Country A and country B are engaged in trade. Country A wants more of Country B's stuff.
Country A has this imaginary thing called "dollars" that they made out of thought-stuff. Country A says "hey, country B, we will take your real avocados and real lumber, and give you this imaginary stuff called dollars." Country B for some reason agrees.
Now country A has more real stuff and just had to give up imaginary stuff to get it. Country B can only use that imaginary stuff if they later buy some stuff from country A at some point in the future (or trade it to people who will use it that way).
This makes trade deficits look not only not bad, but incredibly awesome. Getting the other country to accept your Chuck E Cheese tokens in exchange for actual goods seems like all upside, so what's the catch? I get telling the voters that dollars are fictitious can be a hard sell.
I enjoyed it as a historical journey of how and why "money" (medium of exchange) works, from sea shells up to the present day.
As she is a big Bitcoin proponent, its sort of obvious where the book is heading to, but on the way it goes through what actually happens at the US Bank / US Fed level.
Messing around with money (inflating its value) is quite a recurring theme in history.
The catch is, they *will* be coming back with those dollars to buy real stuff, that you'll have to make at all the usual cost in toil and treasure but won't be able to enjoy because you have to give it to someone else who is only giving you imaginary dollars in return.
The fact that they aren't coming over *today* with all those dollars, just means they're investing them. In T-bills if nothing better, but probably something better, so when they *do* come back to you with all those dollars, they'll be coming with a lot more of them than you may have expected.
And if you say "ha ha, chumps, we've decided to devalue our dollars and/or T-bills so you're stuck with useless paper", you'll find that even your purely domestic ability to coordinate a productive economy is based on the certainty that dollars and T-bills will always be valuable, and the whole thing will collapse if you try that.
Power is more complex then mere accounting of flow of resources. If you house and feed someone but dont allow them to do it for themselves, thats a prisoner.
America as super power needs to pick a good balance of how much free labor from immigrants, money laundering in wars, cultural exporting with schools that people disappear after finishing. In the extreme cases the parasites just kill the host. If you import 10000 poeple to an island that housed 100, the orginal culture is gone; if you make mercencies only care about money and the war machine misses a payment they may march on your capital and make a emperor who then finds ways to fund them.
People should maintain a skill and then institutions should give status for having a skill. *looks around*, I dont see this happening, the balance is off.
I've asked the same question. One answer I got was that some trade isn't included in the trade-deficit calculation, so actually the US trade deficit does not just consist of trading worthless USD for valuable goods and services, but also of trading valuable US assets for valuable goods and services. It still seems non-alarming to me: if people in the US are good at producing companies and people in China are good at producing iPhones, trading US companies for Chinese iPhones seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
The other argument I've seen, that it's non-sustainable, doesn't make much sense to me. That seems like declining a high-paying job because you're afraid you'll have to take a pay cut and go back to your normal salary later – I say enjoy it while you can!
> It still seems non-alarming to me: if people in the US are good at producing companies and people in China are good at producing iPhones, trading US companies for Chinese iPhones seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
This seems like saying that no matter how you spend your money, the result is okay (as long as you keep buying something the other guy is better at producing). But on the individual level, I think we could agree that putting your money in index funds is generally better than spending it on expensive toys. Or rather than the person who keeps putting lots of money in the index funds can a few decades later also buy more expensive toys than the person who only spends their money on toys.
If this is true for individuals, I imagine this could similarly be true for countries, if for some reason people from one country are more likely to buy toys from the other country, but people from the other country are more likely to buy company shares.
Why would two countries behave so differently? I guess one answer is cultural differences, and maybe another answer is democracy vs dictatorship, where the latter has more power to nudge their citizens how to spend the money (or can simply take half of the foreign money away from them).
I am not an expert on economics, but as I see it, it is a complicated game, where on one hand cooperation can help us bake a greater pie together, on the other hand competition decides which part of that pie will belong to whom. So you kinda want other people to do the right thing, but also kinda not to do it. If we all spend our money prudently, we can get rich; but if only a small group of us spends their money prudently, and everyone else will spend it like crazy, the small group can get *super* rich.
So (as an American) you actually *don't* want *all* Americans to save a lot. It is much better for you (as an individual), if the others spend a lot, make the wheels of economy run faster, and your savings/investments get a greater interest. The money flows from them to you, which is good.
But when another country saves more, the money flows from your country to their country, which is bad, because ultimately you still live surrounded by other Americans, and if they become too poor, then you will be surrounded by crime and all kinds of dysfunction. Sure, having lots of money can isolate you from everyday problems of the muggles, but... it would still be nicer to be able to walk around freely, to be surrounded by more happiness, art, etc.
So there is this tension where you selfishly want other people in your country to do worse than you, but better than people in other countries. You want to defend them from the foreigners, but not from people like you. Probably some seemingly illogical behaviors can be explained by these conflicting interests. Such as: you encourage your neighbors to buy lots of useless stuff (some of it made in companies whose shares you own), but you warn them against buying lots of useless *Chinese* stuff.
Sure, if the supply of capital is high, the return on capital will then naturally be lower. But labour demand will generally be higher, and most people get most of their income from selling their labour rather than from capital investments, so I think people should mostly be happy to see inflow of foreign capital.
The obvious downside is that if you keep this up for too long, you'll get fewer and fewer avocados for the same amount of dollars, so you'll have to create more and more of them. No big deal, they're just numbers in a computer anyway. But at some point, someone's gonna say "You know what, I'm not sure I'll be able to trade those dollars for real stuff later on. For the next crate of avocados, I want euros, not dollars." And now you're sad, because you really want those avocados, but all you have are these useless dollars nobody cares about anymore.
Is this an inflation argument or a currency exchange rate argument?
Not having a trade imbalance so we can import things doesn't seem logical.
Edit: I'm remembering my old econ classes more. So as more people accumulate dollars, the natural thing is that my exports get gradually cheaper and my imports get gradually more expensive, so any issue with the trade deficit corrects. In the meantime, as long as someone is willing to take my Chuck E Cheese tokens I'd be a fool to not spend them.
> Is this an inflation argument or a currency exchange rate argument?
Those are essentially the same thing in the context of this thought experiment. "Inflation" means an increase in prices, and "price" is the number of units of currency you have to give away to receive one unit of goods and services. A currency exchange rate is the number of units of currency you have to give away to receive one unit of another currency.
> In the meantime, as long as someone is willing to take my Chuck E Cheese tokens I'd be a fool to not spend them.
Sure, you can go "YOLO! Fuck the next generation!" and screw it up for your kids – or for you-in-five-years, if you go all out for it – but you asked for a "catch". And the catch is that a long and sustained trade deficit will create problems in the future, and the methods to mitigate those problems will cause problems on their own.
Somewhat reassuring, yes, but I wouldn't rule out that he's lying.
> "But we don't think it's constructive for me to stand here today to issue threats about what we're going to do if Russia says no. Let's hope they say yes."
My reading of this is that they have very little direct leverage over Putin, and they know it. Their best bet would be to threaten Russia with strongly increased military aid for Ukraine, but that would run counter to Trump's goal of ending the war. It's getting increasingly clear that Trump (but not necessarily Rubio) really believes that Putin "wants peace" and that Ukraine is to blame for the continuation of the conflict.
I went under anesthesia (fentanyl and Propofol) and worked through some major trauma and it was the first time I've been happy in like 10 years. I've tried every other way of dealing with mind&body pain and this is the only one that actually gave me what might be described as a "breakthrough." How can I replicate the benefits of this without doing a bunch of fentanyl?
This is gonna sound dumb and you’re gonna get turned off by the name but just hear me out. I do a type of breathwork that is very intense. I recently had very severe shoulder pain where I could not find any comfortable position to alleviate the pain. I was having stress from the pain and that was making the pain worse (threat bucket concept). I did a very intense breathwork and it the sensation of the breathwork was so powerful that I did not feel the pain any longer. I use breathwork many times to break sympathetic states of the autonomic nervous system but this is the first time I used it to deal with severe physical pain and it really helped. Afterwards I still had the pain but its presence was much less on my mind. The breathwork takes 10-15 minutes and involves very active breathing then exhaling and holding your breath. There are fun videos on YouTube with electronic music and you don’t have to learn anything or buy anything to do it. There’s zero barriers to try and it has been game changing for me breaking out of a cfs type illness.
I don’t know I just use a YouTube channel called breathwork beats. I know names for the different breath styles but not what this kind of breathwork is called. I do think it could use a name.
What about ketamine? It’s legal and safe, and at large enough doses is in fact an anesthetic. Used to be used to knock people out for surgery.
The other drug that has a pretty good track record for recounting and working through trauma is MDMA. Rather than making you semi-conscious, it makes you feel safe, trusting and happy, so it comes at the task from a different direction that an anesthetic does.
This open thread has some comments on the Mahmoud Khalil arrest, but it's a lot of mindkilled politics bait and pretty thin on actual information.
UPDATE: The Trump admin is going with INA § 237(a)(4), compromising a compelling foreign policy interest, rather than the speculative 8 U.S.C. § 1182 (a) (3), endorsing or espousing a terrorist organization.
The Trump admin is citing "Inadmissible Aliens" 8 U.S.C. § 1182 (a) (3), subsection (B) (VII), which bars any alien who... "endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization." In context, the implication is Khalil supported Hamas, and this support of a terror organization makes him ineligible for US residency. It's also quite clear in related law that inadmissible aliens can be deported. There's also INA § 237(a)(4), subsection (C) (III), "An alien, not described in clause (ii), shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest."
As a permanent resident, Khalil has more due process protections than a mere visa holder. I'm not entirely clear on the process; it's less than the protections given for a criminal proceeding. I think this means he is entitled to an administrative court hearing on whether or not his green card will be revoked, but I'm not positive.
So there are two possible legal theories here. One is Khalil's conduct amounts to supporting a terrorist organization (Hamas). The most relevant legally defined terrorist activity: "(II) The seizing or detaining, and threatening to kill, injure, or continue to detain, another individual in order to compel a third person (including a governmental organization) to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the individual seized or detained." So "endorsing or espousing" the taking of hostages and/or the execution of Israeli citizens by Hamas pretty clearly meets the bar for this statute. The other possible theory is SecState Marco Rubio personally signed off that the admission of Khalil "would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." Advocating for the destruction of Israel seems pretty compromising to the foreign policy interests of the US, not much of a legal argument here.
*Relevant Case Law* (hat tip to Eugene Volokh): Bridges v Wixon - The government may not impose criminal or civil penalties on aliens based on speech that would be protected if said by a citizen. Kleindienst v Mandel - There is no right of entry to the US, therefore entry may be denied to aliens even if the denial is based on speech. As stated previously denied entry = may legally be deported. However, the control over deportation is statutory and may not stand up to Constitutional scrutiny. Harisiades v. Shaughnessy establishes that Congress has nearly unlimited power to deport aliens even based on speech, but at the time active membership in the Communist Party was illegal even for US citizens, so it's not clear this precedent would hold up. Lower courts are mixed on the idea. Reno v AADC - Deportations generally cannot be challenged on the grounds that the defendant was selectively prosecuted, even though such prosecution would be generally illegal outside the immigration context.
Tl:dr - there is established legal statute to deport non-citizens for their speech. While generally speech is protected from legal action by the government, it's not clear this protection extends to protection from deportation. Based on past cases, SCOTUS could go either way on the constitutionality of this issue.
Personally, I find Khalil about as appealing as something smelly stuck to my shoe. But the unsympathetic must be especially protected from government overreach as they make the easiest targets. I say this as someone who honestly thinks the country would be better off without Khalil or people like him in it. The First Amendment is something that the government should never violate because freedom of speech is an unalloyed boon. It's not a specific privilege restricted to certain members of the populace, like voting or running for office. And it's better that people, even aliens, say what they think out loud in public rather than hide it out of fear for retaliation. Better to know who you're really dealing with.
For people who want to read threads without certain people, you can just Block them. And they disappear entirely from your universe. They are un-personed, you will never even be aware of their existence. All their threads and replies to them disappear. Your life is different.
For folks following along, it seems like from the news from the trial and commentary today, it was
> SecState Marco Rubio personally signed off that the admission of Khalil "would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest."
If they deport him (or even if they dont!) I expect to see Rubio getting and signing these orders on an industrial scale.
I'll be honest, I'm a bit surprised they went after Khalil. There are a lot of other much more unsavory activist types. Is he the only one they could find on some kind of visa / not a citizen? Or are they purposely testing that they can get away for deporting on speech alone? Both are, imo, terrible policy AND terrible precedent. The canary is dying folks.
>So "endorsing or espousing" the taking of hostages and/or the execution of Israeli citizens by Hamas pretty clearly meets the bar for this statute.
I don't think it's remotely clear. Couldn't we apply this bar to any government on earth?
Hamas isn't a "terrorist organization" as the term is ordinarily understood; it's a political party and the government of a territory which, before Israel's slaughter campaign began, had over 2 million people living therein.
Any actions it takes against Israel are more accurately described as "acts of war" and any executions of PoWs are more accurately considered "war crimes". Could the US also redefine, say, Russia as a "terrorist organization"?
>The other possible theory is SecState Marco Rubio personally signed off that the admission of Khalil "would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." Advocating for the destruction of Israel seems pretty compromising to the foreign policy interests of the US, not much of a legal argument here.
Israel is not the United States, and a credible argument could be made (and has been made by many American citizens over the years, including a former US president) that American support for Israel is deeply damaging to America's interests elsewhere in the world.
Of course, the SecState has the right to set US foreign policy. He does not have the right to criminalize dissent against said policy using a statute designed to let the US deny admission to exiled politicians or prominent dissidents for diplomatic reasons. Israel has not publicly demanded that Khalil be exiled, AFAIK (and even if it has, Israel is still not a peer competitor, and he's not an Israeli national) so that's a very strained reading.
Setting aside the dubious argument that Hamas aren't actually terrorists, it only matters that the USG has declared them a terrorist organization - which it has since 1997. And if you think the law is stupid and lets the USG deport basically anyone it doesn't like - yes, that is how the law is written.
It seems especially dumb since it'd be pretty easy to argue that MAGAs are "compromising a compelling United States foreign policy interest." four years from now.
I find it pretty funny and deeply ironic that pro-Israel shills who want to simultaneously cheer for Khalil's arrest while not sacrificing any of their Free Speech street cred go for the legalistic fluff angle.
It does call into question why anyone was so upset that Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram/YouTube were censoring Conservative viewpoints. After all, *legally speaking*, those companies have far far wider latitude with Speech on their platforms than the US government have with Speech on its territory, and their censoring of any viewpoints at all is 10-100x as legal and as unambiguously their constitutional right as anything that the 40-IQ insects in Trump's admin are doing or planning right now.
So if the question of Khalil's arrest, whether it's a violation of his Free Speech or not, is solely and exclusively the question of whether it's legal or not, then that means there were never any Free Speech violations in Big Tech and all that whining about Conservative viewpoints being censored were just demands for special treatment, after all. If, on the other hand, "Free Speech" means anything at all outside of what US law graduates decide in their arbitrary, worthless, and pretentious walls of text - and what's what I actually do believe in my heart - then that must mean that Khalil's arrest being a violation of his Free Speech isn't exclusively a question of what those magic walls of text say, and that we're allowed to argue its answer outside of legalistic fluffery.
---------------
On a more meta level, it's also the height of irony and cognitive dissonance the wide contrast between the "Waaah pro-Israel viewpoints are oppressed" sob story that pro-Israel activists love to wallow in on every opportunity, comparing themselves to black people and the Pro-Palestinian protestors to the KKK for instance, and the actual state of the world, where no US permanent resident of Khalil's legal status was ever deported or would have ever been deported for criticizing a foreign government if that foreign government wasn't called a certain biblical name.
And what's curious is that they don't see the clash between complaining about people noticing/getting upset about Israel's/its lobby's influence in the US and its government, and also **threatening** to use said influence to cow opposing voices. In other words, it's not a contradiction in the pro-Israel mind to simultaneously complain about the "antisemitic trope" that Israel has a cancerously outsized influence on most US institutions and especially its government, while ***also*** implying and celebrating that Israel will use its cancerously outsized influence to punish those who criticize, oppose, call for boycott against or otherwise being anti-Israel.
"This isn't happening, and you all deserve it" indeed.
Their core point--it was never about free speech as such--is quite right. I have no idea why they insist on making that point in a manner that gives people inclined to dismiss it so many excuses to do so.
This is kind of confusing, because there's free speech in the context of specific legal protections from the government, and also the context of a cultural norm that people should be able to express their views free of censorship. Let's call the former A and the latter B.
Social media censoring the right is a violation of B. A private company is perfectly within their legal rights to decide what kind of content is hosted on their platform. That doesn't mean using their platform to censor dissenting views is right or proper. The "just a private company" excuse is the same one being employed by the USG here. The "just an alien" excuse is deportation isn't covered by the 1st, so kick em out. It's still wrong because they're violating B, even if A is technically not violated. (Assuming this case isn't also violating A, which is an open question. And ignoring that the Biden admin used federal agencies to pressure media companies into censorship, which is a violation of both A and B.)
Now, the right should look at the past four years and come to the conclusion - that both free speech A and B are really important! Instead, the lesson taken seems to be "what if we made anti-semitism hate speech?" Which just goes to show they not only didn't learn the lesson, they learned the *opposite* of the lesson.
I'm sure that sounded great in your head, but I actually agree with you that the government doing this is wrong. Just because a legal path exists to punish non-citizens for their speech doesn't mean they should be punished. Maybe if you came here for actual discussion instead of a pretext to launch unhinged rants you would have read that part.
However much my comments offend you, they're discussion. Specifically, they're a fundamental premise-level disagreement with your framing of this as a purely legal issue.
If you had read the comment you're dismissing, you would have known your framing would imply that it's never a Free Speech violation for a Big Tech company to do whatever it wants to any and all viewpoints on their servers, which doesn't seem to be a popular opinion on ACX, because it's wrong. But that's exactly what a purely-legalistic treatment of the issue like the ones in your thread starter would have us believe.
Sure my comments might be rants too, there is no rule anywhere that says discussions can't also be rants. In particular, I reserve courtesy to those who are courteous with me and don't dehumanize 2-5 million people.
It seems sort of like you didn't read the initial comment /you/ responded to, either. That is, the thrust of the comment wasn't "well, let's look at this in purely legalistic terms, because that's the only real consideration here", ultimately—sort of the opposite, by the end—and I don't know /how/ you got the various other overblown accusations out of Rothwed's comments (e.g., dehumanizing 5 billion people or whatever, pro-Israel this and that, "...what makes [him] cheer", etc.).
Unless you know Rothwed from other interactions, in which case I apologize for the "overblown" descriptor; if not, though, it seems... pretty "mindkilled", yeah—t'me my own self, anyway.
The big problem, of course, is that the arguments in favor of deportation depend on a determination of aiding terrorist organizations. That determination hasn't happened yet. Much will hinge on the court date on Wednesday -- if the ICE / government refuses to produce Khalil, that should be a massive alarm bell for anyone following the case.
I used that Volokh article as a source actually, it's very informative. And again, the law as written doesn't require aiding a terrorist organization. It only requires endorsing the activities of a terrorist organization.
Perhaps at that hearing, assuming it happens, we will at long last see a shred of evidence that Khalil has actually endorsed the activities of a terrorist organization, as distinct from criticizing a nation ostensibly at war with one.
I don't think there's a difference! Ilya Somin had an article about this over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Hamas has the creation of an independent Palestinian state as an explicit goal; QED advocating for an independent Palestinian state is "espousing support for a terrorist organization." That's what post-9/11 legislation gets you.
8 U.S.C. § 1182 is part of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, so it only applies to aliens under US jurisdiction. But the law is vague enough I think this reading is arguably correct. In fact it's so broad it might not survive in court.
woof. Like... _I guess_??? But at that point they've tortured the definition of 'endorse' so much that the first amendment might well be toilet paper.
There are a lot of folks on the left AND the right who wanted the US out of the Middle East, and that was also an explicit goal of Al Qaeda. I think it would be wild to claim that all those people were 'endorsing' Al Qaeda
Q very much not ED. The actual language is "endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization." It doesn't remotely follow logically from "X supports policy A" that "X endorses or espouses organization Y that attempts to bring about A by means of terrorism." I know that neither you nor Somin are actually arguing that it does; but merely noting that the Trump administration will try to make that argument based on ambiguous legislative language is one thing and conceding it in advance is quite another.
The chilling effect from this being used as a cudgel against protest groups is bad. It would be worse if it was aimed at US citizens rather than green carders. Unfortunately this is inevitable danegeld to be paid because special interest lobbies are not happy with the growing pro Hamas sentiment (whenever you endorse the idea of liberal democracy, remember that this includes tiny, motivated ethnic interest lobbies doing shady shit behind the scenes).
If this gets regularly applied to US citizens, it would be really bad and I would actually reconsider my thoughts on the Trump admin. But since I want to see less immigration, my sympathy for even green cards is very limited.
I have a hunch someone, somewhere in the administration was asked "what pro-palestine people can we go after?" and they settled on this guy, precisely because he is not a US citizen and precisely because of the SCOTUS precedent for allowing deportation of non-citizens for basically anything the government doesn't like. It would be much harder to get anything to stick for protesters with full citizenship. Khyami James, for example, said far worse things than Khalil, but AFAIK James is a US Citizen so you'd have a much higher bar to clear to pin charges.
I also did some background reading on the subject and was surprised to see how much less protection a legal resident has, versus a full citizen. It also sounded like "material support" (as in "providing material support to a terrorist group") has an extremely lenient interpretation thanks to post-9/11 laws; it doesn't mean you need to be handing out kalashnikovs to be prosecuted. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project is relevant on that front.
It wasn't just advocacy though, it was a violent blockade directly aimed at forcing Columbia to take certain actions to hurt Israel. It could be argued that direct violent action (ie a blockade) crosses the line into material support.
So anyone who fought or boycotted or called to boycott Assad's Syria or Putin's Russia is a terrorist or a terrorist enabler right? Those states had plenty of terrorist organizations at war with them.
But Khalil never used any physical force, this much admits even the ultra-Zio crazies compiling dossiers on people.
Unless protests are in-and-of-themselves physical force? In that case anti-Iraq-war demonstrations were uses of physical force against the US government to aid a foreign adversary?
> Protests that block thoroughfares are not what people normally consider violent.
Why not? If you block my way then you force me into a situation where, to go about my legal business, I need to physically fight you. If that happens then it's you who has initiated the violence, not me.
Sieges have been considered part of war for thousands of years. Nobody ever wrote "The French started the war when made an unprovoked attack against the English army that was non-violently picketing their castle".
"Why not? If you block my way then you force me into a situation where, to go about my legal business, I need to physically fight you."
Wow, does this argument ever prove a lot. Let's try to be even mildly creative in coming up with different situations where "I need to fight you in order to go about my legal business" could apply:
1. Somebody stands ahead of me in line at the bank when I'm in a hurry.
2. Somebody picks up the last croissant (which I had intended to buy) out of the bakery case and takes it towards the register with a clear intention of purchasing it.
3. A bus--which I need to catch--rolls up to the stop packed nearly to capacity, and several people are closer to the door than I am.
4. I'm trying to have a business meeting with a softspoken client at the only free table in a crowded cafe, and the ambient noise makes the conversation impossible.
Are all of these example ridiculous? Of course! As is any other suggestion that somebody else making different legal use of a public space than you are--even use that interferes with yours--is initiating violence against you. What an absurd notion. If they were on private property and the property-owners wanted them remove, that's their legal right. If they were on public property and in violation of laws, the local government can get the police to disperse them. But in no case does the fact that *you* find their presence inconvenient mean that *they* are being violent towards you. Let's make sure our word *mean things*, shall we?
"Sieges have been considered part of war for thousands of years."
See, here's a great example showing that you DO know what violence looks like. Historical trivia: if you're in a fortress under siege, and you attempt to leave the fortress, what happens to you? Do the besiegers merely stand in your path? Or do they do other things, *besides* standing in your path? I'm *pretty sure* you know the answer to this one.
Now, if you're talking about protesters striking or throwing things at people who attempt to move past them, that is an *entirely different conversation.* But claiming that them standing in a place that you find inconvenient is the same sort of thing is pretty silly.
> Protests that block thoroughfares are not what people normally consider violent.
Theres growing opinion that running over climate protesters blocking roads is based; the eithical plain reading of right wing theory doesn't have this well integrated(you know locke and the bible being pre car and all) but its absolutely on the table
Bridges v Wixon states that aliens have freedom of speech in that criminal or civil penalties may not be imposed on them in response to their speech. *But it's not clear deportation is covered by this*. Which was the point of a good half of my post.
For Kleindienst, see my response above. I agree that Harisiades is of dubious applicability.
"(A few years ago, in the weirdness of Florida, the “young blood project” saw wealthy old people hooked up to blood extracted from teenagers, at a cost of $285,000 each.)"
So who the heck read "Good Lady Ducayne" and immediately decided that was a money-making scheme?
"'Oh, Lady Ducayne, need I put your wickedness and your physician's still greater wickedness in plain words? The poor girl who is now in your employment has been reduced from robust health to a condition of absolute danger by Dr Parravicini's experimental surgery; and I have no doubt those other two young women who broke down in your service were treated by him in the same manner. I could take upon myself to demonstrate--by most convincing evidence, to a jury of medical men--that Dr Parravicini has been bleeding Miss Rolleston, after putting her under chloroform, at intervals, ever since she has been in your service. The deterioration in the girl's health speaks for itself; the lancet marks upon the girl's arms are unmistakable; and her description of a series of sensations, which she calls a dream, points unmistakably to the administration of chloroform while she was sleeping. A practice so nefarious, so murderous, must, if exposed, result in a sentence only less severe than the punishment of murder.'
'I laugh,' said Parravicini, with an airy motion of his skinny fingers; 'I laugh at once at your theories and at your threats. I, Parravicini Leopold, have no fear that the law can question anything I have done.'
'Take the girl away, and let me hear no more of her,' cried Lady Ducayne, in the thin, old voice, which so poorly matched the energy and fire of the wicked old brain that guided its utterances. 'Let her go back to her mother--I want no more girls to die in my service. There are girls enough and to spare in the world, God knows.'
'If you ever engage another companion--or take another English girl into your service, Lady Ducayne, I will make all England ring with the story of your wickedness.'
'I want no more girls. I don't believe in his experiments. They have been full of danger for me as well as for the girl--an air bubble, and I should be gone. I'll have no more of his dangerous quackery. I'll find some new man--a better man than you, sir, a discoverer like Pasteur, or Virchow, a genius--to keep me alive. Take your girl away, young man. Marry her if you like.
I'll write her a cheque for a thousand pounds, and let her go and live on beef and beer, and get strong and plump again. I'll have no more such experiments. Do you hear, Parravicini?' she screamed, vindictively, the yellow, wrinkled face distorted with fury, the eyes glaring at him."
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 9-10.
1. The current COVID-19 wave continues to recede. Both the CDC's wastewater activity levels and Biobot's wastewater concentration chart show a downward trend in all regions of the US.This XEC wave has had the lowest rates of hospitalizations, ED visits, and deaths of any variant wave so far (at least for the US).
2. Test positivity rates for RSV and Influenza outpaced COVID this respiratory season. Influenza outpaced COVID hospitalizations by 3x. And flu deaths exceeded COVID deaths for the 1st time since the start of the pandemic (but the 2024-25 flu season looks to be more lethal than many of our past seasons—even pre-COVID).
3. Type A influenza cases are falling—but Type B infection rates are rising. The rates of Type B infections are usually an order of magnitude less than Type A, though. And the Type B generally picks up at the tail end of our flu seasons. I've never heard a good explanation for why this happens, though.
4. Per the CDC, there were three more confirmed human cases of A(H5) bird flu in February. The patient who caught it from dairy cows had mild conjunctivitis. The two patients who caught it from poultry were hospitalized. There still have been no known cases of human-to-human transmission.
5. Per the USDA's Feb livestock report, 88 percent fewer broiler chickens were culled due to HPAI in January than in December. A(H5) in birds is seasonal, so I'm not surprised if we see the numbers drop off, but the January numbers are so much lower than December that I wonder if they are incomplete. Especially because a record total of 18.8 million egg-laying birds were culled due to HPAI in January. I don't know how long it'll take for the replacement hens to pick up production, but I doubt if President Trump—Mr. "Shut Up About Egg Prices"—is going to see a drop in the price of eggs this month.
6. The measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico is continuing to spread—two deaths so far. RFK Jr backtracked a bit, asking parents to "consider" vaccinating their kids—but he also praised the medical efficacy of cod liver oil. He's a great mind of the 19th Century!
And I mentioned this late in an earlier open thread, but the claim these are the first measles deaths in 2 decades becomes more tenuous when we dig into the data. Per Vaxopedia, the CDC has been undercounting measles deaths due to the way they interpret death certificates. I'm not sure if I fully buy this explanation, but it looks like there have likely been 22 measles deaths since 2000. And if we include deaths from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE)—which is a syndrome that can develop several years after a measles infection, there've been an additional 42 measles-related deaths since 2000.
My understanding is that SSPE is a very rare complication of measles. If there are few measles deaths, there should be even fewer examples of that, unless somehow modern treatment reduces acute deaths to nothing but still leaves a residue of SSPE. And that seems unlikely.
Where, how, and under what circumstances, generally speaking, are people being tested for COVID, RSV, and/or flu?
I'm asking because I have something right now that may be the common cold, may be a mild flu, may be mild COVID, or could even be RSV, but my HMO doesn't (afaict) provide an easy way to be tested for most of these things without presenting at the hospital for treatment--which I'm not doing because my symptoms are mild and I don't want to sit around in a medical office spreading my germs.
So are the test positivity rates mentioned in #2 mostly from people who were tested when they sought treatment?
First off, I am not an MD. So I'm talking hypothetically, and I'm not giving medical advice. However...
Yes, these tests are done when peeps seek treatment. Generally, if you're *seriously* ill with a respiratory illness and you show up at urgent care or the ER, they *should* test you for the pathogen causing your illness because the downstream treatment depends on the diagnosis. Tamiflu or Relenza is generally indicated for influenza. Virazole may be indicated for RSV. And Paxlovid (or Remdesivir in some other countries) is indicated even for milder cases of COVID-19 (because a COVID-19 infection can escalate, and Paxlovid can only stop it early in its progress).
If you don't want to drag yourself to urgent care, the FDA has approved Labcorp's at-home all-in-one over-the-counter test for Flu, RSV, and COVID, though. I suspect it will set you back over a hundred bucks. If that's too pricey, suggest you at least test yourself for COVID using the standard over-the-counter test kits that run ~$35 at CVS, because if it is COVID, a dose of Pax in the early stages of the infection can protect you from worsening symptoms.
In Jan this year there was a "low confidence" note by the CIA saying it probably was a lab leak. Pretty thin gruel. Such a weird mixed message.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement on Jan. 25. “CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”
Anyway with a year perspective, has anything new come to light (including this CIA article) which now makes you think the answer is now Lab Leak (or more sure)
My takeaway from this exercise is whether it is sensible to have such a debate when you can be fairly sure that some people do know (eg intelligence agencies in this case). The emphasis should be on getting them to spill some of the beans.
In a remarkable coincidence, this is the week that the German intelligence agency says it is high probability a lab leak (you can find similar article in many papers - pick your fav)
They put it at 80-90% and they have known since 2020.
Any comments about what is going on here.
I will repeat the two questions:
a) Do people think it is more likely now that it was a lab leak
b) Is it pointless having debates about security matters, as the truth and pertinent facts are actively suppressed.
No, this week *a report from 2020* was released saying that they estimated a 80-90% chance *at the time*.
Fortunately, we have a lot more evidence now and don't have to rely on people's guesses from early in the pandemic. Much like if I wanted to know the deadliness and rate of spread of original COVID, I would not look up February 2020 tweets and use that as my sole data source.
I think it's pretty clear that the CIA doesn't know anything significantly more than what the public does. The best source is still the Rootclaim debate. The reason the CIA suddenly made that statement is because someone high up at the CIA wanted them to make that statement, not because they have secret information.
Back in 2020, the lab leak hypothesis was plausible from what little was known at the time. A lot more evidence has come out since then.
Based on the reporting, it's pretty clear that they didn't have any smoking gun and the guess was just based on the same things that other people speculating in 2020 based their guesses on, and the same evidence that got presented and refuted in the Rootclaim debate.
It is unlikely that the German intelligence community isn't aware, and really far more aware than you, of all the evidence that has come out since 2020. If they're releasing their 2020 report without further comment, that strongly suggests that they don't think the subsequent evidence moves the needle very much. The alternate hypothesis, that they want to deceive people into believing a lab-leak claim that they now know to be false, is unsupported, conspiratorial, and conspicuously lacking a plausible motive.
ETA: I'm also curious as to how you can be so confident that the CIA doesn't know significantly more than the public does. They do have access to sources the public doesn't, and which they can't publicly talk about. As does German intelligence.
To pick an extreme example for the sake of argument, the CIA has access to non-public information, so they should know a better speedrun path in Super Mario World than the best publicly known one, right?
The CIA's core competency is being friends with the guy who has a friend in Al Qaeda, with a side of state-sponsored hacking. Everything else is just regurgitated OSINT. And in cases where the relevant information is public anyway, I'd expected a dedicated internet army to be much better at interpreting it since A) there's a lot more people on the internet and B) a lot more people with relevant expertise (the number of leading geneticists working at the CIA is probably not much more than the number of record SMW speedrunners at the CIA).
IF there really was a lab leak AND the people at WIV knew about it AND they said so in a discoverable way AND the CIA happened to have informants or spyware in place at the time and got their hands on that, THEN the CIA would have something worth saying about the debate. Otherwise, they're just armchair speculating on the same dataset as the rest of us.
I take Schilling's claim about CIA to mean there exist topics CIA will know more about than the public, not that they will know more than the public on all conceivable topics. It's reasonable to extrapolate that the topics they will know more about are focused more on international military capabilities, including biological capabilities, than they will be on how best to navigate a video game.
The CIA's core competency can likewise be extrapolated to be much more than Al Qaeda + computer tricks. Another extrapolation that is worth noting here is that the CIA, like any espionage agency in the world, will possess methods for gathering information that will persist for years, and even decades. Those methods are often worthless if revealed, and revealing what was discovered with a method often reveals the method. Therefore, they don't reveal what was discovered, often for decades.
It's probably wise to be skeptical if some agency like the CIA or BND makes a claim and doesn't provide material evidence, and to consider the motives of such an agency. But it's also probably wise to not rule out the possibility that they know something the rest of us don't.
Do you know who made the decision to release it? Did they say anything about the decision? (This isn't a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious). It's hard to guess at the motives for the release without any information.
> I'm also curious as to how you can be so confident that the CIA doesn't know significantly more than the public does. They do have access to sources the public doesn't, and which they can't publicly talk about. As does German intelligence.
Well, for one thing, they aren't acting like it. The Biden report was mixed low-confidence answers, which is hardly what you'd expect from someone who is sitting on a smoking gun.
And with such a contentious issue, *someone* would have leaked *something* at some point if there were any goods there. And now we have a president who has a history of publicly sharing sensitive intelligence for far dumber reasons then this and who would benefit enormously from being able to find evidence in favor of a lab leak.
The other thing is that this isn't an area where you'd expect the CIA to have much of an advantage. If they could somehow obtain emails from WIV saying "oh wow look at what crimes we're doing" or whatever, that would be one thing. But if that email doesn't exist, there's very little the CIA could do beyond what we already have from OSINT. It's not like the CIA has any expertise in genetics and epidemiology. We're not talking about Russian war plans or Al Qeada plots here.
"And with such a contentious issue, *someone* would have leaked *something* at some point if there were any goods there. "
Speaking as someone who works with highly classified information, no, that's not at all a safe bet. Leaks can happen anywhere, subject to the personal idiosyncrasies of potential leakers, but they don't become *likely* until you go well beyond "contentious" and most of the way to "that's just obviously and intolerably wrong".
Knowing the probable origin of Covid-19, but knowing it through classified sources that the agency doesn't want to burn and so keeping quiet about it, isn't remotely at that level.
Also, you don't necessarily need "expertise in genetics and epidemiology" to figure out whether Covid-19 escaped from a lab. It is probably sufficient to be able to read all the internal emails of the WIV in 2019-2020. There are many paths to truth, and you seem to be blinding yourself to all but one of them.
I have a somewhat-related question about that debate.
I'm imagining several possible scenarios for the infection of Patient Zero in Wuhan
1. Patient Zero somehow contracts COVID from an infected animal. (I'm not sure whether it matters that the infection was near Wuhan, at the infamous market in Wuhan, or shortly before traveling into Wuhan.)
2. Patient Zero is infected with COVID that was somehow improperly released from the laboratory in Wuhan. (It's possible that they somehow became infected while visiting/working int the lab, came into contact in water that was contaminated with waste from that part of the lab, or some similar event.)
3. Some animal in/near the Wuhan lab becomes infected with COVID that was improperly released from the lab, and that animal infects other animals in/around Wuhan. Patient Zero catches COVID from this population. (The infected animals could have somehow mixed with, or been brought into contact with, the animals sold in the infamous market in Wuhan.)
Did that debate only consider case 1 and case 2, or did it also consider case 3? Would case 3 have been considered zoonosis, or lab-release?
I ought to remember this, as I read the debate analysis by Scott carefully. But I don't recall whether case 3 was mentioned, or distinguished from case 2 or case 1.
I think 3 would be considered unlikely enough to be neglected.
If original-strain covid appeared to be adapted for rats or mice then it would seem much more plausible, but that doesn't seem to be the case (if it were, then China would not have been able to temporarily eradicate the virus since it would have had a huge rodent reservoir).
The alternative scenario where a freaking pangolin or something escapes from the lab seems vanishingly unlikely.
That seems less "damning" and more nitpicking a single point out of a large debate (ok, two points if you count the followup comment about a graph). As someone responded in the comments you linked to:
---
I sincerely doubt that the judges would have reached a different conclusion if they knew that Connor hadn’t claimed his cat died of COVID, so I don’t think the judges had any reason to fact check that claim. On the other hand, the Peter got this wrong and Saar didn’t catch it does suggest that debate format didn’t work very well for ferreting out errors.
I don’t know enough about Saar to have any idea whether this applies to him, but one thing I’ve noticed about conspiracy theorists is that the whole concept of fact checking is alien to the way they think. If you are a conspiracy theorist trying to prove that COVID originated in the lab, and Connor make a claim that supports your theory, you don’t investigate the claim because if you did that, you might find that it’s not credible. And if someone claims that Connor is not credible because Connor claimed his cat died of COVID, you *certainly* aren’t going to start fact checking at that point, because the risk that a fact check might undermine your theory has increased. And if someone offers you a $100,000 if you can convince a couple of judges that your conspiracy theory is true, that doesn’t create an incentive to abandon the thought patterns that led you to believe in the conspiracy theory in the first place.
China is a “hard target.” Even in January 2020, when the U.S. intelligence community was throwing every resource it had at understanding COVID-19, it wasn’t able to get a lot of information. They did know that human-to-human transmission was possible, information that the United States withheld from the World Health Organization and the public, but there is no reason to think they learned anything about the origin of the virus.
The CIA assessment is probably “low confidence” for the same reason that the debate didn’t yield a solid conclusion; there isn’t enough evidence. Whatever classified information the U.S. intelligence community has probably doesn’t make much difference.
I came across this site https://findidfsoldiers.net/ while browsing Haaretz, it's a small compendium of the type of human scum that specifically goes to volunteer in a foreign military committing war crimes, despite not having to, and having the choices to not be involved in a genocidal war.
I like to browse those kinds of lists to remind myself of just how low the bar to being a good human sometimes is, like, you could be a lazy fuck and just wake up one day in your bed unable to do anything, and just by virtue of this alone you would still be immensely morally better than anyone on this list. Merely doing nothing is more moral than whatever the fuck they ended up doing in their newfound volunteer gigs as genocidal war dogs, and it costs 0 dollars.
But what really caught my attention while reading the Haaretz article (https://archive.ph/d1GII) about the website is how paranoid and high-cortisol the mode Pro-Israel lobbies seem to universally operate in, at least in North America. An html web 1.0 page that has ~85 publicly available names of eager war criminals, most of them loud and proud about their "service" on their own anyway? Doesn't look like too much of a big deal, or really any deal at all. Right?
Well, you see, compiling lists of names is Literally Hitler, at least according to Paul Hirschson, the ~~chief clown~~, sorry, "consul general" of Israel in Montreal. "We know what 'Jew lists' mean to Mastacci's [the website's author] type,", Hirschson constipated on his twi**er, cited by Haaretz.
You would think that an expression like "Jew List" would be reserved for something slightly more serious, like a boycott list of supermarkets owned by Jews or some 1933 Germany shit like that. But no, compiling public material about ~~war criminals~~ volunteers in a foreign army is enough to deserve the term, apparently. They don't seem to realize the natural endgame of this antisemitism inflation.
mhm. Imagine if there was a website listing the names and life information of Pro-Palestine activists while calling them "terrorist-sympathizers." Would you consider that doxxing? Do you think the only difference between that and findidfsoldiers is just the object level issue, because you think Pro-Palestine activists are right and Pro-Israel forces are wrong?
> Imagine if there was a website listing the names and life information of Pro-Palestine activists while calling them "terrorist-sympathizers."
This happened in October and November of 2023 and is happening right now, except instead of a website collating publicly available and Googlable info it was trucks with massive screens displaying the information on the streets and KGB dossiers of government data being shared on Pro-Palestinian activists.
> Pro-Palestine activists are right and Pro-Israel forces
I'm surprised you managed to write this without noticing the difference between Pro-Palestine **activists** and the Pro-Israel **forces**, but to it never hurts to repeat information, here's one important difference:
- The **activists** use their voice and their unarmed body, along with some constitutionally-protected rights such as the right to protest and of assembly, to say things like that Israel is perpetrating a genocide and that people should stop buying things from it. The **forces** are using guns and armed support provided by Israel to kill Palestinians in Gaza.
I believe that's enough difference for me to frankly not give a single shit about the "doxxing" (no such thing, the information is Googlable, I could have replaced the website with a google doc and 3 hours of free time) of those who chose to participate in ethnic cleansing and a proto-genocide.
"Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet and without their consent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing The definition of doxxing does not hinge on whether the information was publicly available or not. In fact, most doxxing comes from Googlable information.
Do you think that it would be bad to dox Pro-Israel activists then, and it's only because IDF soldiers are military that findIDFsoldiers is OK?
I'm aware that publicly available info can still be doxxing. This doesn't mean that any amount at all of personal information obtained from the internet is doxxing, or else me following an email from a Reddit account to a Twitter account would be doxxing, and I don't intuitively think of low-effort actions like blindly following links as doxxing.
> Do you think that it would be bad to dox Pro-Israel activists
(1) Yes, it would be bad, and that's precisely the reason why I never share or endorse the Nth list about "Zionist authors" or "Zionist game developers" or whatever is making the rounds on the lowest IQ rungs of pro-Palestinian twitter.
(2) Most of those lists are still not doxxing, they're nothing more and nothing less than a list of names attached to public statements or political positions on Israel-Palestine endorsed by each name. Doxxing has to involve some amount of investigation and uncovering of what the victims were trying to hide, you can never be doxed for something you never tried to hide. Uncovering the place of residence, the place of work, and close social contacts (e.g. discovering and harassing the uninvolved daughter or brother of a pro-Israel activist) are hallmarks of doxxing and easy heuristics to judge whether someone is being doxed, but just being named and shamed is not being doxed.
(3) Many of those lists fall into the communist power dynamics of score-settling and the "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking" [1] rule. Names with no connections to the offense are put on the list just because somebody somewhere hates the name for a completely unrelated reason and figures they can make a plausible case (sometimes the case is "No case, the name looks Jewish"), others are on the list despite not being remotely as bad as the modal or median name on the list.
That's why I hate name and shame lists for the vast majority of contexts.
But almost none of those points apply to the website. (1) Doesn't apply because they're soldiers not activists, and soldiers going mercenary for a state after 1.5 years of brutal extensively-documented war and several hundred pages worth of legal proceedings and ICJ hearings about a very plausible case of genocide, plus an ICC warrant for the head of state for using starvation of civilians as a weapon. I would not call someone who did 1/10 of this for Palestine or Hamas "an activist", I would call them a soldier.
(2) doesn't apply, the list isn't doxxing, there is nothing in there that those volunteers didn't want public. None of them are ashamed or secretive about anything being revealed.
(3) Doesn't apply because the criteria of inclusion is extremely clear: anyone who went to Israel and wore a military uniform. You can't possibly get any clearer than this, it's the "Murder" part of "Arson, Murder and Jaywalking". Sure people can still make things up and simply include names out of thin air, but it will be extremely easy to catch this because the criteria of inclusion is so obvious and clear-cut.
This website is actually pretty concerning. Stalking and tracking people and announcing them as objects of hatred for crimes you think they *might* have done is seriously immoral.
Likely none of these volunteers agree with the accusations against Israel. Whether they're true or not, calling them "eager war criminals" is a lie. Calling them war criminals without a trial is lynch mob justice.
I really hope pro-Palestinian advocates have better things to do than stalking kids on the internet.
Yeah, kids these days man. Just teenagers doing normal horny teenager things like going mercenary for an ICJ-accused genocidal armed forces and logistically supporting the mass murder of 50K people.
> Likely none of these volunteers agree with the accusations against Israel.
Luckily nobody asked them.
> Stalking and tracking people and announcing them as objects of hatred for crimes you think they *might* have done is seriously immoral
It's not stalking, it's collating public data. I could have replaced the entire website with Google, some social media sniffing tools, and infinite patience for propaganda-induced pro-Israel psychopathy.
They're rightful objects of hatred because they're complicit in the murder of children, and there is no amount of "I was just following orders" or "I was just writing Excel macros for the commander" is going to overshadow the fact that they could have went with their daily lives in Canada and forgot that there is anything happening in Gaza, they went out of their way to be involve themselves in an ethnic cleansing.
Not even the smallest violin in the world is deserved.
I doubt, if you throw a rock at random into a randomly selected IDF squad you will hit someone who demolished a Gazan high-rise while dedicating the explosion to his daughter, humiliated civilians and/or used them as human shields, or wore civilian women's underwear and filmed himself doing so. So yeah, the environment is not exactly conducive to not being a war criminal.
And hey, the fastest way to prove you're not a war criminal is to not be offended at a trial, indeed to welcome it, which is not what pro-Israel groups are doing.
I am fairly certain that the demolition of high-rises is delegeted to a very small and specialized fraction of the IDF's "squads". I am also fairly certain that "not being offended at a trial" is insufficient to disprove accusations of war crimes. So your claims are objectively, literally false, and gratuitous hyperbole in the service of insult is both unkind and unnecessary.
I mentioned other examples of wanton criminality and destruction other than the gleeful destruction of Gaza's urban scape, many so widespread that a news channel literally made a 2 hours documentary out of social media material posted by the war criminals themselves.
Not being offended about trials or any sort of reckoning for accused war crimes is of course not enough to disprove said war crimes, but it's the necessary first step towards either proving or disproving (in the Law sense) anything at all. So the mere fact that pro-Israel groups in Europe and America chafe at the proposition is massively telling.
I asked this in the last thread, but got only one response: Has anyone tried that Brilliant interactive STEM lesson thing? If so, what was your experience?
In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the [Budapest Memorandum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Budapest_Memorandum). The short version is that Ukraine destroyed its Soviet nukes, and in return, the signatories pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support actions in the Security Council if it should ever be threatened by nukes.
In 1994, this seemed like a good deal. The cold war was over, Ukraine likely did have more urgent spending priorities than a nuclear weapon program and the rest of the world, both the nuclear powers and the others were glad to keep the number of nuclear powers limited. Wars of conquest seemed a thing of the past. While the US engaged in some regime change operations (most of which turned out rather terrible, tbh), in the 1990s the idea to expand your territory through war seemed basically dead.
The rule-based world order was a higher, better equilibrium, just like most people would prefer to live in a country where weapons of war are controlled only by a small group of mostly decent people to living in some failed state where many people carry an assault weapon for the simple reason that many other people carry an assault weapon.
Putin's invasion made some serious cracks in that vision of a rule-based world order (which was always perceived to be strong in Europe), but Trump II basically broke it. Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea in 2014, before Russia was ready for a full scale invasion. I think it would have been technically feasible. An experienced Soviet nuclear weapons engineer who was 40 in 1990 would have been 64 in 2014. Ukraine also runs a lot of civilian nuclear reactor and has its own Uranium deposits (which would come in handy once they quit the NPT, because this might make acquiring fuel on the world market difficult). WP [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Ukraine) they even have enrichment plants.
In general, figuring out how to make nuclear weapons is something which took a good fraction of the world's geniuses in the 1940s, but has become much simpler since then. Getting an implosion device to work just right is something which would likely be helped a lot by high speed cameras and microelectronics, and a few decades of Moore's law likely makes a hell of a difference for simulations. Delivery systems might be a bit harder, but at the end of the day you don't need 100% reliability for deterrence to work. Even if your enemy is 50% confident that they can intercept the delivery, that still leaves the expected outcome of a nuclear exchange highly negative for them. Attacking a launch site -- conventionally or otherwise -- is forcing your enemy to either use or lose his nukes, and few think it wise to do so.
On a more personal note, I really hate nuclear weapons, and very much prefer the rule-based world order. I very much preferred the 2010s when Putin was mostly known for riding topless, as well as the odd murder of a journalist or dissident, the US was fine playing world police (which included some ill-advised military adventures, but also providing nuclear deterrence for NATO) and I was comfortably regarding nukes, NATO and large scale wars with the same distant horror I might have for medieval healthcare.
Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense, and the UK and France arsenals might not be judged sufficient for deterrence, and some EU nuke might be called for. I am not sure how it would work. Classical EU commission manner, where 27 member states have to push the launch button and Orban can veto if he feels like it? Or give Mrs van-der-Leyen launch authority? Or simply have a common weapon program and distribute the spoils to 27 members?
>Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense,
I keep hearing people say this, but it seems unwarranted. Trump strongarms Ukraine (a country we have no legal requirement or expectation to support yet have given billions of dollars of support already) to get them to the negotiation table, therefore the US can't be trusted to carry out it's treaty obligations with regard to NATO?
Tell me, how many sanctions have Trump taken off of Russia? None? In fact he says he'll punish Russia even harder if Russia doesn't play ball? Interesting, sure seems like America is still punishing defectors to the rules based system.
This idea that the U.S. would abandon it's allies because Trump played hardball with a non-ally seems a bit hysterical.
Look at what he's doing in the trade war with Canada. He also just stated that "just about every country in the world has treated America unfairly". He doesn't even acknowledge the concept of allies.
Lots of NATO countries have tariffs on US goods, how is putting tariffs on a particular member a sign that the US can't be counted on to fulfill it's treaty obligations? Did we have a treaty with Canada saying no trade wars?
There was an agreement. Trump has blatantly reneged and lied about why. It's not about fentanyl. It's about Trump's delusion that he can force other countries to pay for the hole he's blown in US budget and the opportunity for him personally to profit from corruption (by granting exemptions in return for bribes). The US cannot be trusted to honor any commitment it makes now. Who do you think negotiated the USMCA anyway? FFS Trump is threatening to annex Canada! Can you not follow the thread here? And it's not just Trump. Huge numbers of Americans also seem to have completely lost the plot. This is not normal! Canada should now be seriously thinking about whether it should seek to obtain a credible nuclear deterrent to hedge against the possibility of a military attack from our malfunctioning erstwhile ally. Seriously, Fuck America!
USMCA has a specific exception that Trump is using: "Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to: ...(b) preclude a Party from applying measures that it considers necessary for the fulfilment of its obligations with respect to the maintenance or restoration of international peace or security, or the protection of its own essential security interests." Trump declared a national emergency about border crossings and fentanyl smuggling on day 1, and has explicitly claimed that these tariffs are justified under the protection of security interest exemption to USMCA. Which is why he's dumping these large tariffs on the two countries bordering the US (and China, which makes most of the fentanyl that gets to the US) as they're the ones that he is justified by the "national emergency" to put tariffs on.
Now you can say that you think the national security interest is a fig leaf, but it is a legal justification for why his actions are not violating the treaty, one that the treaty itself allows. What exceptions are there to the North Atlantic Treaty that would justify these fears that the US will ignore it's NATO obligations? I'm looking at the treaty and the only possible exception I can see is if the US elected to leave the treaty altogether, which is allowed but only with 1 years notice. Other than that, there isn't any wiggle room on Article 5.
The claim that the recent tariffs were "necessary for the protection of US essential security interests", is the sort of thing that any reasonable non-Trumpist will look at and say "that seems like the sort of transparent lie people tell when they are looking for a petty legalistic excuse to welsh on a deal". This will cause them to reasonably suspect that any other deals may be similarly welshed upon.
Which leaves one with not the terms of the deal, but the perceived desires of the "dealmaker", And Trump's words and policies w/re Ukraine make it pretty clear that he wants the US to not be involved in actively securing Europe against military aggression (unless maybe they pay enough protection money).
So, yes, reasonable non-Trumpists are going to see the US as an unreliable security partner for Europe going forward. And reasonable Trumpists shouldn't need to have this explained to them. Yet here we are.
Anyone familiar with Trump's behavior should know that he not only stretches weasel clauses as far as they can possibly go, but that when they don't go far enough for him he'll straight up ignore agreements, and if someone calls him on it he's as likely as not to delay compliance as long as he can get away with. A prolonged delay in compliance on Article 5 could lead to a fait accompli.
I dearly hope a long term consequence of the Trump administration is the acknowledgement that the 'rules based international order' was a nonsensical concept made up by charlatans and believed in by the worst kind of midwits. People of the future can then try analyzing international deals based on things like money and power!
The rules in that rules-based order were flexible enough to allow Turkey (a NATO ally) to occupy North Cyprus for decades and for Kosovo to be detached from Serbia.
Well, both of these cases involved an ethnic minority trying to break away from a country. I do not think there is a hard and fast rule for these cases.
On the one hand, if every entity down to "sovereign citizen" was allowed to secede from the US, the fractal patchwork of jurisdictions this would have significant downsides (tariffs, localized wars and the like) that it seems prudent to disallow it.
On the other hand, if the rule-based order came into effect when the British were just about done conquering their empire, I would not tell tell India that borders and countries may be accidents of history, but sacrosanct, and they should just make peace with being a British colony, or frown too much on any country which helped them to independence.
Personally, I would put the threshold for supporting self-determination between 100k and 100M, which is still a broad range. Other circumstances might me more or less sympathetic to independence movements.
When Russia occupied Crimea and two mostly ethnic Russian Oblasts in Eastern Ukraine, I did not see that as a major defection from the rule-based world order apart from the fact that it violated the Budapest Memorandum (which I was not aware back then).
However, trying to force a regime change in Kiev is a very different story. Now, the US has also done its share of regime change operations (and I still maintain that GWB had no business invading Iraq), but there are a number of important distinctions between Saddam Hussein and Volodymyr Zelenskyy regarding how closely they followed the rule-based order, the general peacefulness of their respective theaters as well as their respective political systems and their human rights records.
I basically agree with that. I re-read your first comment and now I realise that you most likely meant the 2022 attack when saying "Putin's invasion" rather than more limited operations before that.
Note that I did not say that I support self-determination for any peoples. I simply noted that self-determination is one component of the international rules-based order.
For the record. I do not support the right to self-determination (ie, nationalism) in general, because 1. It has historically been the source of enormous levels of violence; and 2. It is essentially a con pulled by local elites on local commoners.
True, self-determination always co-existed with the sanctity of borders. This allowed America to apply whichever principle worked best for them.
Also, defections by American friends like Turkey were punished less severely than defection by non-friends like Russia.
I guess one could argue that there were not a lot of defections and these were still exceptions rather than the rule. But this is a much weaker statement and you could see how Putin would think that he's entitled to such an exception too.
That makes no sense. The right to self-determination belongs to "peoples," not to states. In fact, the right to self-determination is defined as the right of a people (aka a "nation") to have its own state.
What is a "people"? Does "Florida" not count as a "people" just because it includes several ethic groups? Does the right to self determination only apply to ethnostates?
No, Florida is not a people. Floridians might be a people (ie, a nation) if they identified as such to a greater degree than they identified as, white, or black, or Christian, or what have you. But, empirically, that does not seem to be the case..
>Does the right to self determination only apply to ethnostates?
The right to self-determination of the 'peoples' of the American South, and anywhere else in the US that tried it, have been and would be vociferously denied.
Which people of the American South? Some of the white peoples, yes. The ones permitted political agency. On the eve of the Civil War, the population of the states that made up the Confederacy was about 9 million, 60% white, 40% black. Presumably the latter group was almost entirely in support of the Union (certainly once ending slavery became an important goal of the war). If even a fifth of whites opposed secession, it is unlikely that a majority of the Confederate population supported it.
My understanding is that the hard part of making a nuke these days is getting enough plutonium or highly enriched uranium to make it out of, and the hard part of that for a decent-sized nation state with a good tech base is that it's expensive and hard to keep secret.
Uranium enrichment can be done either with centrifuge cascades, which require big facilities with lots of very specific precision-manufactured equipment, or with gaseous diffusion plants, which consume ungodly amounts of electricity. Building and operating either type of enrichment facility is doable if you don't care if it's secret or not, but it's a lot harder to keep secret from major national or international agencies that are keeping an eye out for that sort of thing.
And plutonium require access to spent fuel rods that have reasonable quantities of plutonium in them. A lot of the international nonproliferation regime goes into restricting which countries are supposed to be building the kinds of reactors that breed larger amounts of plutonium, and into keeping track of what happens to spent fuel rods from the reactors they do have. There are several countries (not exactly sure how many) that have inventories of spent fuel rods suitable for reprocessing and could probably withdraw from IAEA and start making bombs in relatively short order if they wanted. But this would be a very public action that would be likely to rather badly annoy other countries in the meantime.
Similarly, there are several countries that are not nuclear powers currently that have their own supply chains for reactor-grade uranium enrichment. Weapons-grade uranium is harder to make than reactor-grade, but it's more a matter of time and volume than of difference in what equipment you need to do it. And reactor grade enriched uranium can be used as a starting point for making weapons-grade, one which requires a lot less work than if you have to start from natural uranium.
The countries I've heard mentioned most often as being able to make nukes in short order if they decided to risk diplomatic ire (or if their superpower allies gave them to go-ahead to do so) are Japan, South Korea, Canada, Germany, and Brazil. Also, South Africa made a handful of nuclear weapons in the 1970s and disarmed in 1989 but still has the uranium in case they decide they need to un-disarm. I'm sure there are others. I don't know if Ukraine is on the list, but I suspect they are given that they have a bunch of active nuclear power plants.
Again, the issue is the lead time from being obvious that they're working on nukes until they have a bomb ready to go. I'm guessing at least several months, and more likely a year or two. The meantime would be very dangerous for them, since Putin would be extremely motivated to shut it down and might even threaten (or more than threaten) preemptive nuclear strikes. Also, unless the major NATO countries were all on board with Ukraine sprinting for nukes, things could get rather uncomfortable for Ukraine depending on how strenuously NATO countries object.
OTOH, if NATO countries were all on board with Ukraine getting nukes, things could presumably happen quite a bit faster. Probably not to the extent of outright giving Ukraine an American, British, or French bomb, but giving equipment and information could speed things up quite a bit.
Centrifuge cascades for uranium enrichment at nuclear-weapons levels are not all that big, and their manufacture is not all that specialized. And thanks to A.Q. Khan, everybody who has been paying attention knows how to do it. A major industrial nation like Ukraine is almost certainly capable of doing it in a generic warehouse attached to a generic industrial facility, with neither "OMG look at that big specialized facility in our satellite images!" nor "OMG look at all this highly specialized stuff they've been importing!" to clue in outsiders.
HUMINT or SIGINT could still reveal the program, so there would be some risk to Ukraine in following this strategy.
I was under the impression that Tom Clancy was raising the concern even earlier, in _The Sum of All Fears_ in 1991 (there's an afterword where he specifically does so), but now I'm reading that Khan was doing his thing as early as the mid-1970s. So now I suspect Clancy had Khan specifically in mind.
Clancy was almost certainly aware of Khan's work, though probably not the full scope. But note also that Clancy was also by his own admission futzing some of the details about how to covertly build atom bombs, even though he knew the cat was mostly out of the bag at that point.
So, raising the concern, yes, and also being a bit vague about what the concern was.
I just re-checked my source (Matthew Bunn's "Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work" videos on the Belfer Center's youtube channel, from 2013), and it turns out that he agrees with you and I misremembered what he said about size and ease of hiding: it was diffusion plants that he said were big and hard to hide in addition to their power requirements. He does talk about centrifuges being tricky to make and requiring both specialized materials and hard-to-obtain design knowledge and engineering expertise, but I can believe that being an outdated assessment now that Khan has let all the relevant cats out of the bag.
> My understanding is that the hard part of making a nuke these days is getting enough plutonium or highly enriched uranium to make it out of...
To be excessively pedantic, if you don't care about maximizing yield / wasting a lot of uranium then it's never been difficult to make a gun type nuke if you have enough enriched uranium. I'm not a weapons engineer or particularly handy and I could make one if Temu sold bulk weapons grade uranium.
The first time one was detonated was over Hiroshima; the design is simple enough that it wasn't worth using up scarce uranium to test it out, the Trinity test (the site is open twice a year - https://www.nps.gov/thingstodo/alamogordo-visit-the-trinity-site.htm - and is well worth visiting) was for the implosion design.
That more or less accords with my understanding. For a Little Boy style bomb, by far the hardest part is the uranium. And you need a lot of uranium: after Trinity succeeded, there was serious consideration given towards remanufacturing the Little Boy uranium into five-ish implosion devices.
There are a few fiddly bits that would make it a bit tricky to reliably build one in your garage. You need to know the critical mass. You need to have the equipment to cast and machine the uranium. You also need neutron sources (Little Boy used polonium encased in beryllium) in the right places to kick-start the chain reaction. During the Manhattan Project, the critical mass took some experimentation and theoretical work to determine and the neutron sources were a mild design challenge, but today I expect they'd be fairly easy for anyone with a decent physics background and the right materials. Similarly, I expect any machinist with a decent shop could read up on working with uranium and do the job of forming the shell and the plug.
Implosion devices are quite a bit harder, but nowhere near hard enough to pose a challenge to anyone with the resources to do the enrichment or reprocessing.
You don't actually need a neutron source to make a gun-assembly bomb; you just need a "locking" design where the gun projectile gets firmly stuck to the target rather than passing through or bouncing off. Spontaneous fission will give you a detonation fairly quickly, typically under a second IIRC.
And the rest, yeah, that's all at the level where a bunch of clever engineering undergrads in a university lab could do it as a side project. But implosion assembly is now widely understood at the level where a bunch of grad students and a professor could do it as a full-semester research project. It's going to take at least that long to enrich your uranium, and implosion assembly will give you maybe five times as many bombs per unit of enriched uranium.
