and its far less likely that they are used on others because its incredibly rare. you have to be extremely responsible in securing and using them and they are the biggest danger to you and your family since they are always around you.
if i wanted to troll i would pick other ways.
should have posted it one up, for Marcion.
Another way guns are dangerous: If you pull a gun on someone who also has a weapon, they will of course pull out their weapon too. Then, iff they are more experienced with weapons and/or more toughened to actually using them -- as they almost certainly are -- they will use their weapon on you before you get your head screwed on straight and fire yours. And if the robber or rioter or Right-Winger-of-Doom does not have a gun but is tougher and more used to violent encounters than you are he will yank that gun out of your hand and point it at you.
I still prefer a PPK in the leather shoulder holster under my tuxedo jacket.
People on both sides have the capacity to be cruel and dumb as fuck. Here's a story about a Woke event. I heard it from a honest, reliable person who was there. First year grad students in a humanities field are getting to know each other prior to the start of classes. One of them is a Chinese man. His English is good, but he has never been to the US before, only arrived a few days or weeks ago. Another is a thin black woman, born and raised in the US. The Chinese guy compliments the black woman on her thinness, saying something about gracefulness -- the compliment does not come across as flirtatious, just as well-intended but kind of odd. The black woman says angrily that in her culture thinness is unattractive, and that the guy should not be commenting on her appearance without understanding the cultural context. Chinese guy says wow, he's sorry, but after all he had no idea that she would be offended by his comment. Black woman says ignorance is no excuse, he should not have said what he did, and apologizing and explaining does not settle the matter, that's the same bullshit that perpetuates systemic racism. Continues in this vein for a while. The other grad students watch this exchange and nobody says a word.
I have heard many many people on the left make cruel fun of Trump voters. They've joked that a wall should be build around Texas and all the MAGA maggots with their guns should be dumped in and left to self-govern their giant Texas trailer park. I have heard many people on the left wish that Trump would drop dead, or that attempted assassins have had better aim. I have said the same myself.
Buying a gun is going further in that direction. You are better off owning your own meanness, and then learning to manage it.
> I have heard many people on the left wish that Trump would drop dead, or that attempted assassins have had better aim.
This is not cruel.
Just because we’re all the product of fashions, cultural or moralizing, current when we were in school - I really did a double take the first of many times I saw a political sign in the yard of a million-dollar home here, showing Greg Abbott being pushed off a cliff.
i'm reading Indonesia: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani, and in one chapter she talks about the Aceh separatist movement.
like a black lady being mildly cross with you is nothing compared to being forced to swallow your ID card at gunpoint because its out of date, and that was being lucky. Cruelty is people with guns looking for "headaches," and i think people here need to breathe a bit.
Who would you put forward in this scenario as someone who has learned to manage their meanness well? I think the student you spoke of probably learned an important cultural lesson that day, that you do not comment on people's bodies unless you know them well and have their permission, and that doesn't feel like a left-right thing.
The more fundamental principle she was leaning on was that one should do nothing for fear of it being offensive in some context. The problem with this principle is that doing nothing is itself offensive in some contexts. Therefore, anyone is potentially guilty of offense at any time, any place; someone else need merely assert it, whether it's true or not.
The lesson to take from that, in turn, is that there are even deeper interpersonal norms, such as polite silence or apology, that her principles are exploiting for her own gain, and that people should not honor those sorts of principles.
That poor unfortunate newcomer from China will hopefully happen upon that lesson, but it doesn't come naturally. He may indeed simply infer that certain people are just mean. It's certainly easier.
Or, equally probably, he learned a different cultural lesson, and maybe more than one, pick a winner:
women are mean
americans are mean
blacks are mean
etc.
It'd be one thing, totally appropriate, to let him know that this kind of comment is rude, and accept his apology. It's another thing to tear him a new one and tell him he is a terrible human. The first thing may teach him better manners, the second thing may teach him that he might as well throw a Naz..., I mean, Roman salute, people will hate you anyways.
Yep, I hope you're wrong about the outcome there, but I also think it's unfair to expect people who are the target of rude or ignorant comments to respond perfectly in that moment. You mentioned the group of silent bystanders to this conversation, and that jumped out to me as a missed opportunity. I hope someone approached him with some friendly guidance after the incident you witnessed.
You can't expect people to be perfect, but can expect them to be better than this woman was. Consider your own demographics, and some compliment the Chinese guy might have paid you that is, from your point of view, insensitive. Maybe you're Jewish and he says, "I admire the pro-Israel stance American Jews have." Maybe you're a researcher looking for a job in business, and he says "I admire people like you who are motivated only by love of knowledge, and don't care about money." So clearly there is a lot he doesn't get, and you'll probably want him to get that straight. But would you just explain to him what he doesn't get, and caution him against saying that sort of thing to others? Or would you excoriate him at length in front of his new peer group? When he apologizes and explains that there are nuances he didn't know about, would you accept his apology, or tell him he's still not off the hook?
I'm a white guy in a very white city, skinny, well educated, I have a good job, I'm financially secure, I'm a US citizen, I'm straight, cisgender, neurotypical, I don't really have personal familiarity with being the target of daily microaggressions or direct threats or criticisms or unwanted attention based on my appearance or identity.
If someone made one of those backhanded comments to me, about my religious or ethnic identity or career choice, it would probably irk me in the moment but roll off my back pretty quick, because my status associated with the above qualities isn't under threat, and it's generally valued by default as I move through the world.
ONE time I can remember, during a work event, a colleague I barely know made an unwanted comment to me where others could easily overhear, saying that a particular aspect of my body was sexy.
That was probably the closest relevant experience I've had that I can remember. I was shocked and didn't say anything immediately, but in a few minutes when I realized what had happened and kind of confirmed for myself that that was inappropriate, I turned to another colleague and said, "Did you hear what [initial commenter] said to me? That's really weird, right? Why would they say that?"
The person who said the original comment overheard me commenting to the other colleague, and later came up to me to apologize during a break. I said it wasn't a big deal, but that I wasn't really used to receiving that kind of comment about my body, and it seems like a really inappropriate thing to do, especially in a professional setting like where we were both working that day.
In that moment I had the capacity to deal with that comment in a way that I felt was corrective yet respectful -- but still not perfect! I imagine the woman in the original story (which again we are evaluating THIRD-hand) might have had to deal with similar questionable comments about her body on a regular basis over a long period. We have no idea what was going on with her that day, or over the course of her life.
Frankly I'm kind of disgusted that there are more people in this thread coming to the defense of the adult man who made an inappropriate comment rather than the person who was the target of that comment in this case.
The silent bystanders earned no stars here, sure. Unfortunately they almost never do. I second your hope that maybe someone at least try to talk to the poor guy afterwards.
It's impossible to know the subtle norms of another culture without living there. During that same era I had a Chinese grad student patient, and needed to tell him all kinds of stuff about American norms. Don't say 'fuck,' 'fart,' and other crass words around people unless they first use those words themselves (I had to teach him the list of crass words). Don't wear a suit on the first date, and don't give the woman flowers and do not shower her with compliments about her appearance. Hardly anyone expects you to take off your shoes when you enter their office, and if you take them off when no one else does it's a bit weird. It's better to let women go through doors ahead of you -- some old school ones are offended if you don't. Jeez, it was the obvious sensible, humane thing to do. It's ridiculously entitled to get mad at someone's innocent mistake when they've just arrived.
I think people are way more aggressive on the internet than they would be IRL (I've even noticed that phenomenon in myself). Probably not a bad idea to own a gun, if only for insurance against tail risk, but yeah, I don't necessarily infer much about the real world from internet aggression.
I'm worried that this is less and less true the deeper we disappear up our own algo-driven, AI curated buttholes
Pretty soon they're I think going to construct a bubble for everyone that OUTRAGES you and you alone at maximum efficiency without ever needing to interact with another human being at all
Maybe then, once the internet fully transforms into a house of mirrors, we'll get off the internet and start having productive discussions IRL? Perhaps time is just a flat circle
Here on this particular piece of the internet you yourself contributed heat to the divisions among people here. First you describe an enraged, misinformed
right-winger, making no acknowledgement at all that some of the right are civilized and well-informed, then you. announce you’ve got a fucking gun. You have now made it harder for anyone on the right to have a civil exchange with you because you have implied they are all meanie asshole whack jobs and you’ve announced that you’re armed. You, buddy, are the outrage bubble generator in action
> I think people are way more aggressive on the internet than they would be IRL (I've even noticed that phenomenon in myself).
Only to the degree the internet remains uncensored; if german speech laws that hold where insults are outlawed people will both respond to incentives and create incentives.
They don't even need to go that far, all they need to do is ban anonymity. Society can handle the rest.
Alex jones if he hasnt shut up yet will never shut up from soft methods. Its more effective to shadow ban(at least for populations with gun rights) but it has an upper limit.
There this old adage that I learned I about playwriting. “If you bring a gun on stage in the first act, you better make damn sure that it’s used in the second.”
That's because aggression is currently taboo in the real world. Of course, as soon as that taboo is lifted...
I was sorry you got banned, because I thought your comments were getting more civilized and smarter over time. However, now that you are banned even I object to you coming back so provocatively, with the same name and letters rearranged. Cut it out, for god's sake. Take some time off and then if you want come back, do it with a completely different name, not a nose-thumbing one. You'll have to give up your brand recognition, which will, IMO, be a good thing.
Yeah, even speaking as one of the people who drew a firm line of bluntly telling the guy not to engage with me, I had noticed the same improvement over time and was honestly on the fence about whether the comment in question really justified a ban.
But then you get this post ban behavior that just keeps proving Scott's point one alt trollpost at a time.
Hi anomie. Ban-evading for the second time?
I have no idea who you're talking about.
I would caution you against accepting the other sides framing of the problem. Spreading paranoia strengthens them, because frightened people are easier to control. I don't know your situation and can't advise you on whether or not to own a firearm, but if your only reason for obtaining one is fear of random violence by sadists, then that probably isn't the right solution.
Remember, they say most of the stuff they say because they are trying to shock you. That's right out of their playbook. That's literally what "trolling" means. They are trying to exercise power over you with provocative language. Treating them with cool contempt is the best revenge.
I'm a semi Trump supporter. I probably would have voted for him, but when I told my daughter that she had a cow. And so for the second presidential election in a row I wrote in Tulsi Gabbard. (That's just a little background for you.) I don't think it's nearly as bad as you think. Instead of listening to rando a-holes on the web, try and get out and talk with the other side. Go out to some place in rural america, hang out some and talk with people there. They are 95% nice people, (sure some a-holes everywhere.) About the gun, I hope you take some lessons on how to use it and be safe with it. In fact gun lessons could be the perfect opportunity to meet some Trump supporters. Good luck and don't panic.
Oh about Trump and Kash Patel and the FBI. This is just my take on things, but I don't expect them to 'go after' their political enemies. Trump talks tough, "Lock her up." But usually doesn't follow through. I read/ heard somewhere that when someone in his last administration suggested they go after Hillary, he said, "no forget it" or something to that effect. I have no idea if that is tru or not. But they didn't go after her.
I find it difficult to be sanguine about this when the deputy Attorney General, I believe, demanded a list of all FBI agents who were involved in any January 6 investigations.. I believe some very high-level FBI people were forced to resign when they tried to get in the way of this. Window dressing?
Maybe
Oh I assume not window dressing. I don't know any details (nor do I want to know.) but there is plenty of chatter in Trumpland, over the FBI being weaponized against Trump.
I am aware.
I think it's rather dangerous to rest our faith in the American legal system on the whimsy of one man. The mere fact that he *could* plausibly go after them signifies that damage has already been done.
I don't think one man controls our legal system. And yes the damage has been done. But from my perspective the most recent cases of lawfare have been against Trump. He's convicted of twenty some felons you know. :^) (That was meant with sarcasm.)
I sincerely hope you are right. I am afraid that you might be wrong.
Yeah I do tend to be overly optimistic. You are right to be afraid too. I think that's why Biden pardoned all those at the end of his term.
Yes. I don't think that the President should have an unrestricted power of pardon in the 1st place, but since he does, I don't think Biden felt he had a choice.
> In that moment, it crystallized for me a hard truth: there are people out there who will take joy in my pain, over complete bullshit they read on the Internet. And there's no negotiating with someone who get off on your pain.
Okay, technically speaking, sadists do not get off on your pain specifically, they get off on hurting people. Might seem like semantics, but there's a meaningful difference there, because getting off on other's pain requires empathizing with the victim. Sadists mostly gain satisfaction from dominance through violence, humiliation, and dehumanization. Therefore, psychopaths can be sadists, and sadists can get off on harming things they don't empathize with, such as animals.
There are people who directly get off on other's pain, but very unintuitively, these people are often masochists. I like to call them masochists-by-proxy. Ironically, these people's desires are often MORE fucked up due to the fact that they are much more focused on the pain and suffering the victim is going through.
Okay, completely unrelated tangent aside, you should probably leave the country if possible. This country is a lost cause. One gun is going to do jack squat against the coming flood.
> Okay, technically speaking, sadists do not get off on your pain specifically, they get off on hurting people
And by what mechanism precisely, are they to know that they are hurting you? It is utterly a distinction without any meaningful difference.
Welcome back by the way.
I don't think sadism works as cleanly as you describe. Many of the things you say ring true but many others don't.
For example I don't know how enjoying somebody else's pain requires empathy but enjoying hurting them does not. At least in my experience the "hurting others" part is because of the feeling it makes the other person feel and the reaction it evokes. Which should require at least as much empathy as enjoying pain itself requires.
I'll grant that what sadism means differs wildly between sadists, but that's just more reason to say it's messier than your description.
Because it's a show of dominance. What matters isn't the victims' capacity for emotion, but their level of agency. Beating the shit out if emotionless robots isn't quite as good as the real thing, but it's still pretty good. The important part is that you have an opponent to overcome and humiliate.
Dominance and submission are extremely important tropes in human beings and most warm blooded animals for that matter, and they can be contained in various kinds of sexual play, where you have sadists and masochists working together for mutual pleasure. So I think your construction is rather simplistic.
How long do you think it will take before Scott nabs you again? And I’m curious what joy you get out of reappearing with a different mask. Is it in any way related to the subject that is under discussion? Dominance?
Some people might have been banned, done some reflection upon themselves, made some modifications to their online presence, and reappeared with a different handle. You are making no attempt to conceal yourself, except resolving an anagram, so I find it interesting.
I have found some useful nuggets of thinking and some of your previous comments and have engaged with you before, but there seems to be something going on that’s like throwing acid in people’s faces. That is a very strong simile, but I can’t help it. That’s my nature. I will admit to having a very strong urge to wanting to befriend you. I can’t explain it. But it’s there.
I do not contest that people like this exist and I would call them sadists.
But beating the shit out of emotionless robots - or humans for that matter - does nothing for me, yet in the right circumstances human pain and suffering arouse me.
So my impression is you're describing how some sadist are and say that's the definition, when in reality there's more to sadism and sadist than just that one flavor.
Absolutely true in my opinion. See my lengthier response in this thread.
One kind of sadist would enjoy torturing unfeeling NPCs in video games, one kind of sadist finds it completely empty.
Do you and others talking about "sadists" get that all this is different for people into BDSM? for them, being a sadist or submissive is a sexual kink, not a manifestation of their real attitudes towards other people.
Uh. So, I'm into BDSM, and I think you have some misconceptions here.
Well, tell me what they are.
...I don't know why you think that sexual desire can be so neatly cordoned off from the rest of your life. When the desire is strong as it is... it's going to leak through.
I'm not going to converse with you here because I do not like or respect how you've responded to being banned.
But is that because the NPCs are unfeeling, or because they're not even theoretically capable of fighting back? It's equivalent to torturing an inanimate object.
I agree with this, but the post I responded to would only classify the first as sadists, hence my objection.
Is PEPFAR a case of Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics?
The US government did a good thing for some africans starting in 2003 and now is held morally and financially responsible to do the good thing for eternity.
I'm not going to take "we can't afford to keep paying for this" seriously as an argument when Trump and the Republicans in Congress are still promising trillions of dollars in tax cuts. If you can afford that, you can afford to fund a thousand PEPFARs.
Asking how long an obligation should run for and if you're obligated to wind it down gracefully is philosophically fun, but it's a complete red herring, because the obligation is *tiny.*
As far as I'm concerned, everyone ITT is missing the point. Yes, Copenhagenism exists because our intuition often assigns blame to volunteers. But no, the reason is not to preserve the continuance of benefits. The reason is to account for downside-risk. I.e. the volunteer implicitly assumes responsibility over the situation *in case the solution backfires*.
E.g. I remember recently watching some clip [0] where the author shared a story about how he was bored in uni one day. So he dug out a pit in a candle and put some oil in the pit, to make the candle's flame bigger. For funsies. Then his roommate(?) walked in, looked at the blaze, and decided to pour water on it, while blithely ignoring the author's repeated protests. The water spread the oil-fire everywhere. Oops! But can you really blame the roommate? He was just trying to increase aggregate utility, after all.
Incidentally, remember that time when Prussia's "Scientific Forestry" ruined the soil? [1]
Incidentally, remember that time when the British Raj tried to fix its cobra problem? [2]
Incidentally, remember that time when Germany let some fiesty Ruskies pass from Switzerland to Russia, in order to destabilize its wartime rival? [3]
Incidentally, remember that time when the CIA funded the Muhajideen during the Cold War, to proxy-fight the Ruskies? [4]
Alas, the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. [5] Many such cases.
[0] (I wanna say it was hoe_math, but I can't find it. But I know it exists.)
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
[2] https://fee.org/articles/the-cobra-effect-lessons-in-unintended-consequences/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin#February_Revolution_and_the_July_Days:_1917
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
[5] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43816/to-a-mouse-56d222ab36e33
I think of PEPFAR more like noblesse oblige.
Yes, indeed, you have an indefinite responsibility to do good things for the desperately poor and sick. There's not some cut-off beyond which that responsibility ends. This is just as true for the collective as it is for the individual.
I think the point is: if PEPFAR had never been enacted, no one would be this indignant at every president who didn’t enact it, even though they would be in the same moral boat as the current administration. In fact even the last few administrations probably killed roughly a similar number of people by not doubling PEPFAR as the current one did by ending it.
None of that of course is a rebuttal against the claim that eliminating PEPFAR is bad; rather, it’s that it’s not clear why PEPFAR vs no PEPFAR is supposed to be such a critical moral margin that distinguishes good people from moral monsters. That seems less like rationalist utilitarianism and more like conventional moral bias.
If you start 100 government programs, all with stated goals of doing good things, you wind up with, say, 50 that are ineffective, 25 that are actively harmful, 20 that are decent and 5 that are really great. So there is a huge asymmetry between killing one of the 5 and starting a new one, and the more pessimistic you are about the effectiveness of government the more strongly you should object to ending an effective program (and, implicitly, replacing it with an equally expensive average program).
(I don't actually know enough about PEPFAR that you should care about my object level opinion)
The opacity of your argument and your reliance on hypotheticals: neither of these do us any favors.
Hypotheticals have their place but I just don't see what their value is here.
Imagine Elon Musk proposed to pay $1,000 a day to maintain a button that, when pressed once a day, prevents any child worldwide from dying of leukemia.
Would you support that proposal?
If we already had the program that, in fact, had been doing this for the last 20 years since it was enacted in 2005, would you support continuing it?
Doesn't that responsibility apply to everyone equally?
Sure, I just don't see what the value is in that line of reasoning. Human attention is very much a zero-sum game, and the more we worry about the responsibilities of others, the less we are able to live up to our own responsibilities.
I lend my neighbor a 2x4 to hold up his collapsing porch, and he takes it for granted. One day, with no build-up, I say "I'm taking back my 2x4" and yank it out and the porch collapses.
Things were turned off so rapidly, and people given "stop work" orders, that the system had no chance to keep working.
I think at this point, you have to believe that disarray is the objective. I can’t believe that they’re all that stupid so it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It’s hiding in plain sight. A systemic breakdown has been in the discourse on the right for quite a while. Steve Bannon is my best case for that. Steve Bannon still has Trump’s ear. I understand the shock, but I don’t understand the confusion.
If you strongly believe the government shouldn't be doing it at all then you'd be fine with all this.
Did I give you the impression that I am not "fine" with all this? I am doing my best to remain dispassionate. I find passion clouds my thoughts. So when I can do that I am fine. It's easy for a man my age to slip into nostalgia.
I am not sure what "it" encompasses when you say 'the government shouldn't be doing 'it'.
I personally think that ending PEPFAR is a tragedy, and I like that my tax dollars were essentially going to an incredibly efficient charity without me having to actually put in the time and effort to validate that charity.
But separate from that, a lot of folks who like PEPFAR -- and USAID in general -- actually like it for selfish USA-first reasons. These programs are fantastic for getting US policy goals accomplished around the world without the implicit or explicit threat of military intervention.
People seem to forget that we found Bin Laden because of a USAID hepC vaccine drive in Pakistan. A bunch of people got vaccinated AND we got Bin Laden. This is great!
PEPFAR is having your cake and eating it too -- you can do great things for the world AND make yourself better off.
"Who is responsible for preventing an evil? Those who can." Yes, once we agreed to provide the infrastructure upon which innocent people depend upon for their lives, we become responsible for those people. If we want some other actor or process to take over from, it's on us to find that and put them in place before abandoning them.
It's interesting to look at this from a US legal perspective. Let's say I provide some service to my neighbor for free. This service allows them to survive. It doesn't really matter what the service is, let's say they are paralyzed and can't move, so I've been delivering and preparing food for her every day. One day I simply stop, without warning her or providing for any other alternative. Consequently she dies. Would the courts hold me legally liable for her death? I think the probably would. Probably some form of negligent manslaughter.
There might have been a morally acceptable way to cease providing this aid, but is this it?
Certainly looks like it to me; like ... internationally (and to be clear I am not speaking to our host, who is wanting his country's policies to follow his preferences, and I'm not going to fault that), the correct response at some level is to thank the US for all the lives it has saved through its contributions of billions of dollars, and to look for somebody else to fill in.
Instead it's part of a broad thing where there are claims the US is going to lose all this good will ... and I don't see any good will there, certainly not from the people claiming we're going to lose it, and if doing a good deed is only good for good will in the calendar year in which it is done, certainly I don't see any point in making maintenance payments on this "good will".
2 thoughts here:
(1) Good will in terms of gratitude is admittedly fleeting, but it becomes more so when you abandon the field mid-battle. Whatever levels of gratitude the US currently enjoys (enjoyed?) from France and Britain with respect to intervention in WW2, I think it's safe to say that if we had backed out in late 1943 we'd have received *considerably* less of it. It would have been nothing short of farcical to leave them to their own devices and expect them to shrug and say "well in fairness the only thing we can do is thank you for fighting with us thus far, so fare thee well and enjoy our gratitude."
Given the nature of how we are winding down, abruptly out of nowhere and with countries still dependent on the assistance in question, I wouldn't take it as a barometer for how "good will" necessarily functions in all ending partnerships. A decision to sunset the program over a period of years, for example, might have been very differently received.
(2) Even if good will by any measure is fleeting as an international-relations bargaining chip, *leverage* is not. If this program goes from being US-funded to China-funded, it will be one more thing for African nations to weigh on the China side of the scales, rather than the US side, when our competitive interests are pushing them in opposite directions.
Not being a fan of empire-building, the leverage argument isn't of particular interest to me.
That's fair, but leverage can be used for reasons other than straightforward, dirtyhanded imperialism.
For example:
- International organized crime gangs in country A are hitting elderly retirees in country B with a variety of social engineering scams to steal their assets. Country B sure would appreciate some cooperation from country A's law enforcement in putting a stop to it. "Leverage," crude as it is, probably helps.
- Country B cares about public health practices in Country A, because diseases cross borders. "Leverage," crude as it is, probably helps.
- As previous example, but with climate change, or overfishing, etc.
I'm open to argument that benefits such as these may not be *worth* the cost of a program like PEPFAR, just throwing out there that they exist.
As far as the goodwill thing goes, I would point to something like https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-views-of-biden-and-u-s-largely-positive/
... where Nigeria and Kenya have (or had in 2023) pretty high net favorable ratings for the US. They were at +54 and +49, respectively, which puts them:
- Behind Poland (+89 damn they really liked us in 2023, bet that's over) and Israel (+75)
- A little behind South Korea (+57)
- Just ahead of Japan (+48)
- Above Canada (+19) and the other listed European countries (highest Italy at +23)
Although it's also true that MOST countries listed had a more favorable than unfavorable view and the median was +29, which again I would say represents a lot of global goodwill.
Wvhat are Nigeria and Kenya's favorability ratings for, say, Switzerland, or the Netherlands?
Obviously I don't know where to find that, although I'm guessing they don't have super strong opinions one way or another.
I was surprised to learn that China has higher favorable views there, though: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/07/27/views-of-china/
... while having much remorse views in most places.
Well, what's a normal, default favorability rating? What would the US ratings be if they did nothing at all? I think you're assuming +0, but it's not clear to me that would be the case.
Maybe not, but I'd be surprised to learn it's +29.
China is throwing billions of dollars into building African infrastructure in return for access to minerals. My South African friends had less love for them after dealing with them, though. The African honeymoon for China may wear off.
Not really. The true Copenhagen Interpretation says "You got involved with this problem, so from now on we treat it like you caused it." Whether or not you agree about PEPFAR, the argument there is merely "The good thing you've been doing hasn't stopped being good, so it's good for you to go on doing it."
I don't get the impression that attitudes are generally "It's good for you to go on doing it", but rather "It's bad if you stop and you'll be responsible for everyone who dies as a result."
In theory the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is exactly this instinct misfiring.
Since if you have the infrastructure set up to help in *some* way, surely it would not be *too* hard to do other good things right?
But it's a misfire because the obligations part of the brain is explicitly set to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits (because the obligation drive is mostly trained on being a reliable promise deliverer, and since honest optimism is desirable in a trade partner, there's incentive to be deluded about success). I think this is upstream of facts like "people are scope insensitive" or "people are interested in something that's none of their direct business".