Spent fuel rods are useless for getting weapon grade plutonium. A special reactor is needed, Chernobyl plant could do that, but Ukraine's operating plants cannot.
Spent fuel rods do not contain "weapons grade plutonium", but notwithstanding the name, "weapons grade plutonium" is not required for making nuclear weapons. At least one perfectly functional nuclear explosive device has been built and tested using the sort of plutonium that can be obtained from spent fuel rods. It's a very messy process that poses an enhanced risk of killing some of your technicians, but the Ukrainians almost certainly have the nuclear mojo to pull it off if they are desperate enough.
That sounds like a fun premise for a story, Ukrainian engineers secretly rebuild and re-activate the Chernobyl reactor underneath its vast concrete shell to build nuclear weapons.
I think you're overstating the case a bit. If you're a superpower that wants to make thousands of bombs, then you're going to design plants specifically for plutonium production to maximize the good isotopes (Pu239 and Pu241) and minimize Pu240 as the latter has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate and too much of it makes it much harder to prevent premature chain reactions that interfere with the bomb's yield. You also operate the reactor differently, reprocessing the fuel rods before they're fully spent because the Pu240 ratio increases the longer you use the rod.
But that doesn't mean spent fuel rods from power-generating reactors, even "proliferation resistant" ones, are worthless for weapons production. Normal operation for western civilian power-generating light-water designs gives you 20-30% Pu240 in your chemically reprocessed plutonium, which is a lot more than the 5-7% limit for US weapons designs in the later part of the Cold War. But you can still make a bomb out of plutonium with the higher levels of Pu240 if you're willing to accept a lower design yield (on the order of tens of kT) and a significant risk of fizzles (actual yield 1-2 kT).
You can also do isotope separation to reduce the Pu240 fraction, by the same principles as uranium isotope separation. The scale requires is a lot smaller, though: the thing that makes uranium enrichment a megaproject is that you're starting at 0.7% of the desired isotope and the amount of enrichment you get for a given amount of effort is proportional to the amount you start with. Going from 50-70% of the best isotope of plutonium for weapons (Pu239) to 90-95% would be orders of magnitude less work than enriching natural uranium (or even reactor-grade uranium, enriched to 3-5%) to weapons grade. In terms of proliferation risk, uranium that has been enriched even to 20% is in "why don't you just hand them a bomb while you're at it" territory.
The US does isotope separation on plutonium for other purposes: Pu238 is fantastic for radiothermal power sources like the ones used for Voyager and other long-mission space probes. The UK has historically used plutonium from reprocessed commercial reactor fuel rods for nuclear weapons in the past (not sure if they did isotope separation or just pulled the rods early). And North Korea kicked out IAEA inspectors and started reprocessing spent fuel from their "proliferation-resistant" commercial reactor around 2003. Although it sounds like they might have gone for the "small bomb and risk a fizzle" approach (at least at first) rather than attempting isotope separation, at least at first: their 2006 test was a subkiloton fizzle, while their 2009 test as a bit better (most estimates in the 2-10 kT range) and their 2013 and subsequent tests have mostly been in the tens of kT.
Good analysis. I don’t think Putin would do a preemptive nuclear strike, but would be able to shut down the program with conventional strikes. I don’t think that either Europe or the United States would consider it acceptable for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. Ukraine had a government that was not particularly stable and had significant corruption, which is not the type of government one would like to trust with nukes. For the United States, it would be a close call whether Russia annexing Ukraine would be better than an independent Ukraine with nuclear weapons.
I agree that it's more likely than not that Putin would back down rather than use nukes preemptively on Ukraine. But I also think it's one of the scenarios where he's more likely to press the button, since "a country you're already at war with getting nukes" is generally a pretty terrible scenario that one should try to avoid at almost any cost. And the other alternative if Ukraine were about to get nukes and Putin couldn't prevent it with conventional weapons, that of making peace on Zelenskyy's terms or something close to them, might be a vastly preferable option for Russia as a nation to a preemptive nuclear strike and dealing with the fallout (both literal and figurative) of that, but it's less clear which would be the worse option for Putin personally and for the members of his inner circle.
Also inclined to agree that it's very unlikely that the US or other major NATO countries would want to see Ukraine with an independent nuclear arsenal.
I think that the terms of an armistice would be closer to "the current front line, perhaps with a bit of territory swapping" than "Zelenskyy's terms".
I mean, an Ukraine with a few nukes could plausibly nuke a few Russian cities in their region, while Putin can nuke every Ukrainian city and not even put a dent in his stockpile. Zelenskyy would hardly be in the position to get Crimea back. But Putin would not be in the position to conquer Kiev either.
Generally, a country getting nukes is not something other countries like. As a German, I would not want Germany (a relatively stable democracy) to get nukes, unless the alternative was a large scale conventional war. The risk of nuclear war scales with the number of nuclear armed countries, after all, and who knows how the political landscape will develop. A few stable countries spanning their retaliatory umbrella over smaller countries seems much preferable to everyone (with the noted exception of Trump).
Hindsight is 20/20. If Ukraine had started a nuclear weapon program after Crimea, I would have been the first to call them insane and paranoid. Putin would likely have tried to delay their program with conventional strikes, Israel style, and the West would not have lifted a finger to help them. But fighting three years of conventional war with Western support, only for the US to cut funding because he favors the way Putin dresses is not going to lead to a very favorable outcome for them.
> Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
Could the US be relied on to do that in 2014 when Obama was President and Russia invaded Crimea?
Could the US be relied on to do that in 2008 when Bush was President and Russia invaded South Ossetia?
(and so forth, I can't be bothered coming up with examples)
The guy led a group that physically attacked students for being jewish in support of a terrorist organization that tortures babies to death with their bare hands and then throws a parad over it. This is the most blatant case of "deport this guy yesterday" imaginable.
Even if he personally flew to Palestine to deliver guns to Hamas, you would still need a court order to revoke his green card. You don't just have ICE haul him off to a detention facility in Louisiana without telling his wife or his lawyer where he went.
Any due process violations the Trump admin gets away with against him, they'll do to other immigrants.
> Even if he personally flew to Palestine to deliver guns to Hamas, you would still need a court order to revoke his green card. You don't just have ICE haul him off to a detention facility in Louisiana without telling his wife or his lawyer where he went.
The precedent set by the Bush administration and upheld by all succeeding administrations is that due process doesn't apply to members of terrorist groups. It's not a good precedent, but it's the precedent.
There is a reasonable argument for due process violation, but this really is the least sympathetic guy to involve it for (unless Trump has never failed to do due process for anyone else, which I doubt).
>here is a reasonable argument for due process violation, but this really is the least sympathetic guy to involve it for
How so? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this guy has even spoken in favor of Hamas's terrorist activity? A lot of people in this thread are going a full step beyond asserting what ought to be proved: they're not even making the assertion, treating it as though it were a thing that Everybody Knows. Are any of you willing, at the very least, to make the assertion "Mahmoud Khalil has advocated for the terrorist activities done by Hamas" in so many words? Because otherwise you're just saying that this guy is unsympathetic because he disagrees with you (and the current free-speech-loving presidential administration) about the rightness or wrongness of the way Israel is prosecuting its war, which doesn't hold nearly as much water.
I suspect that's the point. When you want to break a norm and start violating a long-standing law, the smart approach is to pick an unappealing target.
I would be very happy to see him deported, but with due process, not willful abuses of power.
So something I'm genuinely confused by: (before this event) I've seen headlines claiming "Trump admin ramps up deportations by X% usingY questionable means". And when questioned on this the Trump admin claimed (a) we're just deporting violent criminals like <unsympathetic example>, and (b) everyone deportable is by definition a criminal (because illegal immigration is illegal), so really even the sympathetic sounding ones are similar to (a).
Given that they've already been ramping this up, feels like the media should already be full of stories of wholesome sympathetic people getting caught up in the crackdown, but I haven't seen any. Is it just because I haven't been following the news closely?
I think the actual numbers of arrests, while high compared to the previous admin, are still pretty small compared to the 7-digit scale they keep talking about. The NYT has some numbers here:
... which suggest that nonviolent (and hypothetically sympathetic) detentions have increased, but not hugely. I would guess that that, combined with all the other news the admin is flooding the zone with, means there's no real space to cover this.
Just my guess, though. I think if the admin follows through on their plans you are going to see more sympathetic stories in the media.
I think you have been blinded by politics and are not really contributing value to this discussion -- one that has a natural tendency to become inflamed as is. I've reported you for your original message, since it's clear you do not have evidence.
You're being weirdly aggressive. I didn't cite every single fact because they've all been pretty widely reported, and I'm having a hard time believing you're disputing them in good faith (although it's possible if the media bubble has become even more polarized than I thought; certainly most mainstream articles about this guy's arrest aren't mentioning any of the background).
TBH I'm pretty disappointed in finding out you're like this, I liked your civ posts.
I just need you to show a single document or journalist who has said that Khalil specifically was either violent or openly supported Hamas. You haven't done that yet. And you don't get to hide behind "I didn't cite every single fact" -- we're all here asking for one, very specific fact, and you made an extremely inflammatory claim so the burden is very much on you here. If it's widely reported, this should be really easy for you.
In case it matters, I'm a Columbia alum. I'm very aware of what these kinds of groups are like, and what the culture of protest is like on campus. Your posts suggesting that this guy is a 'leader' of some sort rings hollow and uninformed. And in fact, the NYP link that you sent over as citation links to a 91 page Columbia report on the matter, where they say (somewhat deeply embedded):
"To be clear: CUAD [Columbia University Apartheid Divest] is a coalition of over a hundred student organizations."
The guy himself was quoted on CNN 8 months ago with the following:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Anti-Semitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace. “They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
I'm glad you like my civ posts, they're fun to write. I apologize if you think I'm being aggressive, but I report things that I think make this community worse.
That article doesn't name any individuals or groups doing the attacking, much less Mahmoud Khalil specifically. What you were being asked to document wasn't antisemitic activity at Columbia which I think everyone agrees happened, but the involvement of "this guy".
I said he led the group, not that he did it personally (I'd guess he probably did, but given they wear masks I agree there's no known proof of it). His group was the main group organizing these activities though.
The article that does mention him though was far from saying he was "the" leader. It sounds like CUAD is/was very much a hurriedly thrown-together group of fellow travelers without much hierarchical structure, and what influence he had within the group mostly came from the fact he felt more integrated into American culture which gave him the confidence to go out on a limb and talk with the media and administration on behalf of others. By the same token though, he had more to lose from getting caught doing crimes. Whether he is actually sympathetic to anti-Israeli violence or not, this doesn't sound especially like the profile of a guy who gets his hands dirty.
You do seem to be okay though with being in support of a terrorist regime that murdered a 6 years old girl with repeated tank shelling [1], what's up with that?
While it's horrible that this particular person wound up dead, you have to wonder how many individual civilian casualties of wars wind up with their own massive wikipedia articles. You have to realise that you're being manipulated by propaganda, right?
Similarly, while it's horrible that Ann Frank died as she did, you do have to wonder how many individual non-Jewish casualties of war in Western Europe wind up with their own massive Wikipedia articles [1]. This must lead us to conclude that any attempt to use Ann Frank's death as argument or evidence against Nazis is transparent manipulation by Propaganda, right?
>The guy led a group that physically attacked students for being jewish
That's odd, I can't seem to find any evidence of Khalil even speaking in favor of physically attacking students for being Jewish, let alone participating in it or suborning it. Is there a news story to that effect, or police reports, or something, that is being hidden from us by the Woke Media, or am I just not looking hard enough?
>in support of a terrorist organization that tortures babies to death with their bare hands and then throws a parad over it.
That's odd, I can't seem to find any evidence of Khalil speaking in support of Hamas, or in favor of torturing babies to death, let alone providing them material support in doing so (such as weapons or actual acts of violence in their behalf). Is that evidence also being suppressed due to woke?
I ask because I notice that the DHS itself is not making any such explicit claim, instead relying on the extremely vague accusation "activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." So vague is that accusation that I would be tempted to wonder whether they simply mean that he is stridently critical of Israel and wants his school to divest from it--which would mean that every critic of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews would be "aligned to Hamas"--were we not speaking of the legendarily free-speech-loving, definitely-not-censorious Trump administration.
>This is the most blatant case of "deport this guy yesterday" imaginable.
Well, all r--but, wait. Something is amiss here. One thing I have constantly heard from free speech warriors over the last few years is that it's *really really important* specifically to protect speech that is controversial, disfavored, or even shocking. Facebook and Twitter banning accounts that were openly pro-Nazi, racist, or pro-rape was seen as an affront to the free exchange of ideas; and if you asked some free speech warriors, even violative of the First Amendment to the Constitution. When Zuck and (especially) Musk let those accounts run free again, a great cheer went up among supporters of free speech--not, perish the thought, because they agreed with Nazism or racism or rape, but because the sacred right to heterodoxy, even heterodoxy that shocks and offends, had been restored.
And of course, the government getting involved at all was especially outrageous to free speech defenders. One of them, in the comments section of this very blog, told me that to vote for Kamala Harris would likely usher in a dark regime of censorship, not because she had personally censored anybody but because she had failed specifically to condemn social media censorship *in Europe*.
That's, as I say, what I heard a lot of. But I don't hear much of it anymore! It's almost as though something had happened fairly recently that had caused a serious shift in the attitude of free speech warriors toward the US government attempting to suppress disfavored speech. I just can't figure out what that thing is.
Do you know of any incident that occurred, I don't know, maybe two months ago or so? that could have made the most zealous defenders of untrammeled expression suddenly get downright sanguine about the government going after people whose speech it doesn't like?
If you don't care about free speech and think it is a bad thing, then what are you criticizing Trump and his minions for? Hypocrisy? They finally came over to your side on free speech and you think that's bad? You should be celebrating: "I voted for Kamala and hate Trump, but he's reversed his position on free speech, at least he's finally doing something right!"
>They finally came over to your side on free speech and you think that's bad?
My side? I'm not the one in this thread saying that lawful permanent residents of the United States should be detained, separated from their families, and sent overseas for advocating divestment from Israel.
"If you don't care about free speech and think it is a bad thing, "
This is a strawman position that very few people actually hold. I guarantee you most peoples' views on speech are at least *slightly* more nuanced than that.
For example, there are lots of people who are simultaneously highly skeptical of "free speech absolutist" claims, but still strongly against *the government* directly interfering with speech, which this is plainly, blatantly an example of. A lot of the debate over speech issues in recent years has been over how private platforms maintain and moderate their own spaces. This has absolutely nothing to do with that, and yet a lot of the people who previously took the position that even private platforms restricting speech was absolutely unacceptable seem...largely uninterested in direct threats to speech by the most powerful government in the world.
There are virtually no liberals who are strongly against the UK government's arresting people for social media posts, or were against Biden's coercion of social media companies to censor people. At least, there are none who hold these opinions strongly enough to actually voice them publicly.
There are many things I could say in response if I were willing to spare the time. But the to-the-point retort is that this is simply a "my opponents are murderists" style argument:
If you think that the only reason that people with different politics than show different responses and levels of opposition to something that you construe as advancing Bad Outcome X is that they're secretly terrible people who want X to happen for it's own sake, you either lack a rich understanding of politics and human psychology, or have failed to apply it properly in this case.
(There's also some toxoplasma of rage thrown in there: you're far more likely to encounter and engage with opposition viewpoints that you find outrageous than those you find reasonable. That doesn't mean they're representative, much less monolithic.)
I consider myself more of a liberal-in-the-US-sense than not and while I'm not strongly against Biden having put pressure on social media companies (already far from a content-neutral speech environment) to moderate down dis- and misinformation that they were profiting from via engagement during a state of national emergency, lately I'm pretty much strongly against anything that happens politically in the UK by default.
Genuine adherence to free speech may be wrong in the eyes of the US left, but it's still a somewhat respectable kind of wrong, based on an unbending principle that is at least superficially noble and unselfish. Banning speech that should be allowed while allowing speech that should be banned is abandoning a kind of moral high ground and shouldn't pass unremarked.
It isn't just that liberals see that 'genuine adherence to free speech may be wrong.'
Liberals actively fought against free speech, demonized it, censored people as much as they could get away with in the private sector. Liberals declared free speech to be evil and fascist, Biden ran a secret censorship campaign to squash opposition to his authoritarian COVID policies, which when finally exposed is greeted with "yeah that was good actually." The ACLU went from defending Nazi parades to advocating for censorship. When confronted with the free speech disaster in the UK, where people are arrested often for innocuous social media posts, liberals are completely unfazed.
But now that the shoe is on the other foot, liberals suddenly see that free speech is 'at least superficially noble and unselfish.' Well isn't that convenient!
Liberals have burned down one of the most important pillars of democracy, which is absolutely unforgiveable. Trump is taking advantage and we will all suffer.
I do not understand this false equivalence. Did liberals ever detain or deport a green card holder for not being woke enough? Did they ever turn back a foreign scientist coming in for a conference because he criticized Joe Biden in personal texts with his friends? Liberals did not burn down the norm that the government can't punish people for their speech. You could more plausibly argue that they created a new norm of a kind of mob justice ("cancelling") that is wrong and bad, but those are not the same thing. No matter how bad cancelling got, no one who got cancelled by liberals was either deported or imprisoned. Please stop with this "the liberals did it first" stuff. They did not.
The US left supported a very strong version of free speech for quite a long time under the theory that the "marketplace of ideas" would seek and reinforce truth and bring moral and material progress to society, and that in the long run this would outweigh the downside of people's ability to smuggle anything from verbal abuse to barely-veiled threats under "just speaking my mind".
Fast forward to the era of increasing democratization of the media, and supporters of free speech saw people building circlejerky media silos to reinforce their preconceived notions and protect them from the corrosive influence of truth. It began to look less and less like honest discussions between people were responsible for the moral and intellectual progress that had been ongoing, and more that it had been a lucky effect of the right kind of people getting disproportionate control of the most effective platforms like movies, television and classrooms. This caused a massive loss of faith in the benefits of free speech and a focus on the abovementioned downside. The new generation of progressives were so insistent on the ills of free speech specifically because they wanted to convince their elders and contemporaries who shared most of their values. It certainly wasn't because they couldn't conceive of something *more* fascist than free speech!
The US right, on the other hand, hasn't actually supported free speech in living memory, the last decade included. It's important to get moderates, libertarians and so on to notice that the right isn't supporting the free speech of Nazis and Hamas sympathizers alike because of some high-flown principle that all speech, however abhorrent, must be protected, but that they are supporting the free speech of Nazis and *not* Hamas sympathizers because they legitimately think antisemitic white people are somehow more respectable than antisemitic brown Muslims.
> support for an independent palestine is not the same as support for hamas
Maybe not, but I think it's incumbent upon those who support an independent, peaceful, Hamas-free Palestinian state that lives in peace with its neighbours to say the latter parts REALLY LOUD to distinguish themselves from the 99% of Palestinians who apparently just want to kill all the Jews.
If this guy hates Hamas so much then why isn't he busy criticising the Hamas supporters within his own organisation who were beating up Jews?
This is a ridiculous double standard, an isolated demand for rigor. This is the same as saying "well, it is in fact the responsibility of the average man to loudly proclaim that they are not, in fact rapists, and why isn't the average man doing more to stop sketchy creeps from sexually harassing people". Or, more to the point, it is the same as saying "well, anyone who supports Israel should loudly condemn all the bombings that Israel does, and spend their time criticizing Israeli organizations who beat up Palestinians".
Unfortunately I mostly think you are arguing in bad faith, based on your comments to me and others in this thread, and I'd ask you to please cut it out.
> This is a ridiculous double standard, an isolated demand for rigor. This is the same as saying "well, it is in fact the responsibility of the average man to loudly proclaim that they are not, in fact rapists, and why isn't the average man doing more to stop sketchy creeps from sexually harassing people"
I think a better analogy would be that a man who is involved in a "WOMEN DESERVE TO BE RAPED AND ALSO I LOVE SHRIMP" protest, who is just there for the shrimp and not the rape, should probably clarify this fact.
No no no, you don't understand, 42 Jewish babies were personally killed by Khalil's bare hands every protest. Stop demanding evidence you antisemite jerk, Shaked just knows it in his heart of heart to be true.
some people, undoubtedly, received harsh criticism for displaying the symbols of an apartheid regime that slaughtered people by the hundreds of thousands. As they very well deserved.
Seems like a misnomer: 21% of Israeli citizens are Palestinians, they have the same rights as everybody else. There are 11 Arabs on the Knesset as we speak, and 1 on the Supreme Court. Doesn't sound like apartheid to me.
If "free speech" is really just supposed to mean "free speech, but only for people we like" then this is an excellent rebuttal. Otherwise it fails to address the complaint in any way whatsoever.
Yeah. It's relevant that these protests got genuinely violent and broke laws (both legally and arguably morally; this does still imply they should've filed charges before the arrest though.)
"It's relevant that these protests got genuinely violent and broke laws "
I'm going to object rather forcefully to the subject here. "Protests" are individuals, they do not have agency, they can not break laws. PEOPLE get violent and break laws.
That's an important objection here because your argument hinged on WHO "got genuinely violent and broke laws." Which individuals? In practice, of course, "the protests got violent" can describe anything from an actual riot to a situation where counter-protesters or even police start attacking people (who of course may then fight back). It tells me exactly nothing about where to assign responsibility, which (see previous) may not even belong with *anyone* in the protest group. So it is a far, far, FAR cry short of reasonable grounds to take legal action against *this specific individual.*
Did he attack anyone personally? Did he directly incite violence against anyone? Did he break other laws? Is there evidence? If none of those apply, then you're really just saying "well, I think he's a bad guy and that's reason enough." Which given the subject matter is absolutely corrosive to any sort of genuine free speech protection.
You're right, I shouldn't have stooped to sarcasm.
Still, agrajagain's comment seemed worthy of it. If their point was that Shaked Koplewitz was wrong to accuse him of actual violence, trotting out support for free speech doesn't seem on point.
If (and I confess I wasn't there) the disagreement was that he advocated violence, or indirectly supported violence, but did not actually perform any with his own hand, well, I trust you all supported Trump in January of 2021.
Well, I apologize for being so snotty in the way I
objected to your sarcasm. Arguments like the one you are having push *me* towards being irritable and mean, and about this issue I don’t even have an opinion yet — I’m still
wondering what *exactly* the guy did, and can’t find the info. In arguments like the one you’re engaged in I think 90% of what makes a difference
is opponents finding ways to weaken the illusion that those on the other side are hate-filled idiots.
When and where did this guy physically attack anyone? Where is the evidence that he did? Neither the article nor the commenter I'm responding to makes the claim that he did.
“Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, hasn’t been charged with any crime. A dossier on him compiled by Canary Mission, a group that tracks anti-Zionist campus activists, includes no examples of threatening or violent speech, just demands for divestment from Israel.”
Most Palestinian refugee camps today are more permanent's settlements with concrete buildings, paved roads, shops, schools.
The areas continue to be officially designated as "camps" for several important reasons:
- Legal status: The term "camp" preserves their special status under international law
- Administrative distinction: They remain under the administration of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency)
- Political significance: The term maintains the temporary nature of the refugee situation in principle, reflecting the unresolved nature of the Palestinian refugee issue.
It's entirely possible that Khalil was arrested for e.g. materially and substantially disrupting the operations of Columbia University, which should not be considered a free speech issue. But if so, that should have been mentioned in the news article, and in the Presidential announcement/"warning".
> But if so, that should have been mentioned in the news article, and in the Presidential announcement/"warning".
Are you criticising the arrest for being unjustified or the journalist for doing a crappy job?
It sure would be nice if the AP could have been more specific than "helped lead". Could they spend five minutes scouring their own archives to see if they've reported on this person in the past so we can see what he's actually done?
I'm criticizing both the arrest (or whatever it's being called) and the AP journalist. Hence my citing the CNN story, written by a journalist who did an at least moderately professional job.
He’s not been charged in any crime. Again, not “not convicted” - not even charged. As much as I despise pro-Hamas student protesters, this is supposed to be a free country.
And oh he is a green card holder, married to an American citizen who’s heavily pregnant with their child.
This shit stinks to high heaven, and yes, anybody who thought Trump was “for freedom of speech” had been sold a rotten Trump Steak.
Aren't specific charges usually only brought up after arrest? Aside from Trump being a blowhard and saying a lot of provocative stuff (which is standard for him), this still seems consistent with that (and by all reports there's plenty to charge this guy with)
You may be right in a narrow technical sense. Technically, you aren't "charged" until the prosecutor files your paperwork, but at least here in the States, you do have to be ACCUSED of a specific crime at the time of arrest, which is listed on the officer's complaint.
Yes when the suspect is arrested at the scene of a crime. Not when the suspect is arrested months after alleged crimes occurred. Back then he was charged with nothing.
Look, like I said, I despise these demonstrators who sided with evil. Of all times to protest for Palestine this was not the time. But if we only stand by our principles when it aligns with our preferences it becomes hard to look in the mirror. This is (well, used to be anyway) a free country, and we can only remain a free country when we protect the rights of unsympathetic people as equally as the sympathetic ones. You sure know the how "first they came for pro-Palestine demonstrators" story ends.
>Look, like I said, I despise these demonstrators who sided with evil. Of all times to protest for Palestine this was not the time.
How is protesting Israel's genocidal response [edit: or, if you prefer, Israel's totally reasonable response which some people misguidedly believe to be genocidal] to a terrorist attack "sid{ing} with evil," exactly?
Were the millions of Americans and Europeans who protested the Iraq war siding with evil? Were those protests despicable? Was that time Not The Time? What would have been the time--should they have waited until the war was over before protesting it? Do you reckon that would be a viable strategy for protesting wars?
Yeah, although given just how far the Overton window has gone (can you imagine how fast and harshly they would've responded if this had been KKK supporters attacking black people?), it's hard to get emotionally invested. But intellectually I agree with you on this.
Pro-Israel shills be unironically whining about "Muhhh antisemitic tropes" while simultaneously celebrating this and making veiled threats against the people they can't win arguments against on the internet that they're next.
I'm not so sure that the Democratic party is not just a fundraising machine, and they just generate more revenue when they're against the ropes, simple as.
This isn't an original take, but it man it just feels more and more like this is true.
You seem to be under the impression that Democrats are interested in regaining political power. But the people running the party are interested in only two things: lifelong sinecures and blocking the left. They're very happy to collect paychecks and corporate donations as an "opposition party" that offers no substantial opposition, and giving up structural advantages to Republicans just gives them an easier time playing good cop.
Ah, I wrote my comment before reading this. Anyway, yeah. :/
On the other hand, republicans seem to have an actual political project that members can rally behind. The parties really do appear to have a nice symbiotic relationship going.
ACX has had several threads on GLP-1 agonists such as semaglutide (Ozemic and Wegovy from Novo Nordisk) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound from Eli Lilly).
I have used semaglutide for 3.5 years and it has been a godsend for me. My weight has gone down 20%. My blood pressure is under 120 with half the medication I used to take.
The worst side effect has been in my bank account. The drugs have been very expensive. I started in 2021, paying ~$1330/mo for a box of 4 Wegovy injectors (you use 1 a week). That is ~$17,300/yr.
Medicare absolutely will not pay for weight loss drugs of any sort, unless you doctor can certify that you are diabetic, and I never was close.
After tirzepatide was FDA approved, the price of semaglutiude began to come down. In the last few months I have been paying ~$810 for a 4 week injector of Ozempic. But, that is still ~$10,500/yr.
Last week week there was more price relief. Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, created NovoCare Pharmacy which will deliver Wegovy to your home for a cash price of $499 per 4 pen package.
The service is for people who do not have insurance coverage for Wegovy, such as I. They are not dispensing Ozempic at this time.
This price represents a saving of $722 over filling prescriptions of Wegovy at my pharmacy and $312 over Ozempic.
In order to use the service your doctor must send a prescription for Wegovy to NovoCare electronically. More information is available on the program website:
I understand that for most people, the drugs are still very expensive. But, the price cuts are a predictable result of a competitive market. As time goes on other pharmas will introduce more competitors. Also the patents will expire and there will be generics. The price will go down and more people will be able to use these drugs which will be very good for them.
Note: I will not use or recommend compounding pharmacies. The FDA has warned against them.
I didn't even pay for it, because I volunteered for the medical research. :D
These things work like magic. They basically turn off the excessive hunger, and then keeping a healthy diet becomes *much* easier. So if you can afford them, definitely try them.
Thank you for that info. I believe I am going to begin taking tirzepatide soon. Mine also will not be coved by insurance, and I believe I am going to try hacking the dosage system. It looks to me like all dosages of these meds cost the same: A 0.5 mg pen costs the same as a 2 mg pen -- is that right? So many are filling scripts for the large dosage pens, then removing the part that contains the drug and using a syringe to draw out only part of the contents. Using this system you can get 4 0.5 mg doses out of a 2 mg pen, while only paying as much as you would for a single 0.5 mg pen.
My understanding is that everyone begins these drugs on the low dose, so this system would be useful for the period of beginning the drug. But also, I looked into the research on the relationship between drug dosage and weight loss , and it appears that only going up to 1/2 the maximum dose of a semiglutide and taking that over the long haul produces almost as much weight loss as taking the full dose, and with fewer side effects.
Do you know anyone who’s doing this, or have any info about how it works?
Thank you! Why are they offering this deal, do you think? Zepbound users lose and average of 18% of their weight in the period when Ozempic users lose 12. And I think Zepbound is newer.
I believe all the inexpensive formulations are by compounding pharmacies, and I'm pretty sure that by law their contents have to be different in some way from the drug sold by the company with the patent. I don't know how to get info about whether that's worth worrying about. Do you?
The price of Hims shares has gone down by half since the FDA recently declared the semaglutide shortage over. Compounding pharmacies have to stop now, or at least within two months. What made the compounding legal was the shortage, not a difference in contents. For tirzepatide, the FDA just won a court case against the compounding pharmacies after it declared the shortage over at the end of last year. Hims plans to sell liraglutide later this year, it is out of patent but has to be injected daily and has much less effect.
(But I have little medical knowledge here and follow this only as the Hims investment and trading story.)
The FDA has a lot of agendas besides informing the public, and their notice really falls short of good information. I point out some ways they do that in my post.
There is a procedure by which compounding pharmacies can be inspected and certified and if I did use a compounded version of the drug I would only buy from one that has met that standard and been certified.
I've got a fair amount of skepticism going on about how worried to be, though. For instance, they say some problems with using these compounded drugs have to do with dosage errors. The thing about compounded drugs is that most or all do not come in pens that give an automatic injection. They come in vials, and the user has to draw the dose they want out of the vial with a syringe. Doesn't surprise me that some users get confused or careless and draw up the wrong dose, but I am confident that you or I could do that accurately.
Then FDA says some people just choose to take more than the prescribed dose. Well we're not going to do that, right?
Then there's the thing about compounding pharmacies using a salt of the semaglutide. I don't know how much to worry about that. It was mentioned on here at some point, and someone who sounded like they knew what's what said that made no difference, because the semaglutide feel right off the salt molecule as soon as it hit the blood.
And then the FDA gives numbers in the 100's of adverse events reported for compounded semaglutides. But we don't know how many adverse events are reported for the prescription version. A fair number of people have quite unpleasant GI symptoms from these things, and contact their doctors about vomiting, constipation, bad heartburn, etc. Seems sleazy and sneaky of FDA to me for them not to clarify whether using a salt of the semaglutide is clearly a bad idea, or whether they merely have no studies proving that it works fine, and whether there are substantially more bad events for compounded semaglutides than for the prescription version.
I didn't expect any better. But I reserve the right to be pissed off anyhow. The FDA hasn't done me any harm with that page, but they are feeding toxic pablum instead of nutritious facts to members of the public whose taxes pay them, and who don't have the skills and social network needed to zoom around and gather good info on their own.
I recall Scott being skeptical of the Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis, linking it to a manifestation of the prevailing theories of mind rather than being more intrinsic. I wonder if his views evolved since.
I sought out this thread to check in on the state of steel-manning this.
I doubt this is a surprise to the Trump team...there's been plenty of allusions to an initial difficult/shock phase to the economy in the interest of long term economic health.
I'd really like to understand more about Trump-II economic thought / why this is good actually. Of course I'm being flippant here, this might be terrible but I do want to understand the motivation and justifications.
I would very much like to see three links to the "plenty of allusions to an initial difficult/shock phase to the economy" from Trump or his people dated BEFORE Trump's inauguration, or at most, the first week after. Then maybe we can try to steel-man this. Otherwise we really have nothing to use as a starting point.
I don't think anyone was predicting a shock phase, but it was very common to believe that the stock market was overvalued relative to the 'real' economy prior to Trump taking office, so it would be easy to believe anything that would rattle investor confidence would cause this.
Look, I don't care about what "anyone" predicted, or if the market is overvalued, which it has been since roughly 2012 and which has not prevented it from going up with only brief interruptions under three presidents. The poster made a specific claim about "plenty of allusions" from Trump people and I want to see those. I don't recall Trump running on giving the nation a shock therapy, everything was going to be tremendous from day one. But let's see if captainclam comes up with anything.
It looks like Musk definitely did say this, so I guess I saw this a while ago and have just been proceeding under the assumption that it was an understood-but-less-broadcast aspect of their economic policy. So you're right, there have not been "plenty of allusions" among the actual Trump team.
That was a really minor point though, I'm just curious about any defenses of the trajectory we're on.
Thanks, this gives us something to go on. The charitable view is that Musk genuinely believes the national debt to be such a crisis that it requires an immediate drastic action - shrinking government significantly, which creates short-term pain. Of course this is patently wrong, the debt load is higher than maybe I'd like it to see, but nothing was flashing red in Nov. 2025. But Musk appears to be uninterested in economic data and seems to have no idea about how modern monetary system functions, so there.
Trump just seems to like tariffs. I really struggle to steel-man this one.
If you want to see the most delicious thinly veiled demure cope this side of 2025, go to r/Conservative and see the responses to "Do you really regret voting for Trump?".
Such timeless gems as "I ain't no regret not voting for Kamala, but man my 401K hates me", my brother in Allah, you are being royally fucked in the most intimate financial sense possible and all you can still think about is some woman living rent-free in your head for close to a year? You probably deserve this.
I'm, however, overflowing with sympathy towards those who didn't vote for the orange scum. One more reason why Small is Beautiful and the small-scale asteroid-nations of outer space will be glorious.
> all you can still think about is some woman living rent-free in your head for close to a year?
Your comment makes sense in a different context but not this one.
While at some point, "Kamala would have been worse" ceases to be a good justification for whatever Trump is doing, you're literally talking about a thread where people are asked if they regret voting for Trump over Kamala. Bringing up Kamala is entirely reasonable.
The problem is not bringing up Kamala, the problem is bringing up Kamala while their pension funds are being wiped out, and then insisting that Kamala was still a bullet dodged and that this is worth all the money being wiped out by the moron they elected over Kamala.
"Rent-free" is not supposed to imply that Kamala shouldn't exist in their mind at all, it's supposed to imply that her priority should be lower than the one we can infer from the comment.
It's entirely reasonable to be bothered by Trump's actions, morally, financially, whatever, and still think that him being president is preferable to Kamala or another Democrat. You just have to think that Kamala would have been worse. It's also entirely within scope to think that taking some financial pain is worth gains in other areas, for instance if you really care about the trans debate or other culture war features.
The DJIA is up 6.87% for the last twelve months. It's down 1% since the day before election day. It's 7% off the all time highs of January. This is not a "wipe out".
While I don't expect Trump's policies to be good for the economy, and while stocks going down is at least minor bayesian evidence for recent news being bad news for business, I would be very hesitant to draw strong conclusions from stock prices changing by a few percent on a particular day. Stock prices go up and down all the time for lots of reasons.
If this turns out to be the opening phase of a major bear market, then stronger conclusions could be drawn from that, but today is too soon to tell.
The S&P 500 is down about 8.5% from the all-time high (February 19). 20% is an official bear market, so we're well on our way if trends continue. We usually have one of those every few years. We'll see how things go this time.
Yeah, we will. Trump is attempting a major reorganization of the US economy, and by extension the global economy, and he’s coming at it pretty hard. This is more than just cyclical I think. It’s a big shift and a lot of things are going to fall off the shelf.
Yeah. I think there’s still a goodly amount of people who still are, which is what we’re seeing start to fall apart in the markets in my opinion. I am starting to smell realization and panic in the air.
This a nuanced situation. Generally one should ignore daily fluctuations of stock prices and think of them as kind of Brownian motion/noise process. However, occasionally some big "new" understanding gains an avalanche-like velocity where human market participants react with enough money to make things move, reflecting their understanding of the situation. In this case, we can view markets as sending a signal. The signal may be short-lived, or it may start some prolonged trend, but a non-random signal it is nonetheless.
As you can probably tell, this view straddles "random walk" and "actual humans act" models of market behavior.
So how do you tell the two apart? If you have to bring in some form of outside knowledge to distinguish, say, the current 8.5% drop from last summer's 8.5% drop, I doubt that "signal" is the right word for it.
This is where we have to look at the underlying causes. Bayesianism is of no help here, we have to understand the driving mechanism. Was it a technical glitch? A fat-fingered options trade? A significant new information coming to light? The "outside knowledge" is important to understand this.
Markets reflect a sum of individual actions of millions of participants, both human and machine. Most of the time, the actions lack an over-arching driving force, resulting in random(ish) behavior. But sometimes an over-arching force shows up and suddenly correlations go to near 1.
OK, but then it's not clear what informational value is being added: it seems to reduce to "the markets can alert us to a problem, provided we already know there's a problem."
I'm not sure I follow. The informational value varies with each case. Sometimes all it does is tell us, huh, market participants think trade wars are bad and push "sell" button really hard. Sometimes you investigate and find out that an options trader entered account number into the dollar amount field, clicked away every warning message because those always pop up, and triggered an avalanche of selling. Sometimes there isn't any specific cause one can identify. Etc. etc. etc.
Q: How many Zizians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: At least two (one left hemisphere, and one right hemisphere), and the light bulb will end up broken... but that's okay, because for complicated game-theoretic reasons there is now more light in a parallel universe, and the electron-eating light bulb deserved it anyway.
One, they assassinate the landlord, ending up in jail and spawning 69 essays in the NYT and WaPo about how Rationalists are the evilest cult to ever exist after Christianity officially became a religion.
Depends on how broadly construed the category "social media and streaming" is. If it's just the major platforms (say, Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, etc), then it might be fine. If it's a huge chunk of the entire Internet, people would probably riot.
I would go for a nationwide power grid shutdown once a week, or maybe once a month, on Sundays at 9pm, so we can all see a Bortle 1 sky routinely (what the night sky looks like with no light pollution).
they turned many businesses "off" on sundays to attend church and tv stations signed off every day 40 years ago, and honestly i don't think people of that generation would say it was a bad thing.
omnipresent media isn't always a total blessing, and one could argue we need more distance from
Crippling riots, purge/luigi voilence killing those responsible and most people do it without phones so the cia spying network gets a unplanned for stress test
You didnt think that thru; if you know the internet is down for 24 hours (and its a the governments spy device), your going to leave it home; its a fucking brick without the internet.
*I* leave the phone as far away from myself as I can, because I view it as a necessary evil. *These people* will carry it with them to their crimes, in the addict-riddled hope that it will reconnect somewhere along the way.
3d printed guns and drones will be newer then the ye old wild west sheriff(who was mostly a myth anyway)
They are complaining about "ghost guns" with their buy backs working and free access to porn(which decreases all forms of rape) and other young male sedatives. A sudden declaration ont stop addiction on the governments time table and withdrawal often includes worse behavior then the baseline.
Oh and its not like there hasnt been city crippling riots.
If it was just social media, people are immediately happier and the policy has widespread support. In a year there are measurable positive social outcomes.
Immediate rebellion due to an arbitrary and capricious violation of freedom of speech / freedom of the press, which does not inhibit the ability to coordinate resistance via same?
Running with the sense of the question, though, I don't think we see much change. Whatever the impact of social media and streaming on our society, I'm pretty sure it's durable enough that a day a week isn't enough time to change it. People post on Saturday night about how #productive their #disconnectday was, along with their backlog of sexy pictures. Advertisers throw a minor fit but adapt. These are fundamentally stay-at-home activities, so I think we see an uptick in other stay-at-home activities. Sale of pulp novels increases. People watch more TV. (Does YouTube count as social media?) Streamers move anything planned on Saturday to Friday afternoon, Saturday night, or Sunday. I don't know what happens to video game sales.
Basically I think it would slow down social media use about as much as the Sabbath prevents Jews from cooking: sure, you're not doing it on the day itself, but there are workarounds.
I recently moved to the Bay Area (Berkeley) and have been looking for work. My background is in development economics (have an MA, left a PhD program without the degree), and I've done almost nothing except academic economics work so far in my career. So I can do some data analysis and have a very good grounding in economics and academic tasks. I also love writing and my ideal job would be research-adjacent or policy-based (e.g. GiveWell, GiveDirectly, both of which I've applied to), but as a start I want to try to cast a wide net. I have good teaching credentials at the college level and have written op-eds on foreign policy matters, both of which are avenues I'm exploring as well. My main hits so far have been through idealist, and I've posted on the EA forum and signed up for 80,000 hours 1-on-1 advising.
Feel free to DM me with thoughts of where to look! Thanks in advance!
International development has been undergoing a slow (and recently very rapid) decline for a long time. Do you have an area or region of specialty or was it just general development economics? Do you have contacts or languages? To be honest, often the answer right now is going to be doing development work (that is, fundraising). There's not many new jobs.
I've recently attended a local "ecstatic dance" event. At each one, someone mentioned valuing "sovereignty." I'm not quite sure what they mean. It occurred to me that they might mean something like "sovereignty of the individual" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ownership), but that concept seems to flow from classical liberalism, and my spidey sense is that the sovereigntists were not classical liberals -- I was getting strong hippy-dippy vibes. Can anyone shed light on what they might have meant by "sovereignty"?
I spent many years volunteering at a large local arts center in the city I grew up in. I myself am a musician but I got to meet a wide array of different artists in all kinds of areas, both local and traveling. From my observations the people involved in the different types of avant garde dance were hands down the oddest people of the group. The best one I remember was a group that refused to refer to what they did as "dance" trying to compose a flyer to get people to come watch them without describing it as "dance" at all. They also did an interview on the local NPR station where they kept correcting the host when they tried to use the d-word.
edit - a downthread comment reminded me of what they picked for the flyer "Bodies. Space. Motion."
For hippies, this translates contextually as 'strong vibes of complete respect for bodily autonomy of (at least) humans in the space, affirmed verbally'. Pattern match to express consent in BDSM scenes, actual anarchists, and safety-conscious scenarios like preparing to parachute or dive.
So it's a fancy hippie way of saying "please don't feel anyone up while dancing"?
(Note: I'm not making fun of them for using fancy in-groupy terms for easily understood concepts, Lord knows that this is a helluva glass house to sit in while throwing that particular stone...)
I think unlikely, given the event OP was at, which is the kind of event where establishing clear protocols around touching other people is pretty standard. If they were talking about vaccines, taxation, child support, or the Evils of Government, more likely.
>What fraction of "sovereign citizens" are embroiled in legal disputes at any given time, and how does that compare to regular citizens?
and it responded:
It’s difficult to pin down an exact percentage because there isn’t a comprehensive, nationwide study that tracks legal disputes among self‐identified sovereign citizens. Most of what we know comes from law enforcement observations and anecdotal reports rather than systematic research.
What We Do Know:
Sovereign Citizens’ Litigious Behavior:
Sovereign citizens adhere to a fringe ideology that often involves rejecting government authority and, as a result, they tend to engage in legal actions—frequently filing lawsuits or presenting “paper terrorism” in court. Experts and law enforcement agencies have noted that, relative to their small numbers, sovereign citizens are disproportionately represented in court filings and legal disputes.
Comparative Estimates:
Although numbers vary widely, some experts have suggested that among those who actively identify with the sovereign citizen movement, a substantial fraction (in some cases, anecdotal observations imply that many—even a majority of the active participants—could be involved in one legal dispute or another at any given time). In stark contrast, studies of the general population indicate that only a small percentage (often estimated roughly between 1% and 5%) of regular citizens are involved in ongoing legal conflicts.
The Caveats:
– The movement is decentralized, and its adherents are not tracked by any official registry.
– “Legal disputes” can cover a wide range of actions, from minor filings to major court battles, and definitions vary between studies or reports.
– Most available data is based on localized observations or law enforcement assessments rather than rigorous, peer-reviewed research.
In Summary:
While exact figures are elusive, sovereign citizens are known to be much more likely to be involved in legal disputes compared to the general citizenry. Whereas only a small fraction (around 1–5%) of regular citizens might be embroiled in ongoing legal conflicts at any given time, a much higher proportion of active sovereign citizens—perhaps even a majority—could be engaged in such disputes. However, these figures should be viewed as rough estimates rather than precise measurements.
Is the benefit of taking SSRIs higher or lower than average in cases where the cause of a depression is known and present in the subject's life, such as difficulties in their primary relationship?
Maybe the right thing to do is to fix the problem in your relationship but maybe that problem has so depressed you that you lack the neurochemical reserves to do it. Seems to me that an SSRI could help a person in that circumstance.
Psychologist here. I'm not sure anybody knows. It doesn't seem to me like what's in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) makes it possible to distinguish between chronic unhappiness in response to a longstanding bad situation and chronic unhappiness due to some brain quirk that's correctable with a nudge from a drug. The distinction may not even be all that meaningful for most unhappy people. Problems that seem insoluble and soul-crushing to a depressed person might seem either soluble or no big deal to someone in good spirits. Still, my advice would be for you to start by trying to solve the relationship problem, and think of SSRI's as a fallback. My impression, from seeing many people take SSRI's, is that on average they help some but are very far from being a magic bullet.
Besides trying to turn Russia away from its alliance with China, is there any other reasonable explanation for the Trump administration geopolitical strategy regarding Russia and the EU? IMO the only one that seems reasonable is that the MAGA movement sees the EU (and most of its member states bar Hungary and a few other former Eastern Bloc countries maybe) as "beyond saving" because they have become "degenerate" etc. and are basically the main enemies of MAGA now that the Democrats are weak in the US, which means that the EU and most of its members need to be fought (if not militarily at least economically and culturally) and thus the US needs to ally with Russia to subjugate the EU. Does this make sense from an "NRX " perspective?
So coming back to this thread I started more than a month ago, I am still not completely convinced by any of the arguments. But I tend to lean most towards the explanation that it's mostly about "culture wars", with the EU seen as an extension of the American "liberal" establishment, and possibly even as a "betrayer of Western culture" by most of MAGA, while Russia is seen as having more in common in terms of values with MAGA and the various other movements on the right that support them. Thus, the acrimony between MAGA and the EU and the "bromance" between them and Russia.
The Ukraine is not winning the war and wont win the war. Better to halt the death and destruction now than throw more bodies on the fire.
Russia is not nearly the threat that they have been portrayed as. While not good guys in any sense, they represent only a minor threat to Europe, and that threat is mostly due to nukes. Therefore, it makes no sense to continually treat them as enemies as that only increases the chance that they will end up using their nukes or generally become a threat.
Europe doesnt like any of this so they should fund their own wars and defense. They are big economies now, if they cant manage to pay for their own defense, then they dont get to call the shots.
How do you propose to halt the death and destruction? Vladimir Putin isn't finished with all the killing and destroying he set out to do, and anything that suggests the US might not keep supplying Ukraine with weapons will make "I can still get all that killing and destroying I want done" seem even more appealing to Putin than it was six months ago. When, as you may recall, he was still very much up for a lot more prolonged killing and destroying.
I propose a truce, plain and simple. If Putin doesnt go for it or breaks the treaty, we can deal with that. I dont buy the arguments that there is nothing we can do because Putin is max evil and wont stop until something something. This war has been costly for Russia as well. Peace is worth pursuing for everyone.
It's not clear what you mean by "truce", but I'm guessing it's something like an immediate cease-fire on present lines. Putin could probably have had that any time in the past two years, so it's unlikely he would go for it now. But I'm more curious as to your "we can deal with that" part. If Putin simply says "no", how do you imagine us dealing with that? And why haven't *we* done that in the past two years?
Bringing the war to an end after three years is a worthwhile goal in itself. Long drawn-out wars can destabilize the world order and brutalizes the people fighting it (which is part of the destabilizing risk).
...clearing away a main obstacle for a future realigment with Russia can be considered an extra bonus.
I don't really model the current administration as having strategy in any meaningful sense. It has "whatever sounds good to Trump today" which its various advisors, hangers-on and allies try to spin into a coherent narrative to make it sound strategic.
An even moderately-competent strategic thinker wouldn't be trying to push strongly forward on an extreme shift in foreign policy, an extreme shift in trade policy and multiple extreme shifts in domestic policy all at the same time: each of these efforts is interfering with the others. They'd instead prioritize by either the most urgent or the easiest win and lay lower-cost groundwork for the others while working on that. Trump's actions around the tariffs, for example, are shockingly poorly timed at achieving either of their obvious goals. If they were about diplomatic pressure he should have focused narrowly on one or two countries at a time until he got what he wanted. If they were about restoring U.S. manufacturing, he should have started with positive incentives (tax breaks or subsidies) to get companies actually building manufacturing capacity, with a promise of increasing tariffs around specific industries to make sure it would be profitable: slapping on sky-high tariffs before anyone can possibly shift production is *highly* counterproductive.
Similar with foreign policy, I think if "ally with Russia and turn it away from China" were a real goal being pursued with even a moderate level of strategic thinking, it would look pretty different from this. Laying actual groundwork before turning on a time and alienating a bunch of longtime allies seems like a bare-minimum precursor. As it is, I'm sure Russia is very happy to see the coalition arrayed against them splintering, but I can't see how or why it would give them any reason to break with China. They can just take the free gift and keep on doing like they've been doing. Driving a wedge between allies usually involves offering something that's good for one and bad for the other and requires at least some amount of commitment. Not something that's helps one substantially without it having to lift a finger, while being neutral-to-slightly-positive for the other.
I definitely think this is a good explanation...Trump seems to be just very impulsive and likes to be flattered. I guess it worked in his previous role in real estate etc., so he probably thinks it works in politics (both domestic and international) too...
Even in real estate it only works when you have long moments of overwhelming leverage (like in Trump Tower) so you can agree to a bad deal impulsively then "change the deal" just as impulsively at a time the counterparty can't do anything about it.
He thinks of the EU as Democrats, and Russia as a Republican faction to try to convert: he's simply applying his model of domestic politics to foreign policy.
Forget about "other reasonable explanations"; I'm not seeing how the administration's geopolitical strategy can reasonably be expected to turn Russia away from its alliance with China. That seems to me basically an underpants-gnome level master plan. Every reason Russia has for allying with China will remain even after a Trumpian "peace" deal in Ukraine, and I haven't seen Trump propose anything that would significantly change that.
I understand that Trump has said that he *wants* to turn Russia away from its alliance with China, but wanting is not a strategy. The strategy part seems to be missing.
It can't hurt to try, it's not like the US is gaining anything from antagonising Russia. And Russia would benefit from restoring it economic ties to Europe and the US, and for cultural reasons has wanted closer relations with the West since 1991, or at least not be rebuked. Also if you're a strategically significant medium sized power in a contest between two great powers it's often a good move to play them off against each other.
I don't think it's unimaginable that taking a more diplomatic approach now could nudge Russia towards a more neutral stance in China-US confrontation. Even if there's a chance the relationship might be irreparably damaged and Russia's material interests favour aligning with China.
OK, but where is the "try"? Wanting is not trying. Hoping is not trying. Wanting and doing something unrelated to Russia's core reasons for maintaining an alliance with China, hoping that this will pull Russia away from China, is not trying. In order to meaningfully *try*, you have to have a strategy by which specific actions are expected to lead to specific results.
Step 1.) Stop fighting a proxy war on Russia's border.
Step 2.) ?????....Probably just step 1 is a good start but otherwise also do normal alliance building stuff like saying nice things about them, cooperating with them and appealing to their cultural desire to be accepted back into to the european and european descended community.
Step 3.) Profit, and avoid adding a european theatre to the upcoming third world war.
If their desire to be accepted back into the European and European descended community was strong enough to actually change their behavior they wouldn't be advertising an intention to genocide a European ethnicity right now.
Russia was treated as a pariah since well before the Ukraine war. And I think that pariah status and general Western hostility were major causes of the war in the first place. The Russians view the war as retaliation in a relationship that's already spoiled.
Step 2: draft some kind of new deal for who gets what influence in the middle east / Africa that benefits big players at the expense of small ones. The biggest obstacle = Turkey, probably.
The Trump world view is all about making deals. The geopolitical landscape isn't about good guys who are our friends and bad guys who are our enemies, it's about the US versus everyone else, and the US's responsibility to itself is to make advantageous deals with the other players.
This means treating the other players more or less equally; no more special treatments for traditional friends or traditional enemies, the only question is: what can you do for me today? This is jarring if you're still looking at things through a friends-and-enemies lens, if you see friends and enemies being treated in the same way then it feels like the US is suddenly favouring its enemies over its friends, but really it's just shifting towards treating them more consistently.
Is this a good idea? Maybe. On one hand, the moralistic "good guys vs bad guys" narrative of international relations has led the US into many bad wars. It has also led to a situation where the US is arguably being taken advantage of, subsidising the defence of Europe while countries like half of NATO refuses to pay for its own defence. A third point against it would be that the good guys vs bad guys narrative was barely more than a hypocritical fig leaf to begin with, e.g. why sanctions against Cuba but not China?
I think the most generous interpretation is that he wants Europe to pay its own way for it’s protection from Russia, and the USA will remain an ally on those terms.. I think the worst possible interpretation is that he doesn’t want Europe as an ally anymore and will actively help to beat it down and dominate it. But first, Canada…
There is nothing wrong with taking a generous interpretation, but it still has to fit the evidence in the first place, which I don't believe yours does. If all Trump wanted was to "encourage" Europe to do more for their own defence, he could have done so without throwing them under the bus.
For example, he could help Ukraine win the war to solve the immediate crisis, preserve the US leadership role, and THEN retreat US troops from EU territory or whatever drastic measure he wants to take. That way, Europe knows just as well that it has to prepare for the eventual Russian recovery on their own and what's at stake if they don't.
How so? Ukraine has been punching way above their weight for 3 years without that kind of support. They have 400k soldiers on the frontline and another 400k in reserves against 700k Russians on the front. They just need the weapons to properly arm these men. That's all the help they've been asking for from day 1.
They don't need "money for guns", they just need guns. We've got plenty of guns sitting in warehouses that we're never going to use, that we haven't gotten around to getting rid of mostly because safely disposing of unwanted munitions costs more than just posting a guard on the warehouse
Indeed, most of the "money for guns" that has been sent to Ukraine so far, is just the book value of guns we've already paid for and are never going to see that money again, but federal law and accounting standards require it be bookkept as an "expense".
We've also paid for some new guns (well, missiles) that Ukraine particularly needs, but that's a small fraction of the total and it mostly goes to rebuilding the American arms industry and and providing American workers with manufacturing jobs. And a bit was sent out as actual money to buy old stockpiles of ex-Soviet ammunition that Ukraine can use but we don't make; that is I think an insignificant part of the total.
well there's all kinda ways to skin a cat. I don't lean to the most generous interpretation much myself but I thought I would offer it up.Just because you would do it differently doesn't mean he isn't doing it his way. I lean towards my darker interpretation personally.
Surely this way is much more effective. Whatever he does can be undone in 4 years, the Ukraine war might last that long itself and once it is over the urgency will be gone.
The Ukraine war is quite unlikely to last that long. I am morbidly curious as to your plan for undoing the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Ukraine in 2029.
From an (western) european perspective, the term 'censorship' here is very debatable.
US and (various) EU views on free speech are culturally quite different but even then I'm under the impression that there are a few misunderstandings.
AFAIK there is only one *opinion* you cannot publicly *promote*, which is holocaust denial, and even then you'll probably never end up in jail for it, unless you make it a long and repeated personal crusade (those guys end up with probation and, sometimes, a few months).
Governements are also enforcing anti 'hate speech' laws, yes, but in the specific understanding of the term being " *Public* speech that expresses *hate* or *encourages violence towards* a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation".
One can still pretty much yell any of their wildest takes online or on national TV, publish it in a 12 volumes essay if they can provide a few simili-arguments, and even create, raise and fund a political party targeting their issue if they're smart enough to look rational and polite.
The only 'censorship' we have is the same as in every free country : it's cultural.
Journalists will refrain from allocating too much space and time to ideas they consider too far from reasonable debate, people will frown upon things socially discouraged, and more or less be open to new strange ideas.
All of this is just a complete mess because we're all so networked now, always asked to form an opinion on everything despite being built for quick decision-making based on inferences.
As for 'fact-checking', well the idea is to present FACTS and sources to enable a rationalist approach of debates, but of course the result is not exempt of sociological bias from the media - any media - and need caution and adjustments. But I cannot remotely understand how this could hurt US tech companies... EU asked for comments moderation and respect of the aforementioned laws, as they do with any EU based media. They never asked for political alignment.
Another common narrative here is that what's 'hurting' the tech giants is that EU is way more careful and protective (doesn't mean in any way it's enough btw) about it's citizens personal data, and that it annoys the sh** out of the GAFAMs - we still name them like that here, but 'Broligarchy' and/or 'Techno-Barons' are gaining traction.
The only opinion I have about that atm is that I'm nowhere near being able to write this on EU built computer and that it's a shame.
I don't think your description of what it takes to be convicted of hate speech in EU countries fits what happened to Jussi Halla-Aho, who is a public intellectual and a leading politician (currently the Speaker of the Parliament) and who was convicted by the Supreme Court for what seems to me to be perfectly reasonable discourse.
I'd never heard of him before your comment, so all I have so far, after a quick search, is his wikipedia page, which states that he “intentionally made controversial statements in order to verify the response of the judiciary”.
I can see how these specific controversial claims about an ethnic population genetic traits could have been reasonable discourse, since it seems they where mirroring non-so-controversial arguments of the same type made about Finns and trying to make a point about free-speech, but since said judiciary response was
- at first to dismiss the charges of hate speech ("ethnic agitation" in the finnish law) while charging him a symbolic fine of a few hundred dollars for another, lesser crime ("disturbing religious worship")
- and then, on appeal, to eventually retaining the ethnic agitation charge and immediately adapating the fine accordingly by... asking for 70 bucks more
to me it really looks more like an attempt at calming the public debate than anything else, and that quite fits my description.
Not sure how he wasn't brought to a trial for writing “Since rapes will increase in any case, the appropriate people should be raped: in other words, green-leftist do-gooders and their supporters" and then immediately naming some of the politicians he had in mind, though.
But of course this is only a wikipedia page and it lack context and counter arguments. If you have some time to elaborate and/or hint at other sources, I'd be interested.
The rape thing I don't really see any legal issue with. It was just a tone-deaf version of "if someone is to suffer the consequences of policy X, it should be the supporters of policy X".
Being forced in front of a judge is not benign and not a great experience for anyone, but I would argue this is quite a fringe example :
- the criticism is particulary and playfully provocative
- I like the use of pure logic but some parts of the argument are debatable and could have been logically rebutted by the court.
- most importantly, while I concede that the chilling effect is somehow justified (in a 'first step of very a long walk towards a slippery slope' way), pragmatically and symbolicly the nature of the actual final real-world consequences here alleviate a lot of the initial chill.
As for the second part, sorry but I'm afraid I'm lost in translation here about what you mean by 'a tone-deaf version'.
Yeah. I follow the (Western) European Right quite a lot these days on Twitter, and there's definitely a feeling amongst a lot of them that the "elites" are openly antagonistic towards them...so kind of similar to MAGA vis-à-vis the Democrats. But I'm not sure if this sentiment is as popular amongst their voters as it is amongst their elites...
I think it varies a lot from one country to another. E.g. in Sweden, there's been quite strong ostracism of the nationalist party (things may have mellowed out a bit in the last few years while I haven't been paying much attention), and I think that's something that voters/sympathizers have been very much aware of, whereas in both Denmark and Norway, the nationalists have been an accepted part of the political landscape for a long time now.
The Right is currently in charge in most european countries and working with what I would spontaneously define as the "elites" prior to a bit of thinking.
If you're talking about what's commonly reffered as the "far-right", I'd say yes, it's a wildly common feeling amongst their voters.
But imho it would be fair to say that one of their main common trait is that they have the same feeling about pretty much everyone...
Now, the thing is that the sentiment is also very prevalent amongst the "far-left", the "left", the "greens" (and of course in pretty much any ethnic/religious/sexual minority as well).
Of course the "elites" definition is very different from one group to another, but everyone seems to feel constraint and prejudiced by 'the other's' discourse and actions.
To me the 'new' thing (compared to a few decades ago) is that the Rights have finally found their own version of "Elites" : a word vague enough to agglomerate all the things they dislike/fear/frown upon without having to name them and make it a whole, seemingly homogenous entity, (instead of the disparate minorities groups with often conflicting interests they are), which allows for that horrible "they're everywhere" feeling, amplified by our new social interconnectedness.
It's not new per se ("the left" is actually also an agglomerate of disparate groups struggling to find a common narrative) ; the new thing is that, nowadays, the "centrists", the "moderate right" and about any conservative can at the same time be "the Elite" in charge AND have enough fear of (read 'being pissed enough by') the horrible and ubiquitous "Wokes" to allow themselves to find reasons to befriend the far right.
I think it is more personal than this. When Trump talks to Putin, Putin commiserates with him about how they have both been persecuted by the 'liberals' and Europeans who look down on them for being real men with real balls. Between us, he implies, we can bury them all. That kind of talk is crack to Trump.
I think Russia is viewed as a sort of redoubt for European culture, however odd that seems.
Then too, I have heard expressed the view of certain conservatives, that there isn't a nickel's worth of difference between Russians and Ukrainians so there is little reason to care about this fight.
I'm not endorsing this - this conservative really just feels an opinion would be presumptuous, beyond the absolute certainty that Putin started the war - but I move in very different company than that found here so thought I'd relay.
I don't think it has much to do with wokeness. After Iraq and Afghanistan, the public doesn't have the appetite for another quagmire. At the beginning there was more support for Ukraine, but that waned quickly as the fight settled into a stalemate. The populist wing of the Republican party in particular is against spending any more money on foreign wars. Trump has been consistent in his position that Europe needs to start funding its own defense instead of relying on the US. The average American intuitively accepts that the unipolar moment is over and wants the government to focus on domestic issues. Ukraine is just a random country on the other side of the globe and they don't particularly care what happens there.
>The average American intuitively accepts that the unipolar moment is over and wants the government to focus on domestic issues.
I have another take on that. I think it might not be ending unipolarity so much as getting back to an America First mindset. We're not the world's rich uncle, though liberals and the rest of the world sometimes like to pretend that we are. The purpose of American foreign policy isn't to help the world, it's to help America. Frequently that takes the form of helping other countries but that's not its ultimate goal. There needs to be a quid pro quo and I think the right thinks we've gotten away from that. I tend to agree. The right is fine with foreign aid, it just wants it to come with a healthy side of self-interest. We're still the biggest dog, after all. It's time to start making countries offers they can't refuse.