I don't know if this explanation is too cynical, but it feels more load bearing than just saying "people are bad and should feel bad", which is what I *feel*.
Could those bans link to the comment just *above* the one that got banned? Right now I can only see the actual banned comment by hitting "Return to thread" and having to wait for the whole page to load (very slow). This would require a little scrolling to find the ban announcement, but would (hopefully) skip the slow page load.
If substack is still taking requests, a "show parent" or "show this thread from the top level comment" feature would be very useful--not only for this use case but also in general.
(Edit) Assuming you aren't talking about any comments the banned user is responding to, just the message before Scott's "banned for x days" one:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-3715/comment/98327657 Is a comment with the parent posts that caused the ban. Although I agree with others in the thread that the messages aren't really worth reading.
Thanks! I agree they mostly aren't reading, but I have a morbid curiosity (and sometimes, I get to see that someone I didn't like got banned).
Tangentially related to the job application fee discussion in the recent links post: now that AI-generated essays can be produced at the click of a button, can we finally get rid of letters of recommendation? I'm thinking primarily of rec letters for college applications (I'm a high school teacher), but I guess this would apply to other stuff too. I can perhaps see how they might be useful for someone applying to grad school (the grad school department may be familiar with your professor who's writing the application), but as a high school teacher, even if I write a bunch of letters over the years for kids applying to the same college, the rec letters probably get read by different admissions officers (if they get read at all). So it's not as if I build up a useful reputation as someone who makes credible recommendations.
I'm a little disappointed that the teachers unions didn't push for this as an equity move post-2020. The poor kid at the inner-city public school probably has teachers who are more overworked, and a much worse student-to-counselor ratio than the kid in the posh suburban school or rich private school. Unfortunately, the left spent all their time talking about how standardized tests are racist (but notice how a lot of universities are starting to use SAT/ACT again post-COVID). They didn't stop to realize that basically everything else in the application process is more racist/classist: the poor kids are probably too busy taking care of siblings or working at McDonald's to start their own non-profit or captain the soccer team or play trombone in the marching band.
There are obviously all kinds of problems in the college application process, and I can't hope to fix all of them, but it seems to me that so little value is derived from letters of recommendation that you could get rid of them and lose very little in the process.
I imagine that letters of recommendation aren't really for the 95% of kids who show up with a letter from a random school teacher, they're for the 5% kids who show up with a letter from someone actually impressive.
But since those 5% of kids are going to do the LoR thing, the other 95% feel obliged to do it as well even if those letters are nigh worthless.
The 95% feel obliged to do it because it's required to apply at most schools.
... but why? Why do admissions counselors put themselves through reading thousands of same-y generic letters from nobodies every year? I imagine it's less about the letters themselves and more about the selection effect of requiring them. If a student can get three letters of recommendation, it means they endeared themselves to at least three authority figures. It's a proof of basic social competency and affability that's hard to fake.
I want to quibble when you mention most letter-writers aren't "actually impressive." Being a public school teacher is actually impressive! But you have a point that elite admissions officers don't see it that way.
Asking for help and ideas: how do I buy some time from a superforecasting team to answer a question for me?
I'm trying to weigh up factors in moving for work, and with the country coming apart at the seams would like a transparent audit able steerable process that emits a probability distribution of changes in political, criminal, nuisance crime rates in the geographic area and time I'm looking at. (American Northeast Corridor in the next 5-10 years.)
I've already tried cold-DMing the Sentinel blog, no dice. Are there routine historical reports I can crib from and rerun their methods to get a forecast?
I've read that Starbucks does such a good job of researching this sort of thing that you can safely choose towns to live in based on whether they have a Starbucks. I'm not sure whether that's true, but it might be worth investigating to see whether it is.
Well, one easy way is the create a question on manifold.markets and offer a hefty subsidy.
Another way is to hire Good Judgement. https://goodjudgment.com/services/
Relevant to the Pro-PEPFAR protest: I am from South Africa, a country with about a 14% HIV prevalence rate (yes, you read that right). About 20% our HIV program is funded through PEPFAR.
Our HIV program has been very effective in reducing transmission rates, and keeping HIV positive people healthy. Both outcomes are at risk with these funding cuts.
A decent overview of the risks, by qualified persons: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-03-04-consequences-of-us-hiv-aids-funding-withdrawal-will-be-dire
If you are American and don't care about the people who will be affected, you might care about the loss of good will and the associated soft power. These dollars must be among the most cost effective ever spent by the US on the African continent, both in terms of health outcomes and good will generated.
If any of these things seem important to you, and you are American, please consider adding your voice to the chorus of people calling for this not to be canned.
>you might care about the loss of good will and the associated soft power.
As a cynic I have to ask: what are some examples of that good will leading to concrete benefits for the US in Africa? I don't know much about our interests there, has this led to anything tangible?
Good will doesn't lead to concrete, tangible benefits, at least that's not the point of it, but tangible benefits are not the only kind. Good will toward others is supposed to lead to good will back at us, and that's fine, but the specific issue here is good will toward the powerless, who are not in a position to do us as much good as we do to them. Similar considerations apply to the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and children. They can't return the favor, so it's unreasonable to expect them to.
Then why do it? For most people, it's to validate our self image as good, generous people. This protects the ego, elevates self-esteem, and promotes our mental health.
One other benefit is that it's more likely other powerful people will trust us, if we value that. The more that we are seen as good, generous people, the more likely we are to develop constructive relationships with people who might not otherwise trust us. I daresay Europeans have a better view of America as a result of our charitable activities in Africa. 'Course, not everyone values Europe's esteem.
No one set of relationships are conducted in isolation. Ultimately human relationships are a system, and future outputs are sensitively dependent upon current outputs. Change what is working, and you risk the unknown.
A bit late to the reply (I'm in a very non-US timezone). Other commenters have attempted to provide concrete answers to your question. You seem unpersuaded.
I do believe that there are concrete, practical, and quantifiable benefits to nations that accrue from good will/foreign aid. I also believe that this is not the appropriate forum to convince someone of this if they have a strong bias towards not believing that. But if you do feel that way, at least note that basically everyone who studies these things disagree with you; this should give you pause ('reason to update your priors' in rationalist speak ). There is also the fact that HIV/AIDS is also a global health risk, that requires a coordinated global response.
In addition there are also GENERAL arguments in favor of various forms of charity; some of them political, others religious or philosophical. Scott has shared various version of these on this very blog.
And finally, a meta answer for you - it is obvious to me that it is better to be liked than disliked. Soft power accrues downstream from this.
Look I'm open to being persuaded, that's why I'm asking.
>basically everyone who studies these things disagree with you
Given the recent history of intellectual dishonesty and politically-correct groupthink in this country's institutions, that's not very persuasive. There are a lot of dollars involved and a lot of people and institutions with their fingers in the pie, so I don't really trust the consensus. This isn't hard science it's soft politics. As far as I'm concerned, everyone in that sphere is a motivated reasoner until proven otherwise.
>In addition there are also GENERAL arguments in favor of various forms of charity; some of them political, others religious or philosophical. Scott has shared various version of these on this very blog.
There are general arguments against charity as well, and in my view they're much stronger. If you've been around here long enough you'll be aware that I regularly challenge the rationality of EA and I have yet to encounter a robust reply. In my view, institutional charity is a deadweight loss of value to the world unless there is sufficient relational compensation. I'm attempting to understand the potential value of that compensation w/r/t sub-Saharan Africa. I currently see very little.
>it is obvious to me that it is better to be liked than disliked.
To paraphrase Plato who was paraphrasing Socrates, it's equally obvious to me that we should only care about the opinions of the wise. It's pointless to chase the good will of low value people.
The replies I've gotten in this thread have slightly strengthened my existing priors. High confidence coupled with weak generalized arguments just pattern-match to motivated reasoning for me. It feels good to support charity so people support it. If I immediately got 5 intelligent realpolitik analyses that told me things I didn't know I'd be much more likely to reevaluate my thinking. But I didn't and I suspect I'm not likely to.
As far as I can tell South Africa has been getting increasingly friendly with China and the US rudely going back on previous commitments without even the grace to say sorry is making China look like the better bet. Unlike the US, China has invested in infrastructure all over Africa, and now the US has yanked the only tangible way they were assisting, and done so in a way that causes maximum distrust and increases Chinese influence. Why is Trump trying to make China great again?
I think China is creating a large loyal consumer market for its exports in the long term by trying to improve African prospects. Africa is currently on track to contain about half of the world's population within my lifetime. If the US isn't interested in serving this market then I think something has gone very wrong with the goals of the US elite.
Agree 100%. If the current administration is serious about re-onshoring (is that a word?) US manufacturing, then surely it needs export markets. There are also serious concerns about the influence of China from those who care about democratic ideals.
Ok but what are the actual stakes? What are our rational interests there? Natural resources is one. Are there others? Do we currently have any sweetheart mining deals that are downstream of soft power? Is China's involvement there likely to disrupt our access to anything we care about? AFAIK we don't have any significant military presence there and don't rely on them for either manufactured goods or consumer markets. There is no military there that we care about allying with. Why do we have a reason to project soft power there?
FWIW you could easily look this up using tools like ChatGPT.
Three answers off the top of my head:
- you already talked about natural resources, but this is no small thing. We are highly dependent on metals coming out of Africa both for economic prosperity (it's cheaper) and for strategic reasons (if we go to war with Russia/China, we need to make sure we have alternate lines for these things). Africa also has some amount of oil/gas exports and iirc a fair bit of agricultural exports (e.g. coffee, cocoa)
- counterterrorism and general security -- having goodwill and softpower projection among African nations makes it significantly easier to police terrorist groups _before_ they get to us. It's easy to just wave your hand and say 'pshh whats a warlord in Somalia going to do to the US, there's a full ocean in between!' except, you know, if you lived through 2001. Fighting wars in other people's land is better than fighting them in your own land, and it helps a lot if you can have governments that are willing to help you do so. (Similar argument towards bio-threats like ebola)
- you don't seem the type to care about this, but i'll say it nonetheless -- African nations are obviously developing, and many of them want to use forms of environmentally hazardous shortcuts to quickly speed their development. Think mass coal industrialization, slash and burn, etc. These effects are obviously global, and will of course impact the US. Exerting softpower to prevent this (and to help them develop clean alternatives like solar) is a win
In general, I think you are massively discounting how difficult a billion people on the other side of the world could make your life if they really wanted to.
"In general, I think you are massively discounting how difficult a billion people on the other side of the world could make your life if they really wanted to."
Or if they just didn't care to *not* make your life difficult and a geopolitical rival was nudging them in that direction.
>We are highly dependent on metals coming out of Africa
Agreed but why do we need softpower projections to buy those? Doesn't money work just fine? Are we currently getting access we otherwise wouldn't because of PREPFAR?
> counterterrorism and general security
Yeah we have a military base in Djibouti. I don't think that's going away because of USAID. I'm sure if we want to go terrorist hunting in, I don't know, Burundi that there are lots of ways to wire $1m to the president's Swiss bank account that don't depend on USAID.
> African nations are obviously developing, and many of them want to use forms of environmentally hazardous shortcuts to quickly speed their development.
I'm skeptical that charity moves the needle there. A program that sends $100m per year to local charities isn't going to stand in the way of some crazy slash-and-burn development scheme that will pump billions into the economy. The scales just don't match up.
My general perspective is that countries generally follow their self-interest and the US has many tools to bend that self-interest in its favor. Charity doesn't seem like a particularly essential tool in that arsenal. That's why I'm asking for specific things that, say, PREPFAR gets us. The CIA using it to find Bin Laden is an example of things I'm interested in.
>I think you are massively discounting how difficult a billion people on the other side of the world could make your life if they really wanted to.
I'm inclined to think that you're a) over-estimating how much they would want to and b) under-estimating what other avenues we have of dissuading them if they did. We spend nearly a trillion a year on our military. I just find it implausible that the US would allow any significant strategic interest to depend on some low-rent charity program.
You asked for reasons why the US may have interests in a geopolitical region, and it seems like you mostly agree with those reasons. Great!
If you agree that there are valid reasons for the US to want to project power in that region, the next step is to think through the various ways the US could do that.
There are a bunch! And, as you correctly point out, they are all _more or less interchangeable_ in terms of achieving our short term strategic goals. You mention a few:
- military force
- money
- charity
Where they aren't interchangeable is in their longevity and in their cost.
I'll be honest with you: there is basically nothing that pepfar does to advance any particular US interests that is unique to pepfar. In fact, you don't need anything other than big piles of nukes and you can get any particular thing that you want done.
What makes pepfar and other charitable aid unique is that they create cycles of goodwill that allow you to solve today's problem AND tomorrow's problem AND the day after's problem, in an extremely cost efficient way. (I assure you, pepfar is significantly cheaper than the cost of putting boots on the ground in every country that we want influence in, especially if those countries hate us)
And, even better, you help people while doing it!
But even if there was literally no long term benefit to doing so, I think that if you could spend $1M to bribe the president of Burundi, or $1M to provide AIDS medication, and they both accomplish the same goal, it's acceptable to think a tiny little bit about ethics here and do the latter on principle.
Which brings me to your last point: you're being unfairly weasley about the word "depend". The US 'depends' on USAID to get things done as a first line of action. It is the cheapest way to get things done, it helps people, its great! And most of the time it seems to work pretty well! And then sometimes it doesnt. So in those cases, the US falls back to (roughly in order) diplomatic pressure, financial pressure, and military pressure. Each of these support the others, but the US doesnt "depend" on one of them as an end all be all. This is basic carrot/stick concepts.
You point out yourself the Bin Laden example. We got bin laden through a combination of military pressure, sanctions, diplomatic intel gathering, and, finally, charitable aid. Except everything is like that, all the time. It's difficult to unentangle, for e.g., how much more effective our counterterror ops are in Sudan because the Sudanese government is willing to help us out thanks to our funding of their anti-malaria programs, or whatever
I'm open to hearing an argument like "well, actually, pepfar costs way more than the cost of bribing + the cost of boots on the ground" if that's what you believe, but you'd need like...at least some evidence of this.
My half-brother died of AIDS in the 90's. I'm on your side.
How did he contract it?
Gay sex
I am an American, and I do in fact care about the people who will be affected.
Just wanted to let you know.
Appreciated. I am sure many feel the same.
@Scott a humble request: can we bring back no culture war open threads?
There's a thread below on things that people miss from the SSC days, and one thing that I personally remember fondly was the no culture war threads. I felt like it allowed the community to really bring their other interests to the forum. And that in turn made the culture war threads feel less like "I am being attacked by my enemy" and more like "we are working together to resolve disagreements between friends"
Commented the same below, but I'd rather bring back the "no news less than a week old" rule, to have posts be about important and not urgent things.
I think that's a perfectly fair request, I do wonder if part of the problem is that its harder to implement fairly than it used to be. It used to be a lot clearer where the culture wars ended, but then they kind of ate everything. Depending on who you ask, people will blame Liberals or Conservatives. My two cents is that liberals were the ones who tried to turn the entire internet into one big culture war, but the battle lines they were drawing were around things like norms in language, gender identity, sexism, racism. So pretty easy to shunt off into a side space. But now the President of the United States is actively pushing an ideological agenda in specific response to supposed mainstream liberal dominance of culture, so its hard to figure out how to talk about any current news or events without circling back to that. Even Scott, who seems to have shied away from talking about politics as much as possible, is talking about them a lot more these days.
> no culture war open threads
what does that mean?
The weather.
Context:
Scott's former [0] blog SSC used to have a certain rule. The rule was "no Culture Wars in the Open Threads". The term "Culture War" basically means contemporary topics that are highly-controversial and politically-charged. E.g. Trump, abortion, gunrights, covid, gay marriage, etc all fall under the umbrella of the Culture War. I'm sure you can think of others. I think the subreddit "The Motte" [1][2][3] was created by fans of Scott to basically siphon away all the Culture War stuff (though personally, I don't use reddit). Also, you could still discuss Culture War stuff under Scott's dedicated essays (assuming it was actually related to the topic).
The rationale is "politics is the mind-killer" [4]. Thus, political discussions commonly turn sardonic and nasty. Also, Culture War topics tend to drown out the other topics, which tends to get stale after a while.
----
[0] before substack, there was SlateStarCodex. Before that, there was LessWrong (as yvain). Before that, there was livejournal and/or raikoth(dot)net(?) (this was before my time, so the timeline gets fuzzy here).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/
[2] From "motte-&-bailey maneuver". AKA rhetorical bait-&-switch. Scott didn't create this term, but he helped popularize it. Original post in citation_3.
[3] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
[4] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
>I think the subreddit "The Motte" [1][2][3] was created by fans of Scott to basically siphon away all the Culture War stuff (though personally, I don't use reddit).
Several errors here.
First error: The sequence of events is:
1) SSC subreddit made a Culture War thread to serve as a containment zone for the CW.
2) The Sneer Club, the people behind RationalWiki, conducted a harassment campaign against Scott in retaliation for said Culture War thread not being politically censored in the way they'd like.
3) Scott caved in and got rid of the Culture War thread. Several regulars formed a subreddit called TheMotte to preserve it.
4) Reddit began ordering TheMotte's admins to politically censor their subreddit, which said admins didn't want to do, so it left Reddit for its own site.
Second error: Due to #4, the correct current URL for TheMotte is themotte.org; the subreddit is locked. It's an okay place, although it's gotten a bit low on new members since leaving Reddit.
Third error: Scott's LiveJournal, under the name squid314, was shortly before and indeed only shut down for good *during* SSC (specifically, it was shut down because it was linked to his real name and prospective employers kept finding it and objecting to psychiatrists having blogs). IIRC Scott joined LessWrong before that.
I see, I see. And I had no idea about the Sneer Club thing.
What do other people think of this?
(I found it annoying to enforce, but will bring it back if there's enough demand)
Noooo, don't do that. If people don't want to read culture war and political discussions, they can collapse those threads. It's one of the few things Substack does really well!
Please yes, ban all culture war and politics discussion!
Open threads went from 1/3 politics, to 2/3, and now it's 80%+.
It's soooooo boring, and such a waste of "bringing a bunch of smart people together to exchange ideas."
There is zero leverage to being smart and having a political opinion, unlike nearly every other area. The amount of "minds changed" is miniscule, and prospectively going down on a weekly basis as everyone polarizes more. In return, you basically ruin Open Threads, and make them as low quality as all the rest of the internet.
It's all heat and zero light, now.
All the rest of the internet is politics! Crap it up out there, not here!
I'm assuming what's meant is "{no culture war} open threads" rather than "no {{culture war} open threads}".
Given that, and as a moderator myself, I can understand wanting them - certain topics just expand to fill the available space, and choke everything else off like an invasive weed. One can alternatively set aside space for those topics that get so much attention, while having a separate space where those topics are aggressively culled, and a lot more topics thus get some room to grow.
And if that's the principle, then the appropriate principle is probably "I will cut off any topics if they appear to be filling up a great deal of the OTs, forever". This allows for some topic that's just really interesting, but will only last a week, like an election or a weird plane crash. It also controls topics like wars, AI doom, etc.
A different way to tackle it is if you think a topic could be interesting, but empirically just turns into yelling matches and impromptu sick burn competitions.
I personally prefer to be able to talk about CW topics *provided* there are norms in place to keep them from turning into yelling matches. We rats have some (steelmanning, tabooing your words, etc.). These might be good times to discuss how to discuss CW topics.
Incidentally, I also support the owner's right to not specify all the rules ahead of time, lest they be gamed. (I've referred to this elsewhere as the Forum Incompleteness Theorem (FIT).)
This isn't great for democracies of law-abiding readers, of course, but such rules aren't really meant for them. Such people largely police themselves, and are generally pleasant company.
I feel like the worst problem is the "running commentary" aspect where someone starts a top level thread to discuss every "here's what Trump did today" story. If there were some way to ban those then that might be a good start.
I've noticed a lot of the trouble seems to be breaking the "no news that's less than a week old" rule. I don't mind in-depth conversations about Trump, but the "Trump just did this" makes it feel more like Twitter than SSC. Is that even a rule anymore, or did that die with the old blog?
The past few weeks have featured some world historic events, and I liked being able to read some opinions about them here in near real time. It's hard to find even somewhat intelligent political discussions by strangers on Twitter. But maybe I'm in the minority in wanting to read that here.
Just have a "Culture War" top-level thread that people can close if they want to.
I said this elsewhere but yeah, I don't know where to draw the lines. Also, compared to everywhere else I've been on Substack, people here seem generally better about restraining themselves. So there's a lot of talk about ideological stuff, because its hard to talk about current events without it, but its not getting super heated, and people are still talking about other things.
probably fine if theres a containment thread at the same time
I don't think it's necessary, maybe there's been an uptick after Trump's election but generally the culture war's seem to be dying down.
I mostly collapse threads the minute I see that they're culture war topics, and I'm doing a lot of collapsing these days. What about just having one open thread a month be culture war free?
And, Scott, while I have your attention: Anomie is posting again as of this thread, under a name that's just a rearrangement of the letters in Anomie (Eon Aim). Can you nix this? It's just provocative, and in fact the current posts are on brand for spicy nihilism. If the person wants to come right back under a truly new name, they might be motivated to change their style so has to keep posting. But Anomie now has brand recognition, and coming back with an easily recognizable variant of the brand is going to guarantee us all an eon of provocative nihilism.
Agreed. I reported many of anomie's comments in previous threads, for largely the same reason. I have maybe a little sympathy (ISTR some clinical depression being cited weeks ago), but not at the expense of depressing everyone else in the thread.
Yeah... No, it's fine. I've been off of my anti-depressants for a while now, I don't really feel like participating much anymore. You guys have fun now. Goodbye.
semi serious: you could plausibly set up a little LLM bot that reads the replies from your inbox and flags when things get culture-war-y. Wouldn't even be that expensive with token costs being what they are
I don't personally think you need to do a ton of enforcing -- the community self enforcement was sufficient to make the experience a lot more pleasant, even if a few culture war topics did leak through
Tbh for the next 4 years it might even become unenforceable; everything's going to fall under culture war
I'm against, feel it's absurdly controlling to restrict speech in this way.
Keep in mind that the intent isn't to censor. There's a difference between controlling and curating. The goal is to have rich, lively discussion. That's hard when every other comment is "Did you see what Trump did today?"
So like a no politics thread? That might be nice, but there were always people ignoring the rule... which is annoying. I guess if you had to say something political you could go back to the previous weeks open thread. (Which isn't a great, given how threads work on substack.)
I'd vote for it. I don't think it's all that difficult to define. Almost all politics is related to culture wars nowadays
It needs a better definition. If discussing Trump is a culture war, or Ukraine or immigration or Musk and DOGE are considered cultural then what can be discussed? I mean the PepFar decision is downstream of culture wars.
> then what can be discussed?
Command and Conquer Generals (and Zero Hour) is the best RTS ever made
The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz is a fascinating book which contains many delightful examples of how food shapes culture, while also pointing out how easy and important it is to eat fermented foods (decline of fermentation is pretty obviously the main cause of a lot of first world health problems, especially autoimmune/GI conditions like Crohn's and gluten intolerance)
I love early Data Romance (Arms, their covers of Clap Hands, Be Quiet and Drive, and If I'm Going), and it'll never stop being sad that they got out of the business so early. Anybody have something similar?
I've been rereading War and Peace, and it's interesting to see how cultural stereotypes have changed...
&c
> Command and Conquer Generals (and Zero Hour) is the best RTS ever made
Ok but in a general discussion forum that’s hardly going to ignite a comment section. Certainly not an open thread.
Yours is the fifteenth reply to my comment, and the second engaging with that exact point.
AI!
Actually, I did have somebody point out to me that I'm a Weak AI per the constraints of the Chinese Room.
Met a girl through a text-only app. She would frequently send strings of emoji, rather than just one at a time, and I was fascinated by this: what a creative way to convey nuanced messages! It was one of the main things which attracted me to her so strongly.
When we finally met in person, I brought it up, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I showed her our text conversations and she became even more confused; she showed me her side of things, and I learned that not only had she been sending single emojis the whole time, but the ones I was seeing usually had nothing to do with the ones she was sending.
Turns out I didn't have the advanced emoji pack installed. I'd been reading all this meaning in what turned out to be noise. I told this story recently to a friend, who suggested that the base emojis were 8-bit, but the packs were 32-bit, so my phone was interpreting one of hers as a string of four (essentially random) ones.
That's a fascinating example (at the risk of being accused of being Claude). Did clearing up the mismatched messages reduce the attraction?
Tib Sun and Red Alert 2 were the peak of the series imo. Though Generals has a lot going for it.
Yeah, those are the popular ones, so you're not alone in this opinion. I also prefer Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 to 2 (the coaster design process was much easier with 3D graphics, where I could see what I was doing).
Anyway, Generals to me takes the cake on the basis of sound design alone, though I guess it's still competing with "We will bury them" and the Hell March.
Anything in particular about those entries which speaks to you?
I think the biggest difference is the atmosphere. RA2 was goofy and over the top but it had this nostalgic cold war energy. And Tib Sun was a dystopian sci-fi adventure. Generals was just kind of like current times, but if an ISIS-like group actually created a Caliphate and declared war on the world. And Zero Hour was specifically changed to pander to China in the campaign because they banned the first game over depicting a successful nuclear attack on Beijing.
Not to mention Generals was the first and only game in the entire franchise not to feature live action scenes. It just had lame voice overs on the mission intro screens. Compare that to Tiberian Sun, it had James Earl Jones!
"The Emperor of Scent" is a good book. Luca Turin has a substack page. https://lucaturin.substack.com/
First review I clicked on had a comparison to folk music. This is an interesting perspective on something I don't consider much (I am acutely aware of smells around me, but haven't worn cologne since childhood).
What I like most about Luca is that he's the latest promoter of an alternate theory of how smell works. Based not on shape, but on the vibrational frequency of molecules.
>how food shapes culture
Treading dangerous waters there.
No, I mean things like how the Mongols fermented milk in, among other things, (bladders? Stomachs?). They'd hang the bags outside their tents, next to a wooden bat; it was expected that a visitor to the tent would give a few good whacks to agitate things before entering. I suppose it also served as a doorbell too.