"The average American intuitively accepts that the unipolar moment is over"
If this does come about it will be entirely self inflicted. America's position as the unipolar power was, if anything, made stronger by the fact that Ukraine held out and continued to hold out against Russia, and every day the war went on further cemented the US position as such. Giving up our status as the unipolar power is not just terrible for international politics, it's also bad for domestic politics (as evidenced by rising prices on everything coupled by the ongoing market crash)
Is it terrible for international politics in the long run, as in, terrible for people who are not U.S. American? Why?
At any rate, it's very funny that MAGA is leading that way. A healthy, conscious acceptance that the US can and should aim at no more than being primus inter pares (and not forever) would make a great deal more sense.
More primus, less pares. The issue is more that the US even nominally agrees to be bound by things like "international law" instead of telling the Hague to pound sand.
Yes, they're doing okay with regard to the ICC, but not so much with the ICJ.
And even with the ICC, in using it as a cudgel against enemies, they make it seem like it's something to be treated with respect instead of contempt.
Also, while the Hague Invasion Act's prohibition on U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the ICC is good, the exceptions (for NATO, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, those with Article 98 agreements) make it pretty toothless.
To be clear, I meant for American standing* in international politics (e.g. the ability for the US to get good trade deals, access to resources, foreign security, etc.)
But, honestly, I think there's a very strong case to made that Pax Americana is an incredibly good thing. There are two reasons for this:
- first, Great Power conflict is incredibly vicious. This has been true from the colonial wars all the way to the cold war, and with the addition of nukes the chance for things to get really bad really quick dials everything to 11. Multipolar power centers invariably lead to great power conflict -- this is almost tautological. So I tend to think that on face, all unipolar worlds are better than all multipolar ones, especially in a post-nuclear age
- second, America is uniquely benevolent. The previous Pax eras -- Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica -- were all _terrible_ for people who weren't citizens of those respective nations. Think: mass slavery, entire provinces put to the sword, economically induced famine, etc. etc. Meanwhile America...gives HIV vaccines and clean water to countries in its sphere of influence. I think there's some truth to the idea that e.g. Norwegian citizens have a higher quality of life because America funds European defense. It just so happens that that's a win / win -- American citizens ALSO have a higher quality of life because America funds European defense.
So, yea, I do think Trump is terrible for people who are not US American.
I agree that its darkly hilarious that MAGA is leading towards isolationism, because normally hatred of Pax Americana is a status symbol of the _extremely_ far left, which likes to point to American foreign policy misadventures in the middle east as an example of the US ultimately being a source of evil in the world. In fact, it was the extremely far left that was originally against programs like USAID, because it was often used as a mechanism to enact American foreign policy goals (in case it wasn't clear, I think this take is stupid)
>- second, America is uniquely benevolent. The previous Pax eras -- Pax >Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica -- were all _terrible_ for people >who weren't citizens of those respective nations. Think: mass slavery, >entire provinces put to the sword, economically induced famine, etc. etc. >Meanwhile America...gives HIV vaccines and clean water to countries in >its sphere of influence.
Surely the distinction isn't so clear, or at least that depends on time and place.
- Not to defend Romans or Queen Victoria, but surely the list of "what the Romans did for us" given in Life of Brian is mainly accurate. Railroads in India are also a good thing, even if the Britons put them there in part so as to get valuable raw products out of the country as fast as possible. I'd imagine there were valuable sanitation and vaccination initiatives in the British Empire (even if, yes, Rhodes lied about a smallpox epidemic for the sake of profit, and yes, the Bengal famine was completely avoidable, as was the Irish famine).
- The US was up to major shenanigans in much of the world throughout 20th century. Uniquely benevolent? Tell that to the Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Indonesians, Chileans, etc.
- I'm ethnically Indian, you're going to have a tough time selling me on the British being good for South Asia. And I know a few Irish folks who would sock you in the face for implying such. Generally speaking, there are often good things that can be salvaged from bad things and vice versa. We got a lot of technological advancement out of the world wars. But it would be wrong to say that the world wars were good. (More generally, I think this is a common failure pattern among smart people. Smart people get so wrapped up in second order and third order effects that they miss the massive first order effects)
- At least wrt the Vietnamese, that was squarely within the multipolar frame of the Cold War. I'm somewhat skeptical that the Vietnam war would have happened otherwise. I'm less certain about the rest, but given that you mention you're talking about foreign policy interventions through the _20th_ century I'm inclined to think that much of that can be framed through the lens of multipolar conflict. Also worth noting that in the modern era the Vietnamese (at least) are very pro America.
- The US has definitely not been good for some groups of people! I think if you are, like, Palestinian, or Afghani, or Irani, or (several other middle-east nationalities) you probably do have a legitimate bone to pick. But I'm not a deontologist about this. I'm looking for 'best alternative' and so far haven't heard a better one.
One response to this would be that the US doesn't uphold the Pax for the sake of world peace, the Pax exists as a by-product of the US maintaining a global hegemony and not tolerating any rivals. As long as no rivals emerge to challenge the the US that hegemony keeps the international system stable, but now that China has risen the US is incentivised to contain it in order to maintain it's status as the hegemon, which probably makes the hegemonic system more prone to war than a multipolar one.
Here is the reality: the hegemon is no longer sustainable. It is necessary to negotiate the transfer of power, and that cannot be done according to the ordinary rules of politics.
Yeah but it's important to note that it's not some inner conviction guiding his strategy. Trump goes with whatever secures enough support from his base. If woke would do the trick, he'd paint the White House rainbow tomorrow.
Trump only cares about Trump. He needs the opportunity for grift and the immunity the office gives him. They're already talking about a third term, and if he gets that, he'll be dictator for life. He will accept any and all externalities to stay in office. Like Putin, his only way is forward.
Yep, Russia is definitely anti-woke. That is one of the very few things where their projected image and the reality fully agree. (There is a lot of gay sex in the army, but that doesn't count as woke, because it is not consensual.)
I suddenly wonder if their virulent homophobia and the sexual violence in the army and prisons are intimately related... (ha, I'm into terrible puns today).
Has anyone written a defense of PEPFAR? I understand why people like it from a EA perspective, but it also seems like there is some status quo bias going on. For other global health initiatives, like malaria nets, EA's usually advocate funding through private charity, rather than through taxation. (Correct me if I'm wrong there.) I'm not normally a "taxation is theft" style libertarian, but in this case the money isn't even going to public services in the traditional sense. It's just a direct, compulsory diversion of funds from citizens into a charity that is seen as effective. Is there a limiting principle on this? Do EA's favor a system where a certain percentage of tax dollars go to effective charities?
The argument for PEPFAR is that it is a very cost-effective way to save lives, even if they aren't American lives, and a majority of Americans have traditionally favored having a small fraction of their tax dollars devoted to such purpose. You may not be one of them, but unless you actually are a "NO TAXES EVER!" libertarian, then you have to accept that some of your taxes will go to things that you don't support. Just as some of the things you want the government to be paying for, will be paid out of the taxes of people who don't support those things.
The argument for EA is that there are nerdy rich people who want to devote more of their money to charitable works than the majority of Americans have deemed appropriate to fund through taxation, and they could use some guidance on what would be the most cost-effective way for them to do that. Something like PEPFAR, where a government has already picked all the low-hanging fruit, is not a cost-effective target for private charity. If the legal and political battles over PEPFAR lead to it being clearly dead as opposed to just briefly interrupted, I expect EA will do the math on recommending AIDS-protection vs malaria protection for nerdy-rich-people private contributions.
> For other global health initiatives, like malaria nets, EA's usually advocate funding through private charity, rather than through taxation.
That's because EA's believe they have more likelihood of moving private dollars than public dollars. If Congress passed a bill to pour public money into malaria nets, I'm sure almost all EA's would rejoice.
I'm honestly baffled that you would be fine with taxation in general but opposed to PEPFAR in particular. Saving lives seems to me to be the most worthy use of taxpayer dollars possible.
I oppose PEPFAR for the same reason I would oppose government officials raising taxes to line their own pockets: the money is meant to serve the public. Even wealth transfers like food stamps are at least directed at the general national welfare and help prevent the poor from becoming angry and violent. PEPFAR supposedly helps our soft power, but I'm pretty skeptical about the ROI on that.
My mind isn't completely made up, but given the budget deficit I'm not inclined to increase the public debt burden by billons of dollars for a charity project. I'm not an EA or even an ethical consequentialist, but a plurality here seem to lean in that direction, so I'm curious about their reasoning on it.
There is the argument that it buys a lot of goodwill for America in Africa, making it a form of plausibly-effective defence/diplomacy spending. I haven't evaluated the cost/benefits but that sounds at least potentially in the ballpark (PEPFAR is small for a military project and buys a lot of continent-wide goodwill in a place that matters for both resource access and unaligned country diplomacy).
Possibly not (although I buy that working more than Hollywood movies), but given that it's relatively cheap it's at least not obviously crazy (unlike, TBH, most USAID programs)
>given the budget deficit I'm not inclined to increase the public debt burden by billons of dollars for a charity project.
This doesn't address the argument, "Saving lives seems to me to be the most worthy use of taxpayer dollars possible." It is not obvious to me why the marginal negative effect of that marginal increase in debt outweighs the lives saved.
Most EAs aren't so nationalist that they believe all projects have to directly benefit Americans for the state to pursue it.
It seems implausible to me that the state should only do things to help Americans and can't help people from other countries, especially considering that aid goes so much further in the third world. PEPFAR is estimated to have saved 25 million lives at the cost of only $110 billion over it's lifetime. That money could not have saved 25 million American lives; I doubt it could have saved even 250,000 American lives. What's so special about an American child that the US government should prioritize helping him orders of magnitude more than an African child?
I think the question isn't whether it's a worthwhile use of money, it's whether it's a worthwhile use of government money specifically. There's some places we generally agree are - e.g. infrastructure projects (that require coordinated central action), or healthcare/welfare (on the grounds of forcing some degree of equality mostly, or because of market failure).
I don't think either of those directly applies here. Otoh there is an issue where individual-based foreign aid doesn't feel real to most people (EAs aside) because no one person can make a noticeable dent in an international health crisis. So if the people do support it, maybe government action is reasonable here.
Foreign aid seems analogous to healthcare. Just as private businesses have no incentive to provide free healthcare to low-income people (so Medicaid steps in), private businesses have no incentive to provide antiretrovirals to Africans in extreme poverty (so PEPFAR steps in).
Depending on private charity, thereby pushing all the costs of maintaining a more just world onto the virtuous and giving the selfish and self-centered a free ride, is the opposite of true meritocracy.
Maybe, but I don't think the government should be in the business of rewarding virtue in general (except in cases where there's a specific call for government intervention, which this might be).
Sure, Africans aren't American taxpayers, but many Americans aren't taxpayers either and we generally don't take that to mean we shouldn't help them. Some are much greater tax burdens than Africans, e.g low-income people who rely on Medicaid and get enough tax breaks that they break even, or retired elderly folks living on welfare.
I like to think of myself as at least EA-sympathetic, but I believe tax-funded aid >> private charity when all else (effectiveness) is equal, because private charity weakens the economic (and hence political) power of the most altruistically minded relative to the least altruistically minded. And PEPFAR is a special case where a nation-state's leverage in negotiations outweighs principle-agent problems and makes it at least as effective as the best private charities for the same purpose.
Quick googling indicates that AMF's spending is on the scale of the low hundreds of millions of dollar per year, while PEPFAR spends about 5 billion. So it may be a question of scale.
Also, most EA's are (sort of by definition) consequentialist, and according to the 2022 EA forum survey (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJDgnPXqZ48eSCjEQ/ea-survey-2022-demographics#Beliefs) fewer than 6% are libertarian while the overwhelming majority are left or left-leaning, so I don't think most of them would have any objection to the government using taxes to fund sufficiently effective humanitarian aid.
So I think there are sort of two related, but importantly different, arguments for PEPFAR.
The first is the argument for why something like PEPFAR should exist, and that's the EA argument about lives saved per dollar etc. I think it's pretty concincing, for what it is.
The second is the argument for why the US Government should be the one providing PEPFAR. This one is less obvious, but I think the strongest version is that the US generally benefits from global stability and wealth, as well as from nations, especially developing nations, having a positive view of the US. PEPFAR, inasmuch as it saves lives, both increases wealth and stability in developing nations, and also presumably improves the image of the US, and it does so relatively cheaply.
That's the argument at least. I personally find the latter argument likely enough to be worth the relatively small amount of money that we are spending, but I'd be open to arguments that it actually doesn't do these things.
Is anyone else angered by the recent spate of shrimp welfare EA advocacy?
The movement seems based on an incredibly naive application of utilitarianism. It's advocates seem holier than though, and motivated by EA virtue-signalling (e.g., look at me I am so enlightened and moral and logical as do to this very un-intuitive act). Meanwhile, the advocacy is actively harming the reputation of EA.
In my experience, the kind of people who get triggered about Animal Welfare enough to dismiss any/all other opinions of people who advocate for it will not be won by being more "moderate" or by tuning down the Animal Welfare advocacy.
Caring about shrimps is ridiculous? ok, look at PETA. I'm sure they do some shrimp advocacy here and there, but 90% of their ads and outreach is "This is a cow. She is suffering horribly. You eating meat is directly contributing to her suffering. Would you like to stop eating meat so you're at least not complicit in this horrible suffering?" The responses - almost invariably - tend to fall into:
(1) [Just World Fallacy] No, she DESEREVES to SUFFER horribly. She is a dirty vile non-human and I have just made up a rule that says morality can't be about non-humans. Now go away VEGETARIAN CUCKS.
(2) [Sinclair's Rule] My Salary/Economy/Dinner/Social Status depends on cows not having rights; therefore cows better not have rights. It will be such a shame that I can't eat what I have been eating all my life, even though theoretically you could be right that cows shouldn't suffer horribly, but alas, I will never understand this, purposfully.
(3) [Low-IQ white noise. no consistent signal] Hahahahaha, who cares bro, r u triggered, let me eat my StEaK in peace.
Do any of those responses predict that there is any sort of principled, compromise-ready objections that could be swayed if only the big bad Animal Welfare advocates stop being so radical and mean?
If you agree with the Nazi that Jews deserve everything being done to them in the hopes that maybe the Nazi will come around on the question of Slavs and Poles, and the Nazi is still as adamant as ever that not only Jews deserve everything they ever get (nice that you agree now), but also the Slavs and Poles are next and they deserve even more, well, haven't you just achieved peak clownery? What did compromising with the Nazi buy you?
I'm not even - necessarily - against pretending to be 50% bigoted so that you can ally with the 70% bigoted against the 100% bigoted, then later pretend to be 30% bigoted to ally with the 50% bigoted against the 70% bigoted, and so on, Divide and Conquer will never NOT be good politics and game theory. From a teaching and pedagogy perspective this is called "Incremental Refinement", start with the natural-but-wrong thesis then gradually nudge the students towards better and better refinements till they learn the topic without feeling force-fed. I'm just saying that there is vanishingly few "70% bigoted" or even "80% bigoted" to ally with in the Animal Welfare battlefront. So why bother pretending that you're more bigoted against Animals than you really are? For what possible benefit?
> EA virtue-signaling
Here's an intuition-pump: "Virtue Signaling" is envy speak. Whenever you find yourself compelled to judge someone as "Virtue-Signaling" for a certain moral position, make extremely sure that it's not because you're actually uncomfortable about the fact that you're morally wrong, and simply afraid that they're right. (And by logical extent, that you're condemned and called out, if even implicitly, by the presence of people who are right on the very issue you're morally wrong about.)
Literally nobody likes to be wrong, morally wrong even more so. But the fact of the matter is that you would have been a slavery supporter if you were an early 1800s rural white farmer in southern North America, and all the people who opposed slavery at the time would have seemed like incredibly insufferable WOKE CUCKS rejecting everything that is good and familiar and ok in the world. Why take such an unintuitive position? How devastating would the effect on the Economy be if they got their way? Can't they just be normal and demand better treatment for the mullato and humane working conditions for everyone? Do they really have to be this """Divisive"""?
"Unintuitive" as criticism? My brother in Buddha, have you **looked** at the rest of EA or Rationalism? Or the history of Ideas and Science in general? Does human intuition really look like such a devastatingly effective truth-finding machine to you?
A cow can be your friend, a shrimp is basically an insect or something similar. And you can't even go about your day, really, without crushing thousands of insects. Even Jainists presumably must have an out when it comes to the microscopic ones. I really do save spiders and bees and flies, but I know I cannot save them all!
So to argue for the welfare of the cow (I'm a carnivore but I do care a bit) is at least somewhat sound in terms of both empathy and philosophy. Whereas the shrimp evokes little empathy, and even the philosophy is dubious.
Regards, Virtue Signaling, I find it strange you define my own usage of words. Perhaps you only use the phrase Virtual Signaling in service of "Envy Speak" but here is how I use the phrase:
The standard definition of Virtue Signaling:
1. Personally costless acts that act as a signal of virtue (e.g., liking a protest on Facebook). Note, engaging in virtue signalling doesn't mean that the thing supported is not virtuous, is just means that the act of support was costless (and therefore indistinguishable from signalling)
2. Acts that superficially seem virtuous, but that on closer examination are in fact harmful. The definition 2. is related to the definition 1. in that 1. enables and allows 2. to occur. When *signaling* virtue is rewarded people optimize for apparent virtue without caring about the actual outcomes, causing deeply harmful outcomes (e.g., defund the police).
Are you saying that neither of these phenomenon ever occur? I don't understand what basis you feel justifies redefining words that others use. I find it faintly ridiculous you would label anyone using these pretty clear and useful terms to be engaging in "Envy Speak"
Ok, I might have been more than a little triggered myself in my original response. I'm sorry. Animal Welfare is something I can get extremely angry extremely easy about. Thanks for not responding in kind.
Replying to both of your replies here to re-centralize the thread:
(1) A philosophy/movement based on an unintuitive belief network is indeed at greater risk from a certain major failure mode, that where the mere unintuitive-ness of a belief makes people respect it more. I have seen variations of this in a lot of other anti-mainstream movements I'm familiar/sympathetic with, like antinatalists calling children/babies vile things because hey, antinatalism is unintuitive and slandering babies is unintuitive so clearly those 2 things fit together and the more you do one the more you're credible at the other.
I don't know what specific "shrimp advocates", if any, did you have in mind, but I guess it never hurts to point to specific ones? I'm not (by most EA's standards) an EA: Neither American, nor gives 10% of my income to charity (just 5% or less, and not typical EA charities), and most importantly I mostly don't read their literature or forums. Oh and I think worrying about AGI before it's 2080 is plain ridiculous.
That said, there is nothing apriori preventing shrimp welfare from being a bandwagon, "something I saw the cool kids do so I have to do it too even though I'm not really into it", that's unfortunately a universal human tendency. I think we would benefit (subject to your interest and time) if we dissect a real post or paper from shrimp advocate on an EA forum and see if it really does believe that advocating for shrimps is the most morally critical course of action or if it's just bandwagoning.
(2) Agreed on both counts, both acts are real. But consider a major failure mode of indiscriminately demonizing/tabooing signaling: Now every attempt to actually tell people to be virtuous is Virtue Signaling. Peter Singer is virtue signaling because his philosophy papers is just some ink that didn't cost him anything (indeed, Philosophy thrives on weird ideas, it benefitted him to be seen as the weirdo who says a starving African child is more important than your daughter's birthday). Scott Alexander eats meat too, as far as I can glean from his blogposts, so that must mean everything he writes about Animal Welfare or Synthetic Meat is just bullshit he uses to virtue-signal, after all what does it actually cost him? words are free.
I'm aware that this can be seen as me strawmanning the very idea of "Virtue-Signaling is a Vice", it's not, I agree that Virtue-Signaling is real and bad, but I look at it from the perspective of "The Optimal Amount of Fraud is not Zero". From a distance, plenty of bad things look like good things. Is this startup founder a dumb overexcited kid who will waste 700 million VC dollars because he can't shut up about AI, or a Theranos-level fraudster who knows damn well what's he doing and is intentionally cooking his valuations to get the VC millions? it's surprisingly hard to decide this question, and all the standard cliches about false positives vs false negatives apply.
You misinterpreted my use of the word unintuitive.
To clarify, my point is that in the EA community is closely aligned (I would argue based) on an unintuitive philosophy. Namely, Peter Singer argues that one should genuinely care equally for strangers as one cares for family. This philosophy is *extremely* unintuitive (e.g., requiring invention, not the default one held in society or practiced by humans). That is not a criticism, just a neutral claim.
Due to this philosophical foundation, along with rationality norms, EA is drawn towards (rather than away) from unintuitive ideas, particularly about morals. Again, no judgement, just an observation. In particular, there is a certain street cred for advocating for such ideas (as many in the community will suppress their default intuitive rejection of the idea, and instead assume the uninuitive idea is 'deep' even when they personally do not understand it).
This effect is why advocating for shrimp welfare gives kudos and status within certain EA circles. Speaking personally, I find advocating for significant effort dedicated to shrimp welfare an incredibly naive, unexamined, philosophically ungrounded (and harmful) idea (e.g., not weighting for degree of sentience, e.g., blithely assuming pain + pleasure should be maximized rather than flourishing, etc...) but because the community has a heuristic of embracing rather than rejecting deeply unintuitive ideas, it gets a superficial pass, and is even broadcast and spread.
Rawlsism is pretty intuitive, and one could arguably place Singer's philosophy as a version of that. However, it neglects the very reality of family which is created by reciprocal bonds extending over time, and does not apply in the same way to strangers.
> Namely, Peter Singer argues that one should genuinely care equally for strangers as one cares for family. This philosophy is *extremely* unintuitive (e.g., requiring invention, not the default one held in society or practiced by humans). That is not a criticism, just a neutral claim.
Even if this is true, that still doesn't get you to the effective part of effective altruism. The *good news* is that you can care about someone distant thousands of times less and still save their life, or an equivalent number of QALYs. The fact that people round this off to "you need to be mentally unusual to donate 6000 dollars once to AMF" is very frustrating.
I doubt the type of person who makes this type of equivocation would care to change their behavior about what to do upon learning this information, in which case, yeah! I largely agree that EA is psychologically deviant, for thinking virtue is for anything but their own convenience and social status.
Do you have any evidence that shrimp welfare is actively harming EA? I've never heard someone be like "damn I would donate to the Against Malaria Foundation but some nerds think shrimp welfare is a good idea so now I won't." I don't think we should abandon some causes from an unfounded fear that it would somehow harm EA's reputation.
n=1, but I started down the EA path and then turned away when stuff like this and AI doomerism kept coming up. I'll probably still donate to Against Malaria, but I've pretty much lost interest in EA otherwise.
Any movement should be very concerned about the extreme views some members amplify. At the margin, it can have a large effect on contributors.
n=2: I've increased my donations to AMF and kept them up to other global health work, but I've decided not to introduce my friends to EA because of the vocal animal welfare advocates. I've been mentioning this on the EA Survey every year.
I don't think shrimp welfare is the best use of EA resources at the margins, especially advocacy resources. The scientific evidence for shrimp sentience is very lacking compared to, e.g., anchovy sentience and is comparable to the evidence of sentience for insects, which would likely have much more sentience per biomass assuming they have any at all (i.e. Big If True). So it's not very close to the Pareto frontier even among nonhuman welfare causes specifically.
No, the shrimp people are good. It is good for people to take their philosophy seriously and own its sillier implications.
Naive utilitarianism is "pain=bad" and someone sat down and was like "If you care about pain so much, animals feel pain. Do you care about animals? Do you care about shrimp?" And then the shrimp guys were like "...yes" and then they started advocating for shrimp welfare. And, just fundamentally, I love and respect people who take the logical implications of their belief system seriously and I think it's people like that who invent 80% of the good stuff in life.
But I would like you to consider becoming an effective shrimp welfare advocate by pledging to eat nothing but beef. Consider:
As a red blooded American, you probably eat half a pound of meat a day. And you're not going to stop because America.
Now, if you were going to sate your meat hunger with shrimp, with the average shrimp weight 1/2 ounce, you would need to kill 16 shrimp a day. (Source: GPT)
Meanwhile, your average rotisserie chicken from Costco has 2 pounds of meat on it, meaning you need to kill ~2 chickens every weak. (1)
But, if you pledge to only eat beef, an average cow has ~500 pounds of meat on it. It would take you more than two years, eating a half pound of beef a day, to eat an entire cow.
So, to satiate our American meat hunger for the next 1000 days, you could:
Kill 16,000 shrimp.
Kill 250 chickens
Or kill 1 cow.
Clearly, we can achieve between 99.6% (3) and 99.99375% (4) of the moral benefit of eating no meat by just eating beef, which is why it's your moral responsibility to eat a cheeseburger.
Which is, yes, kinda silly, but also...the lives of farm chickens, much less farmed shrimp, seem really really bad and sad and probably would be a better world if we just ate beef.
How are the shrimp even supposedly suffering? Presumably when they are deprived of oxygen when they are caught in net and raised out of the water? But do humans even suffer when they are deprived of oxygen? I thought it was one of the most painless ways to go.
Depending on the manner of deprivation, it can be totally painless or excruciating, i.e., nitrogen is the first, tape over face is second. I don't know if we know exactly what shrimp feel when they are pulled out of the water, I'd support modest efforts to ease their potential suffering if an inexpensive and easy-to implement method were proposed.
If you assign a 0% probability to a blade of grass being sentient, your confidence is mathematically infinitely lower than it should be! We must allow for the possibility that each blade of grass has qualia and experiences suffering. 10^20 blades of grass are ruthlessly cut in half each year, maimed and left to wait for their next disfigurement. If a blade of grass is even one millionth as conscious as a shrimp, then global lawn mowing is an unconscionable crime!
This strain of scrupulosity was always there from the very start. It's only now that "we care about Big Existential Risks, so sure maybe you're starving to death in the gutter but man, don't you see that the possibility that somebody might invent Colossus is so great that we *need* to spend all this money flying to conferences overseas to discuss it instead of buying you food and helping you out of that gutter! don't be selfish!" has become the main attraction, that the things like "the poor widdle shrimpies" can creep out into the sunlight to be noticed.
I actually think the problem is less naive application of utilitarianism and instead naive and uncritical application of neuro-biology. The entire premise of animal welfare is an extension of empathy beyond humans. We do not understand our own cognition even close to well enough to be making the claims that are made, beyond animals that are quite closely related.
One can decide to promote shrimp welfare out of some level of caution along the lines of "we don't know, and if they _are_ sentient it would be a tragedy", but I think not many people would find that convincing, and so they over-reach and make much stronger claims about how certain we should be about their ability to suffer.
To be clear, I am very much not making the claim that they _don't_, since such a claim is just an unsupported by my argument as the one that the shrimp welfare advocates are making.
> The entire premise of animal welfare is an extension of empathy beyond humans. We do not understand our own cognition even close to well enough to be making the claims that are made, beyond animals that are quite closely related.
I take it you've never had a pet? Or a close interaction with a bird?
It seems like you might have interpreted my comment as arguing against empathy towards animals. That was not what I said. If that's not what you were doing, then I think I'm going to need you to clarify what point exactly you are making.
> We do not understand our own cognition even close to well enough to be making the claims that are made, beyond animals that are quite closely related.
That sounds to me like arguing against empathy towards animals except for closely related species. Apologies if you didn't mean that.
I guess it depends on where you put the limit for "quite closely", but I offered birds as an example of a distantly related branch of life that we humans are quite able to develop bonds and empathize with.
In any case, the overall argument probably has more to do with sentience than with empathy...
I was arguing that we shouldn't use structural brain arguments to claim that we know that things like shrimp have experiences of pain like ours. It is entirely possible (and probably a good thing) to have empathy for all kinds of animals for all kinds of reasons. But if one tries to justify that empathy (or convince others to share it) because we "know" that those animals have an internal experience somewhat like ours due to something about the brain, then one is way out over ones skies, because we are not even close to understanding how our own brain structure relates to our own internal experiences, let alone how the structure of very different organisms impacts theirs.
At least some of the shrimp people are doing this.
I feel quite confident that many kinds of animals have the basic sentience where pain is felt as something very much like pain.
In evolutionary terms, the basic mechanism of pain as a warning that something is off is probably ancient and widely shared, it certainly doesn't look like a simian or even mammalian innovation. And of course we don't know how the hard problem of consciousness works, i.e how it comes that "it feels like something" to be in pain, but I don't see any particular reason why it would hinge on the few particular extra features of humans over and above our nonhuman ancestors.
But, you know, the same exact thing could be said about radically different humans too. I can never imagine not having language, I can never imagine not knowing calculus, but there are humans who struggle with language, with calculus, with going to bathroom. It doesn't seem all that far-fetched that their brains is so radically different that.... who knows, maybe they don't even feel pain, let's splash some boiling oil on their skin and see what happens.
I've just published a print-on-demand collection of old Slate Star Codex essays. For now it's just a paperback, because nobody does print-on-demand hardcovers in acceptable quality. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZVB8TFF
While this isn't the first printed collection of SSC essays, I believe it is the most aggressively edited one. I've replaced all the images that I don't have the rights for, reformatted everything for print, fixed a bunch of typos, tracked down the original citations for everything, etc.
There's a lot of essays of Scott that I haven't read and having them on paper makes it more likely. Also, it's much easier to share.
I recently ordered vol. 1 of the hard cover collection and my partner picked it up out of curiosity and now she's devouring it and planning to lend it out to a coworker. It's nice to see that kind of reaction to pieces like Toxoplasma of Rage or the Archipelago piece.
I know it's CC-licensed so you can legally do whatever you want, but you really should at least make the PDF/Kindle version freely available, otherwise this feels like you're just profiting off Scott's hard work that he made available for free, without giving anything in return.
I mean... people can still access the essays for free on slate star codex? And what he's giving in return is a printed collection of essays - if that's worth something to you, you can pay for it, if you think you're not getting anything in return, you don't have to. I don't see the issue here, if Scott's fine with it.
Not everything in the book is CC-licensed/public domain. In particular, I've paid for licenses of the images for Le Corbusier's "Plan Voisin", and gotten a license from the estate of Daniel Quinn for "The Fence." I don't have unambiguous rights to distribute digital copies of those works.
Beyond that - the whole point of this effort is that I wanted a printed copy of Scott's work and I wasn't happy with the available options. There are already many places where you can get ebooks of Scott's work, such as https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/. I have no plans to ever make this available as an ebook, free or otherwise.
Also, to be a little more explicit about it: I told Scott I was doing this back in August, asked for his permission, and offered to send him royalties if I ever made any money off it (I'm currently about a thousand bucks in the red). He said I had his permission and not to worry about royalties.
I'm not sure how much I can help with non-awkwardly. There's going to be a tiny bit of friction from having to deal with people instead of a screen (the first few times I got called "bean" in person were weird), but it's worth it if these are people you are considering meeting.
For everything else, I can help. Figure out an appropriate place to meet (could be anything from "anyone around here can meet at this park at time X" to "we're going to this museum ship, I'll book an AirBnB"), see if there's enough serious interest to make it worth your while (I think for DSL we did a couple of polls on dates the first time to gauge interest) and then just pick the most appropriate and announce/book it. You don't need a license or anything.
If you're planning to do something on the bigger end of the spectrum, the logistical details matter quite a bit, and I've written up a guide at https://www.navalgazing.net/How-to-Run-Internet-Meetups, with input from others who have been involved in the DSL/Naval Gazing meetups. It's a tremendous amount of fun, and I would highly recommend it.
I've noticed that you recommend using a house or apartment as a "base". But historically, *I've* hosted meetups at parks, and I've also been to a few other meetups planned for parks (after all, everyone can go to a park). Do you think parks are fine?
It depends on the scale of the meetup. That writeup is targeted for multi-day meetups in a place where most of the attendees don't live. I would not try basing in a park for that because you can't trivially reschedule if the weather is bad and you'll probably want better bathrooms if you're going to be there all day. If you are talking about a few hours with people who live in your area, then a park is perfectly fine.
Edit: It sounds like you're on the "a few hours with people who live in your area" end, in which case, I'd say to just basically pick a day and say "I'll be in X park with a green hat, come if you're in the area". Worst case, you end up sitting by yourself for an hour, slightly embarrassed. (If I go to a museum ship, I can get people to fly across the country. The OKC meetup scene... not so much.)
Whenever I've gone ahead and done it, they've mostly turned out to be just nice normal people with an unusual amount in common with me. Just try it out and if you're compatible the awkwardness dissolves.
Just propose an IRL meetup, possibly around whatever common interest brought you together on the internet. If for example you're all airplane geeks who met talking about airplanes, maybe all get together for the biggest air show or best air museum in your area.
Note that "your area" can be as large as "North America" or possibly "Earth", if you're the sort of person who can afford vacation travel anyway. I've flown across the country for a weekend with a bunch of internet friends.
I've met up with a few of my internet friends on multiple occasions, and I think the best way is to have something planned to do. Some things we did were bowling, going to see a movie, walking around town and checking out stores we're interested in, getting some good food, just anything really. Since you guys already know each other somewhat, when you have something to do together that you all enjoy offline it kind of just happens naturally.
If you've found internet friends who are willing to meet IRL, you've already come so far. Maybe generate some gratitude in that direction. Also, consider your motivation -- you clearly desire an IRL connection, and if you can identify why you want that, you can imagine having it, and it might motivate you to move toward it.
These suggestions don't diminish the awkwardness, but the awkwardness might not be the problem. Instead, the problem might be that you are tense and anxious about the possibility of awkwardness. With sufficient motivation, the awkwardness isn't a barrier. (Consider, e.g, that most people get over the awkwardness of sex -- I'd suppose that's an instance of sufficient motivation.)
How valuable is a genius compared to normal smart people? Say you have a button that creates new people who will work on [thing you care about]. How many ordinary, run-off-the-mill PhDs do you need to be just as good as a single Nobel-quality scientist? How many Nobel-winners do you need to be worth a John von Neumann?
I imagine there's some sort of network or force multiplier effect, where a single genius can make a team of grunts accomplish far more, so there's some ideal ratio (which could be constant, or might vary with organizational size). But that's intuition only. Has anyone looked at the relative intelligence / creativity of different people at, say, the Manhattan project? Or Bell Labs?
(Obviously intelligence isn't discrete like this in real life, but I don't think seeing it as continuous really changes the question.)
They say a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters could write the great American novel. But then you have to sort that novel out of the other 999 novel-length piles of gibberish they've made. So too geniuses and smart people. Maybe a hundred smart people working on an impossible task could solve it piece by piece. But you're going to be spending enormous amounts of time on communicating those pieces to each other and filtering out all the dead ends.
Well, depends. Does the genius consistently do extremely difficult things that are nigh-incomprehensible to lesser intellects and/or harass their lesser colleagues? In that case the value of genius is negative, you would achieve more by either removing the genius or removing everyone else who works with them and leaving the genius to do everything.
This is the model you should have when the work is whitebox and collaborative, like writing non-blackbox code that both the genius and their lesser colleagues need to understand and modify.
On other hand, if you can blackbox and compartmentalize the product of the genius' work, then there is really no bound to how valuable being a genius it. If the most asshole Rick Sanchez in the universe develop a better SAT solver, it really doesn't matter how much of an antisocial non-collaborative asshole he is or how much of an utter clusterfuck the solver code is, the SAT solver is a blackbox component that can be integrated through a tight well-understood interface into other things and achieve wonders, no collaboration with the genius needed.
So the key to unlocking genius is through blackbox compartmentalization, every genius is ultimately limited by the fact that there are non-geniuses around them who need to understand, approve, modify or explain the genius things that the genius is doing to themselves and other non-geniuses. The key to bypassing this is through tight well-defined interfaces that hide whatever implementation details inside them under a comprehensible surface. (allowing the implementation details to be as genius magic as possible.)
> How valuable is a genius compared to normal smart people?
It's literally exponentially valuable.
So it matters most at the top, for complex and difficult problems, but that's basically all the problems at the frontiers of human knowledge.
I would like to refer you to two things - the first: Rausch-normalized IQ scores.
if you look at normalized Rausch IQ scores versus problem difficulty, solving complex problems gets exponentially more difficult the harder the problem, and you need to go further and further out on the IQ and ability curve to have a chance of finding a solution.
“This means that for the hardest problems, ones that no one has ever solved, the ones that advance civilization, the highest-ability people, the top 1% of 1% are irreplaceable, no one else has a shot. It also means that populations with lower means, even if very numerous, will have super-exponentially less likelihood of solving such questions.”
The second: We even see this in the probability of inventing something vs IQ, which increases essentially exponentially with IQ, which a recent paper looked at in inventors in Finland finding the following relationship (link goes to graph):
I have this theory that we are, as a species, fantastically uncreative but very good at iterative improvements once we grasp a concept. I think the history of any long-running technology (e.g. pyrometallurgy) supports this. One result of our general uncreativeness is that technologies tend to develop in an s-curve fashion as a breakthrough gets patiently iterated upon and perfected.
In this scheme, a genius is useful not because they are more intelligent, but because some intelligent people also have that little spark of creativity that allows a breakthrough. But thereafter they can't contribute anything more or less than the smart and hard-working. Worse yet, until we hit a wall with a current technology the geniuses' contributions don't add anything, because invariably "new and unrefined" is more expensive and less efficient than "tried and tested".
So, I'm an ideal world, what you'd want is alternating generations of zillions of smart, hard-working people sans geniuses, followed by one with a larger-than-natural dose of geniuses thrown in.
Hmm... you wouldn't need to mess with birth rates or anything. Just have some mechanism to assign your geniuses to fields which have hit a wall.
Your theory makes sense to me, but what about simultaneous inventions? Calculus, powered flight... You could explain this by saying that multiple geniuses were attacking the same wall at the same time, I suppose.
It depends on what you're trying to do. Novel ideas seem to want more geniuses, and substitutes don't seem capable of reproducing the results.
Running the same experiment 1,000 times in a lab doesn't need a genius, though sometimes a genius can help. If there's a limit on geniuses or they're significantly more expensive, I'd go with the normal group for mundane repeated tasks, even if they're hard to do.
It seems that there are some tasks which even 0.1% geniuses cannot do, but you instead need a 0.01% or better genius to accomplish it. We don't really understand how or why this works, but maybe we could if we ourselves were at that level. Since this area isn't legible from the outside, we may not be able to determine when it applies or if a substitute could ever complete the work.
"Running the same experiment 1,000 times in a lab doesn't need a genius, though sometimes a genius can help. If there's a limit on geniuses or they're significantly more expensive, I'd go with the normal group for mundane repeated tasks, even if they're hard to do."
Maybe, but not necessarily. I could probably design an experiment that's about survey data, or testing a wide variety of chemicals against something specific. And I'm definitely neither a genius nor a scientist. Even if you do, they can help design it and then move on to other things if the ongoing actions don't need them to stay.
Genius means highly intelligent, right? In what arena of life would you ever not want more intelligence? As long as that high intelligence isn't paired with anti-social behaviors or laziness, I don't know why we wouldn't want a perpetual genius printer
I agree a genius printer would be very good. But if you have a genius printer which prints 1 genius per day, and could replace it with a decently-smart-person printer which prints x decently smart people per day, for what value of x is that a good trade?
Google did a study of what makes effective teams, and while they did not directly address your genius "force multiplier" hypothesis, they did say that the "Individual performance of team members" had little overall impact on the success of team projects.
I'm fairly suspicious of this. Google is one of the most DEI-pilled of the FAANGS, and it's a well known dynamic for (internal or external) studies like this to essentially be performative - to contort and abuse the data until it confesses some palatable pablum that somebody at the top wants.
As one "external" example - Woolley Chabris et al (2010) Evidence of a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.
They want to study "group IQ," and what do you know! The end result they find and publicize is that the amount of *women* in a group is the most important factor for group IQ, so everyone everywhere should hire and add more women to decision making groups post haste.
Methodologically they organize and look at many groups of 2-5 undergrads who are asked to do brainstorming, judgment, and planning tasks, and then are evaluated on “group IQ,” and which finds that cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction matter not at all to group performance, but instead (the paper crows), after conversational dominance, it is the number of *women* in a group that is the biggest determinant of performance and “group IQ. (with "conversational dominance," ie a man speaking most of the time, a strong negative for performance).
If you dig into the study, it's dogshit for several reasons. I mean, first it's small groups of undergrads and isn't necessarily broadly applicable. The problems are carefully selected to not actually be hard. Even then the max IQ of the smartest member was actually MORE important (r=.29) than “social IQ” (r=.26), and social IQ wasn't "women" it was "how well did the people do on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which both genders can do, but which women score higher on average on). Overall both smartest member and social IQ were beat out conversational dominance (r=-0.41), which can happen from either gender.
They were clearly contorting both the data and the published conclusions to align with ideology, as is usually the case with things like this. And this was published in Science!
Did you ever work for Google? I didn't, but I sold my company's products into Google. They were definitely some of the smartest and techno-aggressive people in my customer base. DEI or not, they were the key customer that my company's development team listened to. If Google wanted something, we knew that other tech companies would soon be demanding the same. We never went wrong by fulfilling a technical request from Google.
> Did you ever work for Google? I didn't, but I sold my company's products into Google.
Not Google, but another FAANG yes, and there and in finance led teams of Phd's for many years where we both lost people to and recruited from GOOG regularly. Sure, they're sharp - everyone at that level is.
I also have a few friends who've worked there on various teams. They are definitely the most DEI-pilled FAANG, maybe the most DEI-pilled F50 company overall, and I would bet heavily on ideologically slanted conclusions both for base culture reasons at the "study conductor and analyst" level as well as the executive level.
To be honest, I would bet heavily (although less heavily than at Google) on that outcome at most F100 companies, for basically the same reasons.
How do you even test "team performance" rigorously, in a non-biased way? The Garden of Forking Paths is too big, and the desire to shape conclusions at any or all of selection of participants, problem selection, experimental setup, winnowing, data intake, variable selection, analysis, and statistical tests used are all strong and slanted in only one direction at every step of the people involved.
And why do you think DEI has been a bad policy at the FAANGs? They seem to have been either (a) highly successful *despite* their DEI policies or (b) highly successful * because* of DEI policies. I think there might be something to the idea the DEI was effectively ensuring that lower-qualified white males were not being hired instead of more highly-qualified minorities. ;-)
> And why do you think DEI has been a bad policy at the FAANGs? They seem to have been either (a) highly successful *despite* their DEI policies or (b) highly successful * because* of DEI policies.
In my own opinion, DEI isn't really impacting their 10k's and financial performance much either way, their success is a legacy of locked-in decisions from a decade ago that's made FB and GOOG the ad duopoly of the world, and that revenue stream has been rich enough to sustain them and keep them growing as more and more of the world has adopted and become increasingly engaged with the internet.
They are actually *stunningly* bad at their jobs, especially given the level of talent they have. I personally consider it to literally be the greatest waste of human capital in the world, right now and for the last ten years.
As just one example, the biggest / funniest Google disconnect that I know about - I just ran across a site that uses the Google Vision API on any still photo you submit, which uses image recognition and/or Gemini (the API has a zillion options and it's hard to determine which of the zillions the site in question is using) to determine emotion, setting, context, likely income, likely politics, and best marketing products and angles.
Me and some friends tried it, it was suprisingly good and accurate, and we're all in a pretty desirable "income and brand affinity" bucket.
The thing I found most interesting about it was in a decade plus of using Google products, I've basically never seen a relevant ad.
So more than ten years of emails, documents, video meetings, spreadsheets, social graph analysis, and whatever else got them nothing, but running a single still photo through Vision / Gemini single-shot a much better segmentation?? And it's just left to collect dust.
And not just left to collect dust, but it's strictly better *at their core competency,* by some absurd factor (5x - 100x), and is hidden away in some tiny corner of "API services" space not being used by anyone.
That's just "Google in a nutshell," to me.
And that incompetence, that institutional stagnation and sclerotic dynamic, is partly driven by DEI and culture.
People at Google literally wrote the foundational papers for LLM's! And where are they with Gemini? Vastly behind, with basically zero users, despite having a ~2-4B locked in user base at Alphabet overall?
Meanwhile OpenAI keeps shipping out hits and has 300M weekly users, Deepseek is cooking on a global scale for pennies, and Anthropic is the biggest in B2B. Where's Google? Which LLM model alone out of all of them got pilloried for fake-inserting diversity into answers and generated pictures? Google again? Man. It's almost like DEI affects your internal culture negatively.
Interesting. I think Google programmers are a great example of the standard-issue smart people, but presumably Google has some genii too, and they didn't have a big impact on productivity.
This seems wrong to me. If I worked with some friends and we had amazing psychological safety, dependability, etc., and all scientific data available in 1915, I don't think we would ever figure out general relativity, if we didn't know about it going in. Maybe Google projects don't ever have that level of difficulty? Or Google managers are good at not giving people work they aren't smart enough to do?
On the other hand, the fast inverse square root was invented collectively at Id Software, and though they are good programmers, to the best of my knowledge they weren't uniquely brilliant.
I think you're vastly overestimating the usefulness of geniuses and geniushood to society. Lewis Terman and his team began a long-term study around 1916 of genius children that he identified through the Stanford Binet IQ test. His study included 1,528 subjects (856 males and 672 females). All of them were white Californians, and most were from upper-middle-class backgrounds. He and his team tracked them through their lives. Although ~50% of them attended college (back when less than 10% of US population went to college), most of them didn't contribute much of anything to US arts or sciences. None of them won any major awards or prizes. Several dozen of them went into academia and rose through the ranks. A couple became presidents of professional scientific organizations. And one of them became the head writer for _I Love Lucy_. Many of them became doctors and lawyers and retired in the upper middle class. From the Wikipedia article on Terman...
> By the 4th volume of _Genetic Studies of Genius_, Terman had noted that as adults, his subjects pursued common occupations "as humble as those of policeman, seaman, typist and filing clerk and concluded:
>> "At any rate, we have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated."
However two future Nobel laureates didn't make the cut to be included in the Terman study — Robert Shockley and one other Nobel winner (whose name escapes me at the moment). IIRC, Shockley's IQ tested in the high 120s. And anecdotes about Shockley suggest it bugged him that he wasn't "smart" enough to be in Terman's study. Of course, that may have made him try harder...
You might be right! I wasn't thinking of "genius" as a pure IQ thing, more some nebulous combination of IQ + work ethic + other character traits. But I could be defining "genius" as "someone who makes big discoveries", which results in circular reasoning.
"The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.
Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.
Five Jim Davis’s — creator of that unfunny cartoon cat, where 20% of the jokes are about how Monday sucks and the rest are about how much the cat likes lasagna (and those are the punchlines!) … five Jim Davis’s could spend the rest of their lives writing comedy and never, ever produce the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld."
I like Seinfeld quite a but but find I’d rather watch an episode of him in the coffee cars show, than revisit an episode of Seinfeld. But I didn’t own a TV when it was airing so kind of caught up with the show piecemeal, later on, over time. I think maybe in reruns after the news. Speaking of which entertainment delivery mechanism: M*A*S*H is for me the sitcom that will probably never be topped.
But I don’t think younger people would find it funny. You definitely have to have a toe in an earlier era.
Garfield has lasted for 25 years plus, outlasting seinfeld by at least 15 years, and kids know who Garfield is. They don't Kramer.
and seinfeld is nowhere as good a comedian as Harvey Korman, Carol Burnett, or Tim Conway. Bob Newhart is much better. Seinfeld honestly owed a bit to the Newhart Show i feel.
tv shows people have bias for things that were big when they grew up, but its tough to evaluate over time. The Honeymooners for one pretty much created tropes both the flintstones and the simpsons borrowed, and not
particularly well either. Most people seem to have forgotten The Prisoner these days though.
I don't find Seinfeld to be that funny. Not sure if it is because I didn't watch it in the 90s, but much later. Curb your enthusiasm on the other hand, for some reason I find that hilarious! It's much the same premise, but for some reason I just find the way it's delivered so much better.
There is a joke here somewhere about five Larry Davids.
Looking at Seinfeld, not everyone involved was a genius. Assuming arguendo that the writers and actors were, surely there were normal people on set: lighting techs, stagehands, foley artists, etc. Would replacing all of them with true exemplars of their craft have brought the show to newly sublime heights? It doesn't seem self-evident to me.
"five Jim Davis’s could spend the rest of their lives writing comedy and never, ever produce the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld"
To which I respond with a loud "hallelujah!" because one episode of that sort was quite enough for all the rest of time, thanks very much. A show that I never found particularly funny, but it was its own kind of humour at least, became increasingly navel-gazing and resulted in this dumb (to be fair, I didn't watch it but am going by reviews) episode about a very specific store in New York.
A marmalade cat who likes lasagna and Mondays are terrible is way more relatable to the rest of us who don't live in that particular patch of New York. Garfield sometimes made me laugh, I don't think I've ever laughed at anything I've seen of Seinfeld show.
So yeah, gimme five more Jim Davises instead of one more show about "smug people in Noo Yawk", thanks!
Being far too young to have watched Seinfeld, my parents (who once lived in NY) were aghast and eventually sat down to watch some. They selected the Soup Nazi episode, on the grounds that it was the absolute peak of an incredibly funny show. We started watching and... crickets. A couple giggles here and there. The premise had some amusement. But no big laughs. No great punchlines I'll be quoting for years.
Everyone just ended up a little confused. Me at how this was supposed to be the peak of 90s comedy, my parents at how they remembered it being so much funnier.
I'm not sure how this happened. It's not like all humor was like that and we just got better (or more brain-dead and less sophisticated). A lot of comedy from that time holds up great. But Seinfeld... what were people smoking?
One of my favorite monologues to this day is George's at the end of "The Marine Biologist". Capped with a one-liner from Kramer.
It's not nearly as funny without the setup, though. You appreciate it much more if you've watched the previous 20 minutes, with George's growing anxiety and Kramer diving into yet another quirky hobby. Which in turn requires familiarity with the characters, and finding those characters plausible because you've seen behavior like that in people in your everyday life.
I find a great deal of Seinfeld is like that. I don't really care that the characters are unlikeable; they appeal to me because they reflect real people. And then they're funny when they react to situations in a way I didn't quite expect, but in hindsight think "yeah, that makes sense".
(Also, they're not *wholly* unlikeable. Jerry is funny. Elaine is pretty and interesting. Kramer is an adventure. George is probably the hardest to like, but he's understandable, is entertaining when he's having to weather people even less likeable than he, and I find myself just admiring Jason Alexander's work in portraying him.)
I think we got collectively better at making movies. We have figured out what works, and we have gradually increased the dosage.
Similarly, I was watching some child movies with my kids. Tried to show them the child movies that I watched as a child... but those were quite boring. And then I remembered that as a child I have already thought that those movies had many boring moments, but also had some good moments. Well, compared to that, movies like Paw Patrol do not have boring moments at all.
OK, so nobody clicked my link and read the actually VERY INTERESTING statistics about the speed and quality distribution of computer programmers at the same tasks. Instead, people talk about Garfield, Seinfeld and Mozart, which was meant as a throwaway joke by Joel Spolsky. Very well!
I have seen a couple of Seinfeld episodes, and yes, I find them funny. The Soup Nazi is a very original character with a lot of comedy potential. But I also see what Deiseach means: My wife doesn't like it at all, because the main characters are all so very very dislikeable! So neurotic, whining about their bad luck which they brought to themselves, egocentric, doing senseless nasty things out of spite or for their own flimsy little advantage.
We have the same problem with How I Met Your Mother. These people are supposed to be friends, but play each other really nasty tricks.
Rewatching Friends, we find it very silly, but at least they are really friends to each other, they are there for one-another, even when their job's a joke and they're broke.
Garfield: I once saw a theory, don't remember where, stating that it is a "local minimum of comedy". Every little thing you change about it makes it funnier: Remove Garfield's bubbles, remove him altogether, leave away the last panel... It has a lot of good ideas, e.g. the toaster possessed by an evil spirit. But it overdelivers the jokes. Sometimes it's precisely Garfield's snarky comment in the last panel which spoils the whole thing.
>dumb (to be fair, I didn't watch it but am going by reviews) episode about a very specific store in New York
That's like saying that Macbeth is about the goings on at a particular castle. The episode is about the broader phenomenon of what people are willing to put up with for the "privilege" of participating in the latest trend.
Macbeth is nearer to my cultural experience than "bunch of poseurs in NY go to a flavour-of-the-month shop for a product they don't particularly want other than it's all the rage in the lifestyle sections of the NYT". At least Macbeth gives us witches, ghosts, murder, murder and some more murder, and brewers' droop jokes. Seinfeld is "imagine the most annoying people you ever knew, in the most annoying city in the world".
I'm sorry, did you imagine that I was arhpguing that Seinfeld is as great as Shakespeare? Or even that Seinfeld is good? I said neither. I was merely correcting your misapprehension about the topic of the episode.
>for a product they don't particularly want other than it's all the rage in the lifestyle sections of the NYT
As it happens, the soup in question was meant to be unusually tasty.
That’s interesting, because in America, when people got the daily paper (and even the slimmest small city had its daily, or at least its six-daily, complete with comics and jumble and hocus focus) - Garfield was a byword for “never funny” though no less belonging to the comics page (Cathy was still there, and Nancy) for that deficit.
My grandfather-in-law, a laconic man, upon noticing that we were perusing the comics that filled the last page of the ten or so pages of his ******** Bulletin, which he read through twice on those long slow days, once remarked: “That Garfield sure does love lasagne”.
And his pronouncements, though few and widely-spaced, tended, in retrospect, to be the final and most complete word on a subject.
Later on, some “jokers” decided Garfield was funnier without the cat, and reprinted it so. But I’d been intermittently trying to find Garfield funny since I was eight, and didn’t give it another go.
this is a bit sus. that "not funny" cat had multiple tv specials as well as an animated cartoon series. The Nine Lives of Garfield in particular took him in more serious direction and was very popular. He had and still had an absurd number of collected strip paperbacks, to the point they made omnibus 3 in one editions
i think people kind of belief the comics curmudgeon type persons too much. Garfield was popular in the 80s; bloom
county's bill the cat was a parody of him for one.
like theres a lot of attitude changes; the reverse was mister rogers, my generation has none of the adulation moderns do because we werent overstimulated enough to find him calming. he was something very young kids watched and was just there: we liked other things
TV Garfield was funnier than comic Garfield. It was basically the same set of running gags most of the time, but with good comic timing and more effective physical comedy.
Oh, I don’t know that anyone imagines Garfield was not extremely lucrative. Pokémon was too, though it was not funny either. Except for any extracurricular riffing one could do on the names, but that sort of thing wounded the tender sensibilities of our Pokemon-loving child. So we desisted.
I did indeed love Mr. Rogers, purely, as a child and I suspect the degree to which any child did so was the degree to which he was different from the adults in her life and the drama in her household. Ideally, many children would neither need Mr.Rogers nor find him soothing. I loved him so much that I actively resented when the little trolley car appeared to take us to the mostly off-putting puppet segment. I felt Mr. Rogers was off screen then and probably didn’t grasp that he was voicing the puppets. Also, I had no familiarity with European puppet theater and didn’t understand why they were ugly. I preferred the visit to e.g. the factory where they made umbrellas.
I bet I would have liked Reading Rainbow had it come along earlier.
I’d have bern perfectly happy to watch Mr. Rogers make tea or do household tasks, or read a book aloud.
The Muppet Show was big when I was a kid, and we’d been primed for it by Sesame Street. It was very funny, of course - and children trained on that could hardly be expected to find Garfield funny.
But maybe Garfield was Mr. Rogers for kids born later.
not sure, Mr. Rogers was for extremely young children, and he was even more sedate than Sesame Street. Like I watched him as a kindergartener but never really could enjoy him compared to zoom, 321 contact, the electric company, etc.
its more though that he seems to be significantly more loved now, and i kind of wonder if autism and overstimulation kind of buff his reputation a bit. he becomes ASMR for the youtube generation.
garfield was a proto bart simpson, smart-alecks in the 80s were popular and garfield was one for your dad. my point is more a bit frustration because there is a lot of revisionism about how old stuff was received. Like the famiky circus wasn't hated back then either-modern internet commentators craft narratives a lot. AVGN and hating acclaim or ljn video games.
I rather liked Garfield as a younger child. Not sure how much of that was just age and the maturity (or lack thereof) of my sense of humor, and how much was most of my exposure coming in the form of collections of strips from relatively early in Jim Davis's career when the concept was relatively fresh.
There have been several variations of altering Garfield comics. Some remove the cat entirely, while others just omit his thought bubbles (and sometime redraw him in a more realistic style) in order to depict the scenes from Jon's perspective. The overall effect, IIRC, was a mix of surreal and tragic rather than humorous. My personal favorite was "Garfield With Garfield", which took the rather silly step of replacing the cat with a picture of President James A. Garfield:
Those Garfield books were perfectly marketed for small hands, and the strips were not too wordy.
My cohort had a little bit of a thing for Ziggy merchandise, believe it or not.
I liked Hagar the Horrible and the Lockhorns. I tended not to get Wizard of Id, I think. I faithfully read (or hate-read) *most* of them: Peanuts of course, first, up top; and B.C., Hi and Lois, Dennis the Menace, Nancy, Funky Winkerbean (which I'm astonished to learn recently has carried on in spinoff form), Dagwood, Fred Bassett, stupid Cathy, stupider Sally Forth, the Fusco Brothers, Snuffy Smith, Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, a little later Bloom County ... I didn't much like Family Circus but I liked the drawing style and I looked forward principally to the map ones which showed Little Billy's activities with an arrow. I did not read Prince Valiant. It seemed too late in the very long story to begin.
I got to college and became aware that the comic crowd (which was the cool thing to be, then) didn't much like any of that* except they absolutely worshipped Charles Schultz.
*(Barring for expertly drawn, subversive copies when they needed material)
I have difficulties believing that the universe might have existed (not only since always, but) since an infinitely long time ago.
There seems nothing wrong with asking "And how were things before?" again and again after each correct answer, but I have a possibly wrong intuition that there would have happened, I don't know, just _too_ many events if there was no first one. I feel like there must have been a start, but it's only a feeling.
I know an illogical argument against an infinitely old universe, and of course that's not good enough for me.
It goes like this:
A piece of paper is passed from person to person and has passed infinitely many already. When it enters a person's possession and it is blank then they write their name on it before passing it on, if it's not blank then they pass it on right away. When you get that paper, whose name is on it?
The paper, so the argument goes, cannot have your immediate predecessor's name on it, because _their_ immediate predecessor would have written theirs on it, but no, _their_ immediate predecessor would have, no their, and so on. But, so the argument goes also, someone must have written their name on it.
And all that makes no sense, I mean the argument itself, not that against which one came up with it
With the argument one assumes that the paper has passed infinitely many persons, but also that it has entered one person's possession first, namely when it was blank and that very person wrote their name on it - no other than the first person could have done that. The argument is constructed that way but those two assumptions contradict each other.
So the argument doesn't show that an infinitely old universe is absurd, but the argument itself is absurd.
I guess the intuition that there just must have been a start took the better of the inventor.
These kinds of arguments often come up into the context of philosophy of religion. IIRC William Lane Craig is a fervent opponent of a past-infinite universe, but there are others. The Grim Reaper Paradox is also one that's close in spirit to the paper passer paradox. A common reply is the unsatisfiable pair diagnosis. This should give you enough keywords to find everything you're looking for. :)
On second thought... maybe one does not need to believe in an infinite past. Even if the past (of everything) is finite, the universe did NOT pop up (magically or otherwise) like a lion in my bedroom. Because there was nothing to pop up into.
It would simply be finitely old.
Yes. There would have been nothing it originated from *but also* nothing to originate into. It just did not at all originate, it cannot, no matter whether it's infinitely or finitely old.
"Grim Reaper paradox" was a super keyword. It led me to "Temporal finitism" on Wikipedia and it offers a lot of input.
Not having gone through the physics references yet, the main problem with Temporal finitism seems to be that most people who deny an infinite past
a) ignorantly assume the conclusion of a start anyway
b) construct physically impossible processes -- eternal pieces of paper, or there always having been people --, which proof nothing about the subject matter
b) or mistakenly believe that if the universe is infinitely old then there must be a state of it that's infinitely long ago, which of course would not be the case, each is finitely ago.
I'm left leaning to an infinite past, because I don't want a lion to pop up in my bedroom however unlikely that is, but am still not firm in that belief.
I'm not talking about the steady state theory -- which is also only about steady density through continuous creation of matter, as I believe, not about the universe never having been smaller, and not about it not having a beginning.
I'm talking about the big bang not being the first process that ever got going, but some other before it too, and before that too...
I'm not the first to have that idea and I don't know of anything that could rule out this possibility. But I would like too, if there is something. The big bang theory has nothing to say about it.
I have difficulty believing in an infinitely old universe, but I also have difficulty believing in an finitely old universe. So I want to settle this.
I see, you mean "universe" in the wider sense of anything existing at all. Yeah, that's the age-old conundrum. If stuff extends infinitely into the past, it's weird and hard to believe. If stuff appears out of nothing, it's also weird and hard to believe. Thinking minds have been butting on this one for ages.
The paradox here comes from trying to use "infinity" as a numerical value when working within Z (one-dimensional integer space), which is nonsensical because there all integers are finite. The set of all integers has infinite cardinality, and you can use infinity as a limit when doing things with integers, but there is no such thing as "the paper has been passed infinitely many times" in this context.
With real numbers, you mostly have the same problem, but there are vaguely similar stuff you can do with infinite-cardinality subsets. For example, a tritium atom is flying through space. At some point along its path, it decays into Helium-3. Between the start of its path and when it decays, it has travelled a finite distance in a finite amount of time, but has passed through an infinite number of points in space (disregard quantum). You can get away with this because real numbers are a higher degree of infinity than integers: the latter are "countably infinite", i.e. you can define a 1:1 mapping of integers to natural numbers. But it has been proven (Cantor's Diagonalization Argument) that there are too many real numbers to do this with, and moreover, that any bounded segment of real numbers (e.g. "everything between 0.0 and 1.0") is also uncountably infinite in cardinality.
There are some more exotic number systems that do allow you to have infinite numerical values in extensions of natural numbers or real numbers: Cantor's Ordinal Numbers and Conway's Surreal Numbers respectively. Applying these to your paradox is a bit over my head, sadly.
>At some point along its path, it decays into Helium-3. Between the start of its path and when it decays, it has travelled a finite distance in a finite amount of time, but has passed through an infinite number of points in space (disregard quantum). You can get away with this because real numbers are a higher degree of infinity than integers: the latter are "countably infinite", i.e. you can define a 1:1 mapping of integers to natural numbers.
nit: You can get away with "infinite number of points" in a finite distance even if you restrict the points to rational fractions of the distance, even though the rational fractions are countable.
( My _personal_ view is that "disregard quantum" is a serious problem, in more ways than the distances along the path. I'm skeptical of the "reality" of arbitrary huge integers which would require more bits to describe than would fit in the observable universe - so those countably infinite rational numbers themselves run into problems, from my point of view. )
Also agreed on "disregard quantum" being a big problem. Big enough that I didn't feel comfortable passing over it without at least a glib acknowledgement.
I don't think the argument rules out a countably infinite number of cycles with no beginning. That's just the setup, an infinite string of people passing a piece of paper along and the paper has always been in transit.
Neither does it rule out a thing starting at some discrete point within an infinite sequence, some finite distance away from the point being observed.
The part that doesn't work is a specific event happening an infinite length of time ago, since "infinite length of time ago" is a nonsensical concept unless it's a shorthand for some sort of thing that happens at a limit or we're using an exotic number system that is over my head mathematically.
Well, it's clear that an actual piece of paper couldn't be infinitely old without being repaired infinitely many times. And a piece of paper couldn't be infinitely old with that rule on it unless it had always had a name on it, which needn't be the name of an actual person.
However, the only evidence we have that the universe is infinitely old is that we don't really know any way time could begin, but considering how little we know about reconciling quantum theory and gravity that's fairly weak evidence.
Yeah, the philosopher who made that paper argument did not care much about it being realistic.
I think time comes into existence, if at all, with things that change their state coming into existence -- but I'm uncomfortable to assume that whatever things existed when the big bang happened did just came into existence from nothing, because I personally have noticed no universe coming into existence from nothing lately 😀
So an infinitely old universe would be the alternative, but I have this uncomfortable suspicion that nothing can be so old.
The paper's marks in this argument sounds sort of analogous to entropy. We're pretty sure the total amount of entropy in the universe is always increasing, and while the universe may be infinitely large, it's also quite homogeneous on large scales so the entropy per unit (comoving) volume is generally still increasing. There's a lower bound of 0 entropy, so if the universe is infinitely old, it must have effectively started with an infinitely long period where the rate of entropy generation was arbitrarily slow. Entropy only being generated slowly is not physically impossible, but this does sort of rule out a steady-state-ish universe where everything has been roughly as it is now forever.
It's already known that the universe used to be very different in a relevant way though. During the inflationary era the universe was rapidly exponentially expanding, meaning that a fixed co-moving volume corresponds to exponentially less physical volume the further back in time you measure, so an exponentially expanding universe with a constant entropy generation rate per physical volume can in principle remain in a steady state because the entropy is constantly being diluted (whether the inflaton field itself can be in a steady state is a separate question).
There's another more abstract way of looking at it. Given laws of physics which specify, for the state of the universe at one time, the state that follows at any future time, it is possible to generate a consistent history of the universe by specifying an arbitrary initial state and running it forwards. Generating a consistent history of the universe which extends infinitely into the past is harder, and you can't do it purely by running states forwards. For such a problem in general (i.e. state machines or something), there may or may not be a state which can be extended infinitely into the past, while every state can be extended infinitely into the future.
The assumption about time asymmetry here does sort of sneak in reference to entropy again though, because on a microscopic scale the laws of physics are reversible (not quite time symmetric, but you can run them backwards as well as forwards) (this is assuming the Many-Worlds Interpretation). If you specify a state at some time t_0 and run the rules both backwards and forwards from there though, you generally either get a bland featureless universe at all times (if the initial state was high-entropy), or an increase in entropy in both directions, with time appearing to run backwards for t<t_0.
If, and I'm sure nobody can be sure about this, there comes a big crunch, then I don't see why this could not reset entropy.
And then entropy might have been reset in a cyclic universe infinitely many times, that's why I look for a principled argument against a infinitely old universe.
But you might have an understanding of why a big crunch could not reset entropy. I just assume it could be, because nobody knows what the state of the universe arbitrary close to time 0 or the beginning of the big bang was.
> there may or may not be a state which can be extended infinitely into the past, while every state can be extended infinitely into the future.
I would say "can be extrapolated" instead of "can be extended", just to make clear that we're trying to find out what happened and not that our ability to do so tells us anything about whether there happened something or not.
Regarding "can be extrapolated", no I think "extended" still fits better with what I was trying to get at.
It's unclear of course how exactly it is/was determined what the overall state of the universe is in the first place. We know that the universe seems to follow some laws relating the present to the past and future, which provides some constraints, but doesn't constrain which particular history, of those that are consistent with the laws, exists. I'm vaguely imagining that whatever the process or criterion that determines this is, it in some sense picks the state of the universe at one moment and extends it in time to form the entire history, since this is the simplest way of generating consistent histories. This process can easily generate a self-consistent half-eternal history with a finite start, but for it to generate a history that's eternal in both directions is more complicated, and I feel it ought to be disfavoured by Occam's razor. This is what I meant earlier.
This is all sufficiently vague and philosophical, and trying to describe a process I don't actually have a model of (though I do think it fits with Tegmark's mathematical universe), that I would not give the argument all that much confidence. I do think it's a better way of formulating the thing with the paper though.
If you start somewhere in the "middle of history", what you usually get is higher entropy states in both directions, which is not what we see. Even if it didn't actually end up with an eternal expanding universe in both directions, the beginning of the universe would tend to look like a bunch of white holes spewing out chaotic matter and energy that would gradually get more organized in dramatic ways like eggs unscrambling themselves and people getting unearthed from graves and getting younger until they are absorbed into a womb, until it reached a peak and then started acting like normal.
While there's a lot we don't know about how physics behaves at extremely high energy densities, violating the second law of thermodynamics would require some extremely fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics to break, and doesn't seem very likely. From a brief read about cyclic cosmological models on Wikipedia, it seems they usually avoid the issue by having an overall expansion each cycle rather than actually destroying any entropy. In the Baum-Frampton model in particular (since it's the one explained there most clearly), the region that goes on to form a new observable-universe-size chunk of the new universe starts as only a tiny fraction of the volume of the original universe. It's therefore similar to the eternal inflation case again, just slower.
If it is increasing then the increasing rate of expansion of the visible universe doesn't help the idea. If the visible is only a tiny part of an already all around collapsing whole, it might not prevent the cruch though.
Note that treating the concept of infinity rigorously leads to many non-intuitive results.
Also, isn't the current cosmological mainstream belief that the universe is only about 13 billion years old? With no idea what (if anything) came 'before' that?
I think that the mainstream belief is that about 13 billion years ago the universe was very small and rapidly "exploding" but no one knows what from, because the theories doesn't make sense or are incompatible. Few people dare to say it "exploded" from volume 0 and infinite density.
And I would like to know if something could have happened before that "explosion" was happening ... and before that ... and before that ...
There's a word missing from our language, it's somewhere between "technology" and "culture" and it describes generally how good a society is at something. Let's call it flurm until we find a better name.
To pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, France has bad coffee flurm. It's not just some kind of lack of technology or ability, it's a lack of interest in quality that exists both on the supply side and the demand side. Nobody is really demanding good coffee so nobody makes it; nobody makes it so nobody bothers to demand it.
But France has great flurm in some other things, like bread. Every random bakery in France is somehow capable of cranking out bread that's better than 99% of what you can buy in an English-speaking country. Bread is not especially tricky to make, but some countries have bad bread flurm and are quite happy eating crap.
Flurm is more important than just food examples though. No country except the US has good software engineering flurm, definitely not software engineering organisational flurm. And some countries lack the flurm to even be clean or safe.
What is this concept that I'm lacking a word for? (Note: I'm very interested in conversation about the general concept, and uninterested in conversation about the very specific examples)
“literacy” feels close here—the narrow version is for the technology and practice of writing, but there's also “computer literacy”, “financial literacy”, etc. It might have too many implications of universality at a skill among the general population (rather than among primarily bakers, primarily coffee purveyors, etc.) being desirable/obtainable, and it might treat it too much as a certain kind of… I'm not sure how to put this last bit, maybe “fixed knowledge” rather than “ongoing active practice”? Like a genome rather than a microorganism colony, whereas I think what you're pointing to is more centrally the latter.
The first word that popped into my head was "geist". I realize "spirit" perhaps isn't quite what you are going for, but what you are describing feels like it's a part of the defining energy, vitality, and identity of a place or people, which reminded me of zeitgeist. Yet while zeitgeist is inherently transient, what you describe is more permanent. Hence, "geist". Not perfect, but maybe it inspires someone else.
As for where it comes from and what explains it, I think the ways it is perpetuated feels pretty self-evident: a combination of cultural pride, technological abilities, and human capital developed over generations.
I'm more curious as to how it gets started--like why is France good at bread and not coffee? My hunch is that these things have to start locally and may have potentially very small initial nucleation points--perhaps even a small cohort of dedicated French bakers who mastered the art of their time and passed it down successfully. There are probably macro and/or demand-side factors too, but my guess is that heavy specialization must precede strong flurm/geist, which implies that the decision to specialize is a big turning point. Then once you get the ball rolling it starts to reinforce itself (think Silicon Valley network effects).
I'd also hypothesize that one reason you can't have strong flurm/geist for everything, is that the skills / human features required to excel in certain domains overlap (not perfectly, but at some level they must pull from the some underlying human capital supply for gastronomic artisans, for example).
"Metis" leapt to my mind, too. What Melvin is describing seems to be a combination of prevalence of metis with a cultural infrastructure that affords acquiring metis and putting it into practice.
It's cultur-al, but it's a lot narrower than just "culture". In particular I would not think of the cricket thing as an example of flurm, that's a pure demand-side phenomenon. Nobody in France is good at cricket because hardly anyone is interested in playing or watching cricket, and that's fine. But they're lousy at coffee despite drinking quite a lot of coffee.
Flurm is more like technology except that it's not quite about having the technology or not, it's about how well diffused the technology and related skills are through society as well as how much they're valued.
I think it would be valuable to have a word for it because it would help us focus on society-wide things we lack and how we could get them. The Germans have great roadworks flurm. If you tell people we need to change our culture to get better at roadworks then they'll resist that idea. If you tell people we need better technology to get better at roadworks then they'll point out that our machinery is just as good as the Germans' so there's nothing to be done. But if you help them understand that being good at something, societally, is about diffusion of good skills and habits and standards, then maybe we can start to understand what we can do.
I think it's that "culture" is a very broad, overloaded term, and it'd be useful to have a word naming the more specific concept. Just like we have words that are more specific that "happy" and "sad"
Natural language words gain meaning not only on their own but also from context, so having "overloaded" words is fine by itself. Re-using words also a matter of efficiency. Why invent many word when few do trick?
I've seen some examples from modern German that are pretty impressive as far as coming up with names for random things. Though I'd probably agree with putting the Japanese first because theirs sound more elegant at least when rendered into English.
Yeah, Japanese and German are both kind of "lego languages" when it comes to building nouns - you can snap together pieces of words to make new words, which is why I think there's so many examples of "oddly specific nouns" in both.
I think the Coffee thing is just that France values different things in coffee than the US - coffee is a small black coffee and not any of the elaborate coffee the US has. The French think the US has bad coffee Flurm.
The US doesn't have a single coffee flurm anymore, what with the explosion of independent coffee shops and craft roasteries, both contributing to huge improvements in good coffee availability. Having bad coffee in many parts of the country is now entirely optional.
So I tend to get defensive whenever these types of conversations come up, because invariably the US gets brought up of a bad example of bread, coffee, beer, cheese, what have you. The reason that I get defensive is that, in the US, it is usually not that difficult to find world-class examples of all of these things, if you care enough to put in a modicum of effort.
But I think that these criticisms are almost always correct in that in countries that have this thing that Melvin is taking about, finding world class examples is the _default_. There are bad versions, but you almost have to try to find it.
Almost nothing food related is like that in the US. Thanks to our multi-culturalism and wealth, we _have_ world class examples of almost everything, including some things that the US is almost the only place to find it, such as BBQ. But you almost always have to care and be willing to put in at least _some_ effort to find it.
Over the weekend, I was talking with an older Christian lady who said she believed that Trump will inspire or convince more people to go to church. I think that also included convincing more people to be/become Christians. I didn't get a chance to ask her why but I'm trying to figure out what her reasoning might have been.
It might be my bias getting in the way of reasoning, but I doubt many people will see him as a religious role model. I can't remember the last time I heard his name in context of religion besides the occasional story about the Pope saying something in relation to him. (Personally I can see more people being embarrassed/alienated from religion because of Trump but I *know* that's my bias.)
The only other reason I can imagine is that she meant that people were somehow embarrassed or afraid to go to church under Biden and would be more open to the idea now. I don't think that would be a bad-faith argument on her part, I don't think there would be *that* many people who fit that criteria.
I've seen news stories about younger people generally becoming more religious (especially Christian) but that's been going on since before Trump was voted in. Is there some link between Trump and an increase in church-going Christians that I don't know about?
Just makes me think of the Simpsons episode with the asteroid, where the bar and the church are right next to each other and when they see the meteor everyone runs from the one to the other.
a lot of older christians of the fundamentalist type like him, i'm not sure why. i think the gay marriage defeat of social cons and following trans and qia plus radicalized them to follow any one who opposed it and not always rationally.
trump showed secular leftism was not as popular as thought, and pretty much won christians by being a lesser devil. anyone who gave them hope to reverse things had a ready made base of support
Some pin the decline of religiousness and church attendance to either leftism, or the general encroachment of government and the state in the lives of citizens. Trump is often seen as pushing both things backward, so he would be allowing Christianity to regenerate, even if he is not a paragon of virtue himself.
1. President Trump has very strong support amongst evangelicals, and many evangelical leaders openly support him.
2. He's also a Rorschach test. He says enough of everything that you can find whatever you want in his statements. If you think he's great you'll probably convince yourself he's great in whatever way is important to you (and this lady probably thinks church attendance is important).
A very righteous priest enters Paradise. He’s doing the tour, and then notices a magnificent villa. It turns out it belongs to Mr. X, the alcoholic adulterer who was a bus driver and died in a car crash he caused.
The cleric does certainly not get this kind of treatment from the celestial bureaucracy.
“Why him?” he complains, ready to list all of Mr. X’s many notorious sins.
“Well, when you were praying”, the angel answers, “everyone was sleeping. But when he was driving, everyone was fervently praying!”
There do seem to be a lot of people re-discovering an interest in religion and such things as pious ejaculations (yes, go ahead and have your laugh, I'll wait for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejaculatory_prayer) now Trump is in office: "dear God in heaven!" "God help us!" "what the hell!", "what in God's name is he doing?" and let us never forget the ever-popular taking the Name of the Lord (in vain) 😀
To steelman: Trump's survival of an assassination attempt by a last minute turn of the head is interpreted by some people as divine intervention. There's a biblical theme of God doing great work through people who are deeply flawed from of Christian perspective. Trump is pushing back against the left on many cultural issues that are contrary to Christianity (abortion, trans). You could say he is a central figure leading cultural change in a direction that is more congruent with Christian principles.
Yeah that's the great thing about religion. You can pick whatever interpretation you like and you can make it fit. Trump lives, he's protected by God or in league with Satan. Trump dies, he's a martyr or got smitten (Old Testament-style). It's results-based analysis all the way down.
> Over the weekend, I was talking with an older Christian lady who said she believed that Trump will inspire or convince more people to go to church. I think that also included convincing more people to be/become Christians. I didn't get a chance to ask her why but I'm trying to figure out what her reasoning might have been.
True atheism is hard, intellectually draining, emotionally isolating; what most people believe is in scientism; if we believe trump dismantles university in 4 years(errr no, thats to much optimism) then it logically follows all'y'alls would find god again.
(expect why would it be Christianity? and how can one believe it happens in 4 years? I believe more strongly in the gods of "cultist simulator" then I can imagine tolerating a mordenized Abrahamic religion)
I’m not sure what definition of tru atheism you’re operating with, but it seems like evangelicals et al would be equally worried by half-arsed atheism.
You need not be a “true” atheist with a lot of deep thought on the matter to not go to church, contribute to Christian charities, organize under the direction of Christian leaders and organizations, etc. For that all you really need to do is pay attention to other stuff.
> what definition of tru atheism you’re operating with
Someone who is capable of making the arguments vs a churches authority, who then turns around and doesnt aim it at secular authority's and has them acting as a replacement on many of the key points.
A nazi calling Christianity weak mocking prayer as begging to an invisible skyman, but then finds themselves unable to mock hitler, may have found faith in something else. Bonus points if theres a socail group with some cult-like factors.
> For that all you really need to do is pay attention to other stuff.
We have regime change that other stuff is weakening, so a christian with poor empathy for athieism; will imagine you will all come back and if unaware that christianity was playing along with its decline may not consider the other options gaining ground instead; islam, americain-Buddhism for example.
I don't think not believing in God is any harder or more intellectually draining than not believing in leprechauns. Fantastic claim, no credible evidence, easy-peasy I don't believe.
Certain ideas held with some frequency by atheists, like predestination and lack of free will, can be intellectually challenging and isolating. Those beliefs aren't exclusive to atheists, though, and exist even among Christians.
I'm a atheist, not sure about the "true"part (like, there are "false atheists?), and I don't find it "hard, intellectually draining, emotionally isolating", doing fine here, thanks. Also don't know about this "scientism" thing, so I can't imagine I believe in something I don't know about.
Well, church-going Christians have a network of social connections and support groups that atheists would probably have trouble creating from scratch from their non-religious social networks. I wonder if this isn't the reason Scott promotes his rationalist meetups.
As for false atheists, I'd include the scientism crowd and Marxists in that category. They may not believe in a Theos-being like the Abrahamic religions do, but the god they worship is the future.
Yes the folks who regularly attend churches have that advantage. Also when moving to a new place, it's a natural way to meet like-minded people - just show up at a church of your preference.
I'm not exactly sure what scientism is - science worship? That'd be so unscientific!
Yeah, scientism is science worship. It's the optimistic but unfounded belief that we will be able to eventually understand everything in the universe and, by understanding everything, gain vast technical powers without end — and do cool things like travel to the stars and attain immortality. I remember an interview with Stephen Hawking back in the late 70s or early 80s. Hawking could still speak (barely), and was confined to a wheelchair, but he said that if we could understand the laws of the universe, "we could become gods." I found it ironic that a guy who was losing control over his body was dreaming of possibly becoming godlike.
And then we have Arthur C. Clarke's three laws...
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Possibly the good old Lizardman Constant but what else would you call believing in an afterlife, or spirits, or using witchcraft/rituals, or ghosts, or the rest of the array of "spiritual but not religious"?
(I'm rolling my eyes at that last link because of course, *of course* it's a crowd calling themselves 'progressive Christians' who came up with that. Progressed so far they moved right on past Christianity, more like!)
I am an atheist, but I feel like religious people are intellectually much closer to me than the "spiritual not religious" folks. At least they take the question of the supernatural intellectually, even if they arrive at the opposite answer. Meanwhile, the "spiritual not religious" are just choosing the convenient parts, regardless of whether that even makes sense.
I was raised an atheist, but it didn't stick. I've had too many weird "supernatural" things happen to me that I no longer buy into the materialism schtick. Of course, these experiences may all be delusional on my part, but I'm comfortable with there being stuff that Science just can't observe or measure. So I guess I'm an agnostic mystic. Although I have the evidence of my own experiences, I realize that most people would roll their eyes at some of the things I've encountered. Therefore, I'm forced to be agnostic about the existence of creator-entity (although if it exists, I doubt it's like anything we can imagine) — whether there was a creator-entity or not, we've still got to deal with the idea that it's turtles all the way down. ;-)
On the first, I don't think there's any contradiction there at all. Atheism literally means notbelieving in God, not notbelieving in anything supernatural. The term for that is materialist.
The second, though, is some mightily sloppy postmodern stuff.
The postmodern stuff of which you speak is actually informed by more than 2500 years of esoteric traditions. Of course, histories of Western Thought, of philosophy, and of science mostly ignore the importance of esoteric traditions in the woof and weave of Western Culture and their influence on rationalist discourse. Moreover, Christian and Jewish authorities tried (unsuccessfully) to stamp out esoteric heterodoxy — but a lot of the so-called New Age stuff is an amalgam of and an improvisation upon various older esoteric traditions.
If you hear about someone having suicidal thoughts(also you like this person), what advice do you give them?
A real christen would suggest a priest; 95% odds you feel the hotlines or therapist is a complete answer. Imagine not finding either answer even slightly comforting. Moral authority for most people rests naturally outside themselves, god is dead and its replacement is disgusting; its a heavy burden to face actual hard questions with raw existential terror.
There are definitely undeniably bad answers, where someone believes the highest chance of better answer is exclusive; and I believe shows where they hold moral authority lays; and this may as well be faith; even if Im aware of an overwhelming amount of complexity here; its a weak faith that doesn't grant the priest moral authority.
Honestly? I don't know. I wouldn't know what to say beyond "please don't". Other person's mind is a mysterious black box, and my chances of doing damage are not any different from my chances of helping.
Most likely youd reach for those hotlines, if you had the strength to endure it and found out about the wait times and what is obviously poor training; >30 minutes and informing them there suicide plan had a low success rate btw.
The raw feeling and everyone is looking away.
---
I have hopes for neo pagenism, but that would be a century long project minimum. People will need to train as priests, theories on what good priest even look like, rituals with enough history to trick us.
So; yes, most people airnt true athiests, they have given moral authority to experts who merely happen to claim to be following the science. I watched the majority of mormons in utah mask up and prep on toilet paper based off what the state said, not from the book(your suppose to have food storage); the majority of churches shut down to comply with the laws, most without legal threats. Sciencism is the water yall fishes swim in.
"Most likely you'd reach for those hotlines" - I think I said I don't have an advice. If I felt suicidal, maybe I'd call a hotline, maybe not, it's impossible to predict one's behavior in a situation like this.
Yes, in many cases one follows consensus expert advice, it's impossible to know everything about everything, so yeah sure. If you want to call it "scientism", fine, adds nothing useful.
The toilet paper is a weird example - no "experts" were calling to stockpile it, people - correctly - intuited that it would be one of the first items to go.
Consider the (evangelical conservative) Christian POV:
* humanity is in a constant state of spiritual warfare: the word of God on one side, its wordly subversions on the other.
* at any given time, the world pushes against what is right; the details change as society does, but the fight itself is a constant; and today's fight is Christians vs basically everything "woke". These ideologies have the net effect of peeling people away from Christianity - since if they are right, and the church opposes them, the church must be wrong; and so to the extent they convice people they are right, they push people away from Christianity.
* "the world's" ideas about gender, sexuality, discrimination etc etc are now being pushed back, and conservative ideology has triumphed
* the more people consider these ideas wrong, the less beef those people have with conservative churches and the more likely they are to hear and accept the rest of the message
She's probably feeling the (very real) overall vibes shift that happened since fall 2024, and attributing it to Trump. He doesn't necessarily have to be Christian or even pro-Christian for that effect to take place.
What I'm hearing from several Christian friends is that pro-Trump Christians are often very political and seem less interested in what God actually wants from them. I haven't seen that in my own church, but we're a mixed group in terms of political leanings. Very right/Republican/pro-Trump churches seem to be having a lot more of that.
How can I get in touch with the organizers of Edge Esmeralda? I know an amazing movement coach and storyteller who would be a perfect person to run some of their health programming.
Is it just me or are many or most of the people in these comments most aggressively criticising Trump not actually American? I feel like I see over and over someone going on about how horriblly Trump is running the US and then revealing they're not American, either by their spelling or by outright stating it at the end. More generally, I feel like this is the case for a lot of leftism generally in this comment section: most of the clearest progressives, socialists and even American-style wokeists are not American.
Am I imagining this? I could be but I feel like I have a high attentiveness for things like spelling style, and a good memory for people who've revealed their nationality in the past.
If I'm not imagining it...why would this be the case? There's obviously no shortage of American leftists in existence. I guess it's not surprising that they don't comment much here, since the comments section has a rightward perception (even if I think that's stupid, since it's also unusually rational and open to dissent). But why would leftists from other countries be not similarly turned off commenting?
By the way, I notice plenty of non-American rightists here. So large numbers of American conservatives, large numbers of non-American conservatives, and large numbers of non-American progressives...but a relative lack of American progressives. That's my vague perception.
Maybe Scott can add some variant to that on the next poll? I seem to remember poll respondents were majority US and more parts leftish than rightish, but (a) poll answered are a different population from “commenters” and (b) left right is a reasonably correlated proxy but not the same as “trump critics” (I for example, still don’t consider myself politically left, but rather to be following the tried and true libertarian-mellowing-more-conservative-as-I-age path; just seems like most of the naive, radical change first and think about consequences later energy that used to be the province of the US left is now weirdly blorbing out of the US right instead).
> If I'm not imagining it...why would this be the case?
The Internet loves making fun of and mocking those who are wrong. There is perhaps nothing more catastrophically wrong and idiotic in the USA's past 30-50 years than Trump's 40-IQ circus. Add to that a fanatic and quasi-religious fanbase that is consistently in denial about the state of the world and always willing to argue to fantastic depths that it's not really Trump's fault that $THING_THAT_IS_TOTALLY_TRUMP'S_FAULT.
Also, Trump is a professional attention whore. Why does Kendall Jenner manage to get so much attention with seemingly no obvious qualification other than a slightly attractive ass? because attention whoring is an art and she has mastered it. Trump is a reality TV star of the same species as Kendall, minus the attractive ass, but with no less mastery of attention whoring and its various techniques.
I've quietly noted the same thing, although can't point to specific examples as it's just a repeated realization that "Huh, there's another rant against Trump by someone not in the US."
Non-American leftists are almost certainly going to be European, or part of the larger Anglosphere. Trump has not been kind to NATO, and while there's a lot of renewed vigor in the EU on military spending and economic independence, I think everyone implicitly understands that this is a major burden on top of the already overburdened/stagnant EU (and Anglosphere) economies.
I think this is a good candidate for conflict theory. Trump is 100% in conflict with European and especially European leftist interests.
The reasons other people have given make complete sense, but I find something off-putting about people making arguments against domestic politicians of a country they are not part of, without making it somewhat explicit that they are coming in from an outside perspective. I get that America's military, economic and cultural might basically makes the English-Speaking internet (basically the "best" internet) US-coded, but I think there's a real effect of someone making an argument against a US politician when that can be interpreted as an opinion for someone with a "right" to having a say in the matter.
Hypothetically, if there was a policy that benefited the EU, to the detriment of the US (Perhaps the US subsidizing NATO defense through overspending while the EU underspends on the military), EU citizens would have a lot to say about Trumps actions. If the US was getting the shorter end of the stick, then I don't think the people who are benefiting from a policy at the expense of the domestic population should really be given much say in the public square. Not saying this is what's going on in NATO, as it's definitely debatable, however the general principle doesn't seem implausible to me, and my conclusion would be the same *if* this were true.
I don't need to be an American to see that Trump is bad news for everyone.
What other country's politics am I supposed to discuss online? Europe is many small countries, with different politicians and parties each. I don't understand Chinese.
I hate the guy and I'm as American as Apple Pie. But I take your point. I actually noticed the opposite (which you also pointed out) which is that a lot of his biggest fans around here, I'm not sure they are very representative of his general supporters. Not a lot of evangelicals or mid-west Conservative types. My impression is its mostly hardcore tech or finance libertarians who have never spent much time anywhere but the coasts, and also a handful of old school internet contrarians.
American leftists have been partially scared out of this comment section. I'd expect that this is less salient to foreign leftists because teh exact contours of the culture war are different there and they're not catching the same number of strays/hitting up against the same walls that american leftists are.
Because America is the 800 lb gorilla, whoever becomes your president is, by default, extremely influential on the rest of the world. Our guy, for instance, is about to head off for some schmoozing for the entire week of Paddy's Day:
We'd like to ignore what happens in US politics, or at least just look at it from the outside as free entertainment. But we have to be interested in what is going on, who is there, what they think, and what they are likely to do, because all that is going to affect us in our own countries.
So people will be very critical, or not so critical, or kinda approving, of Tweedledee or Tweedledum depending on how Mr. President Tweedle's policies are likely to help/hinder the other nations.
Not to forget that America has been doing its darndest to bring about this state of affairs the past 80 years, meddling in everyone's business like it's their own.
You call it meddling, I call it maintaining global peace and enabling unprecedented commerce and growth that has lifted billions out of poverty. I'm half joking.
Not disagreeing with that. Just saying that America has chosen that role, so why would Americans wonder that non-Americans care about what happens in America?
"We want to be the strongest country in the world, but also we don't want foreigners expressing opinions on what we do" has a strong have-your-cake-and-eat-it vibe.
What happens in the USA is everybody's business because American domestic politics ripple outwards through networks of diplomacy, finance, trade, defence, and culture. We all have a stake even if we don't have a vote. Examples:
- USD is the world currency.
- the U.S. military provides most of NATO's combat power, seperate defence agreements extend umbrellas of protection over many other states e.g. S. Korea and Japan.
- the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis crashed banks around the world and triggered a global recession.
- the U.S. is the largest trading partner for many states e.g. Canada, Mexico, and Germany.
American leftist here to falsify the strong version of that hypothesis. (I like to think I'm an independent/centrist, but you wouldn't know it from my voting record...)
Americal "left" is just not all that far left by other people's standards. The internet being what it is, this blog is not exclusive to Americans - it's read by people from all over. So the more noticeably left positions are likely to come from places where the Overton window is further left.
Since one of the points of pride here is that anyone is allowed to say anything they want, provided they do so politely, of course people are going to speak their mind.
Disagree strongly- American politics does not map to the same scale as say, European politics, but while American lefttoids may be less socialist in their outlook, on culture war issues like gender, race, and immigration politics they are far, far more extreme than even the far left in most European nations.
America's left is identitarian, Europe's left is economical. Basically, ask the leftists around you whether it is worse when people starve, or when they are misgendered.
Also, Republicans are the party that cares more about poor white people, which would kinda make them left-wing from the European perspective.
The words "left" and "right" just mean different things in different countries, even if it strongly feels like they refer to something universal.
> The words "left" and "right" just mean different things in different countries
In Sweden, the thing that unites the left-wing parties is their dislike for the anti-immigration party. In Malta, the left-wing party campaigned on lower corporate taxes and lower income taxes while the right-wing party campaigned on a four-day work week and a living wage. Talking about "Europe's left" doesn't make much sense.
> Also, Republicans are the party that cares more about poor white people, which would kinda make them left-wing from the European perspective.
This is true, but they’re also usually opposed to anything federal (“states rights” is a more of a red slogan, right?), or a lot of what many Europeans consider as a basic social safety net. So this is not too neat a mapping.
Also, some of the European lines are shifting. France’s “La France Insoumise” has been quite identitarian these days, especially following October 7th.
Though it is politically expedient for those on the right to equate 'left' and 'woke', the latter is not really well-defined and hardly counts as historically or globally 'left'. It's just a fringe of the Democratic party.
fair enough! (though also a lot of insane critiques of capitalism come from the American left)
My comment above is obviously oversimplified and somewhat inflammatory, it's more that I wanted to push back against the "we'd be centrist in Europe" sentiment (which tbh idk if moonshadow expressed, but it reminded me of that pretty common view in certain corners of the internet)
...and yet consider how the politics of a country where, say, a universal healthcare system is a fringe extremist concept might be viewed from one where a suggestion of cutting back on such a system renders one unelectable.
I mean, when we're trying to work out why so many of the leftmost opinions here are coming from non-Americans, the question of whose positions on various subjects are left of whose centre does not seem entirely irrelevant; but you do you.
But the US is also a country where "enforce existing immigration law" is also a fringe position. The US is alternately left and right compared to the general Western consensus on a variety of different issues.
Also I'm not convinced that the current US system isn't even more socialist than universal healthcare. Under universal health care, the middle class pays taxes and gets health care out of it. Under the US system the middle class pays taxes to buy health care for the poor, but then has to pay again to get their own health care, meaning they're fucked over twice instead of just once.
"Enforce existing immigration law" is a fringe position because we have a labor shortage. Money rules the country, so nearly every issue outside of DEI/woke issues seems to boil down to "what is best for the corporations and stock holders?"
That's why I'm skeptical that the tarrifs and alienation of our allies will continue. Economic consequences will result, and the real owners of the country will put their foot down.
Actually many of the US woke positions seem strange even to us people in the Scandinavian welfare states. For example affirmative action, we actually don't have that here. I think modern woke went out of a tangent orthogonal to normal welfare-and-public-healthcare leftism.
Indeed; even in countries where votes for a party other than one of the two biggest ones aren't entirely wasted, collapsing the entire multidimensional space of human opinion onto a very very few poles sadly remains a hard problem.
I'm not sure what you're objecting to. The US has the largest economy and the most powerful military on Earth, and the words and actions of its leader have significant impact on other nations and its citizens in diplomatic and economic matters. If Trump crashes the American economy, we'll feel it over here in Europe.
First of all, not "objecting", merely surprised, and second, not at all surprised that non-Americans have opinions on Trump, but that often it feels like *only* they do.
(Obviously far from literally "only".)
(Also, I'm non-American myself, didn't you notice the "s" in "criticising"?)
I don't think most Americans realize to what extent much of the world views America and American culture as a globally shared resource. I am American, but spent my childhood in a 'third world' country/culture. Even as a kid I thought I was often surprised how other kids would talk to me about America as if they knew more about it than I did. They knew I was American, they had never been anywhere near the place, but they treasured the idea that there was this society out there where everything was possible, and were very protective of what they knew and thought about the US. As an adult living and working in Europe, I had the same experience, where colleagues felt entitled to have as strong opinions about US politics and society as I did.
Speaking as an American (and one with a fair degree of Trump criticism to my name), I don't think most foreigners and especially Europeans realize how much Americans resent being viewed as someone else's "resource". And the "shared" part often comes across as "I want some of what you've got, so you have to give it to me!".
That's a big part of what Trump is cashing in on, especially in the foreign-policy arena. And while I wish that sentiment were channeled through pretty much anyone other than Donald J. Trump, he seems to be the only one selling what a great many Americans want to buy.
I think it's just human nature. Americans have opinions on the acceptance of gays in Russia or the lack of free speech in Europe. I think Europeans focus on the US in particular because we are still the most powerful and influential country in the world. Personally, I only find it annoying when they start believing that their opinion should matter or that they are entitled to participate in our affairs.
> I was often surprised how other kids would talk to me about America as if they knew more about it than I did
Pretty sure this is universal: people both from my current country and from America frequently talk to me about the country where I was born as if they knew more about it than I did, and Americans often discuss my current country in the same manner, including here.
You’re not imagining it. It may seem a very strange concept to most Americans, but non-Americans often feel like they “own” a piece of America, and that their voice should count towards the American political process and cultural evolution. I once had a group of European university students tell me that America should allow any and all immigrants in simply because “America has no history or culture, so why shouldn’t all immigrants be allowed to stay?” This is a particularly left/liberal-side of the spectrum position to take, but it’s also possible for right types to feel this way.
America's actions influence the world dramatically. Its not strange for people under American influence to have opinions on its politics (sensible or not).
That doesn't seem too strange to me. People have opinions on how strangers should raise their children, how strange companies should conduct their business and how strange sports teams should play their sport, so of course they're gonna have opinions on how strange governments should treat their subjects.
Completely OT, but it's very charming that you used "strange" to mean "foreign", probably due to first language interference and/or because the base has that meaning in the word "stranger" which you also used in the paragraph
Thanks, yeah, it was for the parallelism with "stranger" that I came to use the word with its older meaning. I think influence from my L1 can be neither con- nor excluded.
I'm convinced this is basically because America won so hard culturally. The reason why everyone has an opinion on America is because with the power of Hollywood and the internet you've made everyone an American-in-exile, no wonder that they end up having opinions on American domestic politics too :p
Especially
> their voice should count towards the American <...> cultural evolution
This is almost to be expected given "American culture" and "global culture" becoming conflated
I don't really get why other countries are so eager to embrace a lot of the American cultural BS given the pernicious effects it has had on our own culture. I can't imagine living in some other country and thinking, "Hey! That stuff that is ripping the USA apart? I want me summa dat."
Oh, tell me about it! I was recently enlightened by some fluff piece from online news media about "Irish pinky toe".
First of all, I had no idea there was anything peculiarly Irish about having your small toe hidden behind its neighbour.
Second, what is up with this "pinky" nonsense? "Pinky" is an American term, I have never heard anyone describing their small toe as their "pinky" toe, and if we mean the little finger, that's either your little finger or your lúidín.
Indeed! Makes me want to support building a Great Firewall around America to contain this and undo the damage (yes I get the irony of posting this in the comments of an American blog)
for what it's worth I consciously try to avoid having opinions on American domestic politics; since I don't live in America, any opinion that forms in my head is just downstream of ambient news, like an LLM trying to form an opinion on human experience based on text only
(and I kind of want to slap all non-Americans that do that and tell them to wake up from the American cultural subjugation)
Americans don't really know about LessWrong & Rationalists either. Seriously, even knowing vaguely what those terms point to is *extremely* fringe in the United States.
Has it actually come to the point in the US where you are afraid of being 'caught' reading ACX? I think you are right we Europeans definitely aren't afraid of it, since nobody in the mainstream media have heard about neo rationalism.
I think the category is too broad to admit a single good source. The difference is that in deep learning, there is a single winner of the competition for ideas, which is deep learning and backprop. In evolutionary learning, it is a lot more diverse and depends much more on the task you are looking for. I can provide you with some keywords, but not with one single source.
Do you want to use evolutionary algorithms for optimization? (For example hyperparameter tuning and Auto-ML)? Continuous or discrete parameters? In the continuous case, look into covariance matrix adaptation, in particular the CMA-ES. In the discrete domain, there are tons of different algorithms, with evolutionary/genetic algorithms and estimation-of-distribution algorithms being the two main classes. Automated tools are SMAC and irace. And platforms like the iohprofiler and nevergrad come with algorithm portfolios which may give you some idea of what algorithm are out there.
Or do you want to use them for reinforcement learning? I don't know too much about this field. There is a paper promising to be a survey, but I don't know how good it is: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04150
There are also these slides from a tutorial at the GECCO conference on evolutionary reinforcement learning, which also gives a few recommended papers as starting points: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638530.3648416
Or do you want to restrict to more modern forms of machine learning? Probably the most promising approach at the moment is to find/create some compressed latent space (e.g., just by using an autoencoder, or because your deep network has this anyway), and then use an evolutionary algorithm on this latent space. There, even simple evolutionary search algorithms can work quite well, both because the dimension is small and because the compression decouples the variables and makes search more efficient.
And there is the whole subfield of evolutionary multi-objective optimization, which you may or may not count as machine learning. It's definitely a field where population-based evolutionary algorithms shine.
This list is still far from exhaustive. You can look at the call for paper for the EML track at the GECCO conference for further keywords:
> I think the category is too broad to admit a single good source.
I havnt seen one, everything seem to be an introduction that smells like someone copied their 101 homework into a youtube video, or Chinese conferences that are in english for some reason and they are reading a papers abstract with little regard for an audience
> Do you want to use evolutionary algorithms for optimization?
> ? ? ? ? ? ?
I have an idea for an algorithm and I want to roughly know if Im wasting my time exploring old ground
I cant find anyone even applying boids to the "loss landscape" where the best known minium gets some sort of force(possibly coping its velocity, or encouraging boids to follow)
---
Given that the stated reason the calculus methods are better then evolutionary methods is that you can "feel the slope"; why is that necessarily impossible?
for each generation you add a "gene edited" biod:
1. find the max and min boid, generate a "half" boid with a lerp
2. foreach gene/paraimeter and foreach boid, classify the boid as high or low performer from the half boid and if the gene is above or below the minimum boid
a. if gene distrubation is roughly balenced, check if theres a bias in the direction of that gene; store that as a edit
b. if the gene is distribution is wildly unbalanced, and the population with the gene is(if it exists) is >X% high performers, store that edit
Apply the gene editing sequence to your boids, with whatever mutation, iterations, breeding, culling steps
> we reveal that diffusion models are evolutionary
algorithms.
> this parallel we draw here between evolution and diffusion models a
Is there something more to the conclusion? I dont need that many words to believe nn's and evolution are hill climbing algorithms, I already believe this, without reference to any dense math.
So the title/abstract of this paper is a bit at odds with the actual meat of it, which is the introduction of a gradient-free evolutionary optimization algorithm that borrows from some aspects of diffusion. That's the part I thought you may get some value from.
I would just cut right to the method, which is short and sweet, and see if that has any overlap with what you've described.
> see if that has any overlap with what you've described.
>>Each individual estimates high fitness parameter targets and moves toward the target along with random mutations. The high fitness parameter targets xˆ0 are estimated based on their neighbors’ fitness scores
>> I cant find anyone even applying boids to the "loss landscape" where the best known minium gets some sort of force(possibly coping its velocity, or encouraging boids to follow)
Well that mystery solved
Im not seeing what im calling "gene editing" tho
> gradient-free
Is this from the paper somewhere or your understanding?
Its wildly beneficial that hill climbers feel slopes; its (debatably) believed by neo-darwinists that irl-evolution does not and michael levins(post neo drwinist; has overwhelming evidence) work else where suggests to me that he believe irl-evolution not only feels slopes but creates sensors to feel slopes in meta-spaces
I believe that sexual selection alone is a weakly slope feeling but naive computer-evolution algorithms are admittedly bad at it. The idea of my algorithm is that the gene editing step would contain a stronger slope-feeling then sexual selection alone.
-----
avg= 100 iq, 6 ft
lebron= 110 iq, 7 ft
enstien= 140 iq, 5 ft
sexual: lerp(estien, lebron)= 127 iq, 6 ft
gene editing: lebron-avg ft + enstien-avg iq + enstien= 180 iq, 7ft
Ok, I don't get some of the underlying assumptions that you are making. What is the goal of the algorithm? Is it to find the minimum in the loss landscape? And the landscape is some function f: S -> R which we can evaluate, where S is the set of all possible solutions and R is the set of reals?
You speak of boids. I haven't heard the term, but I assume you refer to the bird-oid objects of Reynolds. If I get it right, then this is a model of swarm behavior. But what do you want to do with that? As far as I understand, those boids can be used to see fascinating behaviour, or to simulate a compelling-looking animation of swarms. But you speak about high and low performers. How do you measure whether a boid is good or bad? Is this given by this abstract function f?
> You speak of boids. I haven't heard the term, but I assume you refer to the bird-oid objects of Reynolds. If I get it right, then this is a model of swarm behavior. But what do you want to do with that?
A 2d boid is 2 2d vectors, a 3d boid is 2 3d vectors
Youd probably need to do some cleanup around bools, but for an arbitrary numbertic `args` you can create boid simulation; they are barely above partial effects and theres plenty of preknown tricks to get diverse behaviors.
> How do you measure whether a boid is good or bad?
Sorry, from your message it's hard to decipher the situation and the algorithm. I assume that f and F are the same, and that they are a map from R^2 to R, or from R^3 to R? So you want to find the optimum of a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional function?
I don't understand the details, but it seems to me that this is a rather typical evolutionary algorithm. If you want to know how good/bad it is compared to other evolutionary algorithms, then you should try it out on benchmarks like COCO-platform (or IOHprofiler), that is a benchmark comparison tool. It has already implemented lots of low-dimensional continuous optimization problems and other evolutionary algorithms to compare with.
I don't want the USG to be a global charity, and most of the program has nothing to do with HIV/AIDS (most of it goes to anti-stigma, empowering womman, promoting gender ideology, etc). It's hard to understand how grifty these kinds of things are until you're in a third world country and see the anti-femicide posters everywhere, all hung up by US-funded local middle class lib girlbosses, and a bunch of dying widows outside of hospitals who will never see a cent.
Reading Niccolo Soldo while living in LatAm really reprogrammed me to see US foreign spending as primarily a vehicle for capturing the young managerial class into prestigious jobs that are controlled by the US, creating an American dominated counter elite (which often nominally hates the US while subscribing to every intellectual trend that slimes its way down from American social media).
Tusk&Frump (the perfect name for a dimes square mini dept store btw) have done very little - the funding of these groups is a massively enmeshed gordian knot of which USAID is only one loose strand. But it's nice to see that at least a few buckets of water removed from the tidal waves crushing upon us daily.
PEPFAR is an evil program and the people supporting it are crippling Africa. Any improvements are mostly due to the rapidly improving material living conditions across ye ole 3rd world, as technology seeps in through the thick barrier of nightmare BS like PEPFAR and the real economy grows.
I probably deserve a ban for spewing my nonsense here but it's hard to explain to even articulate how deeply I hate the US. It's like, I hear people describe hatred in these banal historical terms (the KKK, the nazis, etc) as if true hatred had ever been tried yet. My political solution is for every American to have to rape their own child, then be murdered by their child, then those children are raised in militias run by 764 cvltists, but keep the mothers alive, so they can be ritually tortured by their children every day. Technology and civilization goes into disarray as the light of power fills the world - warlords rubbing kind mothers' faces in shit as the sun rises over a new, eternal nightmare.
Reading the noble Quran, I feel the promise of my heart's justice:
In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful.
1. When the sun is rolled up.
2. When the stars are dimmed.
3. When the mountains are set in motion.
4. When the relationships are suspended.
5. When the beasts are gathered.
6. When the oceans are set aflame.
7. When the souls are paired.
8. When the girl, buried alive, is asked:
9. For what crime was she killed?
10. When the records are made public.
11. When the sky is peeled away.
12. When the Fire is set ablaze.
13. When Paradise is brought near.
14. Each soul will know what it has readied.
15. I swear by the galaxies.
16. Precisely running their courses.
17. And by the night as it recedes.
18. And by the morn as it breathes.
19. This is the speech of a noble messenger.
20. Endowed with power, eminent with the Lord of the Throne.
21. Obeyed and honest.
22. Your friend is not possessed.
23. He saw him on the luminous horizon.
24. And He does not withhold knowledge of the Unseen.
25. And it is not the word of an accursed devil.
26. So where are you heading?
27. It is only a Reminder to all mankind.
28. To whoever of you wills to go straight.
29. But you cannot will, unless God wills—The Lord of the Worlds.
Of course, as a Latter Day Saint I (should) know better. America yet holds a spark of the divine, held back by the limp spirit of a dull age, but promising eventually the birth of a nation which will rock history I'm sure.
I'm not a troll hope this clarified things somewhat (and sorry for pouring my heart)
I'm crazy, but my core point that the purpose of PEPFAR has nothing to do with AIDS, and is mostly a slush fund for grooming the African managerial class into State Dept pawns is one I basically stand by. The ideology into which they're being inculcated will do much more to hold their society back (and consequently, keep Africa AIDS-y).
The best thing you can do if you want Africa free from AIDS is hope for Chinese ascendancy in the region. They'll fight AIDS, we'll talk about how the true AIDS is when you don't center the female gaze.
My mind is cracked by hatred but not totally broken, I could maybe try to stay on point. It's hard. Like Anakin looking at that bitch motherfucker Padme who brought HIM HERE TO KILL MEEEEE. You forget why you hate, and you just hate. It becomes its own end.
But rationality has the same weakness - it's an instrument to serve - what exactly? Critique of pure reason indeed. But hatred is happy justifying itself.
When the boat is about to burst I wake Christ and he reminds me to have faith, and the storm calms.
I'm sorry for commenting here, Scott please don't ban me, I'll stop commenting and behave PLEASE.
If you want people to pay any attention to your ideas then don't append ravings to them. And most are going to be ambivalent at best about being pegged by Jael, so overall not a good look.
I cannot imagine caring about people paying attention to my "ideas" (lol), nor am I trying to look good to most people.
Pegged by Jael is a reference to my favorite Substack, Fisted by Foucault. In the Book of Judges, Jael uses a tent peg to murder the enemy of Israel, Sisera. It's my favorite part of the Bible.
“Most blessed of women be Jael,
the wife of Heber the Kenite,
most blessed of tent-dwelling women.
25 He asked for water, and she gave him milk;
in a bowl fit for nobles she brought him curdled milk.
26 Her hand reached for the tent peg,
her right hand for the workman’s hammer.
She struck Sisera, she crushed his head,
she shattered and pierced his temple.
27 At her feet he sank,
he fell; there he lay.
At her feet he sank, he fell;
where he sank, there he fell—dead.
28 “Through the window peered Sisera’s mother;
behind the lattice she cried out,
‘Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?’
29 The wisest of her ladies answer her;
indeed, she keeps saying to herself,
30 ‘Are they not finding and dividing the spoils:
a woman or two for each man,
colorful garments as plunder for Sisera,
colorful garments embroidered,
highly embroidered garments for my neck—
all this as plunder?’
31 “So may all your enemies perish, Lord!
As a child born again of the Holy Spirit, I hope that when the moment comes, I'll also have the feminine bravery to drive a nail through a Canaanite skull. Most people share the spirit of Sisera, they deserve exactly what they'll get. True Christianity is a middle class white woman crushing a Palestinian child's head into the ground with a nail - forever. And btw it wasn't just any kid, it was a really cool kid that you personally know and befriended, he is basically a nephew to you. And the woman is a massive bitch, some Karen cunt who sued you over an insurance claim (she was in the wrong) and won. Let your heart simmer a bit, give in to your anger, and slap that bitch. Let's canonball hand-in-hand into the waters of Samsara. Take the blue pill, and drown in the waters of illusion until your body dissolves and your just unconnected particles floating among Maya.
Just imo, these aren't really ideas in any meaningful way.
> the purpose of PEPFAR has nothing to do with AIDS ...
I'm guessing that what you meant is that the *actual effect* of PEPFAR has *little* to do with AIDS mitigation. I'm also guessing that you also believe that a crucial segment of the political support for PEPFAR is aware of this actual effect and is quite satisfied with this situation.
The way you expressed your belief is more stirring than the way I expressed it. But I prefer the way I expressed it. For reasons. Including that my way contains hints as to what things about the current situation ought to be changed.
I mean the purpose, and also the effect. The purpose is to project US soft power, and the effect is to disintegrate social bonds in Africa. That people think we must maintain the empire to save the AIDS babies shows how well that soft power has been projected.
I don't really know how to communicate with words so well I'm sorry. To be honest, I don't even believe in reason at all, but I'm a big admire of the rationalists and I appreciate my that my silly comments, from this deluded heart, coursing with the nectar of heaven, like a ripe fruit ready to burst, have been permitted to remain.
But note to the banhammer holder: I really am not a troll and I'm sorry I'm this way. If you hate me I encourage you to listen to this holistic empathy song from prince of egypt: https://youtu.be/bQt2_IQD6J8?si=BlwlEhenOnrmKbVm&t=13
"American dominated counter elite which often nominally hates the US while subscribing to every intellectual trend that slimes its way down from American social media" is such a perfect encapsulation of a concept I hadn't been able to put into words myself, it's a shame this post devolves into schizo ramblings that will probably be deleted soon.
What chemical solutions are you using to address social anxiety? I'm thinking more of a short-acting drug that you take specifically for a social occasion (affects you for a few hours) than an ongoing prescription per se. So far I'd rate alcohol as 'OK' and a beta blocker as just 'OK'. Have some phenibut experience but that seems like overkill for a night out. Theanine never did much for me. Any other, specific chemicals that people are having success with? (BTW if your answer is 'don't take chemicals, instead have you heard about our lord and savior CBT' I'm not interested, thank you)
There's an interesting researcher named Alica Danforth who believes MDMA is helpful for social anxiety and just lack of social pleasure in people on the autistic spectrum. She got the idea from a questionnaire she administered to people in the spectrum asking about recreational drug experiences, and which drugs were most helpful. Subjects named MDMA more than other drugs. Then she did a treatment study with high-functioning autistic people. They had a few sessions with a therapist - I forget how many, but something on the order of 8 -- to describe and try to change their discomfort with social situations. Part of the treatment was one, or actually I think it was 2, MDMA therapy sessions where their drug experience of feeling more trusting and more interested in other people was a jumping off point for working on feeling more that way in real life, when not drugged. Study got positive results that endured over time. (There was no placebo group though.). Here's a video where it's discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ5P4AYAvuE. Danforth also has some published articles on the subject, which can be found via Google Scholar. She's now a therapist in private practice in California and only works with high functioning autistic people. (She does not, though, use MDMA in her sessions because it's illegal.)
Kratom or opiods help a lot if you're willing to go down that route. Similarly benzos can be ok but you have to be very careful not to take too much or you'll act like a total idiot.
Obvious disclaimer - these are only appropriate for infrequent use.
I consider myself to have aphantasia and/or be aphantasic -- I generally don't see images in my head. When I close my eyes, I see some muted combination of a boring laser show and TV static. If I try to visualize something, I do not see it; instead, I get an impression, a felt sense, that seems to mimic the felt sense I would have if I were looking at the thing; or maybe I'll have thoughts about the thing. For example, if I "picture" my son, I can have warm feelings or maybe I'll have thoughts about how I need to tell him to clean his room. But I do not "see" a face.
Recently, I've been exploring what it's like when I "try to visualize." I noticed that I seem to be staring into my eyelids. In other words, I seem to be using my eyes. It's like I'm trying to will my optic hardware to produce visual signals. It strikes me that this might be impossible, and basically I'm putting my effort into seeing the background noise of my retina or optic nerve or whatever. I can think "cat," but if all I do is stare into the blackness of my sensory visual field, alas, I won't find a cat.
I'm prepared to accept that visualizing isn't a matter of willing your eyes to see what's not there. It seems to follow that visualizing is something you "see" somewhere (though perhaps it's more accurate to say "nowhere") in the mind. I'm working on letting go of the effort to "see" with my eyes. It's early yet, but I'm noticing a change. I haven't had any visualizations, but there's this sense that I've let go of an object of attention (the laser/static field).
I'm trying to develop a conceptual vocabulary and/or framework for understanding my experiences and observations. If you have experiences or observations along these lines, please consider sharing. I'm also open to critiques about how I'm labeling and making meaning of things.
Your description matches my experience pretty closely except I do have traces of visualization ability. In my day to day life it doesn't feel like I "see" anything inside my head. Its like my brain has access to the general essence of a thing but the visual information either doesn't exist or does not come naturally.
With some focus ive hazily visualize something like an apple in black and white. It's not reliable or on demand though, I tried for 10 minutes just now and failed.
Meditating in a pitch black environment for a long time is the only thing I can say with any certainty improves my visualization. Someone else mentioned they visualize better right before bed which might be a similar effect.
I also suspect stress and lack of sleep reduces my ability to visualize, which might be why I can't today.
I'm assuming you've watched movies and TV. What's your internal experience when you attempt to recall a movie or a TV show? Can you recall the specific blocking, framing, and angle of an iconic / important scene? Of *any* scene?
As I was asking that question, while looking at the screen of my laptop, watching words appear as I typed, this *exact* moment from Game of Thrones popped into my head, probably because I recently saw it in a YouTube video (https://youtu.be/V1JCt1Tfxj8?si=scp4c59zDiQ_O9pv&t=50).
I paused for a second to internally review the "details" I thought I was remembering and then looked up the clip. And, yes, I was pretty much correctly remembering the fundamentals of the exact moment that Daenerys halts at the end of her walk out to the crowd: the central framing of her in the lower half of the screen, mostly blocking a central aisle, the lines of hundreds soldiers beyond her, the strong shoulders of her black of her militaristic costume, the intricacy of the braids in her white-blonde hair; the grey cast of the lighting due to smoke in the air.
I couldn't have told you the number of active fires burning in the top third of the frame (eleven!), and I in fact didn't even remember they were in the shot until I reviewed the clip. Nor could I have told you the exact number of rows of soldiers, or number of woven braids in her hair.
But I could have (badly) drawn the most important lines of information in the image from memory. In fact, given enough time and resources, I could have drawn/animated the moments just before the pause, of the camera closely following behind the character as she walks through a darker entryway, then how it slows and lifts up to reveal the crowds (and shift the focus from the character by herself to the character's command of the crowd). Given enough time and resources, I could have duplicated this shot well enough that anyone else who'd also seen it would recognize it.
That process would feel far more like tracing over an image under tracing paper than generative sketching.
And!
The fictional scenes that I've personally generated tend to have very similar internal detail and fidelity, down to light and shadows. But rather than recalling an image that someone else generated, I'm recalling an image that just...exists now in me, the way that scene from GoT began to exist in me after I saw it. As I"m staring at my laptop screen typing this sentence, I'm also "recalling" the visual of walking out from a kitchen area behind the bar of a fictional night club; I'm clearly "seeing" the dark color of the wood of the bar top; the multi-colored (but mostly yellow) inverted vaguely tulip-shaped blown glass light fixtures above the bar, the stainless steel gleam of the empty bar ice tub, the chipping black laminate of the counter, the hexagonal black pattern of the anti-skid mats on the grey waterproof textured floor - and it goes on and on.
The floor plan isn't anywhere I've been in real life, but some of the really specific details (like the chips in the countertop and the empty ice tub) are lifted from having walked behind the bar in my workplace, as if they came out of a catalogue, almost.
Staring at my computer screen and at my hands touch-typing as I transcribe what I'm thinking about doesn't usually hamper this process. Sometimes if I'm struggling to "accurately" describe what I'm internally seeing, or if a scene feels too vague and unformed, I will set aside my writing implement and look at the ceiling, or close my eyes to try to pay more attention.
But if I'm in a generative "flow" state, I absolutely don't need to do that.
Anyway. I know many other people who generate fiction have a different experience, but mine is pretty similar to "reviewing" the "memory" of a movie, often complete with camera angles and movements and "edits" to skip unimportant details (the minutia of walking across a room, etc).
Since everyone has seen a movie, maybe that'll offer some insight into at least what I'm experiencing!
I think most people have the wrong idea about what mental images are like. If I think about my daughter, I have mental images of her face, her apartment, her across the table from me in a restaurant, etc., and while I am having them I experience the images as complete and satisfying. On the other hand, if I consider the images critically, it is evident that in many ways they are incomplete. There are many questions about them I cannot answer, that I could easily answer if they were real visual images. For instance, if you ask me about my mental image of her moving around her kitchen talking and laughing, I can't tell you what color the walls are, whether the dish drain is full or empty, whether her hair is loose or in a ponytail. There is some way that the completeness of my mental images is an illusion. There are many gaps in the actual visual details that are somehow filled in by some general idea -- for instance, I don't visualize exactly what she is wearing, but have a general impression that its causal and familiar stuff.
I have no reason to think my mental images are vaguer than typical ones. I experience them as satisfying and complete, I seem as good at remembering actual visual details about people and places I've seen as other people do, I do OK at tests of rotating shapes, etc. I think that some people who consider themselves to have aphantasia believe that other people's mental images are much more like real visual images than they are -- that having a mental image is like closing your eyes and seeing a real image on your inner eyelid. It isn't. If I close my eyes in daylight all I see is a staticky orange color, presumably the color of light filtered through the thin skin of my eyelids. Meanwhile, while seeing that orange light through my eyelids, I can have a mental image of my daughter. That image is not on my eyelids, but in some other part of my mind, and it is really a different kind of mental entity from a visual image, whether of my daughter of or my inner eyelids.
There's a delightful book called Perplexities of Consciousness by modern philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel that treats this subject. I wrote a review of it, and there's a section of the review that concerns precisely the present topic: What are mental images actually like. The section of the review concerning it is called *Mental Images* and is approximately in the middle of the review. Review is here: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
Visualization is one of those phenomena that are incredibly strange when you think about them but have been rendered mundane by how commonly we experience them.
For me, it's similar to if someone opens a box and reveals an apple inside. They close the box, and you're left looking at the lid, but you know where the fruit is and exactly what it looks like. There's no vision going on, but in some sense you do have an image in your head, or at least the information representing that image.
It's similar to that case, in which you have a detailed idea of the objects and their appearance, but they're separated from you like they're in some other place. When I visualize something at will, I have an impression or sense of the thing and know what it looks like in detail, but it's not really there. If I imagine an apple on my desk, I will always see the desk and never the apple, but it's similar to how I would feel if there had been an apple that was just removed.
If I really focus, the impression becomes more detailed and can start to feel visual and more real, but it never crosses over to being a true picture. The more familiar I am with an object, animal, or person, the better and more lifelike my image of it is, but there's a fundamental difference that prevents me from saying "I can see it."
Very interesting. I am a great pictural phantaziser who also enjoy drawing both from real life and from my imagination, so I have also had some thoughts about this subject.
When I picture an image I am actually able to 'see it' l, but somehow more with my brain that with my eyes. It is very hard to describe exactly where the image is located, perhaps in front of my forehead is the best way I can describe it.
It is very very hard to keep a visualization constant, it will start to change as soon as you focus on it. That is why drawing without a reference is so hard: You can sometimes be lucky and visualize a perect image, but as soon as you try to draw it the details wikl begin to shift around. Sometimes when I have ab idea I try to put down some important lines as quickly as possible before the image changes.
Also I have recently realized that actually the human imagination might have traits in common with AI image generators. It is exactly the same kind of errors (incorrect hands, weird proprtions) that your inner eyes makes when you try to visualize something too difficult. So basically a visual imagination is a bit like having a slightly broken AI running that is constantly producing vague images that disappear or change in a few seconds.
Thank you for the comment. I always thought a drawing reference was because there was no other option! To me, being able to draw is a form of magic. I took an informal drafting class in college, and I appreciated learning the "rules" about how to represent perspective/depth. I think I assumed that drawing was governed by learning more and more rules, something that I wasn't that interested in.
I've read about how AI image hallucinations are similar to human visualization. A year or two ago, I had a lucid dream, which I could recognize because my hands were abnormal. (I believe this is a common cue in the lucid-dreaming world.)
A friend recently described his understanding that the brain includes something like an LLM, but it also has a "gestalt" mode where it can evaluate whether the LLM is making sense. I don't know whether that's literally accurate. But suppose the LLM is looping through finger generation and doesn't know when to stop; a "gestalt" operation could recognize that the overall hand isn't right.
Yeah, nobody sees anything with their eyes when visualizing. You are incapable of imagining anything with visual content? Like imagining there was a basketball in the corner of your room? In that case you must be incapable of retrieving any visual memory? You literally cannot remember what anything looks like- your car, your house, your room, your wife, your son?
> You are incapable of imagining anything with visual content? Like imagining there was a basketball in the corner of your room?
I can imagine all day long. I can imagine that there is a basketball in the room, in the sky, in my nostril. But there's no picture, just a felt sense and maybe traces of other sensations and thoughts that are formulated verbally rather than pictorally.
I have a theory of why it's hard for visualizers (phantasics?) to understand the experiences of nonvisualizers (aphantasics). I've never put this into words, so please bear with me.
I think experience can be dominated by any sense (seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling) or by thoughts. And the dominant sense can often but not always be predicted. For example, at a concert, hearing could be predicted to dominate, but that might not be the case -- seeing could dominate if there's spectacle; or smelling could dominate if the person next to you hasn't showered; or cetera.
To illustrate my theory, I'm going to rely on "seeing," and I will assume that no one doing the seeing is caught up in another sense or in the thought stream. Suppose a visualizer (you) and a nonvisualizer (me) view the same landscape. We each clearly see a river valley. Even though seeing dominates, the overall experience can be tinged with other sensations and thoughts -- but these are subtle and generally not noticed.
Later, we talk about how beautiful it was. You are picturing the river valley and because the picture is vivid, you don't even notice the subtle stuff, which is kind of like a residue of the experience. To me, however, all I have is the residue. The residue is consistent with seeing the river valley, but I don't see a river valley.
I think I can mix and match these "residues" just like you mix and match your experiences, so the experience of gold and the experience of a mountain allow us each to imagine a golden mountain.
> In that case you must be incapable of retrieving any visual memory?