Don't worry, just a cheap joke on my part. Yes, the Mongol culture is of course fascinating, and how their way of life on the steppe and the limited window that world history gave them enabled them to build an empire on horseback.
Culture changes but human nature does not.
My paperback copy of W&P is in the duct tape on the spine stage. i might get one more go thru if I’m careful.
So you aren't reading the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, I take it? People usually claim it is far superior to others, but some say some poetry and warmth to the sentences is lost in it. I've only read P&V but wonder if I'm missing something. I've only read earlier translations of AK and prefer it to W&P, but maybe it's just the other translators that I prefer?
Rosemary Edmonds translation.
I think Anna Karenina is a better novel. My all time favorite. I think Tolstoy improved as a writer between the two books.
i’ve lost count of the times I’ve read AK. It’s usually this time of year that i pull it off the shelf. Something about the late winter light on the snow in my front yard puts me in mind of troikas
Any passages which stand out in your memory? I think I was most emotionally impacted by the scene where (I guess spoilers on a 200-year-old book) Prince Andrew returns home unexpectedly and sees his wife, briefly, twice.
Probably the change in Pierre’s outlook after spending time as a POW of Napoleon’s army sticks with me the most.
I thought Pierre’s prior dabbling in Free Masonry was actually comical in comparison to what he gained from the POW experience.
And of course Petya Rostov’s death in battle at 16 is a moving moment.
In Soviet Union, many laws were kept secret, lest the people actually use them.
I know this is a semi-joke but the penal code was not public knowledge in the Soviet Union. According to Solzhenitsyn you could ask to see a copy from the local authorities. But this would immediately place you under suspicion, as the thinking went that the only people who would do this were either criminals looking to cover their ass or someone trying to figure out a loophole to violate the spirit of the law.
Solzhenitsyn was an extremely dishonest monarchist and his anecdotes have to be taken with a grain of salt.
I'm not relying on Solzhenitsyn here but actual people I know (I myself was too young when I lived in the Soviet Union). For example, the functionaries dealing with churches (these as problematic institutions had to be dealt with and regulated) sometimes wrote letters to their bosses complaining that their 'clients' (the church people) were not able to make rational decisions in the situation where they couldn't see the laws regarding religious activities. My dad somehow found out that the citizens of 'winning nations' (the winning side of WWII) could, by the law, freely move from Eastern Berlin to Western Berlin and back. He thought this could not be true for Soviet citizens, but tried anyway; showed his passport at the gate and got through! He walked around in a Western city when nobody would have found it possible without special allowance documents. Maybe the Eastern Germans always knew that - someone must have tried - but in the core Soviet Union, people didn't know. (This was in the late eighties, maybe in the seventies he would've been arrested for that, idk).
Can't tell if you're satirizing a Soviet-type response or are being straight. If the latter, what was he dishonest about?
No, I was serious. He's a deeply unreliable source. Gifted fiction author, don't get me wrong, but he was a committed ideologue who didn't let the truth get in the way of his ideological crusades.
For starters, he claimed that 60 million died in the Soviet Union's penal system. Utterly bonkers. For the year 1953, he claimed 25 million people were in gulag, when the real number was 10% of that. But his most audacious claim was that Stalin killed over 100 million Soviets.
That's just for starters. Take Solzhy’s Red Wheel series, which is fictional but supposedly the product of extensive research. Just as with Moby Dick, there are several nonfiction essays in this series, explaining the political and Civic situation in Russia shortly before the Revolution. In these essays, Solzhy offers a comprehensively whitewashed picture of Tsarist rule. Tsar Nicholas and the Romanovs were running the war effort in 1917 with a perfectly matched combination of corruption and incompetency. The level of waste and fraud was so staggering that the Romanovs found themselves hated through all levels of society, even by political moderates. not only does Solzhy elide this, he actively lies about the facts.
>But his most audacious claim was that Stalin killed over 100 million Soviets.
Huh, I'd always used that figure too. This comment made me look it up and realize it's false. Thanks! Had no idea. It's really sort of amazing how complete nonsense can percolate into the collective unconscious. Still "only" killing ~10 million or whatever is still a terrible indictment. At least it's directionally correct.
In Soviet Russia, you don't break laws, laws break you!
(Seems like an obvious joke, but quick Google search didn't turn it up)
You need to remove the "you don't" part: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=%22soviet%20russia%20laws%20break%20you%22
This one is a bit of a stretch, but if any of you is working in Berlin, please consider participating in my anonymous salary trends survey that I am now running for the third year in a row: https://handpickedberlin.com/salaries/2025-03/ I am hoping to reach 1,300 responses this year.
Thanks for helping out.
Can someone please tell me how to like comments in ACX? I keep getting notifications that someone liked my comment, and I have no idea how they're doing it because I don't see any like button on comments here. ACX is the only Substack that doesn't seem to let me like comments. What gives?
Download the Substack app. That’s where you find the like buttons.
EDIT: if you click on the three little horizontal bars at the top right of the web interface and click on activity, you will see where you can like a comment
The Substack (Android) app still exposes the 'Like' feature even if the feature is disabled in the browser. I've been assuming that's how most people end up using it.
Scott disabled likes but I'm very sure the relevant Substack feature just doesn't show the button or the count; not prevent the relevant 'backend' feature(s) from working at all. Substack also seems to do quite a lot 'browser side' so the 'disable like' feature itself might not work perfectly, which might be how some 'users' (e.g. people OR bots) can like comments anyways, beyond any kind of 'server side hack' that I expect is very easy to do as well.
I'm pretty sure the mobile app just has the ability to like things still
Correct
Interesting. Do you know why he disabled likes?
Aside from the rest, there's a dopamine hit from getting like notifications and this has been well-proven to be addictive. Hence, removing it to make ACX less Out to Get You than most social media.
Enough of us asked for them to be disabled as we didn't want them/didn't like them/felt they would devolve into a popularity contest.
Probably some variant of the theory that reddit upvotes works for cat pictures, its a disaster for politics
It doesn't even work well for reddit. Early in the site's history, somebody wrote up a post detailing how the algorithm gives a huge advantage to short, easily-digested content, and warned that, unless fixed, this would cause the site to drift towards vapid memes and shallow, repetitive comments.
What a relief THAT didn't happen.
I think if you comment and then get an email notification that someone has replied, you can maybe like from the page linked to in the email. There might also be ways to do it in the app.
That's been my experience, you can like things in your reply queue on the website.
I'm not able to do so in my email, I don't have the app so I can't try that. I'm not really trying to get around it anyway, was just wondering how other people were doing it.
He thinks that it encourages poor behaviour like seen on Reddit - karma farming or whatever the cool kids call it.
1. Sounds like a good protest! Shame about the location xD. I was confused why I was suddenly on a page named "Foggy Bottom"
In my headcanon, it's the sister city of bikini bottom.
xD
What's the situation with PMI (president's malaria initiative)? All the press has been about PEPFAR but I'm assuming PMI faces the same funding cuts -- did Rubio exempt them too, and is Musk also illegally preventing that order?
As far as I can piece it together, PMI has been completely gutted.
Rubio did not exempt PMI as of Feb 4 https://beatmalaria.org/blog/why-the-u-s-presidents-malaria-initiative-should-qualify-under-the-life-saving-humanitarian-assistance-waiver/
The New York Times reported in Feb 1 that 2/3 of their staff was fired and their work was suspended https://web.archive.org/web/20250228153138/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/health/trump-aid-malaria-tuberculosis-hiv.html
And according to this recent usnews article PMI is at least "affected by the cuts," though that's a little vague. They cite a recently fired senior USAID official who says that "all" malaria supplies are cut, so I think that applies to PMI. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-03-04/the-life-saving-programs-disappearing-as-a-result-of-the-usaid-funding-cuts
This memo by a USAID official who was fired by the Trump admin after publishing the memo estimates that cuts to anti-malarial programs could result in as many as 166,000 additional deaths annually- that's more deaths per year than the Against Malaria Foundation has averted in it's entire history https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/2dbddd9a823b8824/168a9032-full.pdf which is just... fuck. Be sure to call your representative and senators to ask them to restore PMI, because that's kind of all we can do.
> The New York Times reported in Feb 1 that 2/3 of their staff was fired and their work was suspended
*JOY*
> read context
...oh
> did you know that the ancient Chinese kept the laws secret, lest people search too hard for loopholes?
"Some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available. That does not seem to have actually been done"
Earlier he mentions how the Confucianists warned that an available written law code would result in rules-lawyering, but they were defeated by the opposing legalists of the Chi'in dynasty the first to unite all of China.
As an aside, I recommend Han Fei. Machiavelli 2000 years before Machiavelli, but with chopsticks.
Not sure why 10 prompted a ban. It objects to language that it sees as treating the condition as inherent or biological, rather than something psychological and subject to social conditioning. Whether or not you agree with the message, I’m not sure why you’d ban a user for it.
The ban for 19 also seems debatable. It makes the point that the vast majority of members of a certain group aren’t sufficiently passionate about their cause to initiate a civil war. Seems obviously true. It described the group as a whole, without the qualifier “vast majority,” but the meaning seems obvious in context of (correctly) rejecting the likelihood of mass political violence.
The ban for 14 is also interesting. It hopes that various politicians get cancer, which is rude, but hardly seems like the end of the world, as many politicians genuinely are evil.
It’s weird that that merited a ban, while threads full of people celebrating the murder of a CEO, hoping for mass murder of insurance workers, and wondering what they could do to personally support the murderer apparently didn’t warrant any bans.
Maybe you’re working in reverse chronological order and will get to banning those, eventually, but even so, this ban seems somewhat questionable (even though probably little would be lost in banning that user).
I think it's weird in a good way. I didn't really like any of the comments you shared but they did not seem significantly worse than the bottom quartile of posters here.
Like, it's not weird because anyone is saying "Hey, that post was great and I liked it, it really added to discourse." It's more like...if the FBI arrested someone for smoking weed in Cali. And you're like, "Oh yeah, that's still a federal crime. Weird though."
I dunno, semi-random and capricious punishment of generalized bad behavior is probably the most efficient way to maximize the quality of discourse while also maximizing time to play with small, adorable children.
I seem to recall this being more or less the principle behind the "reign of terror" moderation era for SSC. It seemed to work out well then, and I fully support Scott if he wants to return to it either directionally or entirely.
I think the most efficient would be for him to outsource the bulk of moderation to others.
>Maybe you’re working in reverse chronological order and will get to banning those, eventually, but even so, this ban seems somewhat questionable (even though probably little would be lost in banning that user).
Did you report the comments you're wondering about the lack of bans for? I'm pretty sure Scott doesn't actually read through every comment on his Substack, except for the top-level ones.
I think the problem with 19 is that it said leftists “will capitulate the moment people start getting shot.” That isn’t saying that leftists won’t initiate a civil war, it seems to be advocating initiating a white terror of shooting leftists. Just saying that people won’t start a war isn’t offensive, many people on the left are pacifists and would agree with that self-conception.
Even a cursory examination of the history of liberalism/leftism reveals that members of these groups are perfectly capable of risking their lives and fighting wars. Including recent history.
> The ban for 14 is also interesting. It hopes that various politicians get cancer, which is rude, but hardly seems like the end of the world, as many politicians genuinely are evil.
>> or approves of it,
I can read this as wishing me cancer
> This is a social contagion
10 makes a claim (above) with no citation but with very emotive language ("you're destorying [sic] innocent children's lives"). It's not a bloodless objection to terminology.
Also Scott gives his reasons in the thread.
The ban for 19 seems very unfair. I don't agree with anything Anomie says but that was a fairly tame comment from someone who's been consistently contributing to ACX comments for a while. I would like to see Scott undo that.
10 is harsh but a temp ban would be fair IMO, it's bad when people make controversial statements about transgenderism without giving any argument and then blame individual users for "destroying kids lives." Blaming commenters for social problems is just too uncivil for ACX; like if someone told a ACX Trumpist that he (the user) was destroying kids lives because Trump's cutting foreign aid, that'd be temp bannable too.
14's ban is perfectly fair, wishing painful death on politicians is bad enough but doing so in a low effort way is unforgivable.
I thought the Anomie ban was a bit unfair. He could chill a little but I kinda like his nihilistic comments and that particular comment wasn't thaaaat inflammatory or untruthful.
agreed.
Anomie had been posting edgy fluff for months. Every thread brought yet another round of "I don't value human life, the world is ending, I will enjoy watching you all die". I think I'd reported six or seven Anomie comments, and I don't go out of my way to find things which make me want to report people.
It appears that Scott correctly thinks it's not worth his time and emotional energy to go through all these users' comment histories to build a rock-solid case for every single one.
Do you think anomie added anything but heat to most conversations? If it’s tongue in cheek, maybe, but it wasn’t.
I would ask for ban reversal as well myself. At first I got wound up about anomie's comments, but he constantly did the edgy nihilist bit so I got used to that, and I don't mind it now.
I think anomie has a genuinely nihilist outlook. I didn’t engage with him much but he was never personally rude or sarcastic. I’d like to see the ban reversed myself.
Anomie consistently makes whatever the edgiest possible point is in context, with no concern for "truth", let alone any sort of sincere belief system. Strongly agree with the ban.
Seconded. Their posts felt much more like trolling for responses than for truth seeking, and consistently made my experience of the larger acx community worse (ironically, the prolificness that OP refers to made this much worse for me)
idk if scott does this with his bans, but I wonder if sometimes there are just some commenters who don't have anything particularly egregious but are just, like, making the place worse, and so end up getting pinned for a lesser evil. I can think of a few off the top of my head, and I probably fit in this category sometimes.
It's a bit like martin shkreli getting convicted for securities fraud. Like, yea, legally he was convicted for fraud, but really he was convicted because he just pissed everyone else off.
"Their posts felt much more like trolling for responses than for truth seeking" They've responded with reasonable points the few times I've engaged with them. Just to give my impression.
Banned, I don't know what he expected. I wouldn't have even noticed if he'd come back a week later.
They already came back in the 9 hrs since the present ban, under the name Eon Aim (=Anomie with letters rearranged).
Anomie claims to be an adult but I have my doubts. Especially if he's engaging in this kind of primary school class clown behavior.
Still alive! Well done.
*sniffles Sometimes I can still hear his voice!
https://youtu.be/FHuynlD_ckM?feature=shared&t=12
He is not there, he did not die, he just moved into another room as it were 😁
I don't think the ban of 10 is fair. In context the poster they are replying to seems to be saying, "transition children to prevent suicide - no citation." The reply that got banned is just saying, "transitioning children ruins lives / cause suicides - no citation"
Given that basically every country (including ones vastly more pro LGBT with better healthcare, e.g., Europe) is moving to ban transitioning minors, the second comment seems the one less needing of a citation!
To quote Scott, "beware of isolated demands for rigor."
That's not a remotely reasonable comparison.
Comment 1: "holding position X would not be morally justified"
Comment 2: "You, the person saying that, are doing bad things in the world and ruining children's lives."
You, le raz, might not care about the difference between making a general statement and a specific, personal accusation. But as Scott clearly does (and its his space) you should at least be able to *recognize* the difference. One of those comments was talking about a general attitude that some people might hold. The other was accusing someone specific of doing bad things.
While we're talking about "isolated demands for rigor," we should perhaps make critical examination of this statement:
"Given that basically every country (including ones vastly more pro LGBT with better healthcare, e.g., Europe) is moving to ban transitioning minors,"
Even if we let "basically every country" pass as obvious hyperbole, this seems like a pretty out-there statement. Some countries are deciding that certain specific medical interventions are contraindicated for minors with gender dysphoria. But such medical interventions have (to my understanding) always been somewhat fringe: the much more widespread practice is social transitioning (while leaving minors to seek medical intervention--if they still want it--when they come of legal age). If you're only talking about some fraction of medical interventions you should say that. If your claim is that "basically every country" is moving to ban social transitioning for minors as well, that is an *extremely* extraordinary claim and you should certainly provide evidence.
I generally try and move away from this debate but… the argument amongst trans advocates that there be nothing but trans affirmative care even for minors does in fact make diagnosis of gender dysphoria obligatory, and often medical intervention necessary.
To me, your characterization of 1 and 2 seem similar. If you say "holding position x is indefensible" then you are implying that people who hold position x are immoral (and likely doing harm in holding, acting on or spreading such an immoral view).
I would also add that comment 1 writes that the indefensible claim is "[people] think that fighting wokeness is more important than actually helping minorities, women, etc."
I think their words implicitly horribly tar and strawman people who care about "fighting wokeness." I think many people who are anti-woke care very deeply about minorities women, etc... and feel that wokeness *is* virtue signalling that actively harms those it claims to help (e.g., there is evidence that defund the police lead to worse outcomes for impoverished communities and higher crime rates). As such, I can see why the banned party would get defensive, see themselves as being personally attacked, and want to respond in kind.
To be clear, to me, comment 1 is implying that people who care about fighting wokeness are harming minorities.
Tbh, you and scott may well have a far better sense of the exchange, I've only read it after seeing the ban notification, and many of the comments have been deleted, but I see the text I've quoted as quite inflammatory, and without the context of all the deleted comments (which could easily tip the balance into making the ban justified), the ban seems disproportionate.
I believe it extremely obvious I was not talking about social transitioning. As you say, that would be a ridiculous and extraordinary claim.
For one, I'm not even sure the phrase "ban social conditioning" even makes sense. It's would be incredibly hard to define, and (luckily) incredibly hard to police, and (luckily) I believe way way outside of the western zeitgeist
An no, it's not hyperbolic at all regarding medical transitioning. I believe it factual. Correct me if I am wrong, but support for LGBTQ is mainly found in the west (as opposed to the Middle East, Asia, Africa). As such, I believe, the majority of non-European non-American countries do not support medical transitioning minors, meanwhile, Europe + UK has outlawed it.
Basically (as I understand it) it is uncontroversial the world over that transitioning minors is a bad idea (e.g., the UK NICE government organisation + the EU regulation conclusively decided, and much of elsewhere it was never even considered). It is just the USA that has this strange controversy around it. And in the USA, no it is not fringe, it is a weirdly contested issue, despite transitioning minors being (extremely fringe / moving to outlawed) everywhere else
To quote myself from ages ago: “If you live near Washington D.C., you could stage a little PEPFAR rally (…a pep rally.)”
https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/every-argument-against-pepfar-debunked?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios
Anyone interested in a round of SSC Diplomacy? It's been a few years since the last one.
We are at 6 players. I’ll give it another day and then I’ll open the game up to anyone on backstabbr to join as number 7. Unless we hit quorum before then of course.
Signed up, thanks for the invite.
Maybe mention it on DSL? I'm self-banned so can't, and we need a couple more players for quorum.
Done
Link below. Need seven to play. @John Schilling @Erusian @bean - want to join?
https://www.backstabbr.com/game/SSC-Diplomacy-2025/5968099650961408/invite/46QTOZ
I would be interested
link above
I’m interested!
link above
Thanks! I’m in.
I am intrigued. Any special rules or maps?
link above
The simplest solution is standard maps on backstabbr. With, say, 2 day turns. If someone wants something different then advocate for it.
Off topic, but we've met in person and I recommend you get a different profile photo, you look substantially better irl.
Huh. Thank you for the feedback!
"Prof Penadés' said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicating his research.
"It's not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one," he said.
"It's that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.
"And for one of them, we never thought about it, and we're now working on that.""
Dr. Penadés gave the AI a prompt and it came up with four hypothesis, one which the researchers could not come up with. Is that not proof of original thought?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o
I am quite confused by this article. The way I understand it is that the team solved a novel problem over 10 years, but didn't publish yet and didn't talk about it on the internet, so it couldn't have been in the public AI training data. Then they gave the same problem to the AI tool, and it then provided a number of promising hypotheses, one of which was the same the team based their work on.
Then comes the confusing part. The article states that the problem "has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool." and the AI "reached the same conclusion in 48 hours". Then it goes on to clarify that the AI only provided the same starting hypothesis that the team spent years working out. While that's not nothing, it is far from doing the entire body of work.
>Prof Penadés' said the tool had in fact done more than successfully replicating his research.
>
>"It's not just that the top hypothesis they provide was the right one," he said.
>
>"It's that they provide another four, and all of them made sense.
Maybe that's just me, but "replicating" research is not the same as "providing a hypothesis", or even several.
Also, there is a major confounding factor here: The reasearch is all but finished already, which creates at least two possible problems.
>"I wrote an email to Google to say, 'you have access to my computer, is that right?'", he added.
>
>The tech giant confirmed it had not.
First problem: If the tool is running locally on the researcher's computer(s), what it can or can't do is Google's word; the responder might have been confused or ignorant about the tool's abilities[1]. In essence, do it again on a clean machine.
Second problem: Looking at the overview of how "co-scientist" works [2], it seems the researcher doesn't just type in "hey google, how do I fight superbugs?", but has to configure the assistant with "preferences, experiment constraints, and other attribute". So it seems there's a chance that the researchers unwittingly fed the assistant with things they couldn't have known without doing the work themselves.
[1] Back in the day, Google's promise about its Streetview cars not collecting WiFi data (literally wardriving) was also incorrect, later excused with a development feature left active in production. These things happen; they may not have been malicious, but they happen.
[2] https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakthroughs-with-an-ai-co-scientist/
It’s definitely not proof of original thought, because we can’t agree on what “thought” is.
It is proof that this is a very useful tool.
And I suspect that some day it will help us understand the many different things we call “thought” a lot better, by seeing which are well-emulated by raw neural nets, which by “chain of thought” text generation, and which by various other things. And maybe at the end we will accept that many of these things along the day do really deserve the term “thought”.
By that reasoning, nothing humans do is proof of original thought either, which makes the question of whether AIs can think irrelevant.
For what it’s worth, I agree with Turing on this. As long as you can keep having conversations and they keep serving your purposes, that’s all that matters. With some humans, those purposes include collectively solving math problems together, with others it’s friendship, and with others it’s just getting your paperwork approved. Some people use “thinking” for some of the steps that go on in some of those activities.
I tend to agree with this, while noting the caveat of "as long as". A real person will keep having conversations (until sleep or coma or dementia or death); an AI will keep having conversations until it starts malfunctioning.
To me, this turns out to be the key concern people have. We have a much easier time telling when a person has stopped serving the purpose of a conversationalist than we do for an AI, because an AI will continue to appear intelligent past the point that it's saying reliable things. This is fine if we're looking for a simulation of an imperfect narrator; it's less fine if we're consulting that AI for advice on a business decision (which seems to be the aim in the long run).
The links kind of work. They sent me to to Scott's comment saying the commenter had been banned.
(I'm always unsure whether I should refer to Scott in the first or third person in the comments. Any guidance?)
Probably not the first person.
Always rude to speak of someone in the third person when they are (possibly) present.
I am Scotticus.
The centrists potions would be 2nd person
The typos somehow make this even better
Why is the protest at noon on a workday? Sacrificing some turnout so that employees in the office will see it?
A lot of people can attend a noon protest downtown during their lunch hour and yes, visibility to the employees and staffers.
Fair. I also commend you for caring and doing something about it.
Thank you for caring and doing something about it.
Imagine you're a maximally malicious actor who becomes President of the United States. Your goal is to decrease overall utility as much as possible. You can't do anything illegal, either under US law or widely recognized international law (e.g can't invade countries). Your party has a supermajority in both houses and are able to pass whatever legislation you want, but don't have enough states to ratify Constitutional amendments. You don't have to care in the slightest about public opinion. What do you do?
(this isn't a commentary on Trump or anything, just a thought experiment)
(seriously please don't mention Trump I'm so tired of him)
Escalate great power conflict with Russia and China as much as possible, while eroding diplomatic safeguards and contacts, until you blunder into an accidental nuclear war (presuming an intentional first strike is illegal).
Could you make the use of money illegal? Including anything that is clearly being used as a substitute for money?
I’m surprised so few people are gwilling bing foreign policy examples, which to me seems like the ‘easiest’ area in which to cause enormous harm. One needn’t invade other countries to start wars. The US could engage in aggressive but legal provocations, like stationing and mobilizing US troops as close as possible.to rival countries while also imposing embargoes on them. Do this while also gutting defense spending, signaling maximal aggression and minimal preparedness for war. The president could also support powerful countries’ territorial claims against weaker ones, or if that violates international law, just signal that he would do nothing whatsoever to punish an aggressor country if it were to attack a weaker neighbor.
I think one could definitely lay the ground work for WW3 without technically breaking any laws.
Most of what one might want to do is probably already found in the Simple Sabotage Manual. Most of it is (I think) perfectly legal, and doesn't even really require giving any orders.
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
The only real utility left in American government comes when the imperial presidency, bloated with executive power, manages to push something through despite institutional gridlock. The legislative branch has been so hollowed out by polarization, corporate influence, and procedural dysfunction that major governance increasingly depends on executive orders, regulatory agencies, and emergency powers.
Take, for instance, Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts. While Congress was utterly incapable of passing meaningful relief, Biden attempted to leverage executive authority under the HEROES Act to wipe out some debt. The Supreme Court struck it down, showing the limits of even the executive's overreach, but the point remains: if something big is to happen in post-1994 Washington, it's usually because the president finds a way to do it unilaterally. Obama’s DACA program was another case where Congress’s failure to pass immigration reform led to an executive workaround. Trump, for his part, governed largely through executive orders and emergency declarations, from border wall funding to pandemic response, because Congress couldn’t get anything done.
A "libertopian" vision of returning to strict constitutional principles, where the executive defers to Congress and states for governance, would be the easiest, most legal way to guarantee disaster. Imagine a scenario where the president voluntarily relinquishes much of their modern power, promising to act only as a co-equal branch as envisioned in the 18th century, along with some "common sense" amendments to rein in the remaining unchecked powers like pardons etc. Congress would then need to pass laws on everything from climate policy to economic stimulus, foreign policy, and crisis response. Given the levels of dysfunction that have prevailed in the American legislature my entire life, I can't imagine a more effective way to decrease utility in American under the provisions given.