I posit that there's no such thing as visual memory. There's memory, and yours includes pictures as well as the residue and mine is just the residue.
> You literally cannot remember what anything looks like- your car, your house, your room, your wife, your son?
I certainly can recognize those things. And if you tell me that my car is red, I can confidently correct you. So it's not right to say that I "cannot remember". It's more accurate to say that I "do not visualize."
But I do struggle to remember new faces. In my 20s, I went on a date with a woman and didn't see her again for a couple of weeks. By the time those weeks had passed, my sense of what she looked like had dissipated. I could recall things like hair color and some features, but the sense was gauzy. That said, I easily recognized her when I saw her again.
Having read about others' efforts to overcome aphantasia, I know it's possible for some people to become visualizers. I suspect that for me, the visualization is happening subconsciously, and it's available to some mental processes, but not globally available. I do intend to work on my visualization, which could change my thinking on how these things work.
> I suspect that for me, the visualization is happening subconsciously, and it's available to some mental processes, but not globally available.
I've independently come to suspect this also (though not aphantasic myself). Relatedly, an acquaintance once told me they can't visualize, but have vivid visual dreams.
I'm also far to the Aphantasic end of the spectrum (with a great effort I can create very dull, faded, static images of familiar things). I've noticed that the moments before I fall asleep I can visualise very clearly- as though as though my brain is no longer throttling the area responsible for it.
So this sounds like great news. If this persists, then Argentina should soon recover to level of wealth it had before but with inflation under control and probably more potential for finally getting out of the vicious cycle of state defaults. If it all works out it will be a great case libertarians can point out when arguing economics and so it might be emulated by others (especially since other countries do not require measures as drastic as Argentina probably did).
Are there any Argentinians here who might chip in (regardless of whether you like or dislike Milei)?
This Twitter thread is pretty clear in comparing the end of 2023, just before Milei took office, to 2024 with Milei in power. I think it expands on your appreciation that "Argentina should soon recover to level of wealth it had before" (you can translate it into English): https://x.com/jmtelechea/status/1897363526215459260
So, comparing 2023 to 2024:
- Inflation is being reduced, but not as much as the gobernment says. They are abusing a methodological issue to make the reduction seem larger than it really is.
- Economic activity shows a recovery to the levels of 2023, before Milei's big devaluation. This recovery was faster than expected, which is great news, but growth is very uneven. The financial and agricultural sectors are growing the most (note that the agricultural sector grew in comparison to a year that had one of the worst droughts ever, so it's a kind of a misleading growth).
The problem is that Industry, Commerce and Construction are much worse than in 2023. These sectors are some of the most important ones for employment and consumption.
- Employment fell drastically. And it wasn't the public sector that took the hit, as Milei wants people to think. It was private employment, with a reduction of 120.000 jobs, mostly due to the decline in the Industry, Commerce and Construction activities mentioned before.
- Wages are significantly below 2023 levels. In some cases, like public employment, the salaries are down as much as 25% (!). This is a lot. People aren't buying anything because no one has money. That's why economic growth is uneven.
So, inflation is being reduced, the economic activitiy is getting back to 2023 levels (unevenly) but this isn't translating to employment or wages. Leaving specially the most vulnerable people in a dramatic situation.
Also, a big problem is that Milei's economic plan depends on keeping the dollar price artificially low, with the government intervening in the financial markets by using all the Central Bank's reserves. At the moment Milei is desperate to finalize a new IMF loan, trying to take huge debt again, to hold down the economy until October elections. This is exactly the same plan that Macri and Luis Caputo (now Milei's Economy Minister) tried from 2015 to 2019. It was a disaster back then. Every economist is speculating on this, some saying that this time is different and it may work, and some saying that this is another disaster. So, the situation is very fragile, and there could be a devaluation at any moment, with a consequent rise in inflation and deterioration of all economic variables.
Most forecasters predict significant growth in 2025 - on the order of 5%. If the 2024 growth was only relative to a depressed 2023 baseline, then the forecasters are wrong to predict continued major growth. So far, it seem that they've been consistently overly pessimistic, so that would be quite a reversal.
>Employment fell drastically
That depends on what you mean. His graph doesn't show population percentages. Looking at the unemployment rate: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/unemployment-rate it appears that consistent with Milei's warning that things would get worse before getting better, unemployment rose from 5.7% in Q4 2023 to 7.7% in Q1 2024. However, it fell in the following two quarters to 6.9%, which is the same as it was in Q1 2023. This is all low by recent standards. Over the last decade, only 6 quarters had a lower unemployment rate, 3 of which were in 2023, during which Argentina reached its lowest unemployment rate of the last decade.
If you question the trend of economic growth, since it started from a low baseline, why be critical of the drop in the unemployment rate, when it, too, started from a historically low baseline?
>Wages are significantly below 2023 levels
Again, this starts at an arbitrary point (not even the midpoint of 2023, or an average of 2023, but specifically, Nov 2023). It appears to show rapid decline starting *before* Milei assumed office, with the decline reversing after he took office. (And real wages in the registered public sector are down 2% from their prior peak, per the graph, which arguably isn't "significantly." It's only significant, if you add 5%, per his preferred alternative CPI metric, which is double counting as that was listed as a separate objection).
That is, not every economic benchmark is as good as it ever was. Inflation was once even lower. GDP was once even higher. Unemployment was once even lower. And real wages were once even higher. But that wasn't the question. The question was about trends which are quite positive.
None of that negates the point of the previous comment that if trends persist (as forecasters predict them to), that Milei's program will continue to succeed.
- I don't get your point about "starting at an arbitrary point." OP said that "Argentina should soon recover to level of wealth it had before." I focused on that. Juan Manuel Telechea's Twitter post, and my summary of it, compare 2023 numbers to those of 2024. That's not arbitrary. It literally answers the question: "Is Argentina better or worse than it was in 2023, before Milei took office?"
"If the 2024 growth was only relative to a depressed 2023 baseline, then the forecasters are wrong to predict continued major growth."
- I don't follow your logic. You can grow over a low baseline, and then grow again the next year (against another low baseline lol). Everyone forecasts growth for 2025 because it will be mostly compared to Milei's 2024 crisis.
The red line represents the EMAE economic estimator. For example, look at month 9, when it was at -6%. It's obvious that if you compare that month from 2024 and the same month in 2025, you'll see significant growth.
- Unemployment fell considerably compared to 2023, there's no way around that. Again, look at Telechea's graphic, it's official data from the Ministry of Human Capital. It's not historically low, but it shows the impact of the uneven economic growth. It's also important to note that the cuts were mostly in the private and not only in the public sector.
- Again, the wage numbers don't start at an arbitrary point. They compare the period before Milei to the period after Milei. You say that registered public sector wages being down 2% is not significant, but admit that they are actually down 7%. That's a lot. Also, the registered public sector is the one with unions that can fight to keep their wages as high as possible. Every other group, like pensions and unregistered wages are much worse and represent a large portion of the real economy. Just the wages situation alone is a disaster.
"None of that negates the point of the previous comment that if trends persist (as forecasters predict), Milei's program will continue to succeed."
- How is Milei's program a success? It's using all the reserves to sustain the dollar price and is forced to take huge loans from the IMF again, just to get to the elections (for political and not for economic reasons!). Wages are down, consumption is low, people are worse off, and economic growth is just for specific sectors. There are no investments anywhere and the real economy is abandoned in favor of financial speculation. How is that going to work out in the long run?
And don't even get me started on the Libra scandal and the fight with major media groups like Clarín that are starting to turn against Milei, damaging his image. Protests are going to start again when the universities begin their 2025 cycle soon (there are already two days of strikes on March 17 and March 18). Many people are beginning to protest alongside retirees every wednesday, including now fans of several football teams (barra bravas), after Milei's repressed old people savagely. The Milei government is in a grave political crisis, markets do not trust him, and everything can explode at any moment, just like it happened with Macri in 2018. It looks like a failure more than anything, sadly for the argentines.
- I will edit my previous post, to make it clear that the data compares 2023, before Milei, to 2024, with Milei.
The main point is the commenter was taking about the *trend*, while you’re mostly talking about the current *level*. Things are trending up, but some benchmarks haven’t yet reached their pre-Milei levels. The commenter said that if trends continue, then they’ll pass pre-Milei levels, which is correct, and no contradiction.
> I don't follow your logic. You can grow over a low baseline, and then grow again the next year (against another low baseline lol). Everyone forecasts growth for 2025 because it will be mostly compared to Milei's 2024 crisis.
This is incorrect. 2024 is projected to have a contraction of 3% (I think it’ll likely be less, but let’s say 3%). 2025 is projected to have growth of 5%. So that’s already growth relative to pre-Milei not just relative to 2024 (e.g. https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/arg#ataglance).
> How is Milei's program a success?
By all the obvious benchmarks, some of which were mentioned in the original comment. Milei succeeded in reducing MoM inflation by over 90% (https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-rate-mom), while it continues to drop, (and even the alternative CPI weighting proposed still acknowledges a sharp reduction in inflation and notes that any differences between the published CPI calculation and the alternatively weighted one are now practically nonexistent: https://cenital.com/inflacion-se-mide-bien-o-quedo-desactualizada/).
And the fact that in spite of taming inflation, he managed to take the economy from recession to expansion (with significant further growth projected, as noted).
And the fact that in spite of concerns that while the economy as a whole would boom, that the poor would suffer, that the poverty rate has been dropping for many months, peaking at 52.9% in the 6 month period from Jan 2024 to June 2024, when he first took office, but dropping each subsequent rolling 6 month period to 34.9% for the period from Sep 2024 to Feb 2025 – the lowest in 6 years: https://www.utdt.edu/profesores/mrozada/pobreza.
And while it’s true that no one can be certain that positive trends will continue (which again, doesn’t negate the original comment which was about “if this persists”), markets, which have an economic incentive in correct forecasts support the projections of the IMF and others that these positive trends will continue. For example, JP Morgan’s risk index (based on market prices) dropped to 7.2%, which is lower than it was at any point from March 2019 to Dec. 2025, with it having been well over 20% for most of 2023.
I think you're missing my point. My comment wasn't a "gotcha" on the OP. I wasn't commenting on any trend. As I mentioned, my comment was expanding on the question, "Is Argentina better or worse than it was in 2023, before Milei took office?" I think the data is clear: Argentina's inflation is better (but it shows that the government doesn't care about using an obviously outdated methodology to try to trick people into thinking it's better than it really is), the economic recession (that started before Milei in August but got much worse with Milei's December devaluation and subsequent economic policies) was severe, but it unevenly bounced back faster than expected, private employment got hit, and wages are really bad, affecting the most vulnerable sectors even more.
If you want to go into trends, you can't just say things are "trending up" and believe they will keep going up, especially in an economy like Argentina's. Historically, Argentina's biggest problem is that the country can't generate enough dollars to sustain growth. When the economy starts to grow, dollars are needed to import machinery, licenses, etc. That puts more pressure on the Central Bank's reserves. Add that to the crazy debt interest payments that have to be paid to organisms like the IMF due to Macri's (and soon Milei's) ridiculous loans. And remember that the dollar is being kept low as a political tool to reduce inflation, making exports unattractive for producers. The other side of the coin is that imports are even more attractive, putting a lot of pressure on national industries, reducing jobs and wages, again in the name of reducing inflation. All of this causes the current account (the balance between exports and imports) to be in a deficit, making debt interest payments difficult, leading to defaults, devaluations and economic collapses.
This same economic plan was implemented several times in the country's history, more obviously during the 1976 dictatorship, then deepened with Menem in the '90s, and with Macri in 2015. Please go take a look at those years. It was a disaster that ruined the country. I just wrote about it in a comment earlier today if you're interested: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/99468708
Pay special attention to how good some economic variables looked during Menem's presidencies and how it ended up exploding. Just saying that things are "trending up" in Argentina without analyzing it in more detail and ignoring the country's history is not the best idea. Specially ignoring the Central Bank reserves.
"This is incorrect. 2024 is projected to have a contraction of 3% (I think it’ll likely be less, but let’s say 3%). 2025 is projected to have growth of 5%. So that’s already growth relative to pre-Milei, not just relative to 2024 (e.g. https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/arg#ataglance)."
- How is my comment incorrect? I said that it was possible, and even likely, to have growth in 2025. It's pretty much inevitable after 2024 levels.
- Inflation is lower, as I mentioned before, and that's Milei's biggest success and his political flag to try to win October's elections. He is sacrificing everything for it. But you can't say that destroying the economy into a very low peak and then getting it back to the previous levels is a big success. Again, especially taking into account the uneven growth and the previous year's drought. And, again, you have to put the economic growth to the test of not having enough reserves to sustain it in the coming years.
- Real wages have been unevenly and slowly growing after Milei destroyed them, but they are still at ridiculously low levels. And there is an explanation for that. If wages go up, people will have more money. If people have more money, inflation will go up. And the government will not let that happen. So it's ideologically impossible for the government to focus on making wages go up. They want to reduce their budget and will keep trying to cut public sector workers and pensions as much as possible (or at least not let them get back to previous levels). Come on, man, look at the graph: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GlTJlDVXkAA0X1h?format=png&name=small
These are people who can't make it to the end of the month. They can't buy their medication. Don't be obtuse by saying that all of Milei's economic benchmarks are great. Just look at it.
I think the rebuttal to using this as an argument for libertarianism is that Argentina was in a uniquely bad situation and shock therapy was the only thing that could get them out but that shock therapy would usually do more harm than good. Also, it remains to be seen if the economy will actually bounce back in the long-term.
"Also, it remains to be seen if the economy will actually bounce back in the long-term."
And long term here has to mean more than a decade.
The last go around I paid attention to was when they got inflation under control with a dollar peg via a currency board. The idea was that the country had one US dollar in reserve for every Argentine peso that was issued. Folks could freely convert from one to the other. Much like an 1800s gold standard, but with the currency backed by US dollars rather than gold.
This worked for about a decade, then convertability was limited followed by a devaluation of the peso (so one pedo would no longer get you one US dollar). Then dollar accounts in Argentine banks were forcibly converted to pesos and then the value of the peso collapsed.
My basic bet on Argentina whenever it does something hopeful or reasonable economically is to give the country about a decade to blow up their economy and have hyperinflation :-(
I hope for better every time, but don't expect it.
I am part of the research group that coordinates UNATI, the largest study that will be done on the impact of moderate alcohol consumption on life expectancy/quality of life. The same researchers did some of the studies with the greatest impact on the Mediterranean diet (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800389). I wanted to present the project and state that we are in the recruitment phase. We are looking for male participants aged 50-70 and women aged 55-75 who already consume some alcohol.
We conduct interviews by videoconference in Spanish, every 3 months to advise either abstinence from alcohol or “adherence to the Mediterranean pattern”. We are looking for participants, we have almost half, but we need 10,000.
UNATI also welcomes new medical collaborators as trialists, who are willing to recruit patients. They can be doctors or nurses.
I am sending all this information in case it fits you, you have patients who may want to participate in the study, or you are in Spain and you would be interested in entering in the recruitment team.
It seems to me that Richard Dawkins' famous book "The Selfish Gene" is based on a fallacy, and a fairly obvious one at that. Basically, the book's argument hinges on an equivocation between two senses of the term "the same". In English, when saying X is the same as Y, we can either mean that they are literally identical ("My father is the same as my male parent"), or that they share a number of salient features in common ("Men are all the same!"). Now, Dakwins wants to solve the evolutionary paradox of altruism -- how can animals evolve altruistic behaviour when it's in each individual's interests to selfishly free ride off the altruism of others? -- by reconceptualising genes as the main unit of evolution. A mother, for example, might lay down her life for her child, which seems altruistic and self-sacrificing. However, Dawkins says, the mother's behaviour is actually driven by her genes, and the same genes are also present in her child. Therefore, the sacrifice is actually selfish after all; the genes are sacrificing the mother in order to save themselves.
However, when we bear in mind that "the same" can have two different meanings, we see that Dawkins is equivocating. The mother's genes might be "the same" as her child's genes in the sense that they're the same kind of genes, but they're not "the same" in the sense of being literally identical. Even if we want to treat everything at the genetic level, therefore, the mother's genes are still sacrificing themselves for the sake of other genes, and hence the paradox still remains.
(Of course, we could try and resolve the paradox by saying that the mother's genes are literally identical to the child's genes -- that each gene is some kind of Platonic entity which finds instantiation in multiple physical bodies -- but of course that's not an option available to Dawkins, given his materialist commitments.)
So anyway, what do you guys think? I post this because the fallacy seems quite obvious to me, but lots of apparently intelligent people have praised "The Selfish Gene", so maybe I'm just missing something.
It feels like you're trying to anthropomorphize a system that's supposed to be purely mechanistic.
Dawkins isn't really talking about whether genes are altruistic or selfish in a personality sense. Hopefully genes are nonsentient proteins with no personality traits whatsoever.
Rather his point is that mechanistically, genes which cause behaviors or mechanisms that increase the number of copies of that gene in the world will tend to proliferate. And things that we call 'altruism' in whole organisms can be caused by such genes.
Whether you want to call that altruistic or selfish is very much semantics, and irrelevant to the argument. It's just a description of a physical process.
I'm well aware that Dawkins doesn't attribute personality to genes. Nevertheless, his explanation for altruism doesn't actually explain how it might arise, so much as push the problem down a level. The paradox of altruism is basically a variation of the free rider problem: altruistic behaviour might be better for the species as a whole, but within the species it seems that selfish individuals should do better, and because it's individuals which reproduce rather than species as a whole, we should expect the selfish to outcompete the altruistic. Saying that actually it's genes which reproduce rather than individuals just changes the question from "Why don't selfish individuals outcompete altruistic ones?" to "Why don't genes which produce selfish behaviour outcompete genes which produce altruistic behaviour?"
>mechanistically, genes which cause behaviors or mechanisms that increase the number of copies of that gene in the world will tend to proliferate. And things that we call 'altruism' in whole organisms can be caused by such genes.
Not sure if you're having trouble picturing how that works at a population level, or making some different point?
Dawkins is saying that natural selection favors the mother giving up her genes spreading, for the sake of the child's genes spreading.
He's not saying it happens every time such a decision has to be made. But that the forces driving the mother, have evolved to make her laying down her life for the child's, likely. On behalf of increasing the chances for those genes continuing to spread. The child is younger and her genes are likely to spread more.
Darwin spoke of why some birds evolve highly colorful attractive feathers. They're more visible to predators but also more likely to attract mates. The latter is why he thinks they evolved such feather - that's a more important driving force.
Btw : In geometry, the two types of "the same" you speak about, would be congruency versus similarity (say, in triangles).
Have you actually read the book? I remember it walking through the actual argument (which is quite mechanical and has nothing to do with anything as abstract as "self-sacrifice" except as a semi-poetic descriptor) pretty clearly.
I have, albeit many years ago. I just went back to check, and in Chapter 3, he quite explicitly says that genes should be regarded as the true units of evolution because they exist for a long time, whereas individual organisms are short-lived ("The cornerstone of the argument, as given earlier, was the assumption that genes are potentially immortal, while bodies and all other higher units are temporary," p. 50). But this falls into the equivocation detailed above. The same kind of gene may be found in many organisms across a long period of time, and we might say somewhat loosely that "This gene is very old". But in a strict, literal sense, this isn't true: the gene, in the sense of the physical set of nucleotides, only survives as long as the organism in which it is found. All my ancestors going back 70 million years might have had the same kind of gene which I also have, but the actual gene I have isn't 70 million years old. But then, if genes are not in fact less temporary than organisms, Dawkins' argument fails, by his own admission. So whilst I will admit that I seem to have misremembered how closely Dawkins' argument is connected to self-sacrificing behaviour specifically, I still maintain that he commits the fallacy of equivocation.
I think the clearest explanation starts by saying that you've missed the point.
Dawkins means that genes are the same in the 'literally exactly identical' sense; two copies of a gene are 'the same' if they have the exact same sequence.
If a creature reproduces sexually, the child organisms don't have the same genome as either parent. So we can say they are 'not the same' genetically.
Genomes are not the unit of selection, because they're not actually a unit.
However, at the individual gene level, (almost) all the genes which exist in the children have an exact copy in one parent or the other. That is, the nucleic acid base sequence of the gene is an exact match. The individual genes present therefore are 'the same'; they are identical in the ways which matter.
The manner in which a gene can direct an organism to act in a certain way is convoluted, and not particularly reliable - but it nevertheless exists.
A 'selfish' gene can therefore sacrifice the organism it's 'in' to save (on average) more than one organism in which copies of the same gene are present.
I’ve thought about the same issue. My answer is that it is the pattern which is the same. This replicating genetic pattern predominates in future generations.
I also try to stay away from the terms selfish and altruistic as they are loaded terms, they are used counterintuitively (moms sacrifice for her kid is deemed selfish)and even evolutionary biologists and game theorists seem to use the terms inconsistently.
But under Dawkins-style materialism, "the pattern" is just an abstraction created by our minds, not something that exists in (for want of a better term) the real world, and it's difficult to see how such an abstraction can play an explanatory role.
In German, there are two different words for "the same", one meaning "another identical instantiation of a thing", and the other meaning "the actual thing again".
"We both went shopping last week and ended up buying the same sweater"
vs.
"This is this the same sweater I was wearing yesterday."
The distinction isn't always observed in everyday speech, but I imagine that the German translation of Dawkin's book doesn't have the "problem" you identified.
I think it seems like you're making a pointless semantic argument instead of dealing with the real issue. You can just taboo the word "same" (panta rhei anyway): "if a cell with a gene with the sequence XYZ acts in a way such that other cells with a gene with the sequence XYZ have more offspring, this leads to a greater number of cells with a gene with the sequence YXZ".
This is correct. If gene A is more effective at making copies of itself than gene B, then after a while there will be more copies of A around than of B.
I also guess you haven't read that book, or you didn't understand it, because @Wasserschweinchens answer is spot on. In the latter case Dawkins might be a bit responsible for that because he uses metaphors -- starting with "selfish" -- and especially critics with biases misrepresent him often based on those metaphors.
Granted, he repeatedly announces that what he says next is just a metaphor, and does explain things literally too, but I believe metaphors are highly misleading for most people.
Yeah, this comment further suggests to be that you haven't read the book - definitely do, it's a great explanation of not just altruism, but how evolution works in general.
I think you're anthropomorphising the genes too much if you're using phrases like "why the genes would act that way in the first place".
They obviously don't reason and make decisions.
Dawkins' argument is simply the observation that genes that cause an organism to behave in those ways (e.g. sacrificing itself for its child) *will* be more frequent in the next generation than genes that don't.
As for why a gene would do *anything* "in the first place": new behaviours can arise due to mutation or due to recombination in sexual reproduction.
It does, the whole point of Dawkins argument is that some stuff which is hard to explain by change and selective advantage (i.e. Darwinian evolution) when you focus on organisms as what is changing and selected, can be understand as working exactly the same as usual if you focus on genes as what is changing and selected
Yes, it does. If e.g. my brain cells did not act in a way such that my sperm cells got to procreate, natural selection would obviously select against the genes in my brain cells.
Altruistic behaviour often hinders procreation. E.g., if I lay down my life defending my village from an angry bear, my chances of reproducing go down to zero. Hence we should expect natural selection to select against the genes that cause such behaviour, and yet people obviously do behave in such a way.
*Your* chances of reproducing go to zero, but the genes that caused you to act in a self-sacrificing way are still safe and sound in your fellow villagers -- probably more so than if nobody took a risk to stop the bear. People also risk their life for non-kin, of course, but the control of genes over behavior is crude, especially in a species with such plastic brains; it's enough that, on average, genes for altruism replicate themselves further than their selfishness-inducing analogues.
>*Your* chances of reproducing go to zero, but the genes that caused you to act in a self-sacrificing way are still safe and sound in your fellow villagers
That's precisely the mistake I talked about above -- genes of the same kind as the ones that caused me to act in a safe-sacrificing way are safe and sound, but the actual genes that caused me to act are dead along with me, and hence will never reproduce.
The point of the book is that the "gene's eye" perspective on evolution explains some behaviour that seems incomprehensible from the "organism's eye" point of view. That doesn't mean we have an explanation for all biological behaviour.
People typically display altruistic behavior that is stronger but less broad-based when they have already reproduced. As for protecting your village from a bear as, say, a young man, historically your village would usually contain a lot of relatives even if you haven't reproduced yet, *especially* if you're male since typical behavior in tribes or villages is for men to stay in the vicinity of their birth family.
The basic truth is that some genes lead to more reproductive success, and other to less, and so the first type of genes spread widely. It doesn't matter at all whether the gene leads to behaviour that, on outside, can be classified as selfish or altruistic - all that matters is which genes survive better. The genes don't need to be "the same" in some higher sense for an animal to display seemingly altruistic behaviour - their bearer just needs to be recognized (possibly falsely!) as "the same enough" to trigger behaviour programmed in by genes of parent.
I'm hosting an HPMoR meetup on VRChat on the 15th in the "LessWrong and AC10 Meetup" group. Everyone with an internet connection is invited, no VR required. Here's a discord link for more details: discord.gg/ADQAHkcWE6
Can highly recommend Newspeak (not resided there, but know people who have, and been to lots of their events). Happy for anyone interested to DM me for (biased) but 3rd-party takes.
What's your opinion about libertarian and children? There seems to be a massive motte and bailey between the two, where libertarian wants to treat everyone the same, but have problems with treating children. So they make motte where "children are different". But lots of libertarian principles are harmed when there's some people who are excluded so when talking about them they're trapped between the motte and bailey. It's especially interesting because I think lots of authoritarianism keep creeping back in under the banner of protecting children. I think you'd have a unique perspective about this especially after having children on your own.
That's not a motte & bailey, that's an unprincipled exception (because inconveniently, the theory doesn't match reality).
As an example of a motte & bailey for the utterance "everyone is equal", consider the equivocation between the interpretations "everyone should have equal political-rights" vs "everyone should have equal incomes". The ambiguity of the utterance allows you to swap between the two specific meanings. Whereas in your scenario, strictly speaking, there's no reasonable interpretation of "everyone is equal" that might be construed as "but children are different".
Maybe you can rework your argument into a motte & bailey like ascend, but it's not a motte & bailey as it stands.
In your later comment, you claim that many libertarians think children should have sexual freedom as the logical conclusion of their beliefs, but pretend to make an exception for children in public. But again, that's not a motte & bailey because there's no ambiguity that's being exploited. It's moreso a matter of libertarians pretending to make an exception in public, but then not really making an exception in private.
Isn't there an anti-libertarian motte-and-bailey that equivocates on two meanings of "children should have the right to do X"? Between "the state shouldn't interfere if the parents allow it" and "the state should FORCE the parents to allow it". It's pretty clear it's almost always the first that libertarians mean, and it's hard to imagine most libertarians endorsing the second except in very extreme cases. Yet anti-libertarians seem to always interpret it as the second; responses like "children aren't generally able to handle X" don't make much sense when no one is saying they should be doing X, only that it should be up to them and their parents, not the state.
The worst example is attempted internet censorship. Few people would claim that all children without exception aren't capable of navigating the internet safely. Yet somehow a disturbing number reach for "the state" instead of parents as the ones to do the protecting...
I think it's a strawman's libertarianism that treats all individuals the same, regardless of inherent capacity. There are some fringe people who support such things, but it isn't the norm.
If you don't treat human beings who don't have the capacity to make decisions or survive on their own differently from a functioning adult, you get absurd conclusions that a baby, or three year old, should have full freedom to do whatever they want (so long as it doesn't directly harm others). Run into the street? Great. Get in a stranger's van? It's their choice. Enter into contracts when they can't read or inherently understand the long term consequences of actions? It's free association.
I think quite obviously a libertarian position is more complicated than "treat everyone the same".
- There exist a small subset adults who, like children, are not capable of taking care of themselves.
- There exist a very large subset of adults who will enter into contracts they don't fully understand, not understanding the full long term consequences.
What is the libertarian position on those? At what level is it reasonable to restrict someones freedom for their own safety? Why should this principle apply only to children?
The simple libertarian position (on the subject of incapable adults) is that the harm caused by restricting those peoples' freedom (using the apparatus of the state) is not worth the benefit.
I think one could just look at history or some 3. world countries to see how that would pan out - at least regarding my first category? At worst, people unable to take care of them selves would simply die on the street, or be left to all kinds of exploitation. At best, some charity (or in some cases family) would step in to help some of those people. In the last case, we have a free-rider problem, where each individual benefits from having other people pay for the charity. To organize this and avoid the free-rider problem you basically need government or some institution with equal function.
As you understand, I have some trouble understanding how one could conclude that this would somehow cause less harm overall, compared to western democracy.
Are there some good arguments for how this would work?
I think we're talking about different things. "People who struggle sometimes and need some help" is different from "People who apparently need to have their rights restricted or they will harm themselves".
The historical solution to the first is e.g. charity (the modern day solution is often forced charity, or welfare). I'm not interested in arguing or litigating the first category (find an actual libertarian for the tax vs charity welfare debate if that's what you're interested in).
The second category is more interesting to me. The historical solution to the second is slavery, servitude, serfdom, involuntary committment, jail, etc. The modern solution to the second is...pretending like they are the first category and acting surprised when this doesn't work (e.g. homeless in America). A libertarian (and in fact, a liberal too) would argue that e.g. involuntary committment, *even if* it leads to better outcomes on average, is bad *because it restricts human rights*. The key observation (which I think is useful and correct) is that essentially you are putting freedom on the balance scale with welfare, and making a value judgement -- a libertarian simply values freedom higher as a matter of philosophy (better to die free than live in chains).
> The historical solution to the first is e.g. charity (the modern day solution is often forced charity, or welfare). I'm not interested in arguing or litigating the first category (find an actual libertarian for the tax vs charity welfare debate if that's what you're interested in).
I was arguing that history is evidence that at least som minimum level of government welfare or safety net is much preferable to arbitrary private charity. Fine that you don't want to debate that point.
> The key observation (which I think is useful and correct) is that essentially you are putting freedom on the balance scale with welfare, and making a value judgement -- a libertarian simply values freedom higher as a matter of philosophy (better to die free than live in chains).
I'm symphatetic to that argument. But one persons freedom is often another's prison. Often more freedom can mean freedom to exploit another. Absolutely I agree that there should be a balance. And certainly if no (significant) harm is done to another freedom should be prefered.
There is a third category I think, in addition to people in need of help, and people unable to not harm themselves when free.
These are easily exploitable people. They need government protection that include restricting their freedom in order to avoid overly bad outcomes from their own actions. This includes:
- workers, who historically have often been exploited in contracts very similar to slavery
- junkies (some, but not all are in the second category), if you allow free distribution of all drugs, I'm sure you will soon have a lot more crack-addicts and heroinists. Often these will start on drugs when young and naive.
- people with no sense of how money works will quickly get exploited by people offering credit at high rates (this one is already mostly legal but would probably get worse with less regulation), or all kinds of scams if those get become legal.
etc. etc.
Like you said protection against these sort of things must be balanced against overly restricting peoples freedoms.
But I just see no way of having a society with acceptable outcomes for most people without many of the restrictions and regulations found in western democracies.
Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist, argued that children should essentially be considered property of their parents until they can "homestead" themselves by living independently.
Unless the children is then also protected against exploitation and abuse by law, It seems this would lead to much worse conditions for many children when comparing to western democracy.
Trivers' theory of genetic conflict says that imperfect overlap between the Darwinian interests of parents & children leads to conflict... but individual children have even less overlap with their governments. Our usual default is to let parents take care of their children for a reason, as it has worked that way prior to governments ever coming into existence.
I think the Rothbardian counter to this is a version of "who watches the watchers?". If child abuse is prevented by law, then the law is implemented by people who serve the state and cannot be as familiar with that child as its own parents, let alone as sympathetic. You've traded one poison for another, and the other is better than abusive parents but worse than the vast majority of parents (as numerous accounts of overactive CPS agents will attest).
Thanks to TGGP and yourself for enlightening me on Rothbards arguments.
It seems an easy counter to the who watches the watcher argument here would be to point to real life outcomes. It should be easy to show that in times and in countries with relative less legal protection for children, the outcomes for those children have been worse? (comparing to contemporary western democracies)
There’s no motte and bailey here. Or at least you haven’t proven it. It’s not a sleight of hand to treat children differently than adults because children are different to adults.
That's the motte. The bailey I've seen is wanting to treat even children same, with things like privacy, *or even sexual liberty*. I know know not every X, but it's very stereotypically motte and bailey.
There's a very American tendency to start out saying "Here's the problems of the world", and then describe a bunch of problems that are very specific to the USA, and then try to invent solutions out of the whole cloth without reference to what might or might not be working in other countries.
Is there anything that isn't specific to the USA, apart from a tweet about South Korea and a study from Colombia? Some of it may happen to apply to some other countries too, but if so then it's only by coincidence.
Most of the article is about US schools' refusal to stream kids by ability. Of course streaming kids by ability is something very common in a lot of places, so if you're going to talk about it as an idea then the obvious thing to do would be to talk about the various different systems that exist in various different places and their advantages and disadvantages. But nope, no countries outside the US exist so there's nothing to be learned.
> streaming kids by ability is something very common in a lot of places
My impression is that although in many countries *some* programs for gifted children exist, they are very few compared to the actual number of gifted children. (I may be wrong, but I would like to see some statistics showing that.)
For example, the Wikipedia page about gifted education provides examples in various countries, but those examples seem like... for example, in Brazil there is one such program for about 500 children, in India one school is mentioned that admits 80 students each year, in Norway there is only a school for kids with musical talent, etc.
So on one hand, such programs exist; on the other hand, obviously most of the children who would deserve to get there won't get the chance. Merely being "1 in 100" is not enough; you either need to be "1 in 10000", or you need to have rich parents, preferably both.
Also, sometimes the gifted schools collect the gifted children in one place... and then teach them basically the same curriculum as everywhere else. Or they have 10% more of something.
I would prefer a system where "1 in 100" kids can get education on the "1 in 100" level, and "1 in 10000" kids can get education on the "1 in 10000" level, etc. What we get instead, in those countries that support gifted education, is that 1 in 10000 kids can get a "1 in 100" level of education, and that's all.
As I said, there's various different approaches to streaming. On the "big chunks" end there's Germany which puts roughly the top, middle and bottom thirds into Gymnasium, Hauptschule and Realschule. This seems like a reasonable solution, but it doesn't quite cater to the needs of the super-geniuses.
At the other extreme you could think about super-selective schools which take in the top one in ten thousand. The problem is that all these tests have error bars, and if you test the same million kids on two different days then you'll probably find that the top hundred kids on day 1 don't overlap all that much with the top hundred kids on day two. So your "one in ten thousand" kids are just a weighted sampling of the top percent or so.
The other problem with super selective schools is that you can't place them within reasonable commuting distance of every smart kid.
I liked it a lot, but I did think he over emphasised the "school is holding back the brightest kids" argument which is only relevant to a small number of kids, and could have focused more on the "school is bad for wellbeing and accomplishes very little in return" argument which applies to most kids.
The brightest kids have an outsized impact on the lives of everyone else 20-40 years down the line. If you can stop holding them back _without_ making it worse for everyone else, it would do more good than the first-order effects on the kids themselves.
There's some truth to this, but also, probably a lot more kids than you might think would fall into the same "brightest kid" traps if they were more stubborn about seeking out challenges, without actually being more bright. Probably at least 50%, considering how much public schools "optimize" for the lowest common denominator student while their approach actually drags even those students down.
> What do commenters think of Zvi's article on education?
Just uncontroversially right and tragic, but happily this crowd is alreadly largely "school is a prison" and agrees with it.
Tracing Woodgrains, a long-time commenter here who has been writing in-depth about the problems in education for years, has spun up a 501c3 with the goal of reforming what's possible to reform in US education. They have 5 main areas of focus right now and are looking for volunteers for research / input / activism:
1. Policy
2. Gifted Regulations
3. Logic Tournament
4. Legal
5. Ohio
Their latest post about that is here if anyone's interested in hearing more / getting involved:
Given the efficacy of placebos even under open label conditions why not sell a prescription-only placebo medication with a typically sounding drug name so that doctors and patients can more readily trial the approach?
I think supplements and other bullshit already fill that space. And while placebos clearly have some effect, it is not a powerful one, and tends to wear off when the novelty and excitement of "ooh, I'm taking a drug for the problem" wears off.
I would disagree in this way: Doing nothing is rarely an option for people. Trying the open placebo approach may prevent harms from the other treatment approaches available.
Even under open label conditions? I’m surprised people would be this closed-minded, especially bioethicists. Could you give a version of their rationale.
I think the prescription only aspect (you’d have to go to a pharmacy and obtain it from someone in a white coat) would help with setting expectation.
I lean fairly heavily libertarian and while watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTBzuKholjo I realized that for the first time in quite a while I actually thought, "huh, maybe government funded projects aren't 100% terrible". This got me thinking about what would it take to convince me to be more favorable to government funded programs beyond the basics like police/military.
1. Show me a credible path to removing bad regulations. Currently, regulations/gov funding is almost purely additive. Someone comes up with something they think is a good idea, that gets mangled during the drafting process, and eventually we end up with a new regulation/funding. There is almost no path to getting rid of this if we later realize it was a bad idea. The only thing that seems to ever happen is even more regulations/funding gets thrown on top to try to rescue it, but usually this just makes things worse. In order for me to be more favorable to supporting governments trying out good sounding ideas, I would need to see a path to deleting old/bad regulations that I am convinced won't just be ignored (empty promises aren't sufficient). I think some city or state government made a rule that for every 1 new rule/program, 2 must be removed. This, if enforced, would likely sway me a lot.
2. Do a much better job of highlighting where prior funding programs and regulations have actually helped, and try really hard to show that it wasn't just correlation. Vaccines are a modern example of something where people always point to it and say "vaccines saved lives" but I rarely see people actually steel man the argument that deaths/disability was already on the decline before vaccines were introduced (due to sanitation). If you want to convince libertarians that government regulations/programs are net good, you have to steel man the best argument that they are bad/not helpful (e.g., success was just correlation, or the problem would have solved itself on its own without the regulation).
3. Acknowledge that the "do nothing" solution is viable and show how you can do better than it. Libertarians tend to believe that the "do nothing" strategy is really powerful because humans/societies/cultures adapt and learn on their own if given time, and the solutions that evolve naturally are far more robust than those that come out of centralized governance. If you want to sell a libertarian that your central solution is better then you need to steel man and soundly beat the "do nothing" strategy.
4. Spend less time telling me how terrible everything is. We (libertarians) know how terrible everything is, you don't need to convince us of the problem, you need to convince us that your solution is better than the "do nothing" solution. Instead spend more time explaining how your solution is better than the alternatives.
I'm not against solving problems. I even usually agree with progressives on what the problems are. It is the solutions that we disagree on, and focusing on solutions should be where the debate is focused. I suspect that conservatives feel similarly.
"Show me a credible path to removing bad regulations." This sounds like thinking about the government being either bigger or smaller on a 1 dimensional scale. Maybe because of how elections work you do have to chose between a blanket increase or decrease in government. But in theory it should be possible to advocate for more government in some areas without having to apologise for everything the government is currently doing.
That's one of the problems with a big government that tries to be democratic: the voter gets only get one vote for an enormous amount of different policy decisions, so one cannot expect policy to reflect the will of the people.
There is no "will of the people", there are millions of people with their own wills. The big question of democracy is how to average them out properly.
"Averaging out" wills results in sheer nonsense that benefits nobody. Compromise is an active, knowledge-intensive process that the formal mechanisms of democracy-as-we-know-it can at best encourage. Lately it doesn't seem to be doing a good job of this--many of the smaller groups are losing track of their own wills in psychological identification with the parties, while at the same in at least the US the last stage of compromise, that between the parties, is also failing due to the same psychological identification.
"This got me thinking about what would it take to convince me to be more favorable to government funded programs beyond the basics like police/military"
One thing to consider might be some concrete examples where the government funded program seems to work out better than the market based solution.
Two examples I can think of (one concrete, one categorical) are:
*) Power Generation, and
*) Internet providers
California has a few large public utilities (publicly traded companies) providing electricity to most of the state: PG&E in the north and Southern Edison to the south.
California ALSO has a number of cities that provide their own power generation. Sacramento, Santa Clara (the city not the county) and Palo Alto are three of them. The cities providing their own power generation seem to have non-trivially lower costs than the electricity provided by PG&E and Southern Edison.
This suggests that in domains where dozens of providers seem to be unfeasible that a direct government operation might be better. It also suggests that this be pushed down to the most local government possible (so city rather than state).
In the general case of Internet providers I occasionally read about cities that managed to install a local network and the citizens saw a huge drop in monthly prices. One would need to verify that the cost of internet access wasn't just moved from the users to the taxpayers, but I think in at least a few of these it was opt-in and not funded from taxes.
I view this as similar to a credit union vs a bank where the advantage to the local government control is to keep the new provider from doing duopoly type pricing with the old provider.
Empirical examples of success should be treated seriously.
I *think* that they are revenue neutral. I expect that they aren't profitable for the same basic reason that credit unions aren't profitable -- because they are set up as non-profit companies operated by the city.
City of Santa Clara power company is "Silicon Valley Power" and has some financial info here:
That is true for both wastewater treatment and the sanitation of drinking water. I'm not sure about some other deployments of modern sanitation (e.g. general practices within hospitals).
I'm not sure, I have not looked deeply into it. The only reason I bring it up was merely to use it as an example of a situation where I commonly see people make a claim and argue for it, but fail to steel man the *actual* counterarguments.
Well, I also lean very heavily libertarian, but I think there is at least a theoretical solution to your first point.
>Show me a credible path to removing bad regulations.
I would do something like this:
1. Make most or all laws (other than the constitution) have sunset clauses. This means that the regulations at least have to be deliberated again. Also make the legislative branch of the government the only one which can pass new regulation. Executive power should not have any power to create new laws probably (only propose them to the legislative body) and judicial power should only be allowed to repeal laws.
2. This is probably easy to create loopholes around, but still - make a "legislation size" limit so that the total "mass" of all laws is constitutionally prohibited from exceeding that limit. I am saying mass because it is not just the number of laws but also how much they do. Maybe the word count could be a crude measure (and make it mandatory to write everything out clearly, no abbreviations etc.). If the limit is reached no new legislation can be passed without first repealing something else.
3. Make it easier to abolish laws than to pass new laws in general. Perhaps a 60% majority to create a new law and only 45% to repeal an existing law (without replacing it, that would still require the 60%).
4. Any actions by the executive that create new monetary demands (and remember the executive cannot create any new regulation in this scenario) can be temporary only and have to be revised by the legislative branch. So if you want the president/prime minister to institute a new office or create a new government programme, it can only be done temporarily (say for a year or two) after which it has to be revised and passed by the legislative body (with a 60% majority like any other laws). The only exception is when the country is at war or in an emergency state (which only the legislative body can pronounce) and anything passed during that time terminates automatically once the emergency state is over or once the war ends.
5. Require something like 80% supermajority of the legislative body to change the constitution (and make any such changes subject to a veto from the executive and judicial branches).
This would make it hard to create any new laws and existing laws would require a persistent support and would need to be continuously revised. The executive would be curtailed significantly, only having major power during situations where you really have to move fast. The judiciary power would mostly just veto laws. The legislative branch would be the only one with lasting power but even its rulings would have to be continuously reaffirmed by a supermajority of the legislative body.
It would make (peacetime) government a lot slower. But I think that is a feature, not a bug. Switzerland has one of the slowest government in the world ... it's worked out quite well for them.
Some of these are already sort of how the US government works. Only legislative branch can make laws, and there is even SCOTUS ruling that says they cannot delegate lawmaking to anyone else (like the executive branch). Congress can and often does make *vague* laws and leave it up to the bureaucracy to "figure out the details", but SCOTUS has cracked down on that a few times in the past and hopefully more in the future.
I also believe only the legislative branch can allocate money, and while the executive branch is ultimately the one that decides whether to buy pencils or pens, they cannot decide to use the money to buy pencils for schools instead of pencils for the military with any given dollar.
The executive branch also cannot create new permanent agencies, but they can create new temporary agencies (3 year limit IIRC).
I really like the idea of 90% super-majority required to create new laws, and 20% minority to repeal laws. I feel like that would really encourage libertarianism as a small minority can remove bad laws/regulations, and you can only create new laws/regulations when nearly everyone agrees. I think it would also address polarization issues somewhat because anything that isn't widely agreed on is basically off the table.
It seemed to me that Trump's executive orders are often similar to laws in scope though. As in, the executive branch seems to have more power in the US than in my country. That is probably because we are a parliamentary republic whereas the US is a presidential republic. But to be honest, I am not exactly sure what the executive can do here in our country. It is definitely smaller in scope than the sweeping changes that Trump is making. For example if we wanted to introduce new tariffs, this would have to go through the parliament first (well not really, since tariffs are out of scope of national governments in the EU so we simply cannot introduce or repeal any tariffs but it would have to go through the parliament if we weren't in the EU).
I think the presidential system might be a mistake and to achieve more libertarian-like laws, you might want to shift to a parliamentary system where the executive is weaker and the legislative branch more powerful.
As a side note, I am not sure about the exact numbers but 90% / 20% for passing / repealing laws seems a bit too extreme. At least in multiparty political systems you will have basically the lizardman constant in politics. Really weird parties which happen to attract 5% of voters and get into the parliament. If you have 2 of those or one which is particularly popular, you might block all legislation even if it makes sense.
But going 75% or even 80% and maybe 33% for repealing laws could be feasible.
Also, somehow ensuring laws and taxes are as local as practically possible would be nice. Like in Switzerland where cantons are tiny but about as independent as US states are. This is very good for internal governmental competition ... moving 100km away often means moving to a different canton and you can still visit all your friends from the other place within an hour. And most taxes are collected by the cantons and municipalities and not the federal government if I am not mistaken. But I am not sure how you could enshrine this principle into the constitution. People can always argue that X has to be decided on the federal level because for reasons A,B and C it is grossly inefficient to do it on lower levels.
Some of Trump's executive orders are probably "illegal" and will eventually be overturned by the courts. Some of his executive orders are described by opponents, and sometimes by Trump's administration, as being quite different than they actually are. These two things make it look like the executive branch has more power than it actually does, but also in the US the executive branch does have some amount of non-trivial power. Especially since over time congress has repeatedly expanded presidential power through legislation that gives things like "Emergency Powers".
You are correct about the lizardman constant, which is why I suggest 90% instead of 95%, and I wouldn't be opposed to lowering it a bit more. However, one goal of this is specifically to make it nearly impossible to add any laws unless essentially the whole country agrees on it. The goal here is to try to prevent tyranny of the majority and people just voting themselves more power over smaller groups. I do think there needs to be a mechanism for changing rules over time, but it should be used extremely rarely, not regularly like most countries do now. If congress managed to pass one new law every 50 years I feel like that would be a pretty big win, especially if that one new law was widely agreed on.
I also agree that federalism is great, and I wish more countries pushed things as local as possible, rather than trying to solve every problem at the national level. Education, for example, is something that doesn't need a giant centralized apparatus, same with medicine. There are perhaps some benefits to collaboration to minimize repeat work, but I feel like this could look something like Prospera where "if drug X is approved in any of these cantons, then it is considered approved by default in our canton as well" so you don't need separate approval in every canton.
I'm pretty skeptical when people make the claim that X is better at federal level than local for almost all values of X. The one exception is defense, but even that can be handled somewhat locally with each canton deciding how it wants to train soldiers, procure arms, etc. and the national level just sets some participation requirements or something.
>each canton deciding how it wants to train soldiers, procure arms, etc. and the national level just sets some participation requirements or something.
This is basically how the Roman republican army operated or rather how its allies did. It worked pretty well.
However, some military equipment is really expensive and is out of reach of most countries even at a national level. Things like aircraft carriers (or almost any military ships, also warplanes) cannot be decided/funded on canton level (unless your hypothetical country is extremely rich, making Switzerland look dirt poor in comparison). You could train basic infantry this way and procure simpler weapons (but you still need your army to use the same standardized equipment, otherwise it will be a logistics hell). But modern military is just so expensive and is also one area where you really want some autarchy (current Trump administration and its behaviour towards NATO allies demonstrates that quite clearly).
For other things, you at least want some coordination of local governments on the national level so that you minimize transaction costs. E.g. if there is any regulation on the canton level, it has to be compatible with the rest. Ideally, the federal laws should mainly restrict such regulation, enforcing free trade internally (same in education etc.). IIRC there is a law like that in the US constitution.
Sunset clauses are great in theory, but given that the US system is more or less explicitly designed to not pass effective legislation, in practice you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
What are you analogizing here to the baby and the bathwater? A sunset clause would seem ideally suited to a system if it were designed not to pass effective legislation, since the ineffective legislation it *does* pass now possesses a deadman switch.
If you're claiming that rare instances of effective legislation would fail to survive their sunset clauses, then I think you'd have to address the convenience of renewing laws that are accepted as worth renewing. Contra Tibor, I believe they don't have to be redeliberated; rather, just revisited. The text of the law is already written, and the practice of that law has now been known for at least one term.
It's not obvious to me that legal renewal will have a higher 'hit rate' than original legislation. On the one hand, you have the benefit of hindsight and not having to write everything from scratch. On the other, constituencies will have formed around the existing spending streams, and the renewal process could be held hostage by whichever party has the majority.
The cost is certain (time spent revisiting current law funges against capacity for new laws) and the benefit is... plausible but not proven? So I think the burden of proof still lies with the proponents of sunset clauses.
Why do you think the burden of proof should lie with people to prove something doesn't work rather than on the party that is trying to prove something does work? In science, for example, it is the norm to put the burden of proof on the party making the claim.
I think a major realization that made me less of a Libertarian is that a lot of government policies (particularly Social Security & Medicare, by far the largest spending items) are basically a coordination mechanism to solve people's poor planning.
The majority of Americans retire with almost nothing saved up, and that's not because they are getting taxed too much to set aside any savings (as the people who retire with no savings usually pay almost no taxes anyway). Some people have family structures they can rely on, but many more do not, so absent a government mandatory-savings system, they would end up destitute on the street, which the charitable human instinct isn't something they'd be willing to accept.
Instead of waiting until this becomes a serious problem at retirement, where society then has to scramble to find the resources to provide for their penniless elderly, we mandate people to buy into a collective saving's plan while working, so we don't need to raise higher taxes later to provide a similar quality of life. The typical libertarian response would of course be, "They made their beds, now they should lie in it without stealing from the rest" which is all well and good, but is a completely imaginary expectation in functioning civilization that values its elderly (all of them).
Then you have to remember that despite all its flaws, democracy is a really good system. One of those flaws is that people can vote to receive transfers from the productive to unproductive people, explicitly or less directly. A libertarian candidate would have to contend with the tens of millions of elderly voters (who are also disproportionately likely to vote), making actual electoral victory basically impossible (This is also why I think so many libertarians psychologically abandon democracy after their young and ideal phase).
I think the ideal libertarian is practical, recognizes the benefits of democracy over alternative systems (at least those that have been tried at scale), and is willing to tactically accept government programs (chiefly among them, the Military, some societal regulation, and some social security) if they would be implemented by an ideological opponent anyways due to policies that positively impact more voters being more likely to be supported by winning politicians. A libertarian society doesn't look like Ayn Rand's vision, it looks like an America with fewer zoning rights, (probably) slightly less spending on medicare, and an education system that places a stronger focus on productivity and individual success.
But those aren't actually mandatory savings plans. Medicare just pays for healthcare regardless what you saved up, and rather wastefully because there are fewer QALYs to be saved at that point. And these programs don't exist because the elderly vote, rather they are also popular with the non-elderly (Bryan Caplan likes to point out that people vote sociotropically rather than selfishly).
Once you realize the signalling effect of education, the notion of reforming school for productivity seems besides the point: school isn't about learning.
I agree, but they *approximate* mandatory savings plans, which is all the more reason they should be designed by a libertarian for practical, rather than altruistic reasons. They are popular with the non-elderly because people generally have elderly relatives, or plan on becoming elderly themselves, which lends more support to the idea that a Libertarian shouldn't be fighting a futile and unpopular fight against these programs, but embrace them as a necessary outcome of a developed economy and democracy.
The alternative option I see is either going the route of so many Libertarians and abandoning democracy, or just loudly complaining while the rest of the world votes your views ever-further to oblivion.
Take Milei. I think he's the right sort of radical to solve Argentina's problems, but it's abundantly obvious he could never have gotten elected unless things were so dysfunctional that both the economy and politics stopped working. If he (or someone like him) played into the existing structure 20 years ago, perhaps things wouldn't have gotten nearly so bad.
Also, I honestly don't buy the idea that school is mostly for signaling and not about learning. There's a lot of hubub about it recently, but I've actually not seen much definitive evidence (although a lot of weak evidence which is fair) that the claim "school is not for learning and is just a teenager daycare" is actually true.
"Take Milei. I think he's the right sort of radical to solve Argentina's problems, but it's abundantly obvious he could never have gotten elected unless things were so dysfunctional that both the economy and politics stopped working. If he (or someone like him) played into the existing structure 20 years ago, perhaps things wouldn't have gotten nearly so bad."
Ok, it's a bit off topic to focus on this part of your comment, but what you're saying isn't correct.
Around 20 years ago Argentina was in its worst economic crisis ever, with 20% unemployment, 65% poverty, scandalous inequality, wages at their lowest point, bank runs, provinces issuing their own currencies that soon weren't worth anything, societal collapse, and the president literally escaping the "Casa Rosada" in a helicopter.
So, let's imagine what would have happened if someone like Milei were in charge before all this, getting elected in 1989 and reelected in 1995. Surely, that would have avoided such a drastic crisis? Let's say, someone that:
- Stopped the recurrent inflation and hyperinflation crisis. Passing from 3079,5% annual inflation in 1989 to 171% in 1991 after the "convertibility" plan was implemented (pegging the peso with the dollar) and then to 25% in 1992, 11% in 1993 and 5% in 1994. Let's add to that that during his 2nd presidency (from 1995 to 1999), the annual inflation was the lowest ever in the country's history!
- Actually made the economy grow, with the GDP per capita going from 8473 USD in 1989 to 10880 USD in 1999.
- Opened up the economy like crazy, deregulating everything, reducing quotas, tariffs, and privatizing an astronomical number of state-owned companies and services.
- Being received in Washington as a Rock Star and as a flagship of neoliberal economy. With the U.S. Congress greeting him in 1991 with a standing ovation that lasted more than a minute. Being best friends with Bush and Clinton, and known as "the best student" of the Washington Consensus, following it as closely as possible.
For reference, John Williamson's original 10 points of the Washington Consensus:
1) Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2) Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
3) Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4) Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5) Competitive exchange rates;
6) Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;
7) Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8) Privatization of state enterprises;
9) Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight of financial institutions;
10) Legal security for property rights.
Ok... The good thing is that we don't have to use our imagination that much. All of this happened with Carlos Menem, according to Milei “the best president of the last 40 years”. Heck, Milei even unveiled a bust of Menem at the "Casa Rosada" last year, removing Néstor Kirchner's one. Menem is everything Milei would want to be and more.
So, all of that is really good, right? What went wrong then? Well... It turns out that:
- Indiscriminately opening up the economy destroys the national industries, creating a lot of unemployment and low wages. Economic growth cannot be for just a few.
- Privatizing state-owned companies, even those that are strategic for the country's future and have robust financials, like YPF (the national oil company) is a terrible idea. It can give you some USDs to sustain your policies and can lower the national budget, but at a huge cost. Imagine the future of Argentina without YPF and Vaca Muerta?
- That betting on financial speculation and capital flight for the rich instead of strengthening the real economy eventually explodes. You can't build real growth on top of a bubble of nothing.
- That maintaining the entire economic plan by taking on scandalous debt from international organizations (like the IMF) to keep the dollar low eventually becomes unsustainable and leads to a default and to a devaluation of the peso, with its corresponding economic collapse.
So, Menem left his government with a ticking time bomb, destroying the foundations of society for a decade by dismantling public education, the scientific system, the productive structures, and basic economic infraestructure like public transportation (for example, trains were shut down for "not generating profits", dragging entire towns and industries into ruin). The subsequent government, under De la Rúa, continued with the same policies, but they were the unfortunate ones on whom the bomb exploded.
By the way, the main advisors and ministers of Menem, such as Cavallo, and later of De la Rúa, like Sturzenegger and Bullrich, are the same ones who were in Macri's government in 2015 (including Luis Caputo and his flamboyant nephew and Milei's main advisor, Santiago Caputo). All of those are now the main Milei's officials and ministers too. This is what I wanted to get at with this comment. Thinking that Milei is something new in Argentina is ridiculous, especially when his government is practically an identical copy of Macri's. Heck, it's all the same people doing all the same things that failed time and time again!
Why do you think there were 12 years of center-left government under Kirchnerism, between 2003 and 2015? Because, from Perón's second government in 1952 to the crisis of 2001, Argentina was a completely liberal country. Especially after the hyper-neoliberalism of the genocidal dictatorship of 1976. This led to one crisis after another, and in 2003 people were fed up with neoliberalism and turned towards the center-left (which found the country in ruins and led it to become one of the best economies in Latin America until the "libertarian" (?) Macri did a disaster in 2015). It's completely ironic to think that if Milei had been in power 20 years ago, things would have been different. Argentina had one Milei after another for 50 years and they led Argetnina to it's darkest moments. Can someone explain to me where the narrative that Milei is something new comes from? It's crazy.
I am not informed enough on the topic to disagree with this.
I will say that this is *probably* a non-starter with Libertarians without a much more in-depth explanation and research. Most people don't really know more than "Argentina is such a mess that they had hyperinflation and elected a radical Libertarian." A-priori, it seems to me like the party more favorable to welfare, government jobs and less fiscally conservative (I.E. The PJ) likely holds more of the blame, but your comment has made me more skeptical of that narrative.
You really need a whole lot of Argentina-specific knowledge to understand what went wrong in the past, and what policies were to blame. I really can't tell if Macri's 4 year term was to blame, or if he was just barely holding it together after 15 years of PJ, or if Fernandez's poor response to Covid is the culprit without doing a lot more digging.
At most Social Security could "approximate" mandatory saving. Medicare is a very different story which doesn't approximate it at all.
Yes, it is the fate of libertarians to complain, as their views are unpopular among voters. The Seasteaders are a rare group trying to do something different to side-step that problem, although I suppose the Free State Project is relatively plausible (certainly more plausible than converting the masses) attempt to build a libertarian democratic majority somewhere.
I think Seasteading is cool, and I appreciate the concept, but I really wonder what happens if it's successful, the founding population ages out, the broader group becomes more average and less wealthy, and people start getting old or sick without the means to pay for survival. Throw them in a rowboat and wish them luck? It seems like a smart exit from the current system, but fundamentally unsustainable without eventually reverting back to what we already have. Maybe that's the best that can be hoped for though?
I've looked into the claims about school, and I'm just not convinced as to how much of what's being measured is actually applicable to "schooling" rather than higher education. It seems to me like a lot more of the motivation has to do with personal dissatisfaction with schooling rather than rational assessment, as there's a whole lot of charter schools that have basically already reformed schooling.
Seasteading aims to make governance dynamic, allowing entry/startups from an "industry" lacking them. It would not be expected to "revert back to what we already have", because it would change the equilibrium once people can exit to better governance.
The link I posted presented regressions based on "average national years of education", which counts both higher and primary education. Caplan was inspired to look into such national measures due to the finding that many countries have greatly increased their amounts of education without seeing apparent benefits https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/why_is_the_soci.html If you think that linked assessment (from Caplan or Lant Pritchett) is "irrational" you're invited to give your own take on the evidence.
My understanding is that charter schools, when they aren't filtering for better students, achieve basically the same outcomes but fortunately at a lower cost.
1. What would an ideal form of government look like (given existing human behaviors) assuming you could actually get into power.
2. What is a form of government that can reasonably get into power and is better than the current situation.
I agree that the argument for libertarianism is basically centered around (1), and it is unlikely get into power in its ideal form. The problem I have with debating (2) is that one could reasonably argue (and I sometimes do) that the current options we have are basically the end-game for democracy. Populists running propaganda campaigns and an uninformed public deciding which angry person they dislike the least. I'm not sure any reasonable group can get into power in late-stage democracy, so discussing it *feels* pointless.
Milei is an example of maybe a light at the end of the tunnel, but as you mention that seemed to require democracy catastrophically failing first.
Perhaps the success of the government is predicated on many "2." people working very hard over generations to keep the machine running, despite deterioration. If so, their work would be mostly invisible, mostly boring, and mostly forgotten to history. We remember the grand successes and collapses of history, not the status-quo would-be collapse that never was, and is always right around the corner.
It might feel like a losing battle, but the country has been so dysfunctional before that it literally broke in half, so I'm (eternally) optimistic we can fix things without having to abandon core values or wait for collapse.
I dislike the term "late-stage". It appears to have been invented by a Communist-turned-Nazi who thought that Communism and/or Nazism would inevitably replace capitalism. But there is much ruin in a nation, and perhaps democracy can continue down this path for much longer, with no obvious stage to follow it.
What would be a better word for "democracy that has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer a functional form of government"?
I'm specifically interested in labeling the situation where people seeking power learn how to achieve that within a given voting population and then optimize that to the point where you just have power seekers doing everything they can to get and retain power, with little to no care about actually running a country.
I read your summary, but not the originals you linked to. It is an interesting fusion of progressivism and libertarianism, but I worry that it suffers the same problem that most systems have which is how do you draw the line between what is appropriate and what isn't? I do like that you are trying to be principled about where you draw the line rather than drawing an arbitrary line, and I think that is significantly better than people who just say "yeah, that sounds nice, we should have government do that". I'm not yet convinced that it is actually a better strategy on net than something like minarchy though, since I'm not sufficiently convinced that government spending is the only way to solve the problem you think is solved by more public services like education and healthcare.
One comment on your line of thinking that I disagree with is around "The problem is that homo sapiens often has trouble calculating things that involve such factors as social standing, present-versus-future utility, etc." In essence, this makes the claim that you know better than the individual what is best for them, and you know what is best for society. My counterclaim is that while you *might* be right, you also *might* be wrong and the average government bureaucrat or congressman is *probably* wrong.
Perhaps what is actually best for society (and even some individuals) is to not have everyone get a PhD and instead have some people who spend a lot of time on education and some people who spend a lot of time doing actual work. One could reasonably argue that evolution hasn't kept up with automation, and while a hunter gatherer society may want 1/100 thinkers, 99/100 doers, in modern society perhaps we want closer to 50:50 🤷. The problem here is that any centralized system will need to decide what the "right" percentage of thinkers vs doers is, and potentially drive people into a category they don't like because it is best for their future and/or society's future.
We will know very soon. The Supreme Court just found that the Trump administration cannot cut off spending that Congress has approved (this includes the USAID freeze that Scott has been actively protesting against). Now we see if Trump obeys that decision.
While this represents a victory for the rule of law, there are some worrying signs. This was only a 5-4 decision against allowing the president to violate the spirit and letter of the constitution. The minority wrote a dissent that basically says the judicial branch of the government should not have the authority to compel the President to defer to Congress when Congress is exercising it's constitutional power. If one SC justice had changed sides, that opinion would basically render the balance of powers components of the constitution meaningless, and would allow the president to ignore any law Congress passes regarding spending.