Interesting thought experiment. Probably an open borders policy combined with an expansion of the "welfare state".
I would grant US citizenship to everyone in the world. Would this lead to civil war, a coup or just the US turning into a developing country? Who knows, but surely something horrible and interesting would happen.
Please don't, I don't want to become liable for paying US taxes.
Everyone wants to enjoy Pax Americana, and no one wants to pay for it. That all changes with the new policy of birthright citizenship for all, which will build a bridge to Mexico and make the Mexicans pay for it.
Add more states? There's no minimum number of people per state, so you just add states with three people each (two Senators and one Representative) until you can amend the Constitution and do whatever you want.
Mess with the definitions of time via executive order.
Make a year last a century or a day. Or keep randomly flipping between the two definitions. Reset the calendar so we start again at year 1.
Rename all the months. Rename all the weekdays to the same name. Add or remove hours to the day.
That's all guaranteed to cause chaos and ruin contracts. Nobody would know when they need to make mortgage payments or deliver goods or anything like that.
I think businesses would adapt by rewriting contracts to observe Canadian dates and times.
Then impose tariffs on all the other countries until they fall in line and observe the ridiculous new calendar.
At that point, the President would be removed from office, either by his own cabinet through the invocation of the 25th Amendment, or by the Senate through impeachment. It would be manifestly obvious that he or she was mentally ill and committed to hurting the national interest. No elaborate justification for removal would be needed.
How many nuclear reactors are still running in the U.S.? How good are the safety features? Doing things like cutting off water supplies or detaining key personnel to deliberately cause meltdowns seems like it could do some pretty widespread damage if it was done right.
In a similar vein, sending a bunch of ships all over the globe with deliberately volatile or dangerous cargo combinations and kneecapped safety precautions could cause a lot of damage that might qualify as "accidental" individually, while still happening reliably by dint of sheer numbers. Bonus points if you can get debilitating and difficult-to-clear wrecks and spills to hit the Panama and Suez canals, and major foreign harbors. You'd need good coordination, though: it probably wouldn't take very many incidents before other nations started turning your ships away at the edges of their territorial waters.
OK, weird thought: I'm sure *issuing orders* to attack other nations would violate international law. But is there anything preventing you from simply deceiving your own personnel *without* actually issuing orders? Like, sending a series of fake communications to various warships and submarines and overseas military bases, feeding each of them a scenario in which a foreign adversary has suddenly attacked, the chain of command is in shambles and they need to act on their own initiative? If even a fraction of them took the bait you could probably cause a lot of chaos very quickly.
My understanding is almost all (maybe all) reactors in the US (and the west in general) are either incapable of non-deliberate meltdowns or have a containment structure around them that would make a worst case scenario have minimal impact outside of losing a reactor and having to maintain the containment structure permanently.
And yes, to address your specific points, our power plants have many redundant safeguards, from complex computer systems down to simple electromechanical switches, all waiting to drop the control rods and SCRAM in a fraction of a second. We also build containment buildings around our reactors.
Fukushima gives a pretty good example of how a worst-case scenario looks for a non-RBMK (Chernobyl) reactor. You'd need decades of basically deliberate neglect, and from my time in and around nuclear plants, I can tell you you'd need to overturn a lot of regulations (many imposed by INPO, which is not a government agency) and somehow toss out a pretty firmly established safety culture to get even a Fukushima in this country.
Worth noting that the nuclear plants I saw (SONGS in California and Palo Verde in Arizona) had made modifications in response to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, &c., so you'd actually need to do even *worse* than the Japanese did to get even the smallest release of radiation to the public.
I've worked in the facilities, studied the drawings as part of my training, and even if you gave me a team of people, the most I could do to a nuclear plant in the US would be to trip the automatic safeties. It's not even close.
To go Full Fukushima, you also need a 9.0 earthquake and associated tsunami or the equivalent, to destroy all the backup systems at once. And if you've got that, then the meltdown is about 0.1% of your problem. Well, OK, 0.1% of your material and loss-of-life problem; it will still be 90% of your PR problem.
Three Mile Island is the reference case for a meltdown without any other affiliated catastrophes, and it's basically a nothingburger for everyone except the plant's owners (who are out an expensive power plant) and their PR team (because obvious).
I disagree about your first point: Chernobyl showed that man-made disasters are plenty sufficient IFF you take away safety culture in engineering, administration, and operation.
Conversely, I think we could survive a natural disaster of the same magnitude as the one which fit Fukushima, because we do have that culture of keeping ourselves honest and being open in communication.
Agree that it's notable that TMI is the absolute worst commercial nuclear disaster in US history and resulted in, within a rounding error, zero harm. Reading the sequence of events at Browns Ferry a couple decades prior, it seems like things are headed for disaster, but even in those cowboy days, we were able to handle things without causing harm.
Chernobyl proved that if you try to build atom bomb factories on the cheap, you're courting disaster. See also windscale. The features that made Chernobyl a bigger catastrophe than e.g. Three Mile Island, were entirely due to its intended use as a plutonium breeder reactor. Don't do that (or pay to do it right), and you take Chernobyl off the table.
My understanding was that Fukushima even had some deliberately bad design decisions (primarily with the backup generator placement) so that if America went to war with Japan America could knock it out.
I don't know anything about that. Their main problem was the door to the room which contained the switchgear for emergency power. The room was below water level and was supposed to be water-tight, but it seems nobody wanted to blow the whistle too hard that the door never passed water tightness tests.
The sea wall was designed to exceed the highest wave they expected to hit the area. Later studies determined a taller potential wave, but they never got around to upgrading the wall.
When the wave hit, nobody put out a distress call. The US could've had a portable generator on-site in less than a day, and I'm sure the Japanese have a domestic force for responding to events like this, but again, it seems nobody wanted to blow the whistle, so you end up with old men carrying plastic buckets down to the beach to get cooling water onto the spent fuel pile. Senseless waste of life.
While I agree with your comment, did anyone actually die as a result of radiation exposure? The wikipedia article claims one possible cancer fatality four years later. As far as I can tell the upheaval of evacuating thousands of old people from their homes for an extended period was probably more harmful on net.
That seems rather incredible. Do you have some source for this?
Looking a bit deeper it seems it might have been a canard I'd been told around the time and never questioned much deeper. It seems the generator placement was according to the General Electric manual for the reactor but the General Electric engineers told TEPCO to ignore that section of the manual and place the generators in a better location which TEPCO ignored.
One thing I'd like to notice regarding solutions is that while (by hypothesis) your party will stay united behind you, so you can keep passing laws even as opinion turns against you, the power to pass laws isn't the same as the power to make people obey. Obviously most people will obey most laws by default, but everyone has limits.
I'd expect some of the more obviously extended and malicious plans to provoke *a lot* of disobedience. Not just from the citizenry, but from the actual people enforcing the law. Part of what makes the challenge interesting (at least to me) is the question "how do you get people to be complicit in their own destruction?" Which is to say, plans in which the average citizen (or law enforcement official) won't see the Bad Stuff coming seem much more likely to succeed than plans which require multiple slow, obviously-harmful steps to produce their desired intent.
Killing sparrows has been successful in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
One of Mao’s goofiest ideas.
Pass a law to tax all income over $47,000 at 100%, combined with a $47,000 basic income. Meanwhile drop the capital gains and corporate taxes to 0% (while reclassifying all dividends to "ordinary", so they get taxed at the 100% rate), and also eliminate all regulation on corporate spending - if corporations want to buy a house and servants and regular meals for their CEO, or even all their employees, nobody is going to stop them. Also, we're abolishing labor unions.
Since corporations can't realistically pay their employees in cash, only stocks and benefits, I expect a merchant-feudal system to quickly arise among the employed, while the unemployed, who will quickly outnumber them, live meager forcefully-unproductive lives, which slowly spiral downward as inflation takes hold and their fixed incomes fail to keep up.
We also build vast densely-packed "planned communities" for all of those people to live in, with all the amenities - food, television, internet - for the low low price of $47,000 a year. They don't have to last very long, just through my term, so we can cut a few corners on construction. The goal is just to concentrate as many people as possible in as small an area as possible. Ideally we place some of these "planned communities" around five miles away from all the various corporate enclaves popping up.
Wait until the last six months of my term, and then end the basic income.
Deploy the national guard to put down the riots. Then send them into just one or two of the corporate enclaves and take into custody all the men and most of the women (leave some of the women and children); we'll only hold them for a little while, but in the meantime will make sure that the rioters know the enclaves have been emptied and are basically undefended except for some of those rich women and their wealthy spoiled children.
Delightfully psychotic.
Premise 1: Congress has near-plenary authority to tax "income from whatever source derived" as well as to impose tariffs, excises, and the like on commerce. Under established domestic and international law, this power can be applied to foreigners living and working in the US, Americans living inside or outside the US, businesses operating in the US, and commerce within the US or crossing American border. The only real constitutional limit is that "direct taxes" (head taxes, property taxes, etc) other than income taxes need to be apportioned between states according to census population. There are some other limits under international law from free trade agreements and tax treaties designed to protect expatriates and multinational businesses from double taxation.
Premise 2: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
The course of action implied by this would be to raise taxes to confiscatory levels and impose them as broadly as existing treaties allow, with the intent of utterly ruining any legitimate commercial activity involving the US.
By raising ta
I think you got cut off at the knees there
Rand Paul had him killed
Her.
Apologies
Thank you.
The sentence fragment at the end was an early false start for the previous paragraph. I seem to have failed to delete it properly.
Some things I would do:
1: Pardon literally every criminal. All of them. If they get arrested again, pardon them again.
2. Triple our nuclear weapons stockpiles and offer to sell nukes at low prices to volatile countries like Iran or Syria.
3. Withdraw from the Biological Weapons Convention (we can actually do that!) and engineer a super-virus, which we can't legally use without being provoked but still raises x-risk.
4. Cut PEPFAR completely and threaten to tariff into oblivion any country that tries to step in and fill the gap.
5. T̵h̵e̵r̵e̵'̵s̵ ̵n̵o̵ ̵i̵n̵t̵e̵r̵n̵a̵t̵i̵o̵n̵a̵l̵ ̵l̵a̵w̵s̵ ̵o̵n̵ ̵a̵n̵i̵m̵a̵l̵ ̵c̵r̵u̵e̵l̵t̵y̵,̵ ̵s̵o̵ ̵b̵y̵ ̵c̵h̵a̵n̵g̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵U̵S̵ ̵f̵e̵d̵e̵r̵a̵l̵ ̵l̵a̵w̵ ̵w̵e̵ ̵c̵a̵n̵ ̵m̵a̵x̵i̵m̵i̵z̵e̵ ̵t̵h̵a̵t̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ ̵j̵u̵s̵t̵ ̵s̵p̵e̵n̵d̵ ̵t̵r̵i̵l̵l̵i̵o̵n̵s̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵d̵o̵l̵l̵a̵r̵s̵ ̵o̵n̵ ̵b̵u̵i̵l̵d̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵t̵o̵r̵t̵u̵r̵e̵ ̵c̵h̵a̵m̵b̵e̵r̵s̵ ̵f̵o̵r̵ ̵s̵m̵a̵l̵l̵ ̵a̵n̵i̵m̵a̵l̵s̵.̵ ̵[EDIT: just occurred to me that it kinda defeats the point of saying you have to follow US law if you can change it, so scratch the torture chamber idea. I guess we'll just have to stick with subsidizing factory farms instead, which to be fair aren't far off from torture chambers anyway]
We have to have a vial of active smallpox hidden away, don’t we?
Both the US and Russia have active stocks! There's a debate over whether they should keep the stocks or destroy it in case a terrorist organization gets the vials or something, but it's kind of a moot point since apparently we can just recreate smallpox anyway on a $100,000 budget, which is just terrifying. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-canadian-researchers-reconstituted-extinct-poxvirus-100000-using-mail-order-dna
Nor does it really matter that much, because we now have the technology to recreate it from scratch based on the known sequence.
Order nuclear strikes on the capitals and largest cities of every nuclear power.
Pretty sure that's not legal under international law. It is probably the quickest way to destroy the world though, and under US law legally can't be disobeyed by the people carrying out the strikes (realistically ofc they would refuse and the 25th amendment would be invoked.)
> ...and under US law legally can't be disobeyed by the people carrying out the strikes (realistically ofc they would refuse and the 25th amendment would be invoked.)
You have US law backwards. You're correct that they would refuse but the refusal wouldn't be illegal, not refusing would be. The President deciding to order a nuclear strike against countries that the US isn't at war with (or covered by some other use of force authorization) and are not an imminent danger requiring immediate response is an illegal order and members of the military are specifically required and trained not to obey illegal orders.
Nuclear command and control is an interesting case both because of their destructive potential and the need to be able to rapidly respond in a decapitation strike scenario (the book literally named "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser is a good overview) but even crews at the point of sale, so to speak, are going to have clarifying questions if suddenly ordered to glass London, Paris, etc. But the order won't ever make it to them as the President can't ring them up directly and everyone involved higher up would, as you note, refuse.
Under international law, is the US allowed to _donate_ the nuclear weapons - say to assorted terrorist groups? Preference given to groups that itch to blow up particularly heavily populated cities?