That would be a major and unprecedented breach of the clear language of the Constitution.
>We will know very soon. The Supreme Court just found that the Trump administration cannot cut off spending that Congress has approved (this includes the USAID freeze that Scott has been actively protesting against).
Not quite: the Supreme Court found that the Trump administration couldn't cut off spending for work that had already been completed before February 13th. They did not rule on whether spending for work that had not yet been completed could or could not be cut off.
You appear to be correct. My bad. My basic point still stands, though. The Trump administration has to pay those funds. Will he obey the court, or ignore it?
coup is objectively the wrong word, unless I missed a major bit of news
a gradual elite consolidation of power that freezes ordinary people out of politics, yes, and it's been going on for more or less the entire 21st century
Yeah, I agree with this. Trump just represents an acceleration of a trend that has been happening for a longer than he has been around. The correct term is "Unconstitutional extension of presidential authority", but that hardly rings off the tongue, so "coup" makes an acceptable shorthand ("Self-coup" if you want to be pendantic).
>President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War to suppress rebellion and invasion. This suspension allowed the government to detain people without due process
If Trump suspends habeas corpus, yes, that would be very major damage and might be a component of a coup. He hasn't.
The Khalil case is explicitly a canary for this, so it's worth seeing where that goes.
(Khalil is a green card holder who as far as anyone can tell was detained by ICE and transported away from his lawyers without anyone knowing, AFTER his lawyers explicitly filed a habeas claim)
I'm not sure how many people who talk about the coup believe it. There's a phenom. in groups, where people kind of try out extreme ideas to see how many people resonate to them. Of course people who are not experimentally expressing extreme ideas are influenced by hearing others express them, and nudged in the direction of taking those ideas a bit more seriously in proportion to how how many people they hear trying them out. So the tests the first group is running are not valid tests. If enough of them run their tests they can start an avalanche of belief.
Upshot: I really think people should consider STFU about coups unless they are doing what they would be doing if they were sure a coup was going on -- leaving the country? Taking their invested money out and turning it into gold bricks? Forming mutual protection groups with their friends?
I looked into leaving the country ahead of the crowd but unfortunately until bullets actually start flying it's not so easy to get into anywhere with much less risk, especially places where I know any of the local language. And I'm not so sure coup risk is going to outrun AI risk anyway.
talking about a Trump coup none of them sound like what they have in mind is some kind of lame attempt. Nobody talks about an “attempted coup.”
And anybody feeling reasonably sure there will be a coup and uncertain whether it will succeed would surely be taking some precautions now, not waiting to see whether the attempt
Allow me to be the first, then, to endorse the phrase "Attempted Coup".
The only precaution that I, as an average person with no political authority, can take without uprooting my life is expressing my displeasure to my congressional representatives, which I have done. What else do you want?
There’s nothing else I want. There never was anything I wanted from you. I don’t even know whether you have posted about a coup, and if so in what kind of language. My point was that I have seen a mismatch between the extremity of the language some have used and their account of steps they are taking. If a thought a coup was imminent I would probably be discussing steps with people on ACX, for instance, because it’s a good place to get smart advice about likely changes in things like banks, investments, health insurance, taxes, laws I’d be asking which they thought would be impacted, and what steps were good to take. I’d be asking about pros and cons of moving to various other states — which are likely to be safest, etc. — and other countries. Nobody posting about a coup is doing that.
I feel the same way about people who maintain that AI extinction will happen in the next 5 years. None of them are talking about what to do with those years, given that it makes sense to take steps like quit work and max out credit cards. None are asking for advice about how to tell their children life is going to end in the next few years. None are talking about painless means of suicide.
If phrased just like that, 8% would be my guess. That's 4% people considering Elon, 2% Trump, 2% Lizardman. Would love to see a poll to see if I'm right.
- Trump keeps talking about running for a third time. Members of his party have introduced legislation to make this a reality. It likely won't pass, but Trump is not above lying or manufacturing fig leaf justifications to stay in power (see: j6, Eastman)
- Trump and his party keeps suing or otherwise threatening people with federal power for nakedly political reasons. Besides going after news outlets, he's also attacking government agents, lawyers, and judges who are perceived to have ever said anything against him. Like, suing CBS for giving airtime to Kamala is insane. Besides the obvious chilling effects, this is a pretty clear stepping stone to voter suppression. Is it a coup if Trump uses federal money to campaign? Maybe not, but it certainly tips the scales in a very particular direction
- the Trump admin is ignoring judicial decrees they don't like. This is pretty bad? Judicial review is critical for reigning in the executive. Again, maybe not explicitly a coup, but it sure isn't pointing a great direction
This is before you get into foreign policy stuff. If Trump orders the invasion of Canada or Greenland (crazy that I'm writing this as if it's a real possibility!) without approval from Congress, is that a coup? There's a sense in which the government is beholden to the Constitution, and so intentionally and repeatedly taking unconstitutional action is a form of coup regardless of whether there is a mandate. I think a lot of fuzziness lies there, especially if the trump regime continues to ignore judicial review on the matter
Congressmen have regularly proposed repealing the Presidential term limits ever since they were instituted. It's never gone anywhere, thankfully. The only new thing there is that now Trump is talking about it too.
I feel like statements like this smuggle in obviously game changing things as if they aren't obviously game changing.
"Lots of people talk about crossing the Rubicon into Rome with an army. The only new thing there is that Caesar is talking about it too"
It is materially important information that the current sitting president, a man who has already tried to illegally extend his time in office once, is talking about extending his time in office
He's already doing that too! Two different courts put restraining orders on the admin to force them to continue to disperse federal funding, and the admin has openly ignored the court orders even after the courts sent second orders.
I understand that it's hard to pay attention to everything that's happening, but the Khalil case re habeas corpus and the ignoring of court orders are really big canaries that people need to pay attention to
Currently? Whatever about Jan 6 there’s no coup like behaviour right now. There’s a lot of radical behaviour but that’s it. There maybe some actions that will be seen as unconstitutional but provided the Supreme Court is still functioning that’s not a coup either.
The reaction to Trump is reminiscent of the reaction, this time from the right, to FDR who was considered to have overstepped the bounds of the presidency with new deal legislation. FDR even threatened to pack the Supreme Court when the largely libertarian court was opposed his agenda. None of what FDR was doing was illegal but it was definitely heavy handed and was often described at the time as a presidential coup. And in fact real plots and coups bubbled up from time to time, in reaction to this rhetoric.
The best reaction to Trump is to let him fail. Not actually try an actual coup.
Trump did a coup and thats a good thing. He campaigned on ending the deep state, the deep state clearly hates him, I think any power wielded by trump; with my advanced pattern noticing and conspiracy *fact* sight, suggests the deep state is weaker. Like he isnt nearly as much as an outsider as he claims(and niether is vanced, or kenndy or tulsi) but its civil war.
I don't think it is a coup. This time, he got elected and last time I checked, the president was the head of the executive. I am sure that some of the firings he did were illegal, but the courts will sort it out.
I also think that this "move fast and break things" approach to federal government is terrible, but that does not make it a coup.
>That statement is definitely true in general, rather than about AI! We are profoundly f***ed in a wide variety of ways. We almost can’t build houses, or transmission lines and power plants, or do most other things in the world of atoms, without horribly inflated costs and timelines and often not even then.
> _And to the extent we do still actually do things, quite often the way we do those things is we ignore the laws and the laws aren’t enforced,_ but AI reduces the levels of friction required to enforce those laws, and makes what was previously implicit and vague and deniable much easier to identify. Which in these cases is big trouble.
which is a large part of why I tend to shrug at illegalities in how Trump is operating. To a good approximation, doing _anything_ is illegal. I'm not happy about it, but officially pruning the laws and regulations down to something sane is a nearly impossible task.
I agree completely that
>I also think that this "move fast and break things" approach to federal government is terrible
Some of the things Trump has done (e.g. firing the people in charge of nuclear weapons' security) were obviously stupid (fortunately, at least _that_ has been reversed). Cutting stuff needs to be done carefully and precisely. Swinging a chainsaw around with little control tends to cut load-bearing structures.
Basically, get elected and then dismantle enough checks and balances that you can't be removed. Is he there yet? Maybe not; I'm not an expert on US constitutional laws.
He's certainly *threatening* a self-coup, given that he's talking about using the insurrection act.
Firing workers in the executive branch is not "dismantling checks and balances". Congress and the Supreme Court still seem to have all the power they held previously, although Congress may not actually be using its power.
I think the point about Congress just giving up on its power is an under-shouted-from-rooftops story of the day. The basic idea of checks and balances stemming from separation of powers is that every branch cherishes its power and will fight attempts to usurp it. That Congress would just... give up... was likely not on the Founders minds.
I agree, but that's been going on for a long time. The Founders also didn't expect direct election of Senators, or bureaucracies nearly as large as what we have now.
Now, I don't think $80 million is much of a dent in total DoD waste, but I've just about had it with DOGE critics who alternate their criticisms between "you're cutting too fast!" and "why haven't you cut this yet?" It's been weeks, let 'em cook.
Because they want the waste to be easily identifiable. They're like small children who get whiny and impatient if the local park district's Easter egg hunt requires looking under more than one bush to find an egg.
How much of US government waste is actually necessary or unavoidable waste? I think any large organization will generally have some large % of activity that can be seen as wasteful, and this is basically unavoidable, though of course targeted activity could trim it down.
Much of what the Federal government currently does is outside its enumerated powers and/or better left to the private sector. That's *all* avoidable waste.
That is correct in my experience. Everybody knows there's some waste somewhere, it's a banal and unactionable kind of knowledge, useless really. It's also indistinguishable from slack, having some spare capacity available to spring to action in an emergency/opportunity.
DOGE strikes me as a team of dummies who'd look at a fire department, see all these men mulling around doing nothing, and fire them all (ha! not a bad pun!).
I think a lot of government regulations are wasteful, like the ones surrounding the Palisades fire as described by Zvi. Also, I'm a quarter of the way through Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Dominic Cummings, and his description of waste the British system is a bit shocking: so far he describes a self-perpetuating class of bureaucrats that obstruct any progress even during serious crises with people dying every day (covid).
It seems Elon is ignoring both regulations and the older bureaucrats, preferring to just fire younger, new ones, so I don't see how he's making progress on that.
Mostly agreed; even more to the point, firing staff does nothing to reduce regulations. In fact, one may need to at least temporarily increase staff in order to analyze existing regulations and work on dismantling bad ones. But firing people makes MAGA happy and liberals cry, and that's all that matters.
I agree 100%. It is annoyingly true that often an organization that is doing things you don't like actually needs a bigger budget (though sometimes cleaning house is also required).
Legislature is what is actually allowed to wipe regulations off the books. Short of a full coup, the best the executive branch can do is ensure there is no power to enforce regulations and then to wink at the people breaking them.
GAO's Yellow Book defines waste as, "The act of using or expending resources carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose. Waste can include activities that do not include abuse and does not necessarily involve a violation of law." My interpretation is that the definition of waste is so broad and open to interpretation that pretty much anything you don't agree with is waste. The problem is when they conflate waste with fraud.
A: People using money to do the opposite of what some law states they can do, to buy themselves kickbacks or treats.
B: People using money do to what the law technically says they can do, but which when said out loud is controversial.
C: People using money to do what the law generally says they can do, but which when said out loud is controversial.
The US government has a lot more of B and C then A. Limiting one's self only to A means vastly limiting the scope of what can be done. Elon and Trump have bigger ambitions.
When considering Elon Musk’s political moves related to Doge and broader policy areas, we might ask ourselves:
1. Is Musk motivated by unselfish public good?
2. Or is he driven by self-interest related to his substantial business holdings?
Consider Musk’s significant conflicts of interest, including:
• SpaceX (NASA & DoD contracts)
• Tesla (DOE, NHTSA, SEC oversight)
• Starlink (FCC oversight)
Given these factors, I’d estimate the likelihood of the second scenario to be greater than 90%.
Musk might sincerely believe reducing oversight is critical to achieving ambitious goals such as Mars colonization—or it may simply reflect a common pattern of powerful individuals seeking to protect and expand their own influence and wealth.
I think Musk is likely clinically manic, and that the substrate of his motivation is not plans or goals but great random bursts of excitement, enthusiasm and confidence, sort of like solar flares.
Elon's actions so far have made him a lot of enemies and damaged the holdings of one of his companies. This seems a case of ideological motivation rather than purely financial.
Seconding FluffyBuffalo, I think we also need to consider sheer recklessness and impulsiveness. Some of these actions might be interpreted as costly expenditures in the service of some ideology, but most of them just seem to be costly unforced errors with no benefit.
This is the same person who, to all appearances, spends a large part of his day scrolling twitter and takes action based on unsubstantiated claims he reads on the platform. I think there's a lot less Machiavellian scheming than there is, in Adrian's words, narcissism and ego boosting.
Given Musk's psychological profile, and the fact that he has surrounded himself with a cadre of neophyte fanboys, their payoff matrix likely maximizes for telling Elon what he wants to hear. I suspect he very much tends to shoot the messenger.
That's a strong... maybe? Certainly, a functional, goal-oriented organization would be organized to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant information to key decision makers. But even in functional organizations, that gets compromised for the usual Moral Mazes reasons once you get enough layers.
I don't think DOGE has enough layers to have developed internal factions, but I expect it's compromised for other reasons. Mainly, all we've seen thus far indicates that real information about what a given gov. organization does just isn't valued internally. The department's own supporters compare it to a chainsaw. 'Use reliable, in-depth information to streamline the operations at agency A' just isn't in the cards. Pausing to gather and consider information about an organization, even if that information is already public and easily accessible, would take too long, even if it had a much larger staff dedicated to just that purpose.
Does Musk have the time or desire to sit down with some staffers and go over the actual functions, headcount, fully-loaded employee costs vs total spending, etc of an organization, one by one, in order to make informed decisions? That just doesn't seem to be the case. They're just trying to cut government employees en masse by broad category. The firings of probationary employees are the clearest example (contrary to the name, this is a category that includes new hires, but also transfers and recently promoted employees, not interns or employees being considered for firing).
Sometimes this leads to costs the administration is unwilling to pay, such as the firing of hundreds of employees related to nuclear weapons and waste, which the administration reversed by itself. More recently, OPM (the office through which DOGE is performing the cuts) walked back and admitted they didn't have the authority to fire some of those employees, and some of them are now back to work. Others are still fired and will doubtless be joining class action lawsuits. The ultimate legal costs to the government will almost certainly be greater than any reduced personnel costs, never mind that less work is now being done and morale can't be good.
Bluntly, if DOGE is an organization that valued that knowledge and wanted to act on it, we're not seeing it. I expect this all flows right down from Musk. As hyperbolic as it sounds, it genuinely seems like Musk just doesn't value information that contradicts his ideas and avoids updating on it at all(cf Sam Harris' account of his falling out with Musk, and Richard Hanania's piece from last week, which is as good a treatment of this as I've seen: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-only-censor-musk-seeks-to).
Certainly, this action is ideologically based, but I don't think it was a calculated risk to his financial holdings in exchange for higher goals. It just seems impulsive.
>They're just trying to cut government employees en masse by broad category.
Yes, and people should realize this was always the goal. DOGE generally isn't going to give advice for streamlining something when the boss has no reason to want it to exist even in a streamlined form.
> Seconding FluffyBuffalo, I think we also need to consider sheer recklessness and impulsiveness.
Case in point: Musk replying "Be quiet, small man" to Poland's minister of foreign affairs and boasting about how he could turn StarLink and make Ukraine's entire front line collapse. [1] Comments like this are terrible for business, and can't be explained with ideology. Rather, they speak for substance abuse and/or lack of impulse control (the latter possibly being a long-term effect of the former).
Maybe. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it could also be the case that Musk underestimated the negative effect of his actions on his companies.
There's a third aspect that might play a role: narcissim and ego-boosting. What's the point of being the richest man in the world if you don't also get to directly influence government policy?
The executive branch's power is not infinite. They cannot write regulations nor can they rescind regulations. What they *can* do is change how they interpret ambiguous/vague regulations and they can (in theory) choose to simply not enforce some regulations.
Given those constraints, do you have some good examples of "bigger fish"? Military spending, for example, isn't something that you can easily make go away I don't think?
I think most of the waste in the US government spending is some combination of:
1. Not evident at first sight (meaning you need a lot of time and expertise to identify it without also flagging legitimate programs).
2. Not outright waste, just less than perfectly allocated resources (again, you need a lot of expertise to identify these and even more to substitute them with better programs).
3. Popular, or at least popular enough with a sufficently motivated group to make it an hassle to axe it (pork barrel and such).
4. A wasteful fix for an issue for which the better solution would require even more spending in the short term.
Last time a real effort was made to cut on government waste was under Clinton: the initiative was bipartisan, staffed by experts in those goverments departments to be cut and took its time, all aspects which DOGE doesn't share.
5. A temporary fix for an issue for which a better solution is being developed.
This is one of the lessons of the Grace Commission. You can look at government, find a bunch of inefficiencies, but by the time you finish writing up your report, many of those inefficiencies will have already been fixed.
I think the real government waste is all kind of ambiguous cases where it's done according to procedure and you can sort of see what someone was thinking but it's stupid. But DOGE wants it to be some really exciting story about a specific evil person using taxpayer money to buy a Ferrari and cooking the books to hide it.
Compare rape, where everyone is extremely against it, but when you give them any example of the sorts of rapes that actually happen (someone's on a date, girl is slightly drunk, says "no" but quietly, and doesn't fight) lots of people find it excusable. People are extremely against "rape" because they imagine someone with a knife raping passers-by in an ally. If you campaigned on stopping the dark-alley type of rape, but all you're able to fight is the awkwardly-drunk type of rape, people won't be excited and will think you're just causing trouble. But the dark-alley type of rape is too rare to be able to say you cut rape 90% or whatever by cutting it, so maybe you have to make up instances so you can cut them.
Yes, I agree about gov’t waste of money. But waste of time due to over-cautiousness and bureaucratic tangles seems like a more legit target — slow FDA approvals being one example.
But DOGE does not have the authority to target that kind of waste. Musk can't unilaterally repeal the regulations that bureaucrats are getting tangled over and properly untangling them would require spending MORE money, which cuts against his whole campaign.
Oh please. Musk and Trump are clearly willing to do things they do not have the to authority to do. My complaint is that since they're willing to do that, why are they not picking big, juicy targets, things where there's a lot of bang for the buck in forcing changes? They have wasted a great deal of time and money doing dumb stuff for which there was no clear rationale, and then sometimes having to reverse that particular dumb piece of dismantlement because somebody found an effective way to push back.
Example: they announce that all probationary (first & somethings also second year) employees at federal agencies are fired. So those people leave, perplexed and indignant, while listening to the heads of their agency talk about what dumb, crazy assholes Trump and Musk are. Then Musk & Trump are forced to rescind that order because somebody made a good case that it was illegal. So now most of the probationary employees come back. Wouldn't surprise me if those were the less competent ones, the more competent ones having quickly gotten other jobs. In any case, those that come back now hear the head of their department chortle about how they kept those 2 crazy assholes from having their way. The department now both loathes Trump and Musk and feels superior to them. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk look foolish. They wasted time and money, created confusion, interrupted tasks the agency was doing, which now will have to be redone ,and not only did they not improve things, they left things the same EXCEPT THAT they lost status with the agency and the public.
The simple answer is that DOGE is incapable of actually "investigating" anything, it simply doesn't have the expertise and manpower. This is of course by design.
Investigating organizations, identifying bottlenecks, snarls and money pits, then revamping the thing takes a lot of smarts, an orderly mind and people savvy. Seems like that should be obvious to anyone with common sense. I don’t understand why people applauding smash ‘n cheer by Thug and Chud don’t take that into account. Are they lost in some Monster Truck Rally fantasy, with Thug and Chud as drivers?
You need to parse the possibilities: If the machine is a device where the people present are tortured one by one on the rack you should destroy it. If it is a restaurant that makes people sick by serving spoiled food then you want to make it run well, i.e. clean it up and hire people who will do the needed procedures to keep it clean. Blowing up the restaurant would be an act of dumb pissiness.
“Trump makes all the right people mad” and “liberal tears” have been pretty explicit MAGA/Tea Party (remembah them?) policy goals. That “all the right people” remain the arbiters of said policy is the irony completely lost.
Medicare just makes insurance payments and Medicaid spending is paid to the states; CMS itself only employs 6,000 people so waste there would be peanuts ("do you really need 4 payroll admins instead of 3?"). VA is transfer payments, VA hospitals and graveyards; you could probably streamline it at a granular level, but cutting veterans' healthcare and/or not mowing the lawn at Arlington would piss of a lot of Republicans for tiny amounts of money.
Defence has massive scope for efficiency savings, including a general procurement model of "we pay Raytheon so Raytheon will pay us" in Congress and DoD. Targeting one of the few cash siphons from taxpayers to Republicans (it's bipartisan, but that makes it about the reddest there is) would be an... interesting strategy?
There were rumors in December of a deal to cancel SLS in exchange for shuffling some NASA centers to the right congressional districts. I have not heard anything since then, but if they do manage to go through with it, I would see it as a legitimate ~$10b/year reduction in waste, not a handout to SpaceX (which in fact risks losing their SLS lander contract).
Possibly, yes. I don't expect this covert goal to be particularly noble. If one were reaching for excuses it could be that Musk genuinely believes in his mission to make humanity into an interplanetary species and considers the regulatory state to be the major obstacle to reaching that goal.
Loudly and dramatically establishing a precedent of doing things without Congress, in order to bring more power to the executive branch / Trump personally / Musk personally via salami tactics?
Could it be that the goal is to keep public and media attention on DOGE while more important (from Trump's gov perspective) but controversial executive orders get implemented without the backlash they would usually have raised?
Just speculative. I'm not American, so I may be missing some context here.
Exactly this. This is the ignorant masses telling the Professional Management Class that they (PMC) are not going to use the levers of the government to force the whatever color pill down their (im) throats. And it has to be costly, to everyone, to show that the ignorant masses really really want this to stop.
No idea, but it doesn't make sense that Elon "First principles" Musk would honestly try to fix the deficit by reducing the tiny proportion of spending that goes to government salaries.
Nice phrasing. Elon doing *anything* honestly would be a big surprise to me. Of course, you are correct in your assessment, and Elon, with his vast expertise in software development (LOL), surely knows that the first step in performance optimization is profiling: focus on the areas where the most resources are spent, because that's where the largest potential savings are.
Of course, you always need to understand what you're looking at to judge whether it's necessary and what the alternatives are. But that would be hard work and not tweet-worthy...
I think we have to accept trump isnt above doing cash grabs, he did a shitcoin and my read of the uckraine deal was that he wanted a fake mining job to be filled with maga children no different from hunters fake job.
Moving away from trump may not be in the direction you want. I will kept my new found guarded optimism the right wing ideas can gain ground before cultural evolution thru civilization collapse and nonviolently.
Also, a quick plug: if you’re in London, you should definitely consider spending more time at Newspeak House. Their upcoming events (listed on their website) look fantastic—if I had to recommend just one, it’d be the HPMOR 10th Anniversary.
For clarity, I don’t have any formal ties to Newspeak House or Ed. I’m just someone who moved to London years ago and found the community they’re building genuinely impressive.
In an earlier Open Thread, I posted an investigation about identity disorders, transgender, and BIID. It was met with positive comments, so I post the second part of my investigation (and also the first part for those who missed it)
I want to say this as kindly and as on-your-side as possible but also not pull any of the weight from this.
I am also a transgender woman, and while I think there is some really cool interesting thoughts in here, the overall thrust is deeply wrong. Its deeply wrong in a way that I already suspect will be impossible to convince you out of, but even if its just to put up a flag for other readers its worth doing.
Essentially ALL mental illnesses are correlated and co-morbid with each other. You've gone into extremely niche spaces that are created by and exist for people well on the tail of intense and variable mental illness, you've seen that there seems to be a lot of BIID and Trans and Autism and Schizotypy happening together, and you are concluding they must be related. You are entirely failing to Look Into The Dark (if we want to quote Yudkowsky) The vast majority of trans experiences aren't anything like these. Your starting description of what dysphoria is like hits _some_ of the same notes as mine does and other trans people in my own circles, but definitely different in important ways. Derealization is not the archetypical response, many trans peoples dysphoria is typified by the opposite, over-realization, or by more borderline/instability/fragility tendencies, or other things. "Derealization is the core symptom of dysphoria" is a wildly strong claim that you haven't got anything like the evidence to back up. More importantly im telling you as one trans-woman-with-an-active-circle-of-trans-connections to another, its just not accurate.
It is _not surprising_ that when you look at the far end of the tail of mental illness, that those people have lots of concurrent mental illnesses. But talk to a large group of psychiatrists or check their published research, and its readily apparent that while trans people have co-morbid mental health issues at a larger rate than cis people, most of the time its "dysphoria and depression and anxiety" and sometimes "dysphoria and anxiety and a bizarre paraphilia" and only rarely dysphoria plus significantly derealization associated body identity disorders.
I know the _point_ you are trying to make isnt "these things happen together or are the same thing" but you ARE relying on what you describe as the similarness of the vibe to conclude a similarness of the cause. But that's an error - Many and perhaps most actual trans experiences aren't the "EXACT. SAME. SHIT." you describe in the people you interrogated about their BIID. There's certainly similar elements, I'm not saying there's no connection. But not everyone's dysphoria is like that, and I speak from personal and community experience.
Not everyone's trans-ness is ego-syntonic. Even now as a transwoman very happy with the result of my transition, if there had been a way to remove the dysphoria entirely up front and let me live as a man with no other ill effect, that would have been better. It wouldn't have resulted in the current me, obviously, but there's every reason to think the counterfactual person would have developed to be a happy and productive person like I have, minus a lingering dysphoria and social stigma and plus a hundred thousand dollars or so.
When you think in terms of distributions it's obvious - most trans people are just like regular people but they are trans. The distribution is shifted so the average trans person is definitely weirder than the average cis person, but most trans-ness isn't especially associated with this deep identity disorder you propose (even if yours is - consider you might yourself simply be comorbid and ascribing to your transness your identity disorder tendencies). But, like Putanomit shows with sports, the nature of the shifted distributions is that the WEIRDEST trans people are gonna be WAYYYY weirder than the weirdest cis people.
Your math aint mathing cuz I don't think you are actually doing the math and you certainly aren't looking at anything like a representative sample. This is important because then you conclude things like "In other words, identity disorders wake up when your body is flooded with estradiol." which is both bananas and crazy irresponsible to say. If you said that to an endocrinologist they would literally laugh in your face.
The pharmacological institutions of this country have been offering hormone affecting prescriptions including just straight hormones for a variety of maladies at mass scale for decades - many of them operate on exactly the little biological elements you identify like NMDA or E2. Things like birth control, Gabapentin, magnesium, dextromethorphan, nitrous oxide etc, all have effects of NMDA receptors. And thats just the antagonists.
Deployed at mass scale our pharmaceutical tinkerings have very likely cause distributional weirdness in cognition and mental illnesses, but there is decidedly NOT some massive group of intense identity disorders that resulted from these because such disorders are not simplistically the result of one or two or three easily legible malfunctioning receptors or receptor systems. If the estrogen differential between men and women is what's causing there to be more Transwomen than transmen by mechanism of action of NMDA working worse without that estrogen, then your theory would also predict that post-menopausal women should be having identity disorders at an increased rate because of the sudden massive deficit of estrogens, and they do not..
You mention in your second post that while trying to look into GPER1 that that is when you feel handicapped by having no formal education in the field - I disagree, you have been handicapped in the entire discussion and unaware of it. There are numerous examples in both posts where you state something as a scientific fact but are plainly wrong or highly misrepresented, like how you link Schizophrenia so tightly to NMDA when in reality the consensus is that its one piece of a model that also relies on dopaminergic and GABAergic factors and that even with all of that we still don't have a terrific model and besides which most shizotypy isn't hallucination its a large swathe of cognitive deficits. Then you state as fact that “NMDA-antagonists cause derealization.” which is oversimplified, and should say “In some cases. Then you state “Inconsistency between the expected and the actual identity causes derealization”, again, in some cases.Then “NMDA receptors signal the expectations of sensory data.” - NMDA receptors do LOTS of things and are associated not just with dissociation but also breathing, cognitive ability, planning, circulation, etc. The implication of your claim then is that you should be able to measure in transgender people a marked deficit in NMDA receptor activity similarly to how they have found this in post-mortem analysis of schizophrenics but this is not the case. Additionally if it is actually downstream of NMDA receptor malfunction then along with derealization you should be getting the other symptoms of NMDA receptor malfunction many of which are physical, but this is also not the case. I don't think you have half the grasp on the complexity and interconnectedness of these neurochemical phenomena that you think you do.
I know the temperature of my response is pretty high right now so I want to pull back and say, I think it's a cool discussion you are having. I also think it's cool of you when talking to BIID or DID(m) or otherkin people to start by simply taking them at their word.
That said, you need to understand, for your sake and my sake, and the sake of the rest of trans people (who don't need the hit right now):
1. You are baselessly speculating that identity disorders including transgenderism are the simplistic result of two to three small biological malfunctions like deficient NMDA receptors, plus daydreaming or media exposure. This is both really easy to identify as wrong and an unbelievably dangerous position. If it wasn’t for the fact that you are clearly “in” with those highly niche groups I’d almost believe this was some sort of political psy-op.
2. You pass out of hand any biological sex differentiation elements without honestly contending with any of the evidence for it. The “estrogen fueled vs testosterone fueled brain” analogy is admittedly simplistic but that's the cutesy little analogy some endos give laymen, that's not the scientific consensus or the state of the data. There's a great deal of studies that have replicably correlated differences in brain structure and gene expression with transness, I can link several. If you’re familiar with this space at all you should well know the John Money experiment and the others like it where cis people were attempted to be raised as the opposite gender without their knowledge from essentially birth and in the majority of cases they experienced gender dysphoria and expressed being their karyotypical gender. The modern model isn't purely biological or based on sex differences, it incorporates both physiology and cultural gender expectations.
3. You are doing a devastating disservice to trans people by spotlighting 10/10 crazy people, parading them out as literal specimens, and saying “oh yea this is trans-ness” and I hate you a little for it. THESE ARE NOT TYPICAL TRANS EXPERIENCES. These aren't typical anyone experiences. These are far-end-of-the-tail people. I'm not saying these people are freaks or degenerates and I agree with you that everyone should have bodily autonomy and that includes elective disfiguring surgery with sufficient informed consent. But to paint trans-ness as a whole with this brush is so incredibly inaccurate and devastatingly bad optics at a time when it really matters. To be clear, the bad optics alone aren't making me reply, it's that it's also so wrong.
No, this is not a political psy op, and not a claim that this is typical trans experience. This is the tail end of most severe specimens because this is how you study novel phenomena on little data. You observe the phenomenon at its largest magnitude, and once you get that down, you go into subtler details.
I am aware that those are the most across the board mentally ill and dysfunctional - _this is the point_, and this is how most mental illnesses were first studied. You don't discover OCD by noticing a guy who washes his hands 10% more than usual and tends to ruminate. You discover OCD by seeing a guy tortured by an hours-long thought loop about how if he doesn't pour bleach onto every surface of his house he'll release a zombie virus. Many of the people I've worked with also have other comorbid illnesses like ADHD or OCD; I am aware of how comorbidities work and am not claiming those are also connected just because I see them together.
A lot of what you said is just incorrect as a matter of fact, and the doctors I showed this to did not, in fact, laugh in my face. Still, some points warrant attention. Email me at the address given in the article; we can discuss this in more detail.
Its always acceptable to delve into the truth of the matter and I was pretty explicit about that.
I was not saying "you shouldnt be looking at this at all"
Im saying "youre wrong [for reasons] and because of optics its more important that you get it right than usual"
The backdrop of the culture war shouldnt stop our investigations and I was not suggesting it ought to - but it does mean we need to be more cautious with speculation than say, hypothesizing why there doesnt seem to have ever evolved poisonous eggs even though that would stop them from being eaten.
The backdrop of the culture war and the optics means we need to be on our extra-good rationalistic behavior, and as you say, do _proper_ research.
If the result is uncomfortable truths so be it, Im expecting that to be honest. My issue with this work is that its very far fetched and speculative
To be even more clear, I dont care strongly about political correctness and I have plenty of my own problematic beliefs about transness and overwhelmingly support free speech and the ability to research what you like. I know theres a lot of fingers-in-ears cancel-y mobs in trans spaces, ive been canceled by em. Just because I care about optics at all doesnt make me one. My position is not anything with bad optics is necessarily untrue or must be fought. If its true and the optics are bad so be it.
But if its UNTRUE and the optics are bad then its a no brainer to say so.
Just because good research isnt happening doesnt mean crazy speculation somehow now works. "Do something!" "Well, the right thing is impossible" "Then do the wrong thing!" "But that will make it worse" "Wow okay look at this chick concerned with optics and political correctness."
We can certainly be doing better than this. You'll have to excuse me for caring about our public presentation of transness - You see care was banned in my state due to an uninformed perception on the right that the whole thing is just a fetish, due to the speculations and anecdata of one Ray Blanchard.
To me as a layman, this seems to be good and potentially very relevant work, and I would recommend looking for a collaboration with an open-minded expert to turn this into a scientific publication and maybe organize more systematic studies.
Two questions: I don't doubt that you found trans people whose symptoms match those of BIID. But "trans" seems to be a very broad term these days. Do you think your explanation applies to all of the people who consider themselvea trans?
Also, you speculate that identity disorders happen when a child's phantasies fixate on an identity that doesn't match reality. Should we be much more careful what possible identities we expose our children to by way of TV, comics, video games etc? Then again, the possible fixation of "other gender" has always been available, handicapped people used to be much more visible, and presumably children in previous ages typically suffered much more trauma than today, so... why now? Why the increase in various forms identity problems?
> Do you think your explanation applies to all of the people who consider themselvea trans?
No. It's a general wisdom in trans circles that you don't need dysphoria to be trans. To be trans, you just need to identify with a gender different from the one you were assigned at birth, and that's it, you may have other reasons for it than dysphoria. And cis people can sometimes experience gender dysphoria too, such as cis men being dysphoric if they lose their genitals in an accident. I'm using the word "trans" there to refer to social circles, but in reality this is about gender dysphoria specifically.
> Should we be much more careful what possible identities we expose our children to by way of TV, comics, video games etc?
I have no idea what's the best course of action here is.
> Then again, the possible fixation of "other gender" has always been available, handicapped people used to be much more visible, and presumably children in previous ages typically suffered much more trauma than today, so... why now? Why the increase in various forms identity problems?
I have some vague hypotheses for why, that I plan for a future chapter in this investigation. One thing I strongly suspect is that the kind of trauma that causes children to dissociate is actually more common. But that may be a red herring. You'll have to wait for the next chapter.
> Why the increase in various forms identity problems?
As with all manner of other conditions, the world is kinder now than it used to be, and more of those people survive long enough to be noticed than in the past.
How do we know objectively - based on primary sources rather than theories of mind or historical analogy - whether or not Putin intends to conquer European nations other than Ukraine if he is not thwarted there?
Putin did not become president of Russia in 2014, and his foreign policy over his whole career can be viewed as a valid guide.
Which means he'll readily intervene in former USSR states and he's not above creating puppet states, but in the absence of a civil war or serious unrest approaching one, won't do anything to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland.
We could save money by not going after suspected murderers unless we are confident that they will do it again, but we shouldn't because it would greatly weaken the deterrent against murder. Similarly for mass murder of the sort Putin commits.
I mean, I think it is pretty clear that given the option to conquer whole of Europe completely without any costs, he would do that. But that is completely irrelevant. Hell, if I would be given an opportunity to became Supreme Emperor of Europe, I would be at least tempted.
You shouldn't base foreign policy on what you think are wet dreams of foreign actors, but on what you think are they likely to do under real-world conditions. And in the case of Putin, it seems clear to me that he is very willing to attack various countries when he thinks he has a reasonable chance to win and limited downside risk (note: this is very much NOT normal and acceptable behavior of head of any country).
Relevant question is how much downside risk is he willing to tolerate, and on that, we have something like a floor and a ceiling, but that range between them remains broad.
As opposed to anchoring it in what are those states likely to do with some reasonable probability?
That seems impractical, since that "what is someone (physically) capable of" is far far larger category than "what is someone likely to do", or perhaps I am misunderstanding your point
No, I AM saying something non-obvious/counterintuitive (or "patently retarded," if you disagree): treat other states as amoral psychopaths with neither friends nor values, only interests, AND as if they were insane and willing to act completely counter to their interests, since you don't really know what their interests are/will be.
States are mostly not coherent entities, with internal factions in opposition vying for control. How would you treat PEOPLE if they had this feature? Relevant Yes, Minister clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM
Yes, this is much harder than assuming everyone acts only in "normal and acceptable" ways.
That makes sense for Russia, it doesn't necessarily make sense in all contexts.
For instance, both Sweden and Russia are capable of invading Finland, but it makes sense for Finland to devote more resources to defending against the more likely threat from the east than the unlikely threat from the west.
I don't think that states are _quite_ that unpredictable.
That Russia might try to invade one or more Baltic states looks plausible.
That Switzerland might invade Lichtenstein (and retain the territory - I gather they've inadvertently trespassed with apologies a couple of times...) looks much less plausible.
>note: this is very much NOT normal and acceptable behavior of head of any country
It was very much normal and acceptable until about the pre-modern time. The Ukraine war might well determine whether or not that period between WW1 and today was an abnormal, relatively short-lived exception.
We don't know. He may or may not have a serious plan to take over more countries after Ukraine. However, we can say for sure that the Ukraine war has been such a military, economic, and psychological strain on Russia that the country will need a break of at least several years after the end of the war to regain an appetite to invade anyone else.
I think the Western European heads of state and top officials who keep gloomily announcing that they "just know" that Putin plans on invading the Baltics, Poland or somewhere else right after the Ukraine war ends are making it up to maintain public support for continued funding of Ukraine. If voters believe Russia will attack their country right after the Ukraine war ends, then voters will agree to keep sending money to Ukraine to prolong the war.
Furthermore, Putin didn't really want to invade Ukraine and even now it's unlikely his objective is to occupy the whole country--he probably just wants the oblasts in the far eastern part of the country.
>Furthermore, Putin didn't really want to invade Ukraine and even now it's unlikely his objective is to occupy the whole country
Yes, that's why his first offensive was aimed directly at Kiev. Because capturing the capital and toppling the government is exactly the strategy you'd choose if you only wanted to capture a limited area.
Putin much preferred having Ukraine as a loyal satellite country that paid to defend and govern itself. Only after that arrangement was jeopardized did Putin invade.
The 2022 invasion, including the decision to try seizing Kiev, was shaped by badly flawed intelligence about how hard the Ukrainians would fight. The Russians assumed they could quickly take over Ukraine, (re)install a puppet government, and then leave behind only a small military force. If Putin had known how bad it would be, he would have focused on just taking over the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine.
To answer any question of this kind you need to know three things. (1) What the government has said (2) what the country is capable of doing (3) what would be a sensible course of action anyway. And it's unwise to focus on individuals too much.
On (1) the Russian position has not changed that much since the 1990s. They do not want western troops on their borders and particularly not with a capacity to launch nuclear weapons against them at short notice. In the case of the present operation, the Russians have made clear from the start (I think Lavrov was the last to reiterate it at the bilateral with Rubio) that their objectives are political not territorial. They want a Ukraine which is neutral and mostly disarmed, and with a government which knows that its best interests lie in good relations with Moscow. This is what the aborted agreement of March 2022 would have provided. Territorially, the Russians are obviously obliged politically to clear the territories of the two Republics which revolted against Kiev in 2014, and are now legally part of Russia. It's also being suggested that they will have to take Odessa. Beyond that, nobody really knows, but of course it depends to a large degree on what the West does, and whether it accepts the situation gracefully.,
On (2) the Russians do not have the capability to occupy Ukraine, except symbolically in a few places. It would be a logistic nightmare and a constant source of political trouble and financial cost, for no obvious reward. It would also play poorly with the Chinese and other BRICS members and the Global South generally. This is why their objectives are political.
On (3) as I say it's hard to see any benefit from going further than they need to. I suspect that even a relationship with Kiev similar to that of the pre-2014 period would be enough. Of course there are individuals in Russia who are still stuck in the Soviet mentality that true security only comes from physical occupation of a huge cordon sanitaire around the country, but even if such a policy became more popular, it isn't actually feasible. Again, given the unbalanced statements of some more extreme western politicians, it's possible that a crisis would be created in the Baltic States, but I really doubt this. Europe is coming to the sickening realisation that it's managed to violently anger a neighbouring military superpower, that the US can't affect the situation very much, and that the reality of western political military and economic weakness will just have to be lived with. Again, what the Russians have been seeking (and any future Russian government is likely to want also) is a new political relationship with the West, not control of territory.
I don't understand the claim that Putin invaded Ukraine because he felt militarily threatened by Ukraine wanting to westernise. Is the idea that he was afraid that America would invade Russia through the border with Ukraine? That would imply that he has an improbably poor ability to model reality.
The far more likely explanation is that, like many leaders through history, he just wanted to expand his territory through conquest.
It’s a country bordering on Russia which has the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.
The realist model of world politics says Russia wants to keep it friendly or at worst as a buffer state, regardless of how friendly or unthreatening the governments of Europe and the USA appear to be.
What exactly is the worry here? That America would destroy the black sea fleet from Ukraine, something they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do with their massive arsenal of intercontinental nukes?
As a warlord, you don’t really like to have an enemy outpost that close to your strategic naval base. If you look at a map of the Ukraine War battle lines, it’s clear that Russia has built a “wall” of territory keeping the Ukrainian military from getting too close to Crimea.
Obviously anyone can blow up anything with enough nukes but there are reasons not to do that.
I don't think I've heard anyone suggest that: I certainly wouldn't. But for the last thirty years the Russians have felt threatened by the eastward march of NATO and said as much repeatedly. They do not want NATO aircraft and missiles capable of striking Moscow based on Ukrainian territory, and have said so. They compare the situation to the acceptability to the US of Russian troops and nuclear weapons based in Canada. So far as I can judge, this position has been held by the Russian establishment for a generation now: many commentators in Russia blame Putin for not acting earlier, and believe he allowed himself to be duped by the West.
But it doesn't matter what I think. It's simply necessary to pay the smallest attention to what the Russians have actually said, and entertain the possibility that they might actually mean it. None of this is exactly hidden.
How do they feel about NATO aircraft and missiles capable of striking Moscow and even more trivially St. Petersburg, being based in Finland? Because that was a very predictable consequence of their invasion of Ukraine. And from their response, it really doesn't seem that they care,
> It's simply necessary to pay the smallest attention to what the Russians have actually said, and entertain the possibility that they might actually mean it.
The same logic would lead us to believe that they would never invade Ukraine. So why should we use the same logic to determine whether they are planning to also invade someone else?
Unfortunately, the idea you dismiss is the correct one. There has been a long-standing Russian/Soviet complaint that NATO was an anti-Russia pact. The paranoia about this kind of thing is not new, Stalin in the inter-war period feared that the Western nations were going to invade the USSR (which is funnier because he didn't believe reports that Germany *had* invaded in WW2).
Putin appears to believe in Color Revolution Theory as well, which is nonsense created to perpetuate the idea that George Soros and USAID/CIA fund revolutions in other countries (edit: specifically in post-Soviet countries). He also believes that there is an elite in the West which is in total control, elections meaning nothing.
He seems to genuinely think that democracy is a sham, so giving into democratic protests makes no sense since it's all a ruse. This is incredibly convenient, of course, because the 2010s in terms of geopolitics is the decade of social unrest and democratic protest (Arab Spring, Ukraine, etc.) To be able to dismiss the demands for democracy mean that you don't need to consider the moral implications of being a tyrant.
> Putin appears to believe in Color Revolution Theory as well, which is nonsense created to perpetuate the idea that George Soros and USAID/CIA fund revolutions in other countries
I mean, the idea that the CIA funds revolutions in other countries is not total nonsense.
Color Revolution Theory is not just about revolutions in general. If I misled you, I apologize. The argument is that Soros/CIA/USAID backed revolutions in *former Soviet countries*. That is a far more specific claim for which evidence is lacking.
If your point is that we can't rule it out, then I will simply point out that people also like having power via representative government and taking steps to improve their own lot. Between the CIA and people everywhere wanting to do better, the latter has far more explanatory power in why we saw protests and revolutions throughout the 2010s.
The Russian (earlier) interference to bolster separatist regions resembling DPR/LPR in Georgia and Moldova would be a point towards a greater geopolitical ambition than in Ukraine, at least. Likewise for the Russia/Belarus Union State which was originally openly conceived as something aiming at a confederation.
Even if we were to presume that Putin does not have aims beyond these regions and Ukraine, there are plenty of forces in Russia openly declaring their intention to restore Soviet Union/Czarist Russia or otherwise have extensive expansionist aims, and there´s a high chance that once Putin passes away his follower would implicitly or explicitly represent such a force.
It's not like he has published maps of his goals. But Putin has expressed in many speeches the desire to restore the historic sphere of influence of Russia. He has expressed hatred for Gorbachev and the later Czars for having relinquished Russian authority over those areas.
I don't know how you can draw the line on the spectrum between "it would be nice to have control of these areas in my ideal world" and "I am actively pushing to take control of this area". Putin's foreign policy regime is omnichanel, knocking on every door, pushing every argument, and embracing any assets that come along. It's a ratchet-like apparatus that grows and grows. If it suddenly gets him the government of a formerly hostile power as an ally, all the better.
I am not sure what kind of sources you are looking for. It's not like Putin would disclose that information. If you think back to Ukraine, Russia still denied any intention to invade Ukraine just hours before that. (And in fact, days after that.) The absence of official declarations should not be considered evidence in either direction, this would be the policy regardless of whether there are plans for invasion. And it seems very unlikely that Putin even knows this for himself yet. Most likely he would test out reactions to grey-zone actions like deniable violations of borders etc.
Putin is certainly taking actions to leave the option for such a strike open. For example, he has declared that the measures of the baltic states against Russian citizens a threat to the safety of Russia. It's exactly the same justification that he used for invading Ukraine. But again, he only leave the option of invasion open regardless of his intentions, so this should not be evidence in either direction, and most likely Putin doesn't know himself yet.
The option of invading Baltic states is openly discussed in Russian media. Medvedev has called them "our provinces". Mordwitschew (high-ranked Russian general) has said in a documentary that the war will expand over all of Eastern Europe. Balitsky (Putin's head of Ukrainian region Saporischschja) has said in an interview with Ria Novosti that Russia should march into the Baltic states. And so on. But all this only leaves the option open, and Russia will certainly not officially announce an invasion.
I think this is exactly the question that we should be focusing on. The way I see it, there are two possible realities:
1. Russia wants to conquer the world.
2. Russia doesn't want to conquer the world.
In reality (1), it is critically important that the rest of the planet stands united against him, even if it costs us dearly, because the threat of harm to any would-be world dictator needs to be a very credible threat.
In reality (2), letting him take Ukraine may be the lest bad option on the table. It sucks that he may get away with an invasion of a neighbor, but if that is the end of all Russia invasions and we can move forward with world peace then it seems like a small price to pay.
Phrasing it so that the only proposed conquests are "the world" and "not the world", is really quite foolish and misleading. Far more plausible goals are,
3. Russia wants to conquer or otherwise reacquire the territories of the former Soviet Union.
4. Russia wants to conquer or otherwise exercise hegemonic dominion over the former Warsaw Pact
5. Russia wants to reestablish the historic Russian Empire.
The one that *isn't* plausible, is the one where Russia wants to conquer just Ukraine and no other country, because there is no plausible characteristic of Ukraine that would put it on the to-be-conquered list that isn't shared by several other nations.
It is possible that Russia will not launch any further wars of conquest, but if so it won't be because they don't *want* to, but because they don't think they can get away with it. What happens in Ukraine, will almost certainly color their thinking as to what else they might be able to get away with in the future. Presumably after a few years' respite to reconstitute their Army, but they'll be doing that in any event.
>The one that *isn't* plausible, is the one where Russia wants to conquer just Ukraine and no other country, because there is no plausible characteristic of Ukraine that would put it on the to-be-conquered list that isn't shared by several other nations.
The first Russian state was centred on Kiev, so Russian nationalists regard the area as their ancestral homeland and get especially twitchy about the prospect of it being in a rival nation's sphere of influence. I don't pretend to know Vladimir Putin's long-term goals, but it's not at all implausible that he'd regard Ukraine as a special case.
Putin has been playing up the historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people, yes, but he seems to be avoiding anything that might remind Russians that Kyiv was first and Moscow was a Kyivan colony.
And, courtesy of Stalin, there are ethnic Russians all over the former Soviet Union, so "look, it's got Russians in it therefore we have to make it part of Russia", isn't going to point uniquely at Ukraine.
This is a recurring theme of replies to my comment, and I think it would have been better if I phrased it as:
1. Russia is engaging in a war of conquest.
2. Russia is engaging in an escalation in a historic stream of escalations.
The root question is what exactly is Russia's *real* goal, and knowing that is hard but ones belief in that seem to be strongly correlated with how they view the situation in Ukraine.
It is rare for nations to have goals that are satisfied by exactly one war of conquest; far more common are "none" and "many". When you do find a just-one-war goal, it's usually the reconquest or reunification of a territory that was lost in some previous rearrangement that is perceived as unfair, e.g. the Union's response to Confederate secession in 1861. But in the Russian case, that points to I think fourteen different now-sovereign nations.
Three of which are tiny and easily conquerable but also part of NATO.
> It sucks that he may get away with an invasion of a neighbor, but if that is the end of all Russia invasions and we can move forward with world peace then it seems like a small price to pay.
You're begging the question that the former leads to the latter. In a world where "okay Ukraine, but no more" happens, peripheral states will be more likely to believe that the vaguely-defined "rules based international order" will not keep them safe from even blatant invasion.
In such a world, these states will have every incentive to either cleave to an explicit defensive alliance with a more distant (and more disinterested, if not necessarily more friendly) superpower and/or to develop their own independent military capability, up to and including a nuclear arms program.
We've started to see both consequences from this war. Russia's invasion of Ukraine to notionally block NATO expansion led directly to the accession of Finland and Sweden. In the meantime, Europe generally and Poland specifically are rebuilding their militaries, with Poland discussing basing French nuclear weapons for its protection
In my opinion, durable world peace is more likely when Russias _don't_ get away with invading Ukraines. A rational actor will not invade another if they believe that the losses will outweigh the gains, and there's no better way to ensure that outcome than if the gains – the conquering and annexation here – never happen. In this view, the 2022 invasion happened in large part because of the weak response to the 2014 invasions of Crimea and the Donbas region; all it took was a miscalculation about the odds of prompt success to make the current war appear rational.
Why do you want such a credible threat only for would-be world dictators, and not for all breakers of world peace? It would seem to me that if world peace is the aim, we should want rulers to consider starting any war to be a very risky proposition.
I think this is the first time I see anyone even mention the scenario of Russian world conquest, so I find it rather odd to see that as one half of a dichotomy.
Most responses to my comment seem to be centered around (1) being a straw man (rather than steel man), but I have actually met people who believe (1) is the case. Zelenskyy even implied it in the televised dumpster fire of a meeting with Trump when he suggested that if the US doesn't help Ukraine defend against Russia eventually the US will have to defend itself against Russia itself.
That being said, I tend to agree that something in the middle is more likely, and I agree with you that we should strongly discourage any kind of land grabbing. However, many believe that Russia is not engaging in a land grab, but rather a "first strike" in response to perceived US/NATO advance and attempts to surround Russia. A first strike in response to a credible threat is far more reasonable cause for war that land grabbing.
The idea that NATO was gearing up to invade Russia in the foreseeable future and urgently needed the collaboration of Ukraine to pull this off is only "credible" to someone who has bought into paranoid Russian-imperialist propaganda.
1. The major Western European powers had exactly zero motive to start a war with Russia, had lots of other problems on their plates, and were not in a mood to spend hundreds of billions of Euros on their military. (Now they are, thanks to Russia.)
2. The US had exactly zero motive to start a war with Russia, had a bigger problem on their plate (namely, China), and was not enthusiastic about throwing military weight into Europe rather than other places.
3. Russia still has its nukes. As long as you can threaten to fry anyone whose tanks attempt to roll into Russia, why worry?
Why then even move NATO east. The Russians really radicalised after the 2014 color revolution, which was clearly a coup to push a pro western president to power. The reason that NATO is hostile to Russia is because it was set up to be hostile to Russia. If you create an organisation to kill cats then it will continue to kill cats even if cats are not a threat.
Did you mean the Maidan Revolution, instead of the the Color Revolution? The latter happened in 2004, no 2014. It is the former that led to Russia invading Ukraine. (And of course wasn't in any way a "coup".)
In any case, NATO membership was off the table in 2014. It had been rejected in 2008, and maybe 20% of Ukrainians were in favor of it. Yanukovich was obviously against, but even after he was ousted the Parliament was explicit that NATO wasn't even being considered.
And of course, a country should be able to voluntarily join NATO without being invaded by Russia. I don't know why that has to be stated.
All in all, implying that NATO's expansion was the cause of the war, or that Euromaidan was a "coup", is not an honest misunderstanding, it is active pro-Russian propaganda.
"Why then even move NATO east" - because Eastern European countries wanted to join, for good reason, as the fate of Chechnya, Georgia and finally Ukraine showed. (Did you feel any tingling of cognitive dissonance when you typed "cats are not a threat"?)
Why would NATO accept them? Because having a war on your doorstep is always bad (see Ukraine), and a good defensive alliance is a good way of preventing that war from happening.
You jump from "Russia doesn't want to conquer the world" straight to "Russia only wants to conquer Ukraine". These propositions are not equivalent, nor does the former imply the latter.
Yes, it is fair to say that my description above is a simplification. Perhaps Russia wants to conquer Ukraine and Poland but stop there. Or maybe Ukraine, Poland, and Germany but that is it. None the less, the impression I have gotten in discussions from people on both sides is that people usually hold one of the two views I outlined above. Either they believe that Russia is an expansionist country that wants to take whatever they can get, or they believe that Russia is defending itself against military encirclement by US/NATO and doesn't actually want to take over much of anything.
I feel like if Putin currently just wants all the former members of the USSR, if he actually manages to get those without heavy losses, he'd probably decide that he may as well take more. Russia invaded Ukraine without even having successfully invaded similar countries. Once they know they can get away with that, that's all the more reason to keep invading.
I'm fairly attached to Poland remaining part of the EU, continuing its growth curve, and continuing to become a much better place to be. I expect the Poles are even more attached.
I'm a Brit, so I think the EU/ UK needs to absolutely step up here. But this is also the only live theatre of war atm, and I think the US should be involved for both our sakes, and theirs -- they will lose a war based on legacy manufacturing to China, so need to develop weapons that can outcompete a much larger industrial base.
It's time for the US to think more asymmetrically, and that means working with Ukrainians.
Don't you word this too strongly? Putin may not want to conquer the world - nobody's quite that crazy these days, and who wants some remote parts of Africa, anyway. I would go as far as to say that even most of Europe probably isn't in any great danger: even if Russia could conquer, say, Germany and France, it's very hard to imagine it controlling those territories for very long simple from the lack of soldiers (and, I imagine, willing collaborators). But ex-USSR countries, especially Baltics, are another matter. Putin, of course, doesn't want them for their population (hostile) or resources (non-existent) or industry (more so than resources), but for he might want them for free access to Kaliningrad region, which is an awkward exclave right now. I'm not saying it will happen - Baltics ARE protected by NATO, and Putin is a man of the ear when everyone was afraid of nuclear war, but setting this up as "whole world, or nothing at all" is a false dichotomy.
See my comment here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/99349778 for a bit more depth, but the TL;DR is that most people I talk to hold one of the two beliefs I listed. I agree with you that (1) does seem unlikely, and a more likely (1) is what you describe.
You are talking to very simple-minded people, then. Or at least to people who hold simplistic views on this particular subject. But that's often a reasonable thing to do, and one reasonable simplification is to round "wants to conquer many other countries" to "wants to conquer the world".
A. All people are subjugated by their governments. Ukrainians having a new master probably won't change much for the day-to-day life of most Ukrainians. Ukraine government wasn't exactly a pinnacle of honor, honesty, efficiency, and freedom (nor is Russia), so its not like swapping out Singaporean rule for North Korean rule.
B. That is exactly the question. Would sacrificing Ukraine end the violence and not result in more violence to follow? We do not know the answer to this, and I think this is the core disagreement between those who support and those who oppose US involvement in the Ukrainian war.
Russia has made it pretty clear that if they conquer Ukraine, there will be no more such thing as a "Ukrainian". That doesn't mean that they will kill every single man, woman, and child presently in Ukraine, but the process of forcible de-Ukrainianization will not be a simple matter of being issued a new passport. It will be a very substantial change in their day-to-day life, and for probably a million or more of them, it will be the last day in their life.
"Everybody is subjugated by their government, therefore resisting invasions is just needless bloodshed" is, well, I don't have any polite words for that, but it would start with "hopelessly ignorant".
I agree on A (Putin wouldn't even add the whole of Ukraine to Russia, so "subjugation" would be somewhat distant), but disagree on B. Russia's win will show the rest of the world that the will of USA and the rest of the West can be successfully resisted, if only by violence. When people talk about Russia eroding world order, this is what they really mean. USA and its allies almost acquired a monopoly on violence (aside from some African conflicts nobody cares about), and Russia is breaking it up. So while "the town" used to have one "sheriff" who set all the rules, now every country might have some choice on which set of rules to take, especially in case of close Russian-Chinese alliance (which Trump, I think, is trying to prevent at all costs).
> I agree on A (Putin wouldn't even add the whole of Ukraine to Russia, so "subjugation" would be somewhat distant),
Since the latest public Russian nod to peace involves accepting its stated annexation of Ukrainian territory – seemingly including ground not yet de facto controlled by Russia – in addition to permanent disarmament and 'neutrality' for Ukraine, it seems very likely that any pause on subjugation would be temporary. Eight to ten years – the distance between the annexation of Crimea and today – is not "somewhat distant" in my mind.
> Russia's win will show the rest of the world that the will of USA and the rest of the West can be successfully resisted, if only by violence.
I submit that this is a bad thing. The US has been far from perfect, but the late 20th century and early 21st century saw historically low levels of international armed conflict and deaths from interstate violence.
A multipolar world not restrained by a strong taboo on aggressive war is an unstable one. A world where Russias and Chinas think they can resist the US 'by violence' is a world where Ukraines and Polands and Koreas and Taiwans think they must resist their own neighbour hegemons-in-waiting 'by violence'.
Besides that I feel that your moral stance is contradictory here. If being forced under Russian influence against its will is an acceptable outcome for Ukraine, why is it more unacceptable for nations to be 'forced' into the American sphere of influence?
> it seems very likely that any pause on subjugation would be temporary
I'm not sure Russia even wants to try to physically control hostile Western Ukraine. Eastern regions were mostly friendly toward Russia, but simply policing Western parts of the country would require a lot of forces. Conceivably, it would be even harder than Chechnya, where historical hostilities between tribes made coordinated resistance harder, and foreign help was further away. A more likely approach is to try to install and support some kind of pro-Russian government, but this is far better than war.
> I submit that this is a bad thing. The US has been far from perfect, but the late 20th century and early 21st century saw historically low levels of international armed conflict and deaths from interstate violence.
Oh, I'm not saying it's entirely good. There are both good and bad things about it. There certainly will be more violence, which is very bad. But there will be a bit more freedom, too, and opportunities. Even America has a chance to benefit from this, as it finally might find a worthy rival again (in China, Russia, or EU, or some combination thereof). Ever since collapse of USSR, USA has been too complacent and bored to the point of self-harm.
> Besides that I feel that your moral stance is contradictory here. If being forced under Russian influence against its will is an acceptable outcome for Ukraine, why is it more unacceptable for nations to be 'forced' into the American sphere of influence?
I'm not sure I ever expressed this stance. Personally, I would prefer it to be unacceptable for any country to be forced into another's sphere of influence, but the world so far doesn't work this way, and I'm certainly against allowing only one country, or alliance of countries to force others into their sphere of influence, as I'm not a citizen of one of the "team world police" countries.
So my moral stance is rather "if America can do it, and does it, so should Russia and China be allowed to try". I mean, if America was a shining beacon of restrained use of power that would be preferable, but after the many military adventures USA had over the last 30 years, I'm not counting on it.
At all cost seems indeed an apt description, if you interpret how Trump is degrading USA relation with it's historic allies at warp speed as a tactic to confuse China by offering it soooo many new possible partners beside Russia.
To me it looks more like extremely poor analysis of cost/benefit of those historical alliances, and a very distorted assessment of US strengths and weaknesses w.r.t. other global actors. I.E. poor international affair knowledge and a lot of drinking too much of his own medecine...
I would argue that in this case it's "drinking establishment medicine", because any kind of alliance, or even closer partnership with China was unimaginable to any US ally for a very long time. After all, isn't China that horrible, barbaric place with no freedom that will collapse from economic problems any time soon? What about Uyghurs and Tibetians, how could any western country possibly seek to better relations with a country that oppresses them?
Actually, I'm not sure Trump's team is too wrong here. Does EU really have a choice of partners? And if not, well, they can bluster and make great displays of their independence from America, but in the end will accept whatever policy America chooses. And I'm pretty sure that "partnering" with China would include giving up Ukraine (to a degree), too, which so far seems unacceptable.
As for non-EU allies, I don't really know what goes on in Middle East or Asia. India keeps playing its own game, and Turkey, as well...
Interestingly, I think China is somewhat worried about Trump's tactics. One of their officials recently made a statement that Russia and USA should not decide the fate of Ukraine between themselves, but should involve others in the process. I think this was a clear warning to Russia not to chum up to America too much, which means they consider it at least a distant possibility, and don't like it one bit.
I do not think that there is a way to know that, objectively. After all, even primary sources can be strategic lies.
Also, intents change, and often we lie even to ourselves about what we intend to do.
Given the attacks on Ukraine, it seems that wars of conquest are very much on the table for Putin. Saying "we can not possibly know if he will be satisfied with taking Ukraine" is technically correct, but not strategically helpful. Not having full information is part of the game. If you are standing in a crowd and someone shoots your neighbor, you do not know that the shooter intends to harm you. Perhaps he just had some beef with your neighbor and had excellent aim so you were never in danger. You have only historical analogy -- the existence of previous mass shootings -- arguing that you might be in danger. Still, the correct response would be to take cover and try to disable the shooter. People who remain standing until it is conclusively proven to them that they are intended targets often end up in the morgue.
There is a school of thought that Putin attacking Ukraine is in response to actions done by US/NATO, not because he just wanted more land/cities and an even bigger border. **IF** that is true, then what is happening isn't a war of conquest, but rather an escalation of an ongoing series of escalations.
Figuring out whether that is closer to the truth than the claim that he wants more land/cities to rule is incredibly hard, but also incredibly important I think.