Resolution 1540 prohibits all states from supporting any non-state actors, including terrorist organizations, to acquire weapons of mass destruction, so that would be straightforwardly illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1540 .
It's more difficult to say whether we can give nukes to states. Currently under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, we cannot; no nuclear state is permitted to give nukes or help other states acquire nukes at all, ever. We could withdraw from that treaty; I'm not sure whether it's still technically legal after withdrawing to give nukes to a volatile state like Iran or Syria. I asked Grok (tried Claude at first but it's too scared to say anything about such a negative sounding scenario) and it had this to say:
"If the US withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), it would no longer be legally bound by its specific obligations, including Article I’s prohibition on transferring nuclear weapons to "any recipient whatsoever." The NPT allows withdrawal under Article X, requiring a state to give three months’ notice and cite "extraordinary events" jeopardizing its supreme interests. So, yes, technically, post-withdrawal, the US could give nuclear weapons to other states without violating the NPT—since it wouldn’t apply anymore.
However, international law isn’t just the NPT. Other frameworks and principles would still complicate this. The UN Charter, which the US can’t realistically exit without upending its global position, includes Article 2(4)’s ban on the threat or use of force against states’ territorial integrity or political independence. Sharing nuclear weapons with a state could be seen as enabling aggression, depending on the recipient and context—say, arming a volatile ally against a rival. The US could counterclaim self-defense under Article 51 if it argued the transfer preempted an imminent threat, but that’s a high bar and easily contested.
Customary international law, binding even without treaties, also frowns on proliferation. The NPT’s norms—non-transfer, non-acquisition—reflect a widespread state practice and opinio juris (sense of legal obligation) that’s arguably crystallized into custom. Transferring nukes could breach this, though enforcement is murky: no automatic penalties, just potential ICJ cases or countermeasures by other states, both of which require political momentum.
UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (2004), binding under Chapter VII, further mandates preventing weapons of mass destruction from reaching non-state actors, but it’s less explicit about state-to-state transfers. If the recipient state then passed them to terrorists, the US could be indirectly liable for not ensuring safeguards—though proving intent or negligence would be a legal mess.
Post-withdrawal, practical limits would dominate. Giving nukes to, say, a stable ally like Japan might dodge legal blowback but spark a proliferation cascade—think South Korea, then China arming others. Arming an unstable state like North Korea (hypothetically) would invite sanctions, condemnation, or worse. The 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, still binding on the US unless it withdrew there too, requires preventing misuse of nuclear material, which could be stretched to cover reckless transfers."
I am way too tired to figure out what that means or whether it is technically legal after withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty to give other states nukes, but maybe that'll be of some help to you.
Many Thanks for your detailed and informative reply!
So just relocate some nukes to, uh, strategic locations, and then reduce costs by getting rid of the guards.
I missed that, sorry. It's late. I should sleep.
I hate to say it but I'd probably do a lot of what he's doing.
Yeah honestly the tariffs and cutting foreign aid are literally some of the worst things a president can do without being immediately impeached.
That and basically starting fights with all our historical allies. There was a lot of goodwill due to cultural similarity and shared history with Canada and Europe that is going to be very hard to rebuild.
Does anyone have any useful feedback on IFS or Internal Family Systems therapy? My therapist suggested it to me and my take was "let's try it, sounds dumb, things that sound dumb sometimes work."
I've done it with my therapist. It can be powerful if done well, and has failure modes if done poorly. If you trust your therapist, I'd recommend giving it a shot.
I don't know what constitutes useful feedback. It's not clear what you're looking for.
Broadly, IFS is one of several approaches to dealing with your reactive self, your shadow self, whatever you want to call it. I see it as an organizational device -- it can help you categorize and understand your experiences, leveraging things that seem to be innate. For example, IFS depends on viewing discrete events as a narrative, which is something you do anyway (likely without noticing). You (we, everyone) also have a tendency to take the few things you know about a person and construct a full personality; you turn that tendency inward, and you can learn to know yourself as distinct persons or "parts" -- and then "you" (the "Self" that's in the center of it all) can engage with (soothe, persuade, cajole, recruit) those parts. One of my internal metaphors is that you are lining up the huskies to pull the sleigh in one direction.
I haven't done formal IFS. But in talking with those that have, I can see that some of my internal (shadow) work accomplishes the same goals: creating loving, compassionate spaces for aspects of experience that we have a tendency to reject. (Kind of like, you don't yell at a crying baby, you hold it.)
The pitfall I've seen is reification of narrative and parts. As noted above, we bind discrete experiences into narratives (including parts/personalities). But the bound things aren't real; they are mental devices that help to navigate the world. There might come a point where the mental device no longer fits with experience, and yet you might continue to add to what becomes a baroque narrative, keeping you stuck in a half-healed state. Maybe an analogy is leaving a cast on too long. Yes, the bone is healed, but you're still disabled by the cast and by the weakened soft tissue. Just as there comes a time to remove the cast and get some physical therapy, there comes a time to release a narrative, freeing you to be open to experiences and the possibility of a new narrative.
I mostly know about IFS from Scott's review of "The Others Within Us". My main takeaway from is was that IFS occasionally leads its practicioners to conclude that their patient are literally possessed by demons, which sounds like a failure mode to me.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
How did I forget that article? Thanks!
If you can successfully "exorcise" those "demons", you could theoretically induce permanent psychological changes. I mean, this is more just brainwashing than therapy, but if it works, it works.
Hm yeah. I was going to say 'at worst, it sounds like you get to roleplay various internal motivations and dump out some internal monologue, which could be useful' ... but it does seem like there might be more radical possible downsides
Does it work?
I am the wrong person to ask.
Hello fellow peasants! Since the paying members have let us into their clubhouse for the day, what should we do?
@Erusian interested in a round of SSC diplomacy? Link above.
Speaking as nobility, know that I am perfectly willing to betray the ancien régime in exchange for a position of power in the new world order.
I don't know how the misunderstanding arose, but you're only here to feed us grapes while we recline.
Implying we wont just steal the grapes for ourselves while we are here
Guards! Seize him!
That's peasant thinking, real vitalists steal the chair.
We had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, I’ll say to you all what I say to the servants on servants day.
1) don’t wreck the place.
2) don’t drink the good stuff.
3) don’t drink too much of the bad stuff.
Otherwise have fun. There are fish fingers in the mini fridge and the air fryer is powered up.
I believe it's traditional to do some combination of overindulging at the bar and buffet, then embarrass oneself with obvious social faux pas and unintentional class-revealing slips, to generally make the paying members feel like they're getting good value from keeping the riff raff out.
That's how our holiday parties usually play out where I work.
So I guess we should be making fun of polyamory?
> So I guess we should be making fun of polyamory?
Yeah, also we should skewer AI risk and be vocally pro-school.
"My computer is so dumb it routinely crashes, loses files, forgets years-long wifi passwords, pops up dumb dialogue menus for no reason, and forces me to update when I don't want to - and you guys are *worried* that they're going to get smarter?? Lol, nerds."
"Schools are great, what do you mean it's all wasted time and homework? What we really need to do is cut funding for gifted and talented programs so we can extend the school day so I can pick them up later. Also we could spend more on sports that way."
Nice attitude. But how traditional is the ACX readership?
a) Can you imagine having a conversation with somebody in your head (not hallucinating one, but rather imagining one, or having a conversation with an imagined version of a real person)?
b) How close is it to what a real conversation with that person would be like?
c) Can you do the same with a fictional character? With somebody who you don't know particularly well?
This is typically how I think. The conversation I am having in my head is usually with myself, but often enough it's some other person, real or fictional, that I make up in my head. Right now, I am thinking these words I type inside my head, as if I was speaking aloud (which I am not).
I'm not sure what you mean by "how close". If you mean does if feel like I'm having a conversation with someone, yes it does. Sometimes I'm even surprised by the responses.
Yes, it doesn't matter if the person is real or not. In fact, I sometimes have internal conversations with fictional characters I have made up for the work I am writing on at the time. Those lead to some interesting insights...
Yes, very easily and with a decent amount of accuracy.
> Can you do the same with a fictional character?
If the conversation is taking place in your head, then by definition, it is a fictional character, even if it looks like your mother.
I do this all the time. There is a whole cast of characters I have conversations with. I think it’s an essential skill if you are a fiction writer or a playwright.
a) Not very well.
b) It's blurry, can't fill in details, like what specifically would be said. I can see the person and their body language though.
c) Can do it with fictional characters.
I regularly do that. How close is it to a real conversation with the real person? Not at all, since the imaginary conversations allow me to monologue, engage in l'esprit d'escalier, and have all my points be winning ones (of course) which convince the other party to come around to my point of view.
That's the whole point of imaginary conversations: real ones don't follow the neat script you have laid out in your head.
You are lucky. In my conversations with my fictional characters they all berate me. It’s like being on trial all day.
Wait, you always win the arguments you have in your head? I talk to myself so much I don't even notice a lot of the time unless somebody comments on it, but I do find myself changing my mind based on these conversations.
Mostly, but that's because I only engage in conversations with the imaginary interlocutor when I'm upset/energised about something and feel like "no, *I* am in the right here". It's a lot easier (and more polite) to have the last word when talking to myself than doing it with a real person.
Doesn’t everyone do that?
Much easier to have snappier comebacks in the imagined conversation.
The closest thing I have to internal conversations is unfocused monologues. Like for example, if I'm ranting about a subject in my head, I'll sometimes imagine likely responses and then argue against them, but it could only loosely be considered a conversation, even apart from the inherently unfocused nature of thought.
I thought so, but apparently some people can't see things in their minds, so I wasn't sure if this was something like that.
I guess I should have also asked, given that people keep volunteering it:
d) Why do you do this?
e) How much time do you spend in imagined conversations?
My own answers:
a) Yes
b) Depends on how deep the conversation goes; if I'm imagining talking with somebody at work, it's pretty true to how it actually goes since it's mostly small talk, less so for, say, my family. It also depends on the person; some people are pretty predictable (but not 100%), others I have a hard time figuring out what they would say besides some mannerisms
c) It feels weird to talk to actual fictional characters or people who I don't know well, but I can. I can definitely have a conversation with a hypothetical person though, for some reason.
d) To prep for important conversations, to think about hypothetical scenarios, because I can get better thoughts in some scenarios if I imagine talking with somebody about it. It's usually not because I want to change the past.
e) Usually it's when I'm running/biking or when getting ready to go to sleep- so a decent amount of time but I also think without having conversations a lot.
I wonder what the range of reports as to how close this is to a real conversation means. Do people who write or read more fiction perceive it as closer? Does it have some correlation with neurodivergence?
> Why do you do this?
Because I can’t seem to help myself. I have a very disorganized mind but I have learned to find my way around the clutter.
d) Sometimes I'll spontaneously fantasize about an interaction going well, but then, I can only visualize what I say.
e) Maybe 10% of my time?
a) yes, pretty easily
b) no because it's always me saying things I wish I had said/could say
c) no to the first question, yes to the second question if despite my not knowing them well we ever had a conversation that I wish had gone differently
a) with difficulty
b) probably quite far removed from it
c) definitely not on both counts
(a) Yes, fairly vividly; I can mentally "hear" their tone and each word.
(b) I can make it like a real conversation if I tried, but typically most of my imaginary conversations involving people I know are arguments that my imaginary interlocutor eventually concedes, which basically never happens in real life because people never admit when they're wrong!
(c) Yes, but I never do so because I'm not particularly into fiction. I do often imagine conversations with famous figures that I've never met IRL, e.g advising the President to do this or that.
I imagine conversations a lot. I don’t know if I imagine them audiovisually or just textually. I don’t think they represent what the person would say all that well - they better represent what seems poetically appropriate to me for the person to say. (In my imagination they usually argue with me a lot more and I come up with reasons for what I’m saying, but in person they just say “sure go ahead” after I say the first line.)
Oh for the gift of such a silver tongue, or, I guess, friends too busy to argue with nearly every single sentence I say or write. Why poetically appropriate, rather than maximally likely? My interlocutors have the uncanny ability to focus on all the weakest parts of my arguments, no poetry involved unfortunately.
1) I’m generally having conversations in my head with somebody rather than me. Otherwise I’d just be talking to myself
2) the antagonist is smarter or not as smart as real life depending on how smart they actually are and how smart I am.
3) sure.
I don’t see how you can have an imaginary conversation in your mind with someone else. They may wear a good disguise, but they’re not someone else.
Well my point 2 acknowledges that.
But that’s like saying that everybody in my dreams is me. They are, and they aren’t. They are because they are from my imagination, they aren’t because they don’t appear in my dream as me. That would be a very specific and weird nightmare - a town full of me.
In your head it is a town full of you, no matter what they look like. How could it be otherwise?
I don’t think anybody is denying that. But in my head and the head of people who do this - and judging by literature that’s a lot - we don’t have conversations with ourselves representing ourselves in our head. Instead another person - voiced by us for sure is in there. It’s odd that you see only yourself in dreams
> It’s odd that you see only yourself in dreams.
I am coming back to this, because I am not sure what you mean. Did I give the impression that my dreams are only populated by “clones” of myself (meaning they all look like me?)