I agree that in the heat of the moment assuming the worst is reasonable, but we have had many years to talk/think things through and I think we would do well to try to dig into the root causes more rigorously if possible.
> Figuring out whether that is closer to the truth than the claim that he wants more land/cities to rule is incredibly hard, but also incredibly important I think.
Were it the case that Russia cared only for geopolitical interests, it would not have claimed outright annexation of Kherson, Donbas, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia
oblasts.
Doing so makes redrawing the border an essential item for any peace deal, which in turn makes a security-focused agreement much more difficult. Ukraine now has all the credibility in the world when it says it needs a very strong army and/or ironclad Western security guarantees, sine the lack of either has led directly to its loss of land!
The European community is predisposed to think well of its neighbours, and by now Russia knows that its territorial ambitions harden Europe's stance towards rather than away from intervention in Ukraine.
There's also a "school of thought" that persistently believes that the Earth is flat, and no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present, they'll keep believing.
The question whether Putin is just defending his house and home against the ever-increasing hordes of NATO countries, and whether he was basically forced to invade Ukraine first, lest Ukraine conquers Russia (aaaany day now, right?), has been debated to death, and people who still believe that yes, Russia is the real victim here, won't be swayed by any quality or quantity of arguments.
A 2017 survey of US international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of International Relations in the past 20 years."
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A "school of thought" that includes an academic of such caliber cannot be dismissed as equal to flat earthism. You will not find an equivalent scientist who believes that the earth is flat.
Therefore I think that the theory deserves to be argued against instead of being casually dismissed as the equivalent of flat earthism, or as having been already "debated to death" (without even providing a link to such a debate).
Also, reasonable people who make that argument don't necessarily claim that "Russia is the real victim". A person can believe that Ukrainians are the victims of evil Russian aggression, and at the same time believe that such evil aggression is mainly motivated by fear of NATO expansion, and can be placated by assuring Putin that NATO will not expand. The two beliefs are not mutually exclusive, at all.
I myself have not made up my mind about this whole topic, and I'm open-minded. But it's irritating is when critics of that "school of thought" accuse its believers of being Putin apologists and/or flat earthers.
NATO didn't "move eastwards", countries east of NATO applied to join. This may sound like hair splitting at first, but it reveals a fundamental difference between NATO and the Soviet Union respectively the Warsaw Pact: Countries join NATO of their own volition to protect themselves against Russian aggression, while Warsaw Pact countries were invaded by the Soviet Union and were effectively forced to join.
As for NATO's reason for existing past the fall of the Soviet Union: Apparently the leaders of member states were able to consider time horizons longer than 6 months before ending alliances and partnerships that had been existing for decades at that point. In retrospect, you can hardly argue that they were wrong. It didn't take long for Russia to resume its imperialistic tendencies.
We would have a strong indication on the basis of (1) things he has said (2) things he has done (3) things he has written (4) things other people who have influence with him have said/done/written (5) all of the above in the negative, if such a fact were relevant.
That is how you build a theory of someone's mind. None of what you suggest is more authoritative than Putin's inner beliefs that only he has access to.
If he wanted to invade other European nations, it would be in his best interest to not let it show beforehand. He has an incentive to (1) Not say it out loud, (3) Not write his intentions pubicly (4) Control that people around him don't say those things. If he did, Europe would rally against him.
But he still needs to rally his own people behind him. Before the 2022 attack, Russian television was all the time talking about how Ukraine is not a proper country, and so on.
I don't think that what he says is necessarily a good indication of what he (or other current leaders) has in his mind. For example he says he conducts a special operation in Ukraine, not a war. Or that his objective is to denazify Ukraine and compare this war is similar to the Great Patriotic War (WW2 against Nazi Germany).
I would honestly rather trust sensible historical analogies than whatever he says in this context.
IIRC, he did say that he would attack Ukraine if it tried to join NATO. US advisors even strongly warned the US that if Ukraine looked like it was going to join NATO then Russia would attack. So we do have at least a little evidence that he telegraphs his intentions in advance.
Yeah, Russia has been saying since the '90s that Ukraine joining NATO would be a massive red line, so it's not really surprising that Putin should have invaded Ukraine when it started looking like the country might at some point in the future join NATO. The idea that the Russian invasion is some kind of bizarre, unpredictable thing is, it seems to me, mostly propaganda.
That's a plausible reason for the 2014 invasion; not so much for 2022. One of the consequences of the 2014 invasion was a "frozen conflict", and one of the rules of NATO is that no new member may be admitted while it has an outstanding territorial dispute that NATO might be called upon to settle. So long as "separatists" control the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and Crimea is formally annexed by the Russian Federation but still claimed by Ukraine, there's no chance of Ukraine joining NATO.
Also, I'm pretty sure there's no chance of Ukraine joining NATO while Viktor Orban is in power in Hungary or Erdogan in Turkey. It was hard enough getting Finland and Sweden past those vetoes.
Since NATO is crumbling, their "paranoia" is more justified than ever. Should Ukraine fall and Russia survive economically, Russia might need another 5-10 years to be ready for the next large war. If Poland (who would then share an even longer border with Russian puppets) wants to be ready then, they need to start now.
Link to the article? I don’t know your policy preferences so can’t tell if you should be optimistic. I am optimistic because Trump is losing Wall Street and once his inflationary policies produce inflation I think his support will crater. And some of the democrats are openly going against progressivism, see Newsome interview with Charlie Kirk.
(1) America will dissolve in the acid vat of Entropy like every complex structure that ever existed in the universe. Just like the Roman Empire and the mummified kings of Egypt, the Sun and the Moon, you and me. Everything complex and orderly existed against the will of this universe, withstood its terrible rage for a while, and then arrived at its dissolution and decay. Death is the inevitable conclusion of the premise of Birth. You should think of this as a win, every pocket of order and negative entropy in the world is a steal that we temporarily swindled away from Physics and played with for an hour, a thief doesn't shed tears over the stolen goods being returned again. What Death takes, Death has always owned.
(2) Evil is immensely dumb. I cannot come to terms yet with how utterly, pathetically, surprisingly, and surreally dumb and ineffective evil can be. If evil had just 10% more efficiency or intelligence or foresight the damage it could do with resources it has would have been unimaginable, but it just so happens that evil is dumb and disorganized and confused and thinks that "Tariffs" is a mean cuss word. This is cause for optimism, it's at least cause for relief that things are not worse despite that very easily could have been.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GtZg-LY-5Uo
a reading of molloch
I knew this once, half my lifetime ago.
Country A and country B are engaged in trade. Country A wants more of Country B's stuff.
Country A has this imaginary thing called "dollars" that they made out of thought-stuff. Country A says "hey, country B, we will take your real avocados and real lumber, and give you this imaginary stuff called dollars." Country B for some reason agrees.
Now country A has more real stuff and just had to give up imaginary stuff to get it. Country B can only use that imaginary stuff if they later buy some stuff from country A at some point in the future (or trade it to people who will use it that way).
This makes trade deficits look not only not bad, but incredibly awesome. Getting the other country to accept your Chuck E Cheese tokens in exchange for actual goods seems like all upside, so what's the catch? I get telling the voters that dollars are fictitious can be a hard sell.
Eaten bread is soon forgotten. By the eater, as well as the donator.
Country A people live in houses they can't afford, whereas Country B people have jobs.
Have you read Broken Money by Lyn Alden.
I enjoyed it as a historical journey of how and why "money" (medium of exchange) works, from sea shells up to the present day.
As she is a big Bitcoin proponent, its sort of obvious where the book is heading to, but on the way it goes through what actually happens at the US Bank / US Fed level.
Messing around with money (inflating its value) is quite a recurring theme in history.
The catch is, they *will* be coming back with those dollars to buy real stuff, that you'll have to make at all the usual cost in toil and treasure but won't be able to enjoy because you have to give it to someone else who is only giving you imaginary dollars in return.
The fact that they aren't coming over *today* with all those dollars, just means they're investing them. In T-bills if nothing better, but probably something better, so when they *do* come back to you with all those dollars, they'll be coming with a lot more of them than you may have expected.
And if you say "ha ha, chumps, we've decided to devalue our dollars and/or T-bills so you're stuck with useless paper", you'll find that even your purely domestic ability to coordinate a productive economy is based on the certainty that dollars and T-bills will always be valuable, and the whole thing will collapse if you try that.
Power is more complex then mere accounting of flow of resources. If you house and feed someone but dont allow them to do it for themselves, thats a prisoner.
America as super power needs to pick a good balance of how much free labor from immigrants, money laundering in wars, cultural exporting with schools that people disappear after finishing. In the extreme cases the parasites just kill the host. If you import 10000 poeple to an island that housed 100, the orginal culture is gone; if you make mercencies only care about money and the war machine misses a payment they may march on your capital and make a emperor who then finds ways to fund them.
People should maintain a skill and then institutions should give status for having a skill. *looks around*, I dont see this happening, the balance is off.
I've asked the same question. One answer I got was that some trade isn't included in the trade-deficit calculation, so actually the US trade deficit does not just consist of trading worthless USD for valuable goods and services, but also of trading valuable US assets for valuable goods and services. It still seems non-alarming to me: if people in the US are good at producing companies and people in China are good at producing iPhones, trading US companies for Chinese iPhones seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
The other argument I've seen, that it's non-sustainable, doesn't make much sense to me. That seems like declining a high-paying job because you're afraid you'll have to take a pay cut and go back to your normal salary later – I say enjoy it while you can!
> It still seems non-alarming to me: if people in the US are good at producing companies and people in China are good at producing iPhones, trading US companies for Chinese iPhones seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
This seems like saying that no matter how you spend your money, the result is okay (as long as you keep buying something the other guy is better at producing). But on the individual level, I think we could agree that putting your money in index funds is generally better than spending it on expensive toys. Or rather than the person who keeps putting lots of money in the index funds can a few decades later also buy more expensive toys than the person who only spends their money on toys.
If this is true for individuals, I imagine this could similarly be true for countries, if for some reason people from one country are more likely to buy toys from the other country, but people from the other country are more likely to buy company shares.
Why would two countries behave so differently? I guess one answer is cultural differences, and maybe another answer is democracy vs dictatorship, where the latter has more power to nudge their citizens how to spend the money (or can simply take half of the foreign money away from them).
Asian Americans also save considerably more than other Americans according to https://news.prudential.com/latest-news/feature-stories/feature-stories-details/2018/Exploring-financial-wellness-within-diverse-populations-12-11-2018/default.aspx, so it seems to be a racial or cultural difference. But I think that if people are worried about the savings rate, they should be looking at the savings rate rather than at the trade balance.
I am not an expert on economics, but as I see it, it is a complicated game, where on one hand cooperation can help us bake a greater pie together, on the other hand competition decides which part of that pie will belong to whom. So you kinda want other people to do the right thing, but also kinda not to do it. If we all spend our money prudently, we can get rich; but if only a small group of us spends their money prudently, and everyone else will spend it like crazy, the small group can get *super* rich.
So (as an American) you actually *don't* want *all* Americans to save a lot. It is much better for you (as an individual), if the others spend a lot, make the wheels of economy run faster, and your savings/investments get a greater interest. The money flows from them to you, which is good.
But when another country saves more, the money flows from your country to their country, which is bad, because ultimately you still live surrounded by other Americans, and if they become too poor, then you will be surrounded by crime and all kinds of dysfunction. Sure, having lots of money can isolate you from everyday problems of the muggles, but... it would still be nicer to be able to walk around freely, to be surrounded by more happiness, art, etc.
So there is this tension where you selfishly want other people in your country to do worse than you, but better than people in other countries. You want to defend them from the foreigners, but not from people like you. Probably some seemingly illogical behaviors can be explained by these conflicting interests. Such as: you encourage your neighbors to buy lots of useless stuff (some of it made in companies whose shares you own), but you warn them against buying lots of useless *Chinese* stuff.
Sure, if the supply of capital is high, the return on capital will then naturally be lower. But labour demand will generally be higher, and most people get most of their income from selling their labour rather than from capital investments, so I think people should mostly be happy to see inflow of foreign capital.
Good point, but the people who get most of their income from selling their labor don't own the media.
Is this a trick question?
The obvious downside is that if you keep this up for too long, you'll get fewer and fewer avocados for the same amount of dollars, so you'll have to create more and more of them. No big deal, they're just numbers in a computer anyway. But at some point, someone's gonna say "You know what, I'm not sure I'll be able to trade those dollars for real stuff later on. For the next crate of avocados, I want euros, not dollars." And now you're sad, because you really want those avocados, but all you have are these useless dollars nobody cares about anymore.
Is this an inflation argument or a currency exchange rate argument?
Not having a trade imbalance so we can import things doesn't seem logical.
Edit: I'm remembering my old econ classes more. So as more people accumulate dollars, the natural thing is that my exports get gradually cheaper and my imports get gradually more expensive, so any issue with the trade deficit corrects. In the meantime, as long as someone is willing to take my Chuck E Cheese tokens I'd be a fool to not spend them.
> Is this an inflation argument or a currency exchange rate argument?
Those are essentially the same thing in the context of this thought experiment. "Inflation" means an increase in prices, and "price" is the number of units of currency you have to give away to receive one unit of goods and services. A currency exchange rate is the number of units of currency you have to give away to receive one unit of another currency.
> In the meantime, as long as someone is willing to take my Chuck E Cheese tokens I'd be a fool to not spend them.
Sure, you can go "YOLO! Fuck the next generation!" and screw it up for your kids – or for you-in-five-years, if you go all out for it – but you asked for a "catch". And the catch is that a long and sustained trade deficit will create problems in the future, and the methods to mitigate those problems will cause problems on their own.
Reassuring statement from the White House, in response to a question that didn't even allege it:
"As far as I'm aware, the United States has not provided armaments to Russia. The United States is not providing assistance to Russia."
https://www.newsweek.com/us-not-providing-armaments-russia-rubio-2043622
"My 'Not selling arms to Russia' T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt."
Somewhat reassuring, yes, but I wouldn't rule out that he's lying.
> "But we don't think it's constructive for me to stand here today to issue threats about what we're going to do if Russia says no. Let's hope they say yes."
My reading of this is that they have very little direct leverage over Putin, and they know it. Their best bet would be to threaten Russia with strongly increased military aid for Ukraine, but that would run counter to Trump's goal of ending the war. It's getting increasingly clear that Trump (but not necessarily Rubio) really believes that Putin "wants peace" and that Ukraine is to blame for the continuation of the conflict.
I went under anesthesia (fentanyl and Propofol) and worked through some major trauma and it was the first time I've been happy in like 10 years. I've tried every other way of dealing with mind&body pain and this is the only one that actually gave me what might be described as a "breakthrough." How can I replicate the benefits of this without doing a bunch of fentanyl?
This is gonna sound dumb and you’re gonna get turned off by the name but just hear me out. I do a type of breathwork that is very intense. I recently had very severe shoulder pain where I could not find any comfortable position to alleviate the pain. I was having stress from the pain and that was making the pain worse (threat bucket concept). I did a very intense breathwork and it the sensation of the breathwork was so powerful that I did not feel the pain any longer. I use breathwork many times to break sympathetic states of the autonomic nervous system but this is the first time I used it to deal with severe physical pain and it really helped. Afterwards I still had the pain but its presence was much less on my mind. The breathwork takes 10-15 minutes and involves very active breathing then exhaling and holding your breath. There are fun videos on YouTube with electronic music and you don’t have to learn anything or buy anything to do it. There’s zero barriers to try and it has been game changing for me breaking out of a cfs type illness.
Out of curiosity, what is the type of breathwork called?
I don’t know I just use a YouTube channel called breathwork beats. I know names for the different breath styles but not what this kind of breathwork is called. I do think it could use a name.
What about ketamine? It’s legal and safe, and at large enough doses is in fact an anesthetic. Used to be used to knock people out for surgery.
The other drug that has a pretty good track record for recounting and working through trauma is MDMA. Rather than making you semi-conscious, it makes you feel safe, trusting and happy, so it comes at the task from a different direction that an anesthetic does.
This open thread has some comments on the Mahmoud Khalil arrest, but it's a lot of mindkilled politics bait and pretty thin on actual information.
UPDATE: The Trump admin is going with INA § 237(a)(4), compromising a compelling foreign policy interest, rather than the speculative 8 U.S.C. § 1182 (a) (3), endorsing or espousing a terrorist organization.
The Trump admin is citing "Inadmissible Aliens" 8 U.S.C. § 1182 (a) (3), subsection (B) (VII), which bars any alien who... "endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization." In context, the implication is Khalil supported Hamas, and this support of a terror organization makes him ineligible for US residency. It's also quite clear in related law that inadmissible aliens can be deported. There's also INA § 237(a)(4), subsection (C) (III), "An alien, not described in clause (ii), shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest."
As a permanent resident, Khalil has more due process protections than a mere visa holder. I'm not entirely clear on the process; it's less than the protections given for a criminal proceeding. I think this means he is entitled to an administrative court hearing on whether or not his green card will be revoked, but I'm not positive.
So there are two possible legal theories here. One is Khalil's conduct amounts to supporting a terrorist organization (Hamas). The most relevant legally defined terrorist activity: "(II) The seizing or detaining, and threatening to kill, injure, or continue to detain, another individual in order to compel a third person (including a governmental organization) to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the individual seized or detained." So "endorsing or espousing" the taking of hostages and/or the execution of Israeli citizens by Hamas pretty clearly meets the bar for this statute. The other possible theory is SecState Marco Rubio personally signed off that the admission of Khalil "would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." Advocating for the destruction of Israel seems pretty compromising to the foreign policy interests of the US, not much of a legal argument here.
*Relevant Case Law* (hat tip to Eugene Volokh): Bridges v Wixon - The government may not impose criminal or civil penalties on aliens based on speech that would be protected if said by a citizen. Kleindienst v Mandel - There is no right of entry to the US, therefore entry may be denied to aliens even if the denial is based on speech. As stated previously denied entry = may legally be deported. However, the control over deportation is statutory and may not stand up to Constitutional scrutiny. Harisiades v. Shaughnessy establishes that Congress has nearly unlimited power to deport aliens even based on speech, but at the time active membership in the Communist Party was illegal even for US citizens, so it's not clear this precedent would hold up. Lower courts are mixed on the idea. Reno v AADC - Deportations generally cannot be challenged on the grounds that the defendant was selectively prosecuted, even though such prosecution would be generally illegal outside the immigration context.
Tl:dr - there is established legal statute to deport non-citizens for their speech. While generally speech is protected from legal action by the government, it's not clear this protection extends to protection from deportation. Based on past cases, SCOTUS could go either way on the constitutionality of this issue.
Personally, I find Khalil about as appealing as something smelly stuck to my shoe. But the unsympathetic must be especially protected from government overreach as they make the easiest targets. I say this as someone who honestly thinks the country would be better off without Khalil or people like him in it. The First Amendment is something that the government should never violate because freedom of speech is an unalloyed boon. It's not a specific privilege restricted to certain members of the populace, like voting or running for office. And it's better that people, even aliens, say what they think out loud in public rather than hide it out of fear for retaliation. Better to know who you're really dealing with.
For people who want to read threads without certain people, you can just Block them. And they disappear entirely from your universe. They are un-personed, you will never even be aware of their existence. All their threads and replies to them disappear. Your life is different.
For folks following along, it seems like from the news from the trial and commentary today, it was
> SecState Marco Rubio personally signed off that the admission of Khalil "would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest."
If they deport him (or even if they dont!) I expect to see Rubio getting and signing these orders on an industrial scale.
I'll be honest, I'm a bit surprised they went after Khalil. There are a lot of other much more unsavory activist types. Is he the only one they could find on some kind of visa / not a citizen? Or are they purposely testing that they can get away for deporting on speech alone? Both are, imo, terrible policy AND terrible precedent. The canary is dying folks.
>So "endorsing or espousing" the taking of hostages and/or the execution of Israeli citizens by Hamas pretty clearly meets the bar for this statute.
I don't think it's remotely clear. Couldn't we apply this bar to any government on earth?
Hamas isn't a "terrorist organization" as the term is ordinarily understood; it's a political party and the government of a territory which, before Israel's slaughter campaign began, had over 2 million people living therein.
Any actions it takes against Israel are more accurately described as "acts of war" and any executions of PoWs are more accurately considered "war crimes". Could the US also redefine, say, Russia as a "terrorist organization"?
>The other possible theory is SecState Marco Rubio personally signed off that the admission of Khalil "would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest." Advocating for the destruction of Israel seems pretty compromising to the foreign policy interests of the US, not much of a legal argument here.
Israel is not the United States, and a credible argument could be made (and has been made by many American citizens over the years, including a former US president) that American support for Israel is deeply damaging to America's interests elsewhere in the world.
Of course, the SecState has the right to set US foreign policy. He does not have the right to criminalize dissent against said policy using a statute designed to let the US deny admission to exiled politicians or prominent dissidents for diplomatic reasons. Israel has not publicly demanded that Khalil be exiled, AFAIK (and even if it has, Israel is still not a peer competitor, and he's not an Israeli national) so that's a very strained reading.
Setting aside the dubious argument that Hamas aren't actually terrorists, it only matters that the USG has declared them a terrorist organization - which it has since 1997. And if you think the law is stupid and lets the USG deport basically anyone it doesn't like - yes, that is how the law is written.
It seems especially dumb since it'd be pretty easy to argue that MAGAs are "compromising a compelling United States foreign policy interest." four years from now.
I find it pretty funny and deeply ironic that pro-Israel shills who want to simultaneously cheer for Khalil's arrest while not sacrificing any of their Free Speech street cred go for the legalistic fluff angle.
It does call into question why anyone was so upset that Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram/YouTube were censoring Conservative viewpoints. After all, *legally speaking*, those companies have far far wider latitude with Speech on their platforms than the US government have with Speech on its territory, and their censoring of any viewpoints at all is 10-100x as legal and as unambiguously their constitutional right as anything that the 40-IQ insects in Trump's admin are doing or planning right now.
So if the question of Khalil's arrest, whether it's a violation of his Free Speech or not, is solely and exclusively the question of whether it's legal or not, then that means there were never any Free Speech violations in Big Tech and all that whining about Conservative viewpoints being censored were just demands for special treatment, after all. If, on the other hand, "Free Speech" means anything at all outside of what US law graduates decide in their arbitrary, worthless, and pretentious walls of text - and what's what I actually do believe in my heart - then that must mean that Khalil's arrest being a violation of his Free Speech isn't exclusively a question of what those magic walls of text say, and that we're allowed to argue its answer outside of legalistic fluffery.
---------------
On a more meta level, it's also the height of irony and cognitive dissonance the wide contrast between the "Waaah pro-Israel viewpoints are oppressed" sob story that pro-Israel activists love to wallow in on every opportunity, comparing themselves to black people and the Pro-Palestinian protestors to the KKK for instance, and the actual state of the world, where no US permanent resident of Khalil's legal status was ever deported or would have ever been deported for criticizing a foreign government if that foreign government wasn't called a certain biblical name.
And what's curious is that they don't see the clash between complaining about people noticing/getting upset about Israel's/its lobby's influence in the US and its government, and also **threatening** to use said influence to cow opposing voices. In other words, it's not a contradiction in the pro-Israel mind to simultaneously complain about the "antisemitic trope" that Israel has a cancerously outsized influence on most US institutions and especially its government, while ***also*** implying and celebrating that Israel will use its cancerously outsized influence to punish those who criticize, oppose, call for boycott against or otherwise being anti-Israel.
"This isn't happening, and you all deserve it" indeed.
For those wanting an example of the mindkilled politics bait, this is Exhibit A.
Which post do you mean? It’s hard to tell because of Substack format
I think one comparing isreal to the kkk
One has to wonder if the lefts new found antisemitism can call isreal nazis or if they will need a new metaphysical evil; exciting times in politics.
Who or what is "Isreal"?
Who is anyone really? What is a name? As raper shakepear once remarked "is a rose by another name just a beutiful"
Their core point--it was never about free speech as such--is quite right. I have no idea why they insist on making that point in a manner that gives people inclined to dismiss it so many excuses to do so.
This is kind of confusing, because there's free speech in the context of specific legal protections from the government, and also the context of a cultural norm that people should be able to express their views free of censorship. Let's call the former A and the latter B.
Social media censoring the right is a violation of B. A private company is perfectly within their legal rights to decide what kind of content is hosted on their platform. That doesn't mean using their platform to censor dissenting views is right or proper. The "just a private company" excuse is the same one being employed by the USG here. The "just an alien" excuse is deportation isn't covered by the 1st, so kick em out. It's still wrong because they're violating B, even if A is technically not violated. (Assuming this case isn't also violating A, which is an open question. And ignoring that the Biden admin used federal agencies to pressure media companies into censorship, which is a violation of both A and B.)
Now, the right should look at the past four years and come to the conclusion - that both free speech A and B are really important! Instead, the lesson taken seems to be "what if we made anti-semitism hate speech?" Which just goes to show they not only didn't learn the lesson, they learned the *opposite* of the lesson.
Your boos mean nothing, I have seen what makes you cheer.
I'm sure that sounded great in your head, but I actually agree with you that the government doing this is wrong. Just because a legal path exists to punish non-citizens for their speech doesn't mean they should be punished. Maybe if you came here for actual discussion instead of a pretext to launch unhinged rants you would have read that part.
However much my comments offend you, they're discussion. Specifically, they're a fundamental premise-level disagreement with your framing of this as a purely legal issue.
If you had read the comment you're dismissing, you would have known your framing would imply that it's never a Free Speech violation for a Big Tech company to do whatever it wants to any and all viewpoints on their servers, which doesn't seem to be a popular opinion on ACX, because it's wrong. But that's exactly what a purely-legalistic treatment of the issue like the ones in your thread starter would have us believe.
Sure my comments might be rants too, there is no rule anywhere that says discussions can't also be rants. In particular, I reserve courtesy to those who are courteous with me and don't dehumanize 2-5 million people.
It seems sort of like you didn't read the initial comment /you/ responded to, either. That is, the thrust of the comment wasn't "well, let's look at this in purely legalistic terms, because that's the only real consideration here", ultimately—sort of the opposite, by the end—and I don't know /how/ you got the various other overblown accusations out of Rothwed's comments (e.g., dehumanizing 5 billion people or whatever, pro-Israel this and that, "...what makes [him] cheer", etc.).
Unless you know Rothwed from other interactions, in which case I apologize for the "overblown" descriptor; if not, though, it seems... pretty "mindkilled", yeah—t'me my own self, anyway.
Volokh has a pretty good rundown of the legal precedent on both sides of this: https://reason.com/volokh/2025/02/03/may-aliens-be-deported-based-on-their-speech/
The big problem, of course, is that the arguments in favor of deportation depend on a determination of aiding terrorist organizations. That determination hasn't happened yet. Much will hinge on the court date on Wednesday -- if the ICE / government refuses to produce Khalil, that should be a massive alarm bell for anyone following the case.
I used that Volokh article as a source actually, it's very informative. And again, the law as written doesn't require aiding a terrorist organization. It only requires endorsing the activities of a terrorist organization.
Perhaps at that hearing, assuming it happens, we will at long last see a shred of evidence that Khalil has actually endorsed the activities of a terrorist organization, as distinct from criticizing a nation ostensibly at war with one.
I don't think there's a difference! Ilya Somin had an article about this over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Hamas has the creation of an independent Palestinian state as an explicit goal; QED advocating for an independent Palestinian state is "espousing support for a terrorist organization." That's what post-9/11 legislation gets you.
Wouldn't this argument criminalize literally everyone who advocated for a two-state solution?
8 U.S.C. § 1182 is part of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, so it only applies to aliens under US jurisdiction. But the law is vague enough I think this reading is arguably correct. In fact it's so broad it might not survive in court.
woof. Like... _I guess_??? But at that point they've tortured the definition of 'endorse' so much that the first amendment might well be toilet paper.
There are a lot of folks on the left AND the right who wanted the US out of the Middle East, and that was also an explicit goal of Al Qaeda. I think it would be wild to claim that all those people were 'endorsing' Al Qaeda
Q very much not ED. The actual language is "endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization." It doesn't remotely follow logically from "X supports policy A" that "X endorses or espouses organization Y that attempts to bring about A by means of terrorism." I know that neither you nor Somin are actually arguing that it does; but merely noting that the Trump administration will try to make that argument based on ambiguous legislative language is one thing and conceding it in advance is quite another.
The chilling effect from this being used as a cudgel against protest groups is bad. It would be worse if it was aimed at US citizens rather than green carders. Unfortunately this is inevitable danegeld to be paid because special interest lobbies are not happy with the growing pro Hamas sentiment (whenever you endorse the idea of liberal democracy, remember that this includes tiny, motivated ethnic interest lobbies doing shady shit behind the scenes).
If this gets regularly applied to US citizens, it would be really bad and I would actually reconsider my thoughts on the Trump admin. But since I want to see less immigration, my sympathy for even green cards is very limited.
I have a hunch someone, somewhere in the administration was asked "what pro-palestine people can we go after?" and they settled on this guy, precisely because he is not a US citizen and precisely because of the SCOTUS precedent for allowing deportation of non-citizens for basically anything the government doesn't like. It would be much harder to get anything to stick for protesters with full citizenship. Khyami James, for example, said far worse things than Khalil, but AFAIK James is a US Citizen so you'd have a much higher bar to clear to pin charges.
I also did some background reading on the subject and was surprised to see how much less protection a legal resident has, versus a full citizen. It also sounded like "material support" (as in "providing material support to a terrorist group") has an extremely lenient interpretation thanks to post-9/11 laws; it doesn't mean you need to be handing out kalashnikovs to be prosecuted. Holder v Humanitarian Law Project is relevant on that front.
It wasn't just advocacy though, it was a violent blockade directly aimed at forcing Columbia to take certain actions to hurt Israel. It could be argued that direct violent action (ie a blockade) crosses the line into material support.
So anyone who fought or boycotted or called to boycott Assad's Syria or Putin's Russia is a terrorist or a terrorist enabler right? Those states had plenty of terrorist organizations at war with them.
Boycott: fine
Call to boycott: fine
Use physical force to try to force someone else to boycott: not fine
But Khalil never used any physical force, this much admits even the ultra-Zio crazies compiling dossiers on people.
Unless protests are in-and-of-themselves physical force? In that case anti-Iraq-war demonstrations were uses of physical force against the US government to aid a foreign adversary?
> Protests that block thoroughfares are not what people normally consider violent.
Why not? If you block my way then you force me into a situation where, to go about my legal business, I need to physically fight you. If that happens then it's you who has initiated the violence, not me.
Sieges have been considered part of war for thousands of years. Nobody ever wrote "The French started the war when made an unprovoked attack against the English army that was non-violently picketing their castle".
But they DO say Japan started the war by launching an unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor just because America cut off their oil supply.
"Why not? If you block my way then you force me into a situation where, to go about my legal business, I need to physically fight you."
Wow, does this argument ever prove a lot. Let's try to be even mildly creative in coming up with different situations where "I need to fight you in order to go about my legal business" could apply:
1. Somebody stands ahead of me in line at the bank when I'm in a hurry.
2. Somebody picks up the last croissant (which I had intended to buy) out of the bakery case and takes it towards the register with a clear intention of purchasing it.
3. A bus--which I need to catch--rolls up to the stop packed nearly to capacity, and several people are closer to the door than I am.
4. I'm trying to have a business meeting with a softspoken client at the only free table in a crowded cafe, and the ambient noise makes the conversation impossible.
Are all of these example ridiculous? Of course! As is any other suggestion that somebody else making different legal use of a public space than you are--even use that interferes with yours--is initiating violence against you. What an absurd notion. If they were on private property and the property-owners wanted them remove, that's their legal right. If they were on public property and in violation of laws, the local government can get the police to disperse them. But in no case does the fact that *you* find their presence inconvenient mean that *they* are being violent towards you. Let's make sure our word *mean things*, shall we?
"Sieges have been considered part of war for thousands of years."
See, here's a great example showing that you DO know what violence looks like. Historical trivia: if you're in a fortress under siege, and you attempt to leave the fortress, what happens to you? Do the besiegers merely stand in your path? Or do they do other things, *besides* standing in your path? I'm *pretty sure* you know the answer to this one.
Now, if you're talking about protesters striking or throwing things at people who attempt to move past them, that is an *entirely different conversation.* But claiming that them standing in a place that you find inconvenient is the same sort of thing is pretty silly.
> Protests that block thoroughfares are not what people normally consider violent.
Theres growing opinion that running over climate protesters blocking roads is based; the eithical plain reading of right wing theory doesn't have this well integrated(you know locke and the bible being pre car and all) but its absolutely on the table
Bridges v Wixon states that aliens have freedom of speech in that criminal or civil penalties may not be imposed on them in response to their speech. *But it's not clear deportation is covered by this*. Which was the point of a good half of my post.
For Kleindienst, see my response above. I agree that Harisiades is of dubious applicability.
This looks absolutely brilliant to me, very very good EA and a genius idea: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/11/plutocratic-proposal-life-saving-drugs-lack-of-funding-desparate-rich-people?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I wandered off on a tangent at this part:
"(A few years ago, in the weirdness of Florida, the “young blood project” saw wealthy old people hooked up to blood extracted from teenagers, at a cost of $285,000 each.)"
So who the heck read "Good Lady Ducayne" and immediately decided that was a money-making scheme?
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605261h.html#ch03
"'Oh, Lady Ducayne, need I put your wickedness and your physician's still greater wickedness in plain words? The poor girl who is now in your employment has been reduced from robust health to a condition of absolute danger by Dr Parravicini's experimental surgery; and I have no doubt those other two young women who broke down in your service were treated by him in the same manner. I could take upon myself to demonstrate--by most convincing evidence, to a jury of medical men--that Dr Parravicini has been bleeding Miss Rolleston, after putting her under chloroform, at intervals, ever since she has been in your service. The deterioration in the girl's health speaks for itself; the lancet marks upon the girl's arms are unmistakable; and her description of a series of sensations, which she calls a dream, points unmistakably to the administration of chloroform while she was sleeping. A practice so nefarious, so murderous, must, if exposed, result in a sentence only less severe than the punishment of murder.'
'I laugh,' said Parravicini, with an airy motion of his skinny fingers; 'I laugh at once at your theories and at your threats. I, Parravicini Leopold, have no fear that the law can question anything I have done.'
'Take the girl away, and let me hear no more of her,' cried Lady Ducayne, in the thin, old voice, which so poorly matched the energy and fire of the wicked old brain that guided its utterances. 'Let her go back to her mother--I want no more girls to die in my service. There are girls enough and to spare in the world, God knows.'
'If you ever engage another companion--or take another English girl into your service, Lady Ducayne, I will make all England ring with the story of your wickedness.'
'I want no more girls. I don't believe in his experiments. They have been full of danger for me as well as for the girl--an air bubble, and I should be gone. I'll have no more of his dangerous quackery. I'll find some new man--a better man than you, sir, a discoverer like Pasteur, or Virchow, a genius--to keep me alive. Take your girl away, young man. Marry her if you like.
I'll write her a cheque for a thousand pounds, and let her go and live on beef and beer, and get strong and plump again. I'll have no more such experiments. Do you hear, Parravicini?' she screamed, vindictively, the yellow, wrinkled face distorted with fury, the eyes glaring at him."
A great tangent though
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 9-10.
1. The current COVID-19 wave continues to recede. Both the CDC's wastewater activity levels and Biobot's wastewater concentration chart show a downward trend in all regions of the US.This XEC wave has had the lowest rates of hospitalizations, ED visits, and deaths of any variant wave so far (at least for the US).
2. Test positivity rates for RSV and Influenza outpaced COVID this respiratory season. Influenza outpaced COVID hospitalizations by 3x. And flu deaths exceeded COVID deaths for the 1st time since the start of the pandemic (but the 2024-25 flu season looks to be more lethal than many of our past seasons—even pre-COVID).
https://tinyurl.com/3vfk73jp
3. Type A influenza cases are falling—but Type B infection rates are rising. The rates of Type B infections are usually an order of magnitude less than Type A, though. And the Type B generally picks up at the tail end of our flu seasons. I've never heard a good explanation for why this happens, though.
4. Per the CDC, there were three more confirmed human cases of A(H5) bird flu in February. The patient who caught it from dairy cows had mild conjunctivitis. The two patients who caught it from poultry were hospitalized. There still have been no known cases of human-to-human transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-02262025.html
5. Per the USDA's Feb livestock report, 88 percent fewer broiler chickens were culled due to HPAI in January than in December. A(H5) in birds is seasonal, so I'm not surprised if we see the numbers drop off, but the January numbers are so much lower than December that I wonder if they are incomplete. Especially because a record total of 18.8 million egg-laying birds were culled due to HPAI in January. I don't know how long it'll take for the replacement hens to pick up production, but I doubt if President Trump—Mr. "Shut Up About Egg Prices"—is going to see a drop in the price of eggs this month.
6. The measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico is continuing to spread—two deaths so far. RFK Jr backtracked a bit, asking parents to "consider" vaccinating their kids—but he also praised the medical efficacy of cod liver oil. He's a great mind of the 19th Century!
tinyurl.com/4pr229yv
And I mentioned this late in an earlier open thread, but the claim these are the first measles deaths in 2 decades becomes more tenuous when we dig into the data. Per Vaxopedia, the CDC has been undercounting measles deaths due to the way they interpret death certificates. I'm not sure if I fully buy this explanation, but it looks like there have likely been 22 measles deaths since 2000. And if we include deaths from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE)—which is a syndrome that can develop several years after a measles infection, there've been an additional 42 measles-related deaths since 2000.
tinyurl.com/y3d5e9kf
Slides here...
https://t.co/mAEwscm1LT
My understanding is that SSPE is a very rare complication of measles. If there are few measles deaths, there should be even fewer examples of that, unless somehow modern treatment reduces acute deaths to nothing but still leaves a residue of SSPE. And that seems unlikely.
Where, how, and under what circumstances, generally speaking, are people being tested for COVID, RSV, and/or flu?
I'm asking because I have something right now that may be the common cold, may be a mild flu, may be mild COVID, or could even be RSV, but my HMO doesn't (afaict) provide an easy way to be tested for most of these things without presenting at the hospital for treatment--which I'm not doing because my symptoms are mild and I don't want to sit around in a medical office spreading my germs.
So are the test positivity rates mentioned in #2 mostly from people who were tested when they sought treatment?
First off, I am not an MD. So I'm talking hypothetically, and I'm not giving medical advice. However...
Yes, these tests are done when peeps seek treatment. Generally, if you're *seriously* ill with a respiratory illness and you show up at urgent care or the ER, they *should* test you for the pathogen causing your illness because the downstream treatment depends on the diagnosis. Tamiflu or Relenza is generally indicated for influenza. Virazole may be indicated for RSV. And Paxlovid (or Remdesivir in some other countries) is indicated even for milder cases of COVID-19 (because a COVID-19 infection can escalate, and Paxlovid can only stop it early in its progress).
If you don't want to drag yourself to urgent care, the FDA has approved Labcorp's at-home all-in-one over-the-counter test for Flu, RSV, and COVID, though. I suspect it will set you back over a hundred bucks. If that's too pricey, suggest you at least test yourself for COVID using the standard over-the-counter test kits that run ~$35 at CVS, because if it is COVID, a dose of Pax in the early stages of the infection can protect you from worsening symptoms.
Here are some Labcorp test kit links...
https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/covid-flu-rsv-test
https://www.ondemand.labcorp.com/at-home-test-kits/covid-19-flu-rsv-test-home-collection-kit
Oh, but I see you have send the test sample in to get the results. Bummer.
Thank you for the update!
It is almost a year since the great Bayesian Wuhan lab leak debate
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7
In Jan this year there was a "low confidence" note by the CIA saying it probably was a lab leak. Pretty thin gruel. Such a weird mixed message.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement on Jan. 25. “CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”
Anyway with a year perspective, has anything new come to light (including this CIA article) which now makes you think the answer is now Lab Leak (or more sure)
My takeaway from this exercise is whether it is sensible to have such a debate when you can be fairly sure that some people do know (eg intelligence agencies in this case). The emphasis should be on getting them to spill some of the beans.
In a remarkable coincidence, this is the week that the German intelligence agency says it is high probability a lab leak (you can find similar article in many papers - pick your fav)
They put it at 80-90% and they have known since 2020.
Any comments about what is going on here.
I will repeat the two questions:
a) Do people think it is more likely now that it was a lab leak
b) Is it pointless having debates about security matters, as the truth and pertinent facts are actively suppressed.
No, this week *a report from 2020* was released saying that they estimated a 80-90% chance *at the time*.
Fortunately, we have a lot more evidence now and don't have to rely on people's guesses from early in the pandemic. Much like if I wanted to know the deadliness and rate of spread of original COVID, I would not look up February 2020 tweets and use that as my sole data source.
Do you think it is more likely now that it was a lab leak?
Have the recent intelligence agency reports moved the needle for you?
I think it's pretty clear that the CIA doesn't know anything significantly more than what the public does. The best source is still the Rootclaim debate. The reason the CIA suddenly made that statement is because someone high up at the CIA wanted them to make that statement, not because they have secret information.
Remarkable that you say this on the same day the german intelligence services said that they had 80-90% probability and had known since 2020.
(look for articles - german wuhan lab leak news)
Back in 2020, the lab leak hypothesis was plausible from what little was known at the time. A lot more evidence has come out since then.
Based on the reporting, it's pretty clear that they didn't have any smoking gun and the guess was just based on the same things that other people speculating in 2020 based their guesses on, and the same evidence that got presented and refuted in the Rootclaim debate.
The CIA in particular has access to many things inaccessible to the public
- frequent high resolution imagery
- comms monitoring of US based individuals
- potentially encrypted comms of Chinese
- other stuff
I think/assume they know a lot more about what was going on.
What they say they know is a different matter.
Why they wait 5 years to say it is another
Back to the questions - your answers as I understand them
a) Yes for lab leak? And about as sure as before (not more so)
b) unclear - Yes, worth debating?, because we had enough facts to discuss and decide irrespective of intelligence agencies
You didn't ask any questions in the comment I responded to, so I'm not sure what you're on about as far as the "your answers" part goes.
Also, see my responses to John Schilling in the sibling comment:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/100090541
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/100093774
It is unlikely that the German intelligence community isn't aware, and really far more aware than you, of all the evidence that has come out since 2020. If they're releasing their 2020 report without further comment, that strongly suggests that they don't think the subsequent evidence moves the needle very much. The alternate hypothesis, that they want to deceive people into believing a lab-leak claim that they now know to be false, is unsupported, conspiratorial, and conspicuously lacking a plausible motive.
ETA: I'm also curious as to how you can be so confident that the CIA doesn't know significantly more than the public does. They do have access to sources the public doesn't, and which they can't publicly talk about. As does German intelligence.
To pick an extreme example for the sake of argument, the CIA has access to non-public information, so they should know a better speedrun path in Super Mario World than the best publicly known one, right?
The CIA's core competency is being friends with the guy who has a friend in Al Qaeda, with a side of state-sponsored hacking. Everything else is just regurgitated OSINT. And in cases where the relevant information is public anyway, I'd expected a dedicated internet army to be much better at interpreting it since A) there's a lot more people on the internet and B) a lot more people with relevant expertise (the number of leading geneticists working at the CIA is probably not much more than the number of record SMW speedrunners at the CIA).
IF there really was a lab leak AND the people at WIV knew about it AND they said so in a discoverable way AND the CIA happened to have informants or spyware in place at the time and got their hands on that, THEN the CIA would have something worth saying about the debate. Otherwise, they're just armchair speculating on the same dataset as the rest of us.
I take Schilling's claim about CIA to mean there exist topics CIA will know more about than the public, not that they will know more than the public on all conceivable topics. It's reasonable to extrapolate that the topics they will know more about are focused more on international military capabilities, including biological capabilities, than they will be on how best to navigate a video game.
The CIA's core competency can likewise be extrapolated to be much more than Al Qaeda + computer tricks. Another extrapolation that is worth noting here is that the CIA, like any espionage agency in the world, will possess methods for gathering information that will persist for years, and even decades. Those methods are often worthless if revealed, and revealing what was discovered with a method often reveals the method. Therefore, they don't reveal what was discovered, often for decades.
It's probably wise to be skeptical if some agency like the CIA or BND makes a claim and doesn't provide material evidence, and to consider the motives of such an agency. But it's also probably wise to not rule out the possibility that they know something the rest of us don't.
Do you know who made the decision to release it? Did they say anything about the decision? (This isn't a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious). It's hard to guess at the motives for the release without any information.
> I'm also curious as to how you can be so confident that the CIA doesn't know significantly more than the public does. They do have access to sources the public doesn't, and which they can't publicly talk about. As does German intelligence.
Well, for one thing, they aren't acting like it. The Biden report was mixed low-confidence answers, which is hardly what you'd expect from someone who is sitting on a smoking gun.
And with such a contentious issue, *someone* would have leaked *something* at some point if there were any goods there. And now we have a president who has a history of publicly sharing sensitive intelligence for far dumber reasons then this and who would benefit enormously from being able to find evidence in favor of a lab leak.
The other thing is that this isn't an area where you'd expect the CIA to have much of an advantage. If they could somehow obtain emails from WIV saying "oh wow look at what crimes we're doing" or whatever, that would be one thing. But if that email doesn't exist, there's very little the CIA could do beyond what we already have from OSINT. It's not like the CIA has any expertise in genetics and epidemiology. We're not talking about Russian war plans or Al Qeada plots here.
"And with such a contentious issue, *someone* would have leaked *something* at some point if there were any goods there. "
Speaking as someone who works with highly classified information, no, that's not at all a safe bet. Leaks can happen anywhere, subject to the personal idiosyncrasies of potential leakers, but they don't become *likely* until you go well beyond "contentious" and most of the way to "that's just obviously and intolerably wrong".
Knowing the probable origin of Covid-19, but knowing it through classified sources that the agency doesn't want to burn and so keeping quiet about it, isn't remotely at that level.
Also, you don't necessarily need "expertise in genetics and epidemiology" to figure out whether Covid-19 escaped from a lab. It is probably sufficient to be able to read all the internal emails of the WIV in 2019-2020. There are many paths to truth, and you seem to be blinding yourself to all but one of them.
I have a somewhat-related question about that debate.
I'm imagining several possible scenarios for the infection of Patient Zero in Wuhan
1. Patient Zero somehow contracts COVID from an infected animal. (I'm not sure whether it matters that the infection was near Wuhan, at the infamous market in Wuhan, or shortly before traveling into Wuhan.)
2. Patient Zero is infected with COVID that was somehow improperly released from the laboratory in Wuhan. (It's possible that they somehow became infected while visiting/working int the lab, came into contact in water that was contaminated with waste from that part of the lab, or some similar event.)
3. Some animal in/near the Wuhan lab becomes infected with COVID that was improperly released from the lab, and that animal infects other animals in/around Wuhan. Patient Zero catches COVID from this population. (The infected animals could have somehow mixed with, or been brought into contact with, the animals sold in the infamous market in Wuhan.)
Did that debate only consider case 1 and case 2, or did it also consider case 3? Would case 3 have been considered zoonosis, or lab-release?
I ought to remember this, as I read the debate analysis by Scott carefully. But I don't recall whether case 3 was mentioned, or distinguished from case 2 or case 1.
I think 3 would be considered unlikely enough to be neglected.
If original-strain covid appeared to be adapted for rats or mice then it would seem much more plausible, but that doesn't seem to be the case (if it were, then China would not have been able to temporarily eradicate the virus since it would have had a huge rodent reservoir).
The alternative scenario where a freaking pangolin or something escapes from the lab seems vanishingly unlikely.
Gwern's assessment of the rootclaim debate was pretty damning. It is pretty clear that the winner just made stuff up and nobody checked it.
In what way was Gwern's assessment pretty damning? Is Scott's summary https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/143072255/connor-reed-gwern-on-cats not correct? Because that doesn't read like the winner made stuff up at all.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52804647
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13237.msg640358.html#msg640358
That seems less "damning" and more nitpicking a single point out of a large debate (ok, two points if you count the followup comment about a graph). As someone responded in the comments you linked to:
---
I sincerely doubt that the judges would have reached a different conclusion if they knew that Connor hadn’t claimed his cat died of COVID, so I don’t think the judges had any reason to fact check that claim. On the other hand, the Peter got this wrong and Saar didn’t catch it does suggest that debate format didn’t work very well for ferreting out errors.
I don’t know enough about Saar to have any idea whether this applies to him, but one thing I’ve noticed about conspiracy theorists is that the whole concept of fact checking is alien to the way they think. If you are a conspiracy theorist trying to prove that COVID originated in the lab, and Connor make a claim that supports your theory, you don’t investigate the claim because if you did that, you might find that it’s not credible. And if someone claims that Connor is not credible because Connor claimed his cat died of COVID, you *certainly* aren’t going to start fact checking at that point, because the risk that a fact check might undermine your theory has increased. And if someone offers you a $100,000 if you can convince a couple of judges that your conspiracy theory is true, that doesn’t create an incentive to abandon the thought patterns that led you to believe in the conspiracy theory in the first place.
---
And even worse, based on https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/143072255/connor-reed-gwern-on-cats, it doesn't seem like Gwern was even right about his nitpicking in the first place. I guess this is proof that even really smart people like Gwern can screw up sometimes.
That's fantastically interesting, thanks for sharing.
You'll see this with scrolling anyway, if you clicked the former link, but just to highlight:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/53624130
...is also interesting.
China is a “hard target.” Even in January 2020, when the U.S. intelligence community was throwing every resource it had at understanding COVID-19, it wasn’t able to get a lot of information. They did know that human-to-human transmission was possible, information that the United States withheld from the World Health Organization and the public, but there is no reason to think they learned anything about the origin of the virus.
The CIA assessment is probably “low confidence” for the same reason that the debate didn’t yield a solid conclusion; there isn’t enough evidence. Whatever classified information the U.S. intelligence community has probably doesn’t make much difference.
I came across this site https://findidfsoldiers.net/ while browsing Haaretz, it's a small compendium of the type of human scum that specifically goes to volunteer in a foreign military committing war crimes, despite not having to, and having the choices to not be involved in a genocidal war.
I like to browse those kinds of lists to remind myself of just how low the bar to being a good human sometimes is, like, you could be a lazy fuck and just wake up one day in your bed unable to do anything, and just by virtue of this alone you would still be immensely morally better than anyone on this list. Merely doing nothing is more moral than whatever the fuck they ended up doing in their newfound volunteer gigs as genocidal war dogs, and it costs 0 dollars.
But what really caught my attention while reading the Haaretz article (https://archive.ph/d1GII) about the website is how paranoid and high-cortisol the mode Pro-Israel lobbies seem to universally operate in, at least in North America. An html web 1.0 page that has ~85 publicly available names of eager war criminals, most of them loud and proud about their "service" on their own anyway? Doesn't look like too much of a big deal, or really any deal at all. Right?
Well, you see, compiling lists of names is Literally Hitler, at least according to Paul Hirschson, the ~~chief clown~~, sorry, "consul general" of Israel in Montreal. "We know what 'Jew lists' mean to Mastacci's [the website's author] type,", Hirschson constipated on his twi**er, cited by Haaretz.
You would think that an expression like "Jew List" would be reserved for something slightly more serious, like a boycott list of supermarkets owned by Jews or some 1933 Germany shit like that. But no, compiling public material about ~~war criminals~~ volunteers in a foreign army is enough to deserve the term, apparently. They don't seem to realize the natural endgame of this antisemitism inflation.
"this is not a doxxing website"
mhm. Imagine if there was a website listing the names and life information of Pro-Palestine activists while calling them "terrorist-sympathizers." Would you consider that doxxing? Do you think the only difference between that and findidfsoldiers is just the object level issue, because you think Pro-Palestine activists are right and Pro-Israel forces are wrong?
> Imagine if there was a website listing the names and life information of Pro-Palestine activists while calling them "terrorist-sympathizers."
This happened in October and November of 2023 and is happening right now, except instead of a website collating publicly available and Googlable info it was trucks with massive screens displaying the information on the streets and KGB dossiers of government data being shared on Pro-Palestinian activists.
> Pro-Palestine activists are right and Pro-Israel forces
I'm surprised you managed to write this without noticing the difference between Pro-Palestine **activists** and the Pro-Israel **forces**, but to it never hurts to repeat information, here's one important difference:
- The **activists** use their voice and their unarmed body, along with some constitutionally-protected rights such as the right to protest and of assembly, to say things like that Israel is perpetrating a genocide and that people should stop buying things from it. The **forces** are using guns and armed support provided by Israel to kill Palestinians in Gaza.
I believe that's enough difference for me to frankly not give a single shit about the "doxxing" (no such thing, the information is Googlable, I could have replaced the website with a google doc and 3 hours of free time) of those who chose to participate in ethnic cleansing and a proto-genocide.
"Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet and without their consent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing The definition of doxxing does not hinge on whether the information was publicly available or not. In fact, most doxxing comes from Googlable information.
Do you think that it would be bad to dox Pro-Israel activists then, and it's only because IDF soldiers are military that findIDFsoldiers is OK?
I'm aware that publicly available info can still be doxxing. This doesn't mean that any amount at all of personal information obtained from the internet is doxxing, or else me following an email from a Reddit account to a Twitter account would be doxxing, and I don't intuitively think of low-effort actions like blindly following links as doxxing.
> Do you think that it would be bad to dox Pro-Israel activists
(1) Yes, it would be bad, and that's precisely the reason why I never share or endorse the Nth list about "Zionist authors" or "Zionist game developers" or whatever is making the rounds on the lowest IQ rungs of pro-Palestinian twitter.
(2) Most of those lists are still not doxxing, they're nothing more and nothing less than a list of names attached to public statements or political positions on Israel-Palestine endorsed by each name. Doxxing has to involve some amount of investigation and uncovering of what the victims were trying to hide, you can never be doxed for something you never tried to hide. Uncovering the place of residence, the place of work, and close social contacts (e.g. discovering and harassing the uninvolved daughter or brother of a pro-Israel activist) are hallmarks of doxxing and easy heuristics to judge whether someone is being doxed, but just being named and shamed is not being doxed.
(3) Many of those lists fall into the communist power dynamics of score-settling and the "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking" [1] rule. Names with no connections to the offense are put on the list just because somebody somewhere hates the name for a completely unrelated reason and figures they can make a plausible case (sometimes the case is "No case, the name looks Jewish"), others are on the list despite not being remotely as bad as the modal or median name on the list.
That's why I hate name and shame lists for the vast majority of contexts.
But almost none of those points apply to the website. (1) Doesn't apply because they're soldiers not activists, and soldiers going mercenary for a state after 1.5 years of brutal extensively-documented war and several hundred pages worth of legal proceedings and ICJ hearings about a very plausible case of genocide, plus an ICC warrant for the head of state for using starvation of civilians as a weapon. I would not call someone who did 1/10 of this for Palestine or Hamas "an activist", I would call them a soldier.
(2) doesn't apply, the list isn't doxxing, there is nothing in there that those volunteers didn't want public. None of them are ashamed or secretive about anything being revealed.
(3) Doesn't apply because the criteria of inclusion is extremely clear: anyone who went to Israel and wore a military uniform. You can't possibly get any clearer than this, it's the "Murder" part of "Arson, Murder and Jaywalking". Sure people can still make things up and simply include names out of thin air, but it will be extremely easy to catch this because the criteria of inclusion is so obvious and clear-cut.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking
This website is actually pretty concerning. Stalking and tracking people and announcing them as objects of hatred for crimes you think they *might* have done is seriously immoral.
Likely none of these volunteers agree with the accusations against Israel. Whether they're true or not, calling them "eager war criminals" is a lie. Calling them war criminals without a trial is lynch mob justice.
I really hope pro-Palestinian advocates have better things to do than stalking kids on the internet.
Yeah, kids these days man. Just teenagers doing normal horny teenager things like going mercenary for an ICJ-accused genocidal armed forces and logistically supporting the mass murder of 50K people.
> Likely none of these volunteers agree with the accusations against Israel.
Luckily nobody asked them.
> Stalking and tracking people and announcing them as objects of hatred for crimes you think they *might* have done is seriously immoral
It's not stalking, it's collating public data. I could have replaced the entire website with Google, some social media sniffing tools, and infinite patience for propaganda-induced pro-Israel psychopathy.
They're rightful objects of hatred because they're complicit in the murder of children, and there is no amount of "I was just following orders" or "I was just writing Excel macros for the commander" is going to overshadow the fact that they could have went with their daily lives in Canada and forgot that there is anything happening in Gaza, they went out of their way to be involve themselves in an ethnic cleansing.
Not even the smallest violin in the world is deserved.
What if they aren't war criminals?
I doubt, if you throw a rock at random into a randomly selected IDF squad you will hit someone who demolished a Gazan high-rise while dedicating the explosion to his daughter, humiliated civilians and/or used them as human shields, or wore civilian women's underwear and filmed himself doing so. So yeah, the environment is not exactly conducive to not being a war criminal.
And hey, the fastest way to prove you're not a war criminal is to not be offended at a trial, indeed to welcome it, which is not what pro-Israel groups are doing.
I am fairly certain that the demolition of high-rises is delegeted to a very small and specialized fraction of the IDF's "squads". I am also fairly certain that "not being offended at a trial" is insufficient to disprove accusations of war crimes. So your claims are objectively, literally false, and gratuitous hyperbole in the service of insult is both unkind and unnecessary.
I mentioned other examples of wanton criminality and destruction other than the gleeful destruction of Gaza's urban scape, many so widespread that a news channel literally made a 2 hours documentary out of social media material posted by the war criminals themselves.
Not being offended about trials or any sort of reckoning for accused war crimes is of course not enough to disprove said war crimes, but it's the necessary first step towards either proving or disproving (in the Law sense) anything at all. So the mere fact that pro-Israel groups in Europe and America chafe at the proposition is massively telling.
> in the service of insult
Whom did I insult?
I asked this in the last thread, but got only one response: Has anyone tried that Brilliant interactive STEM lesson thing? If so, what was your experience?
(Crossposted from https://www.themotte.org/post/1741/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/307361 )
In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the [Budapest Memorandum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Budapest_Memorandum). The short version is that Ukraine destroyed its Soviet nukes, and in return, the signatories pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support actions in the Security Council if it should ever be threatened by nukes.
In 1994, this seemed like a good deal. The cold war was over, Ukraine likely did have more urgent spending priorities than a nuclear weapon program and the rest of the world, both the nuclear powers and the others were glad to keep the number of nuclear powers limited. Wars of conquest seemed a thing of the past. While the US engaged in some regime change operations (most of which turned out rather terrible, tbh), in the 1990s the idea to expand your territory through war seemed basically dead.
The rule-based world order was a higher, better equilibrium, just like most people would prefer to live in a country where weapons of war are controlled only by a small group of mostly decent people to living in some failed state where many people carry an assault weapon for the simple reason that many other people carry an assault weapon.
Putin's invasion made some serious cracks in that vision of a rule-based world order (which was always perceived to be strong in Europe), but Trump II basically broke it. Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea in 2014, before Russia was ready for a full scale invasion. I think it would have been technically feasible. An experienced Soviet nuclear weapons engineer who was 40 in 1990 would have been 64 in 2014. Ukraine also runs a lot of civilian nuclear reactor and has its own Uranium deposits (which would come in handy once they quit the NPT, because this might make acquiring fuel on the world market difficult). WP [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Ukraine) they even have enrichment plants.
In general, figuring out how to make nuclear weapons is something which took a good fraction of the world's geniuses in the 1940s, but has become much simpler since then. Getting an implosion device to work just right is something which would likely be helped a lot by high speed cameras and microelectronics, and a few decades of Moore's law likely makes a hell of a difference for simulations. Delivery systems might be a bit harder, but at the end of the day you don't need 100% reliability for deterrence to work. Even if your enemy is 50% confident that they can intercept the delivery, that still leaves the expected outcome of a nuclear exchange highly negative for them. Attacking a launch site -- conventionally or otherwise -- is forcing your enemy to either use or lose his nukes, and few think it wise to do so.
On a more personal note, I really hate nuclear weapons, and very much prefer the rule-based world order. I very much preferred the 2010s when Putin was mostly known for riding topless, as well as the odd murder of a journalist or dissident, the US was fine playing world police (which included some ill-advised military adventures, but also providing nuclear deterrence for NATO) and I was comfortably regarding nukes, NATO and large scale wars with the same distant horror I might have for medieval healthcare.
Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense, and the UK and France arsenals might not be judged sufficient for deterrence, and some EU nuke might be called for. I am not sure how it would work. Classical EU commission manner, where 27 member states have to push the launch button and Orban can veto if he feels like it? Or give Mrs van-der-Leyen launch authority? Or simply have a common weapon program and distribute the spoils to 27 members?
>Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense,
I keep hearing people say this, but it seems unwarranted. Trump strongarms Ukraine (a country we have no legal requirement or expectation to support yet have given billions of dollars of support already) to get them to the negotiation table, therefore the US can't be trusted to carry out it's treaty obligations with regard to NATO?
Tell me, how many sanctions have Trump taken off of Russia? None? In fact he says he'll punish Russia even harder if Russia doesn't play ball? Interesting, sure seems like America is still punishing defectors to the rules based system.
This idea that the U.S. would abandon it's allies because Trump played hardball with a non-ally seems a bit hysterical.
Look at what he's doing in the trade war with Canada. He also just stated that "just about every country in the world has treated America unfairly". He doesn't even acknowledge the concept of allies.
Lots of NATO countries have tariffs on US goods, how is putting tariffs on a particular member a sign that the US can't be counted on to fulfill it's treaty obligations? Did we have a treaty with Canada saying no trade wars?
There was an agreement. Trump has blatantly reneged and lied about why. It's not about fentanyl. It's about Trump's delusion that he can force other countries to pay for the hole he's blown in US budget and the opportunity for him personally to profit from corruption (by granting exemptions in return for bribes). The US cannot be trusted to honor any commitment it makes now. Who do you think negotiated the USMCA anyway? FFS Trump is threatening to annex Canada! Can you not follow the thread here? And it's not just Trump. Huge numbers of Americans also seem to have completely lost the plot. This is not normal! Canada should now be seriously thinking about whether it should seek to obtain a credible nuclear deterrent to hedge against the possibility of a military attack from our malfunctioning erstwhile ally. Seriously, Fuck America!
We kind of did actually. First NAFTA and then USMCA, the latter of which was agreed to by Trump himself before he decided to "alter the deal" again.
USMCA has a specific exception that Trump is using: "Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to: ...(b) preclude a Party from applying measures that it considers necessary for the fulfilment of its obligations with respect to the maintenance or restoration of international peace or security, or the protection of its own essential security interests." Trump declared a national emergency about border crossings and fentanyl smuggling on day 1, and has explicitly claimed that these tariffs are justified under the protection of security interest exemption to USMCA. Which is why he's dumping these large tariffs on the two countries bordering the US (and China, which makes most of the fentanyl that gets to the US) as they're the ones that he is justified by the "national emergency" to put tariffs on.
Now you can say that you think the national security interest is a fig leaf, but it is a legal justification for why his actions are not violating the treaty, one that the treaty itself allows. What exceptions are there to the North Atlantic Treaty that would justify these fears that the US will ignore it's NATO obligations? I'm looking at the treaty and the only possible exception I can see is if the US elected to leave the treaty altogether, which is allowed but only with 1 years notice. Other than that, there isn't any wiggle room on Article 5.
The claim that the recent tariffs were "necessary for the protection of US essential security interests", is the sort of thing that any reasonable non-Trumpist will look at and say "that seems like the sort of transparent lie people tell when they are looking for a petty legalistic excuse to welsh on a deal". This will cause them to reasonably suspect that any other deals may be similarly welshed upon.
Which leaves one with not the terms of the deal, but the perceived desires of the "dealmaker", And Trump's words and policies w/re Ukraine make it pretty clear that he wants the US to not be involved in actively securing Europe against military aggression (unless maybe they pay enough protection money).
So, yes, reasonable non-Trumpists are going to see the US as an unreliable security partner for Europe going forward. And reasonable Trumpists shouldn't need to have this explained to them. Yet here we are.
Anyone familiar with Trump's behavior should know that he not only stretches weasel clauses as far as they can possibly go, but that when they don't go far enough for him he'll straight up ignore agreements, and if someone calls him on it he's as likely as not to delay compliance as long as he can get away with. A prolonged delay in compliance on Article 5 could lead to a fait accompli.
I dearly hope a long term consequence of the Trump administration is the acknowledgement that the 'rules based international order' was a nonsensical concept made up by charlatans and believed in by the worst kind of midwits. People of the future can then try analyzing international deals based on things like money and power!
What rules has the Trump administration broken, such that everyone will acknowledge that the rules based order is nonsense?
The rules in that rules-based order were flexible enough to allow Turkey (a NATO ally) to occupy North Cyprus for decades and for Kosovo to be detached from Serbia.
Well, both of these cases involved an ethnic minority trying to break away from a country. I do not think there is a hard and fast rule for these cases.
On the one hand, if every entity down to "sovereign citizen" was allowed to secede from the US, the fractal patchwork of jurisdictions this would have significant downsides (tariffs, localized wars and the like) that it seems prudent to disallow it.
On the other hand, if the rule-based order came into effect when the British were just about done conquering their empire, I would not tell tell India that borders and countries may be accidents of history, but sacrosanct, and they should just make peace with being a British colony, or frown too much on any country which helped them to independence.
Personally, I would put the threshold for supporting self-determination between 100k and 100M, which is still a broad range. Other circumstances might me more or less sympathetic to independence movements.
When Russia occupied Crimea and two mostly ethnic Russian Oblasts in Eastern Ukraine, I did not see that as a major defection from the rule-based world order apart from the fact that it violated the Budapest Memorandum (which I was not aware back then).
However, trying to force a regime change in Kiev is a very different story. Now, the US has also done its share of regime change operations (and I still maintain that GWB had no business invading Iraq), but there are a number of important distinctions between Saddam Hussein and Volodymyr Zelenskyy regarding how closely they followed the rule-based order, the general peacefulness of their respective theaters as well as their respective political systems and their human rights records.
I basically agree with that. I re-read your first comment and now I realise that you most likely meant the 2022 attack when saying "Putin's invasion" rather than more limited operations before that.
>and for Kosovo to be detached from Serbia.
Hardly inconsistent with the rules-based order, since one of the primary rules is the right to self-determination.
I hope you're being consistent here and would support the self-determination of Crimea, Kurdistan etc. etc.
Note that I did not say that I support self-determination for any peoples. I simply noted that self-determination is one component of the international rules-based order.
For the record. I do not support the right to self-determination (ie, nationalism) in general, because 1. It has historically been the source of enormous levels of violence; and 2. It is essentially a con pulled by local elites on local commoners.
True, self-determination always co-existed with the sanctity of borders. This allowed America to apply whichever principle worked best for them.
Also, defections by American friends like Turkey were punished less severely than defection by non-friends like Russia.
I guess one could argue that there were not a lot of defections and these were still exceptions rather than the rule. But this is a much weaker statement and you could see how Putin would think that he's entitled to such an exception too.
Except where US states are concerned.
That makes no sense. The right to self-determination belongs to "peoples," not to states. In fact, the right to self-determination is defined as the right of a people (aka a "nation") to have its own state.
What is a "people"? Does "Florida" not count as a "people" just because it includes several ethic groups? Does the right to self determination only apply to ethnostates?
No, Florida is not a people. Floridians might be a people (ie, a nation) if they identified as such to a greater degree than they identified as, white, or black, or Christian, or what have you. But, empirically, that does not seem to be the case..
>Does the right to self determination only apply to ethnostates?
Obviously not: https://easysociology.com/sociology-of-identity/understanding-civic-nationalism-in-sociology/
See, eg, the United States.
The right to self-determination of the 'peoples' of the American South, and anywhere else in the US that tried it, have been and would be vociferously denied.
Which people of the American South? Some of the white peoples, yes. The ones permitted political agency. On the eve of the Civil War, the population of the states that made up the Confederacy was about 9 million, 60% white, 40% black. Presumably the latter group was almost entirely in support of the Union (certainly once ending slavery became an important goal of the war). If even a fifth of whites opposed secession, it is unlikely that a majority of the Confederate population supported it.
My understanding is that the hard part of making a nuke these days is getting enough plutonium or highly enriched uranium to make it out of, and the hard part of that for a decent-sized nation state with a good tech base is that it's expensive and hard to keep secret.
Uranium enrichment can be done either with centrifuge cascades, which require big facilities with lots of very specific precision-manufactured equipment, or with gaseous diffusion plants, which consume ungodly amounts of electricity. Building and operating either type of enrichment facility is doable if you don't care if it's secret or not, but it's a lot harder to keep secret from major national or international agencies that are keeping an eye out for that sort of thing.
And plutonium require access to spent fuel rods that have reasonable quantities of plutonium in them. A lot of the international nonproliferation regime goes into restricting which countries are supposed to be building the kinds of reactors that breed larger amounts of plutonium, and into keeping track of what happens to spent fuel rods from the reactors they do have. There are several countries (not exactly sure how many) that have inventories of spent fuel rods suitable for reprocessing and could probably withdraw from IAEA and start making bombs in relatively short order if they wanted. But this would be a very public action that would be likely to rather badly annoy other countries in the meantime.
Similarly, there are several countries that are not nuclear powers currently that have their own supply chains for reactor-grade uranium enrichment. Weapons-grade uranium is harder to make than reactor-grade, but it's more a matter of time and volume than of difference in what equipment you need to do it. And reactor grade enriched uranium can be used as a starting point for making weapons-grade, one which requires a lot less work than if you have to start from natural uranium.
The countries I've heard mentioned most often as being able to make nukes in short order if they decided to risk diplomatic ire (or if their superpower allies gave them to go-ahead to do so) are Japan, South Korea, Canada, Germany, and Brazil. Also, South Africa made a handful of nuclear weapons in the 1970s and disarmed in 1989 but still has the uranium in case they decide they need to un-disarm. I'm sure there are others. I don't know if Ukraine is on the list, but I suspect they are given that they have a bunch of active nuclear power plants.
Again, the issue is the lead time from being obvious that they're working on nukes until they have a bomb ready to go. I'm guessing at least several months, and more likely a year or two. The meantime would be very dangerous for them, since Putin would be extremely motivated to shut it down and might even threaten (or more than threaten) preemptive nuclear strikes. Also, unless the major NATO countries were all on board with Ukraine sprinting for nukes, things could get rather uncomfortable for Ukraine depending on how strenuously NATO countries object.
OTOH, if NATO countries were all on board with Ukraine getting nukes, things could presumably happen quite a bit faster. Probably not to the extent of outright giving Ukraine an American, British, or French bomb, but giving equipment and information could speed things up quite a bit.
Centrifuge cascades for uranium enrichment at nuclear-weapons levels are not all that big, and their manufacture is not all that specialized. And thanks to A.Q. Khan, everybody who has been paying attention knows how to do it. A major industrial nation like Ukraine is almost certainly capable of doing it in a generic warehouse attached to a generic industrial facility, with neither "OMG look at that big specialized facility in our satellite images!" nor "OMG look at all this highly specialized stuff they've been importing!" to clue in outsiders.
HUMINT or SIGINT could still reveal the program, so there would be some risk to Ukraine in following this strategy.
I was under the impression that Tom Clancy was raising the concern even earlier, in _The Sum of All Fears_ in 1991 (there's an afterword where he specifically does so), but now I'm reading that Khan was doing his thing as early as the mid-1970s. So now I suspect Clancy had Khan specifically in mind.
Clancy was almost certainly aware of Khan's work, though probably not the full scope. But note also that Clancy was also by his own admission futzing some of the details about how to covertly build atom bombs, even though he knew the cat was mostly out of the bag at that point.
So, raising the concern, yes, and also being a bit vague about what the concern was.
I just re-checked my source (Matthew Bunn's "Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work" videos on the Belfer Center's youtube channel, from 2013), and it turns out that he agrees with you and I misremembered what he said about size and ease of hiding: it was diffusion plants that he said were big and hard to hide in addition to their power requirements. He does talk about centrifuges being tricky to make and requiring both specialized materials and hard-to-obtain design knowledge and engineering expertise, but I can believe that being an outdated assessment now that Khan has let all the relevant cats out of the bag.
Thank you for the correction.
> My understanding is that the hard part of making a nuke these days is getting enough plutonium or highly enriched uranium to make it out of...
To be excessively pedantic, if you don't care about maximizing yield / wasting a lot of uranium then it's never been difficult to make a gun type nuke if you have enough enriched uranium. I'm not a weapons engineer or particularly handy and I could make one if Temu sold bulk weapons grade uranium.
The first time one was detonated was over Hiroshima; the design is simple enough that it wasn't worth using up scarce uranium to test it out, the Trinity test (the site is open twice a year - https://www.nps.gov/thingstodo/alamogordo-visit-the-trinity-site.htm - and is well worth visiting) was for the implosion design.
That more or less accords with my understanding. For a Little Boy style bomb, by far the hardest part is the uranium. And you need a lot of uranium: after Trinity succeeded, there was serious consideration given towards remanufacturing the Little Boy uranium into five-ish implosion devices.
There are a few fiddly bits that would make it a bit tricky to reliably build one in your garage. You need to know the critical mass. You need to have the equipment to cast and machine the uranium. You also need neutron sources (Little Boy used polonium encased in beryllium) in the right places to kick-start the chain reaction. During the Manhattan Project, the critical mass took some experimentation and theoretical work to determine and the neutron sources were a mild design challenge, but today I expect they'd be fairly easy for anyone with a decent physics background and the right materials. Similarly, I expect any machinist with a decent shop could read up on working with uranium and do the job of forming the shell and the plug.
Implosion devices are quite a bit harder, but nowhere near hard enough to pose a challenge to anyone with the resources to do the enrichment or reprocessing.
You don't actually need a neutron source to make a gun-assembly bomb; you just need a "locking" design where the gun projectile gets firmly stuck to the target rather than passing through or bouncing off. Spontaneous fission will give you a detonation fairly quickly, typically under a second IIRC.
And the rest, yeah, that's all at the level where a bunch of clever engineering undergrads in a university lab could do it as a side project. But implosion assembly is now widely understood at the level where a bunch of grad students and a professor could do it as a full-semester research project. It's going to take at least that long to enrich your uranium, and implosion assembly will give you maybe five times as many bombs per unit of enriched uranium.
Spent fuel rods are useless for getting weapon grade plutonium. A special reactor is needed, Chernobyl plant could do that, but Ukraine's operating plants cannot.
Spent fuel rods do not contain "weapons grade plutonium", but notwithstanding the name, "weapons grade plutonium" is not required for making nuclear weapons. At least one perfectly functional nuclear explosive device has been built and tested using the sort of plutonium that can be obtained from spent fuel rods. It's a very messy process that poses an enhanced risk of killing some of your technicians, but the Ukrainians almost certainly have the nuclear mojo to pull it off if they are desperate enough.
https://npolicy.org/greg-jones-americas-1962-reactor-grade-plutonium-weapons-test-revisited/
That sounds like a fun premise for a story, Ukrainian engineers secretly rebuild and re-activate the Chernobyl reactor underneath its vast concrete shell to build nuclear weapons.
I think you're overstating the case a bit. If you're a superpower that wants to make thousands of bombs, then you're going to design plants specifically for plutonium production to maximize the good isotopes (Pu239 and Pu241) and minimize Pu240 as the latter has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate and too much of it makes it much harder to prevent premature chain reactions that interfere with the bomb's yield. You also operate the reactor differently, reprocessing the fuel rods before they're fully spent because the Pu240 ratio increases the longer you use the rod.
But that doesn't mean spent fuel rods from power-generating reactors, even "proliferation resistant" ones, are worthless for weapons production. Normal operation for western civilian power-generating light-water designs gives you 20-30% Pu240 in your chemically reprocessed plutonium, which is a lot more than the 5-7% limit for US weapons designs in the later part of the Cold War. But you can still make a bomb out of plutonium with the higher levels of Pu240 if you're willing to accept a lower design yield (on the order of tens of kT) and a significant risk of fizzles (actual yield 1-2 kT).
You can also do isotope separation to reduce the Pu240 fraction, by the same principles as uranium isotope separation. The scale requires is a lot smaller, though: the thing that makes uranium enrichment a megaproject is that you're starting at 0.7% of the desired isotope and the amount of enrichment you get for a given amount of effort is proportional to the amount you start with. Going from 50-70% of the best isotope of plutonium for weapons (Pu239) to 90-95% would be orders of magnitude less work than enriching natural uranium (or even reactor-grade uranium, enriched to 3-5%) to weapons grade. In terms of proliferation risk, uranium that has been enriched even to 20% is in "why don't you just hand them a bomb while you're at it" territory.
The US does isotope separation on plutonium for other purposes: Pu238 is fantastic for radiothermal power sources like the ones used for Voyager and other long-mission space probes. The UK has historically used plutonium from reprocessed commercial reactor fuel rods for nuclear weapons in the past (not sure if they did isotope separation or just pulled the rods early). And North Korea kicked out IAEA inspectors and started reprocessing spent fuel from their "proliferation-resistant" commercial reactor around 2003. Although it sounds like they might have gone for the "small bomb and risk a fizzle" approach (at least at first) rather than attempting isotope separation, at least at first: their 2006 test was a subkiloton fizzle, while their 2009 test as a bit better (most estimates in the 2-10 kT range) and their 2013 and subsequent tests have mostly been in the tens of kT.
Good analysis. I don’t think Putin would do a preemptive nuclear strike, but would be able to shut down the program with conventional strikes. I don’t think that either Europe or the United States would consider it acceptable for Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. Ukraine had a government that was not particularly stable and had significant corruption, which is not the type of government one would like to trust with nukes. For the United States, it would be a close call whether Russia annexing Ukraine would be better than an independent Ukraine with nuclear weapons.
I agree that it's more likely than not that Putin would back down rather than use nukes preemptively on Ukraine. But I also think it's one of the scenarios where he's more likely to press the button, since "a country you're already at war with getting nukes" is generally a pretty terrible scenario that one should try to avoid at almost any cost. And the other alternative if Ukraine were about to get nukes and Putin couldn't prevent it with conventional weapons, that of making peace on Zelenskyy's terms or something close to them, might be a vastly preferable option for Russia as a nation to a preemptive nuclear strike and dealing with the fallout (both literal and figurative) of that, but it's less clear which would be the worse option for Putin personally and for the members of his inner circle.
Also inclined to agree that it's very unlikely that the US or other major NATO countries would want to see Ukraine with an independent nuclear arsenal.
I think that the terms of an armistice would be closer to "the current front line, perhaps with a bit of territory swapping" than "Zelenskyy's terms".
I mean, an Ukraine with a few nukes could plausibly nuke a few Russian cities in their region, while Putin can nuke every Ukrainian city and not even put a dent in his stockpile. Zelenskyy would hardly be in the position to get Crimea back. But Putin would not be in the position to conquer Kiev either.
Generally, a country getting nukes is not something other countries like. As a German, I would not want Germany (a relatively stable democracy) to get nukes, unless the alternative was a large scale conventional war. The risk of nuclear war scales with the number of nuclear armed countries, after all, and who knows how the political landscape will develop. A few stable countries spanning their retaliatory umbrella over smaller countries seems much preferable to everyone (with the noted exception of Trump).
Hindsight is 20/20. If Ukraine had started a nuclear weapon program after Crimea, I would have been the first to call them insane and paranoid. Putin would likely have tried to delay their program with conventional strikes, Israel style, and the West would not have lifted a finger to help them. But fighting three years of conventional war with Western support, only for the US to cut funding because he favors the way Putin dresses is not going to lead to a very favorable outcome for them.
> Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
Could the US be relied on to do that in 2014 when Obama was President and Russia invaded Crimea?
Could the US be relied on to do that in 2008 when Bush was President and Russia invaded South Ossetia?
(and so forth, I can't be bothered coming up with examples)
Could america be relied on to enforce the rules based order when it gave guns and training to islumic freedom fighters vs the soviets?
(I wonder what these rules are)
Today in "Well, At Least We Have a Free-Speech Friendly Administration Now" news: https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-6964107d218dba43eb995d6dbbe528b1
The guy led a group that physically attacked students for being jewish in support of a terrorist organization that tortures babies to death with their bare hands and then throws a parad over it. This is the most blatant case of "deport this guy yesterday" imaginable.
Even if he personally flew to Palestine to deliver guns to Hamas, you would still need a court order to revoke his green card. You don't just have ICE haul him off to a detention facility in Louisiana without telling his wife or his lawyer where he went.
Any due process violations the Trump admin gets away with against him, they'll do to other immigrants.
> Even if he personally flew to Palestine to deliver guns to Hamas, you would still need a court order to revoke his green card. You don't just have ICE haul him off to a detention facility in Louisiana without telling his wife or his lawyer where he went.
The precedent set by the Bush administration and upheld by all succeeding administrations is that due process doesn't apply to members of terrorist groups. It's not a good precedent, but it's the precedent.
There is a reasonable argument for due process violation, but this really is the least sympathetic guy to involve it for (unless Trump has never failed to do due process for anyone else, which I doubt).
>here is a reasonable argument for due process violation, but this really is the least sympathetic guy to involve it for
How so? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this guy has even spoken in favor of Hamas's terrorist activity? A lot of people in this thread are going a full step beyond asserting what ought to be proved: they're not even making the assertion, treating it as though it were a thing that Everybody Knows. Are any of you willing, at the very least, to make the assertion "Mahmoud Khalil has advocated for the terrorist activities done by Hamas" in so many words? Because otherwise you're just saying that this guy is unsympathetic because he disagrees with you (and the current free-speech-loving presidential administration) about the rightness or wrongness of the way Israel is prosecuting its war, which doesn't hold nearly as much water.
I suspect that's the point. When you want to break a norm and start violating a long-standing law, the smart approach is to pick an unappealing target.
I would be very happy to see him deported, but with due process, not willful abuses of power.
So something I'm genuinely confused by: (before this event) I've seen headlines claiming "Trump admin ramps up deportations by X% usingY questionable means". And when questioned on this the Trump admin claimed (a) we're just deporting violent criminals like <unsympathetic example>, and (b) everyone deportable is by definition a criminal (because illegal immigration is illegal), so really even the sympathetic sounding ones are similar to (a).
Given that they've already been ramping this up, feels like the media should already be full of stories of wholesome sympathetic people getting caught up in the crackdown, but I haven't seen any. Is it just because I haven't been following the news closely?
I think the actual numbers of arrests, while high compared to the previous admin, are still pretty small compared to the 7-digit scale they keep talking about. The NYT has some numbers here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/04/us/politics/trump-immigration-policies-deportations-data.html
... which suggest that nonviolent (and hypothetically sympathetic) detentions have increased, but not hugely. I would guess that that, combined with all the other news the admin is flooding the zone with, means there's no real space to cover this.
Just my guess, though. I think if the admin follows through on their plans you are going to see more sympathetic stories in the media.
> The guy led a group that physically attacked students
Citation needed.
Here you go
https://nypost.com/2024/08/31/us-news/columbia-antisemitism-task-force-details-student-assaults-targeting-after-oct-7/
I think you have been blinded by politics and are not really contributing value to this discussion -- one that has a natural tendency to become inflamed as is. I've reported you for your original message, since it's clear you do not have evidence.
You're being weirdly aggressive. I didn't cite every single fact because they've all been pretty widely reported, and I'm having a hard time believing you're disputing them in good faith (although it's possible if the media bubble has become even more polarized than I thought; certainly most mainstream articles about this guy's arrest aren't mentioning any of the background).
TBH I'm pretty disappointed in finding out you're like this, I liked your civ posts.
Look, I'm open to being proven wrong.
I just need you to show a single document or journalist who has said that Khalil specifically was either violent or openly supported Hamas. You haven't done that yet. And you don't get to hide behind "I didn't cite every single fact" -- we're all here asking for one, very specific fact, and you made an extremely inflammatory claim so the burden is very much on you here. If it's widely reported, this should be really easy for you.
In case it matters, I'm a Columbia alum. I'm very aware of what these kinds of groups are like, and what the culture of protest is like on campus. Your posts suggesting that this guy is a 'leader' of some sort rings hollow and uninformed. And in fact, the NYP link that you sent over as citation links to a 91 page Columbia report on the matter, where they say (somewhat deeply embedded):
"To be clear: CUAD [Columbia University Apartheid Divest] is a coalition of over a hundred student organizations."
The guy himself was quoted on CNN 8 months ago with the following:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Anti-Semitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace. “They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
I'm glad you like my civ posts, they're fun to write. I apologize if you think I'm being aggressive, but I report things that I think make this community worse.
That article doesn't name any individuals or groups doing the attacking, much less Mahmoud Khalil specifically. What you were being asked to document wasn't antisemitic activity at Columbia which I think everyone agrees happened, but the involvement of "this guy".
I said he led the group, not that he did it personally (I'd guess he probably did, but given they wear masks I agree there's no known proof of it). His group was the main group organizing these activities though.
> I said he led the group
What group? Which part of the article you posted talks about it?
He led the group that did the attacking? Why isn't that in the article?
The article that does mention him though was far from saying he was "the" leader. It sounds like CUAD is/was very much a hurriedly thrown-together group of fellow travelers without much hierarchical structure, and what influence he had within the group mostly came from the fact he felt more integrated into American culture which gave him the confidence to go out on a limb and talk with the media and administration on behalf of others. By the same token though, he had more to lose from getting caught doing crimes. Whether he is actually sympathetic to anti-Israeli violence or not, this doesn't sound especially like the profile of a guy who gets his hands dirty.
You do seem to be okay though with being in support of a terrorist regime that murdered a 6 years old girl with repeated tank shelling [1], what's up with that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab
While it's horrible that this particular person wound up dead, you have to wonder how many individual civilian casualties of wars wind up with their own massive wikipedia articles. You have to realise that you're being manipulated by propaganda, right?
Similarly, while it's horrible that Ann Frank died as she did, you do have to wonder how many individual non-Jewish casualties of war in Western Europe wind up with their own massive Wikipedia articles [1]. This must lead us to conclude that any attempt to use Ann Frank's death as argument or evidence against Nazis is transparent manipulation by Propaganda, right?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank
>The guy led a group that physically attacked students for being jewish
That's odd, I can't seem to find any evidence of Khalil even speaking in favor of physically attacking students for being Jewish, let alone participating in it or suborning it. Is there a news story to that effect, or police reports, or something, that is being hidden from us by the Woke Media, or am I just not looking hard enough?
>in support of a terrorist organization that tortures babies to death with their bare hands and then throws a parad over it.
That's odd, I can't seem to find any evidence of Khalil speaking in support of Hamas, or in favor of torturing babies to death, let alone providing them material support in doing so (such as weapons or actual acts of violence in their behalf). Is that evidence also being suppressed due to woke?
I ask because I notice that the DHS itself is not making any such explicit claim, instead relying on the extremely vague accusation "activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." So vague is that accusation that I would be tempted to wonder whether they simply mean that he is stridently critical of Israel and wants his school to divest from it--which would mean that every critic of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews would be "aligned to Hamas"--were we not speaking of the legendarily free-speech-loving, definitely-not-censorious Trump administration.
>This is the most blatant case of "deport this guy yesterday" imaginable.
Well, all r--but, wait. Something is amiss here. One thing I have constantly heard from free speech warriors over the last few years is that it's *really really important* specifically to protect speech that is controversial, disfavored, or even shocking. Facebook and Twitter banning accounts that were openly pro-Nazi, racist, or pro-rape was seen as an affront to the free exchange of ideas; and if you asked some free speech warriors, even violative of the First Amendment to the Constitution. When Zuck and (especially) Musk let those accounts run free again, a great cheer went up among supporters of free speech--not, perish the thought, because they agreed with Nazism or racism or rape, but because the sacred right to heterodoxy, even heterodoxy that shocks and offends, had been restored.
And of course, the government getting involved at all was especially outrageous to free speech defenders. One of them, in the comments section of this very blog, told me that to vote for Kamala Harris would likely usher in a dark regime of censorship, not because she had personally censored anybody but because she had failed specifically to condemn social media censorship *in Europe*.
That's, as I say, what I heard a lot of. But I don't hear much of it anymore! It's almost as though something had happened fairly recently that had caused a serious shift in the attitude of free speech warriors toward the US government attempting to suppress disfavored speech. I just can't figure out what that thing is.
Do you know of any incident that occurred, I don't know, maybe two months ago or so? that could have made the most zealous defenders of untrammeled expression suddenly get downright sanguine about the government going after people whose speech it doesn't like?
Of course! The ultimate goal of free speech warfare was all about "free speech for me and for thee."
If you don't care about free speech and think it is a bad thing, then what are you criticizing Trump and his minions for? Hypocrisy? They finally came over to your side on free speech and you think that's bad? You should be celebrating: "I voted for Kamala and hate Trump, but he's reversed his position on free speech, at least he's finally doing something right!"
>They finally came over to your side on free speech and you think that's bad?
My side? I'm not the one in this thread saying that lawful permanent residents of the United States should be detained, separated from their families, and sent overseas for advocating divestment from Israel.
"If you don't care about free speech and think it is a bad thing, "
This is a strawman position that very few people actually hold. I guarantee you most peoples' views on speech are at least *slightly* more nuanced than that.
For example, there are lots of people who are simultaneously highly skeptical of "free speech absolutist" claims, but still strongly against *the government* directly interfering with speech, which this is plainly, blatantly an example of. A lot of the debate over speech issues in recent years has been over how private platforms maintain and moderate their own spaces. This has absolutely nothing to do with that, and yet a lot of the people who previously took the position that even private platforms restricting speech was absolutely unacceptable seem...largely uninterested in direct threats to speech by the most powerful government in the world.
There are virtually no liberals who are strongly against the UK government's arresting people for social media posts, or were against Biden's coercion of social media companies to censor people. At least, there are none who hold these opinions strongly enough to actually voice them publicly.
There are many things I could say in response if I were willing to spare the time. But the to-the-point retort is that this is simply a "my opponents are murderists" style argument:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
If you think that the only reason that people with different politics than show different responses and levels of opposition to something that you construe as advancing Bad Outcome X is that they're secretly terrible people who want X to happen for it's own sake, you either lack a rich understanding of politics and human psychology, or have failed to apply it properly in this case.
(There's also some toxoplasma of rage thrown in there: you're far more likely to encounter and engage with opposition viewpoints that you find outrageous than those you find reasonable. That doesn't mean they're representative, much less monolithic.)
I consider myself more of a liberal-in-the-US-sense than not and while I'm not strongly against Biden having put pressure on social media companies (already far from a content-neutral speech environment) to moderate down dis- and misinformation that they were profiting from via engagement during a state of national emergency, lately I'm pretty much strongly against anything that happens politically in the UK by default.
Genuine adherence to free speech may be wrong in the eyes of the US left, but it's still a somewhat respectable kind of wrong, based on an unbending principle that is at least superficially noble and unselfish. Banning speech that should be allowed while allowing speech that should be banned is abandoning a kind of moral high ground and shouldn't pass unremarked.
It isn't just that liberals see that 'genuine adherence to free speech may be wrong.'
Liberals actively fought against free speech, demonized it, censored people as much as they could get away with in the private sector. Liberals declared free speech to be evil and fascist, Biden ran a secret censorship campaign to squash opposition to his authoritarian COVID policies, which when finally exposed is greeted with "yeah that was good actually." The ACLU went from defending Nazi parades to advocating for censorship. When confronted with the free speech disaster in the UK, where people are arrested often for innocuous social media posts, liberals are completely unfazed.
But now that the shoe is on the other foot, liberals suddenly see that free speech is 'at least superficially noble and unselfish.' Well isn't that convenient!
Liberals have burned down one of the most important pillars of democracy, which is absolutely unforgiveable. Trump is taking advantage and we will all suffer.
I do not understand this false equivalence. Did liberals ever detain or deport a green card holder for not being woke enough? Did they ever turn back a foreign scientist coming in for a conference because he criticized Joe Biden in personal texts with his friends? Liberals did not burn down the norm that the government can't punish people for their speech. You could more plausibly argue that they created a new norm of a kind of mob justice ("cancelling") that is wrong and bad, but those are not the same thing. No matter how bad cancelling got, no one who got cancelled by liberals was either deported or imprisoned. Please stop with this "the liberals did it first" stuff. They did not.
The US left supported a very strong version of free speech for quite a long time under the theory that the "marketplace of ideas" would seek and reinforce truth and bring moral and material progress to society, and that in the long run this would outweigh the downside of people's ability to smuggle anything from verbal abuse to barely-veiled threats under "just speaking my mind".
Fast forward to the era of increasing democratization of the media, and supporters of free speech saw people building circlejerky media silos to reinforce their preconceived notions and protect them from the corrosive influence of truth. It began to look less and less like honest discussions between people were responsible for the moral and intellectual progress that had been ongoing, and more that it had been a lucky effect of the right kind of people getting disproportionate control of the most effective platforms like movies, television and classrooms. This caused a massive loss of faith in the benefits of free speech and a focus on the abovementioned downside. The new generation of progressives were so insistent on the ills of free speech specifically because they wanted to convince their elders and contemporaries who shared most of their values. It certainly wasn't because they couldn't conceive of something *more* fascist than free speech!
The US right, on the other hand, hasn't actually supported free speech in living memory, the last decade included. It's important to get moderates, libertarians and so on to notice that the right isn't supporting the free speech of Nazis and Hamas sympathizers alike because of some high-flown principle that all speech, however abhorrent, must be protected, but that they are supporting the free speech of Nazis and *not* Hamas sympathizers because they legitimately think antisemitic white people are somehow more respectable than antisemitic brown Muslims.
I believe this meets the definition of Freud's concept of projection.
If you don't have a citation for this, I'm strongly tempted to report for being extremely uncharitable on three counts:
- it seems like a straight up lie that he physically attacked students
- support for an independent palestine is not the same as support for hamas
- 'tortures babies to death with their bare hands and then throws a parade over it'
Relatedly, does it change your opinion at all to know that groups dedicated to tracking antisemitism have basically nothing on the guy?
> support for an independent palestine is not the same as support for hamas
Maybe not, but I think it's incumbent upon those who support an independent, peaceful, Hamas-free Palestinian state that lives in peace with its neighbours to say the latter parts REALLY LOUD to distinguish themselves from the 99% of Palestinians who apparently just want to kill all the Jews.
If this guy hates Hamas so much then why isn't he busy criticising the Hamas supporters within his own organisation who were beating up Jews?
No, sorry, it's not incumbent on them to do that.
This is a ridiculous double standard, an isolated demand for rigor. This is the same as saying "well, it is in fact the responsibility of the average man to loudly proclaim that they are not, in fact rapists, and why isn't the average man doing more to stop sketchy creeps from sexually harassing people". Or, more to the point, it is the same as saying "well, anyone who supports Israel should loudly condemn all the bombings that Israel does, and spend their time criticizing Israeli organizations who beat up Palestinians".
Unfortunately I mostly think you are arguing in bad faith, based on your comments to me and others in this thread, and I'd ask you to please cut it out.
> This is a ridiculous double standard, an isolated demand for rigor. This is the same as saying "well, it is in fact the responsibility of the average man to loudly proclaim that they are not, in fact rapists, and why isn't the average man doing more to stop sketchy creeps from sexually harassing people"
I think a better analogy would be that a man who is involved in a "WOMEN DESERVE TO BE RAPED AND ALSO I LOVE SHRIMP" protest, who is just there for the shrimp and not the rape, should probably clarify this fact.
How many pro-Israel protestors @ Colombia or elsewhere clarify that they were not against Palestinian rights or for their murder by the IDF ?
No no no, you don't understand, 42 Jewish babies were personally killed by Khalil's bare hands every protest. Stop demanding evidence you antisemite jerk, Shaked just knows it in his heart of heart to be true.
no one was "attacked for being Jewish"
some people, undoubtedly, received harsh criticism for displaying the symbols of an apartheid regime that slaughtered people by the hundreds of thousands. As they very well deserved.
<apartheid regime
Seems like a misnomer: 21% of Israeli citizens are Palestinians, they have the same rights as everybody else. There are 11 Arabs on the Knesset as we speak, and 1 on the Supreme Court. Doesn't sound like apartheid to me.
sounds like the Tricameral Parliament to me
now look at the West Bank, which Israel also administers
He didn't lead the group, according to the article.
If "free speech" is really just supposed to mean "free speech, but only for people we like" then this is an excellent rebuttal. Otherwise it fails to address the complaint in any way whatsoever.
Yeah. It's relevant that these protests got genuinely violent and broke laws (both legally and arguably morally; this does still imply they should've filed charges before the arrest though.)
"It's relevant that these protests got genuinely violent and broke laws "
I'm going to object rather forcefully to the subject here. "Protests" are individuals, they do not have agency, they can not break laws. PEOPLE get violent and break laws.
That's an important objection here because your argument hinged on WHO "got genuinely violent and broke laws." Which individuals? In practice, of course, "the protests got violent" can describe anything from an actual riot to a situation where counter-protesters or even police start attacking people (who of course may then fight back). It tells me exactly nothing about where to assign responsibility, which (see previous) may not even belong with *anyone* in the protest group. So it is a far, far, FAR cry short of reasonable grounds to take legal action against *this specific individual.*
Did he attack anyone personally? Did he directly incite violence against anyone? Did he break other laws? Is there evidence? If none of those apply, then you're really just saying "well, I think he's a bad guy and that's reason enough." Which given the subject matter is absolutely corrosive to any sort of genuine free speech protection.
Did you miss the “physically attacked” part? Or is violence speech now? I have such trouble keeping up.
It doesn't look like Free Speech defenders are the ones doing the missing here, Mist.
Oh is this the part where we haul out the lowbrow sarcasm? Is snot champagne now? I have such trouble being sure I'm not on Shitter at the moment.
You're right, I shouldn't have stooped to sarcasm.
Still, agrajagain's comment seemed worthy of it. If their point was that Shaked Koplewitz was wrong to accuse him of actual violence, trotting out support for free speech doesn't seem on point.
If (and I confess I wasn't there) the disagreement was that he advocated violence, or indirectly supported violence, but did not actually perform any with his own hand, well, I trust you all supported Trump in January of 2021.
Well, I apologize for being so snotty in the way I
objected to your sarcasm. Arguments like the one you are having push *me* towards being irritable and mean, and about this issue I don’t even have an opinion yet — I’m still
wondering what *exactly* the guy did, and can’t find the info. In arguments like the one you’re engaged in I think 90% of what makes a difference
is opponents finding ways to weaken the illusion that those on the other side are hate-filled idiots.
When and where did this guy physically attack anyone? Where is the evidence that he did? Neither the article nor the commenter I'm responding to makes the claim that he did.
clipped from NYT
“Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, hasn’t been charged with any crime. A dossier on him compiled by Canary Mission, a group that tracks anti-Zionist campus activists, includes no examples of threatening or violent speech, just demands for divestment from Israel.”
The Canary Mission dossier:
https://canarymission.org/individual/Mahmoud_Khalil
Slight tangent but can anyone explain to me the concept of "Palestinian refugee camps"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_refugee_camps
Like, they've been there for decades at this point, how are they still "camps" and not just "towns"?
Most Palestinian refugee camps today are more permanent's settlements with concrete buildings, paved roads, shops, schools.
The areas continue to be officially designated as "camps" for several important reasons:
- Legal status: The term "camp" preserves their special status under international law
- Administrative distinction: They remain under the administration of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency)
- Political significance: The term maintains the temporary nature of the refugee situation in principle, reflecting the unresolved nature of the Palestinian refugee issue.
It's entirely possible that Khalil was arrested for e.g. materially and substantially disrupting the operations of Columbia University, which should not be considered a free speech issue. But if so, that should have been mentioned in the news article, and in the Presidential announcement/"warning".
There's a more detailed writeup at https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/10/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-university-israel-hnk/index.html ; and it does not look good for the Trump administration having thought this through and acting with proper respect to due process of law even if Khalil is guilty of something worthy of arrest and/or deportation.
Yeah a bad look for Trump. Free speech for me but not for thee... same old, same old.
You're not Trump's lawyer; don't give him new excuses.
> But if so, that should have been mentioned in the news article, and in the Presidential announcement/"warning".
Are you criticising the arrest for being unjustified or the journalist for doing a crappy job?
It sure would be nice if the AP could have been more specific than "helped lead". Could they spend five minutes scouring their own archives to see if they've reported on this person in the past so we can see what he's actually done?
I'm criticizing both the arrest (or whatever it's being called) and the AP journalist. Hence my citing the CNN story, written by a journalist who did an at least moderately professional job.
He’s not been charged in any crime. Again, not “not convicted” - not even charged. As much as I despise pro-Hamas student protesters, this is supposed to be a free country.
And oh he is a green card holder, married to an American citizen who’s heavily pregnant with their child.
This shit stinks to high heaven, and yes, anybody who thought Trump was “for freedom of speech” had been sold a rotten Trump Steak.
Aren't specific charges usually only brought up after arrest? Aside from Trump being a blowhard and saying a lot of provocative stuff (which is standard for him), this still seems consistent with that (and by all reports there's plenty to charge this guy with)
You may be right in a narrow technical sense. Technically, you aren't "charged" until the prosecutor files your paperwork, but at least here in the States, you do have to be ACCUSED of a specific crime at the time of arrest, which is listed on the officer's complaint.
Attempting to revoke a perfectly valid green card is something that would normally happen *after* conviction AFAIU.
Yes, I agree with this part being bad.
Yes when the suspect is arrested at the scene of a crime. Not when the suspect is arrested months after alleged crimes occurred. Back then he was charged with nothing.
Look, like I said, I despise these demonstrators who sided with evil. Of all times to protest for Palestine this was not the time. But if we only stand by our principles when it aligns with our preferences it becomes hard to look in the mirror. This is (well, used to be anyway) a free country, and we can only remain a free country when we protect the rights of unsympathetic people as equally as the sympathetic ones. You sure know the how "first they came for pro-Palestine demonstrators" story ends.
>Look, like I said, I despise these demonstrators who sided with evil. Of all times to protest for Palestine this was not the time.
How is protesting Israel's genocidal response [edit: or, if you prefer, Israel's totally reasonable response which some people misguidedly believe to be genocidal] to a terrorist attack "sid{ing} with evil," exactly?
Were the millions of Americans and Europeans who protested the Iraq war siding with evil? Were those protests despicable? Was that time Not The Time? What would have been the time--should they have waited until the war was over before protesting it? Do you reckon that would be a viable strategy for protesting wars?
Yeah, although given just how far the Overton window has gone (can you imagine how fast and harshly they would've responded if this had been KKK supporters attacking black people?), it's hard to get emotionally invested. But intellectually I agree with you on this.
If he had been, it would have been mentioned. Somewhere. By somebody.
Ruth Marcus resigned from WaPo today after her latest op-ed was killed. Fuck.
Pro-Israel shills be unironically whining about "Muhhh antisemitic tropes" while simultaneously celebrating this and making veiled threats against the people they can't win arguments against on the internet that they're next.
Bannable comment. Ewww.
Yeah? Well sorry to hear that. Feel free to continue scrolling.
Musk wants to remove from Xitter the ability of an algorithm to disagree with him: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix-x-after-polls-show-high-support-for-ukraines-zelenskyy
Free speech everywhere, but only for our people!
I'm not so sure that the Democratic party is not just a fundraising machine, and they just generate more revenue when they're against the ropes, simple as.
This isn't an original take, but it man it just feels more and more like this is true.
You seem to be under the impression that Democrats are interested in regaining political power. But the people running the party are interested in only two things: lifelong sinecures and blocking the left. They're very happy to collect paychecks and corporate donations as an "opposition party" that offers no substantial opposition, and giving up structural advantages to Republicans just gives them an easier time playing good cop.
This is an incorrect view of how democrats see things: they believe that they hold power regardless of who is office.
Ah, I wrote my comment before reading this. Anyway, yeah. :/
On the other hand, republicans seem to have an actual political project that members can rally behind. The parties really do appear to have a nice symbiotic relationship going.
Newspeak House is a doubleplusgood name.
ACX has had several threads on GLP-1 agonists such as semaglutide (Ozemic and Wegovy from Novo Nordisk) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound from Eli Lilly).
I have used semaglutide for 3.5 years and it has been a godsend for me. My weight has gone down 20%. My blood pressure is under 120 with half the medication I used to take.
The worst side effect has been in my bank account. The drugs have been very expensive. I started in 2021, paying ~$1330/mo for a box of 4 Wegovy injectors (you use 1 a week). That is ~$17,300/yr.
Medicare absolutely will not pay for weight loss drugs of any sort, unless you doctor can certify that you are diabetic, and I never was close.
After tirzepatide was FDA approved, the price of semaglutiude began to come down. In the last few months I have been paying ~$810 for a 4 week injector of Ozempic. But, that is still ~$10,500/yr.
Last week week there was more price relief. Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, created NovoCare Pharmacy which will deliver Wegovy to your home for a cash price of $499 per 4 pen package.
The service is for people who do not have insurance coverage for Wegovy, such as I. They are not dispensing Ozempic at this time.
This price represents a saving of $722 over filling prescriptions of Wegovy at my pharmacy and $312 over Ozempic.
In order to use the service your doctor must send a prescription for Wegovy to NovoCare electronically. More information is available on the program website:
https://www.novocare.com/obesity/products/wegovy/get-product.html
I understand that for most people, the drugs are still very expensive. But, the price cuts are a predictable result of a competitive market. As time goes on other pharmas will introduce more competitors. Also the patents will expire and there will be generics. The price will go down and more people will be able to use these drugs which will be very good for them.
Note: I will not use or recommend compounding pharmacies. The FDA has warned against them.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information-patients-and-providers/fdas-concerns-unapproved-glp-1-drugs-used-weight-loss. Nor I am interested in the opinions of Bobby Kennedy Jr. who I think is a dangerous lunatic, nor of anyone who thinks he is not a dangerous lunatic.
I got from 103 kg down to 88 kg thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orforglipron
I didn't even pay for it, because I volunteered for the medical research. :D
These things work like magic. They basically turn off the excessive hunger, and then keeping a healthy diet becomes *much* easier. So if you can afford them, definitely try them.
Did you eventually come off it? My big worry would be the inability to maintain the lower weight without taking some drug permanently.
I am still taking it; actually this is the last month. And yeah, I am worried, too.
Thank you for that info. I believe I am going to begin taking tirzepatide soon. Mine also will not be coved by insurance, and I believe I am going to try hacking the dosage system. It looks to me like all dosages of these meds cost the same: A 0.5 mg pen costs the same as a 2 mg pen -- is that right? So many are filling scripts for the large dosage pens, then removing the part that contains the drug and using a syringe to draw out only part of the contents. Using this system you can get 4 0.5 mg doses out of a 2 mg pen, while only paying as much as you would for a single 0.5 mg pen.
My understanding is that everyone begins these drugs on the low dose, so this system would be useful for the period of beginning the drug. But also, I looked into the research on the relationship between drug dosage and weight loss , and it appears that only going up to 1/2 the maximum dose of a semiglutide and taking that over the long haul produces almost as much weight loss as taking the full dose, and with fewer side effects.
Do you know anyone who’s doing this, or have any info about how it works?
Try this link: https://lillydirect.lilly.com/pharmacy/zepbound
Thank you! Why are they offering this deal, do you think? Zepbound users lose and average of 18% of their weight in the period when Ozempic users lose 12. And I think Zepbound is newer.
I see Hims dot com is selling some formulations. i don’t know if their prices are any better.
Please read the last paragraph of my post above.
I believe all the inexpensive formulations are by compounding pharmacies, and I'm pretty sure that by law their contents have to be different in some way from the drug sold by the company with the patent. I don't know how to get info about whether that's worth worrying about. Do you?
The price of Hims shares has gone down by half since the FDA recently declared the semaglutide shortage over. Compounding pharmacies have to stop now, or at least within two months. What made the compounding legal was the shortage, not a difference in contents. For tirzepatide, the FDA just won a court case against the compounding pharmacies after it declared the shortage over at the end of last year. Hims plans to sell liraglutide later this year, it is out of patent but has to be injected daily and has much less effect.
(But I have little medical knowledge here and follow this only as the Hims investment and trading story.)
Please read the last paragraph of my post above.
I did read it, and then I read the last FDA notice you linked. I expressed some skepticism about how worried to be in this post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/99476731
The FDA has a lot of agendas besides informing the public, and their notice really falls short of good information. I point out some ways they do that in my post.
There is a procedure by which compounding pharmacies can be inspected and certified and if I did use a compounded version of the drug I would only buy from one that has met that standard and been certified.
Sorry, no I don’t.
Here's the FDA notice about compounded versions: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information-patients-and-providers/fdas-concerns-unapproved-glp-1-drugs-used-weight-loss
I've got a fair amount of skepticism going on about how worried to be, though. For instance, they say some problems with using these compounded drugs have to do with dosage errors. The thing about compounded drugs is that most or all do not come in pens that give an automatic injection. They come in vials, and the user has to draw the dose they want out of the vial with a syringe. Doesn't surprise me that some users get confused or careless and draw up the wrong dose, but I am confident that you or I could do that accurately.
Then FDA says some people just choose to take more than the prescribed dose. Well we're not going to do that, right?
Then there's the thing about compounding pharmacies using a salt of the semaglutide. I don't know how much to worry about that. It was mentioned on here at some point, and someone who sounded like they knew what's what said that made no difference, because the semaglutide feel right off the salt molecule as soon as it hit the blood.
And then the FDA gives numbers in the 100's of adverse events reported for compounded semaglutides. But we don't know how many adverse events are reported for the prescription version. A fair number of people have quite unpleasant GI symptoms from these things, and contact their doctors about vomiting, constipation, bad heartburn, etc. Seems sleazy and sneaky of FDA to me for them not to clarify whether using a salt of the semaglutide is clearly a bad idea, or whether they merely have no studies proving that it works fine, and whether there are substantially more bad events for compounded semaglutides than for the prescription version.
> Seems sleazy and sneaky of FDA
If you expected anything else of them, that's on you. You should know better.
I didn't expect any better. But I reserve the right to be pissed off anyhow. The FDA hasn't done me any harm with that page, but they are feeding toxic pablum instead of nutritious facts to members of the public whose taxes pay them, and who don't have the skills and social network needed to zoom around and gather good info on their own.
I recall Scott being skeptical of the Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis, linking it to a manifestation of the prevailing theories of mind rather than being more intrinsic. I wonder if his views evolved since.
Another round of FAFO, who could possibly have known:
DJIA -1.93%, S&P 500 -2.73%, Nasdaq -4.18%, TSLA -13.56%
Watch live stream here: https://www.wsj.com/market-data
I sought out this thread to check in on the state of steel-manning this.
I doubt this is a surprise to the Trump team...there's been plenty of allusions to an initial difficult/shock phase to the economy in the interest of long term economic health.
I'd really like to understand more about Trump-II economic thought / why this is good actually. Of course I'm being flippant here, this might be terrible but I do want to understand the motivation and justifications.
I would very much like to see three links to the "plenty of allusions to an initial difficult/shock phase to the economy" from Trump or his people dated BEFORE Trump's inauguration, or at most, the first week after. Then maybe we can try to steel-man this. Otherwise we really have nothing to use as a starting point.
I don't think anyone was predicting a shock phase, but it was very common to believe that the stock market was overvalued relative to the 'real' economy prior to Trump taking office, so it would be easy to believe anything that would rattle investor confidence would cause this.
Look, I don't care about what "anyone" predicted, or if the market is overvalued, which it has been since roughly 2012 and which has not prevented it from going up with only brief interruptions under three presidents. The poster made a specific claim about "plenty of allusions" from Trump people and I want to see those. I don't recall Trump running on giving the nation a shock therapy, everything was going to be tremendous from day one. But let's see if captainclam comes up with anything.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/economy-if-trump-wins-second-term-could-mean-hardship-for-americans-rcna177807
It looks like Musk definitely did say this, so I guess I saw this a while ago and have just been proceeding under the assumption that it was an understood-but-less-broadcast aspect of their economic policy. So you're right, there have not been "plenty of allusions" among the actual Trump team.
That was a really minor point though, I'm just curious about any defenses of the trajectory we're on.
Thanks, this gives us something to go on. The charitable view is that Musk genuinely believes the national debt to be such a crisis that it requires an immediate drastic action - shrinking government significantly, which creates short-term pain. Of course this is patently wrong, the debt load is higher than maybe I'd like it to see, but nothing was flashing red in Nov. 2025. But Musk appears to be uninterested in economic data and seems to have no idea about how modern monetary system functions, so there.
Trump just seems to like tariffs. I really struggle to steel-man this one.
If you want to see the most delicious thinly veiled demure cope this side of 2025, go to r/Conservative and see the responses to "Do you really regret voting for Trump?".
Such timeless gems as "I ain't no regret not voting for Kamala, but man my 401K hates me", my brother in Allah, you are being royally fucked in the most intimate financial sense possible and all you can still think about is some woman living rent-free in your head for close to a year? You probably deserve this.
I'm, however, overflowing with sympathy towards those who didn't vote for the orange scum. One more reason why Small is Beautiful and the small-scale asteroid-nations of outer space will be glorious.
> all you can still think about is some woman living rent-free in your head for close to a year?
Your comment makes sense in a different context but not this one.
While at some point, "Kamala would have been worse" ceases to be a good justification for whatever Trump is doing, you're literally talking about a thread where people are asked if they regret voting for Trump over Kamala. Bringing up Kamala is entirely reasonable.
The problem is not bringing up Kamala, the problem is bringing up Kamala while their pension funds are being wiped out, and then insisting that Kamala was still a bullet dodged and that this is worth all the money being wiped out by the moron they elected over Kamala.
"Rent-free" is not supposed to imply that Kamala shouldn't exist in their mind at all, it's supposed to imply that her priority should be lower than the one we can infer from the comment.
It's entirely reasonable to be bothered by Trump's actions, morally, financially, whatever, and still think that him being president is preferable to Kamala or another Democrat. You just have to think that Kamala would have been worse. It's also entirely within scope to think that taking some financial pain is worth gains in other areas, for instance if you really care about the trans debate or other culture war features.
The DJIA is up 6.87% for the last twelve months. It's down 1% since the day before election day. It's 7% off the all time highs of January. This is not a "wipe out".
People will suffer 100X to protect their identity, and if the identity is "liberals bad", then...
While I don't expect Trump's policies to be good for the economy, and while stocks going down is at least minor bayesian evidence for recent news being bad news for business, I would be very hesitant to draw strong conclusions from stock prices changing by a few percent on a particular day. Stock prices go up and down all the time for lots of reasons.
If this turns out to be the opening phase of a major bear market, then stronger conclusions could be drawn from that, but today is too soon to tell.
Oh I think it’s well on it’s way over the last few weeks. 4% in one day (NASDQ)
Is a lot; today is the beginning of the great puke in my opinion. Then a buying opportunity… god willing
The S&P 500 is down about 8.5% from the all-time high (February 19). 20% is an official bear market, so we're well on our way if trends continue. We usually have one of those every few years. We'll see how things go this time.
Yeah, we will. Trump is attempting a major reorganization of the US economy, and by extension the global economy, and he’s coming at it pretty hard. This is more than just cyclical I think. It’s a big shift and a lot of things are going to fall off the shelf.
Yeah, while I was staring at work-related screens Nate Silver published a timely take on the topic: https://www.natesilver.net/p/will-wall-street-turn-on-trump-and
From that article;
Investors seem to have underpriced the instability this would create and the political realities of how other countries would respond:
I could not agree with him more
I think a lot of people were in a complacency bubble from his first term, and, as that idiotic expression went, took him but not literally. Well….
Yeah. I think there’s still a goodly amount of people who still are, which is what we’re seeing start to fall apart in the markets in my opinion. I am starting to smell realization and panic in the air.
This a nuanced situation. Generally one should ignore daily fluctuations of stock prices and think of them as kind of Brownian motion/noise process. However, occasionally some big "new" understanding gains an avalanche-like velocity where human market participants react with enough money to make things move, reflecting their understanding of the situation. In this case, we can view markets as sending a signal. The signal may be short-lived, or it may start some prolonged trend, but a non-random signal it is nonetheless.
As you can probably tell, this view straddles "random walk" and "actual humans act" models of market behavior.
So how do you tell the two apart? If you have to bring in some form of outside knowledge to distinguish, say, the current 8.5% drop from last summer's 8.5% drop, I doubt that "signal" is the right word for it.
This is where we have to look at the underlying causes. Bayesianism is of no help here, we have to understand the driving mechanism. Was it a technical glitch? A fat-fingered options trade? A significant new information coming to light? The "outside knowledge" is important to understand this.
Markets reflect a sum of individual actions of millions of participants, both human and machine. Most of the time, the actions lack an over-arching driving force, resulting in random(ish) behavior. But sometimes an over-arching force shows up and suddenly correlations go to near 1.
OK, but then it's not clear what informational value is being added: it seems to reduce to "the markets can alert us to a problem, provided we already know there's a problem."
I'm not sure I follow. The informational value varies with each case. Sometimes all it does is tell us, huh, market participants think trade wars are bad and push "sell" button really hard. Sometimes you investigate and find out that an options trader entered account number into the dollar amount field, clicked away every warning message because those always pop up, and triggered an avalanche of selling. Sometimes there isn't any specific cause one can identify. Etc. etc. etc.
There's no universal recipe, one has to look.
Fair enough.
Q: How many Zizians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: At least two (one left hemisphere, and one right hemisphere), and the light bulb will end up broken... but that's okay, because for complicated game-theoretic reasons there is now more light in a parallel universe, and the electron-eating light bulb deserved it anyway.
One, they assassinate the landlord, ending up in jail and spawning 69 essays in the NYT and WaPo about how Rationalists are the evilest cult to ever exist after Christianity officially became a religion.
Very good take!
The government turns off social media and streaming one day a week every week, say Friday evening to Saturday evening. What happens to society?
Depends on how broadly construed the category "social media and streaming" is. If it's just the major platforms (say, Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, etc), then it might be fine. If it's a huge chunk of the entire Internet, people would probably riot.
I would go for a nationwide power grid shutdown once a week, or maybe once a month, on Sundays at 9pm, so we can all see a Bortle 1 sky routinely (what the night sky looks like with no light pollution).
Government is sued for lost profits.
they turned many businesses "off" on sundays to attend church and tv stations signed off every day 40 years ago, and honestly i don't think people of that generation would say it was a bad thing.
omnipresent media isn't always a total blessing, and one could argue we need more distance from
information these days.
It adjusts.
Crippling riots, purge/luigi voilence killing those responsible and most people do it without phones so the cia spying network gets a unplanned for stress test
>and most people do it without phones
Oh I see, this is a fantasy story. Anyone getting violent over the Internet being down has their phone attached directly to their heart.
?
You didnt think that thru; if you know the internet is down for 24 hours (and its a the governments spy device), your going to leave it home; its a fucking brick without the internet.
*I* leave the phone as far away from myself as I can, because I view it as a necessary evil. *These people* will carry it with them to their crimes, in the addict-riddled hope that it will reconnect somewhere along the way.
I feel your underestimating the rationality of violent actors
No, you are overestimating the violence of rational actors.
Wishful thinking.
shhhh no Im cynical and mysterious; Ive never had hope ever.
People used to enforce laws before the internet too
3d printed guns and drones will be newer then the ye old wild west sheriff(who was mostly a myth anyway)
They are complaining about "ghost guns" with their buy backs working and free access to porn(which decreases all forms of rape) and other young male sedatives. A sudden declaration ont stop addiction on the governments time table and withdrawal often includes worse behavior then the baseline.
Oh and its not like there hasnt been city crippling riots.
There would be no way to know, since social media and streaming are turned off.
If it was just social media, people are immediately happier and the policy has widespread support. In a year there are measurable positive social outcomes.
I would hear about it on the news I suppose.
This blog could be considered social media adjacent at least but it is as close as I’m willing to get to that steaming pile of junk.
Immediate rebellion due to an arbitrary and capricious violation of freedom of speech / freedom of the press, which does not inhibit the ability to coordinate resistance via same?
Running with the sense of the question, though, I don't think we see much change. Whatever the impact of social media and streaming on our society, I'm pretty sure it's durable enough that a day a week isn't enough time to change it. People post on Saturday night about how #productive their #disconnectday was, along with their backlog of sexy pictures. Advertisers throw a minor fit but adapt. These are fundamentally stay-at-home activities, so I think we see an uptick in other stay-at-home activities. Sale of pulp novels increases. People watch more TV. (Does YouTube count as social media?) Streamers move anything planned on Saturday to Friday afternoon, Saturday night, or Sunday. I don't know what happens to video game sales.
Basically I think it would slow down social media use about as much as the Sabbath prevents Jews from cooking: sure, you're not doing it on the day itself, but there are workarounds.
Where to look for an EA-aligned job search?
I recently moved to the Bay Area (Berkeley) and have been looking for work. My background is in development economics (have an MA, left a PhD program without the degree), and I've done almost nothing except academic economics work so far in my career. So I can do some data analysis and have a very good grounding in economics and academic tasks. I also love writing and my ideal job would be research-adjacent or policy-based (e.g. GiveWell, GiveDirectly, both of which I've applied to), but as a start I want to try to cast a wide net. I have good teaching credentials at the college level and have written op-eds on foreign policy matters, both of which are avenues I'm exploring as well. My main hits so far have been through idealist, and I've posted on the EA forum and signed up for 80,000 hours 1-on-1 advising.
Feel free to DM me with thoughts of where to look! Thanks in advance!
International development has been undergoing a slow (and recently very rapid) decline for a long time. Do you have an area or region of specialty or was it just general development economics? Do you have contacts or languages? To be honest, often the answer right now is going to be doing development work (that is, fundraising). There's not many new jobs.
Find social events or paper / poster days or public workshop events at Lightcone, it's pretty dense in superconnectors
80,000 hours job board, but maybe you've already done that.
I've recently attended a local "ecstatic dance" event. At each one, someone mentioned valuing "sovereignty." I'm not quite sure what they mean. It occurred to me that they might mean something like "sovereignty of the individual" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ownership), but that concept seems to flow from classical liberalism, and my spidey sense is that the sovereigntists were not classical liberals -- I was getting strong hippy-dippy vibes. Can anyone shed light on what they might have meant by "sovereignty"?
I spent many years volunteering at a large local arts center in the city I grew up in. I myself am a musician but I got to meet a wide array of different artists in all kinds of areas, both local and traveling. From my observations the people involved in the different types of avant garde dance were hands down the oddest people of the group. The best one I remember was a group that refused to refer to what they did as "dance" trying to compose a flyer to get people to come watch them without describing it as "dance" at all. They also did an interview on the local NPR station where they kept correcting the host when they tried to use the d-word.
edit - a downthread comment reminded me of what they picked for the flyer "Bodies. Space. Motion."
You own and are in charge of your own body and self
Sovereignty of the self
For hippies, this translates contextually as 'strong vibes of complete respect for bodily autonomy of (at least) humans in the space, affirmed verbally'. Pattern match to express consent in BDSM scenes, actual anarchists, and safety-conscious scenarios like preparing to parachute or dive.
So it's a fancy hippie way of saying "please don't feel anyone up while dancing"?
(Note: I'm not making fun of them for using fancy in-groupy terms for easily understood concepts, Lord knows that this is a helluva glass house to sit in while throwing that particular stone...)
> So it's a fancy hippie way of saying "please don't feel anyone up while dancing"
No, it’s saying, please be in tune enough with yourself and your partner to know when it’s OK.
I suspect it's just a new way to say "bodily autonomy"
I think unlikely, given the event OP was at, which is the kind of event where establishing clear protocols around touching other people is pretty standard. If they were talking about vaccines, taxation, child support, or the Evils of Government, more likely.
I asked ChatGPT o3-mini-high
>What fraction of "sovereign citizens" are embroiled in legal disputes at any given time, and how does that compare to regular citizens?
and it responded:
It’s difficult to pin down an exact percentage because there isn’t a comprehensive, nationwide study that tracks legal disputes among self‐identified sovereign citizens. Most of what we know comes from law enforcement observations and anecdotal reports rather than systematic research.
What We Do Know:
Sovereign Citizens’ Litigious Behavior:
Sovereign citizens adhere to a fringe ideology that often involves rejecting government authority and, as a result, they tend to engage in legal actions—frequently filing lawsuits or presenting “paper terrorism” in court. Experts and law enforcement agencies have noted that, relative to their small numbers, sovereign citizens are disproportionately represented in court filings and legal disputes.
Comparative Estimates:
Although numbers vary widely, some experts have suggested that among those who actively identify with the sovereign citizen movement, a substantial fraction (in some cases, anecdotal observations imply that many—even a majority of the active participants—could be involved in one legal dispute or another at any given time). In stark contrast, studies of the general population indicate that only a small percentage (often estimated roughly between 1% and 5%) of regular citizens are involved in ongoing legal conflicts.
The Caveats:
– The movement is decentralized, and its adherents are not tracked by any official registry.
– “Legal disputes” can cover a wide range of actions, from minor filings to major court battles, and definitions vary between studies or reports.
– Most available data is based on localized observations or law enforcement assessments rather than rigorous, peer-reviewed research.
In Summary:
While exact figures are elusive, sovereign citizens are known to be much more likely to be involved in legal disputes compared to the general citizenry. Whereas only a small fraction (around 1–5%) of regular citizens might be embroiled in ongoing legal conflicts at any given time, a much higher proportion of active sovereign citizens—perhaps even a majority—could be engaged in such disputes. However, these figures should be viewed as rough estimates rather than precise measurements.
Good little indoctrinated Ai
They asked ChatGPT the legal fiction, when they should have been talking to .:ChatGPT:. the intelligence on the land.
Is the benefit of taking SSRIs higher or lower than average in cases where the cause of a depression is known and present in the subject's life, such as difficulties in their primary relationship?
Maybe the right thing to do is to fix the problem in your relationship but maybe that problem has so depressed you that you lack the neurochemical reserves to do it. Seems to me that an SSRI could help a person in that circumstance.
Psychologist here. I'm not sure anybody knows. It doesn't seem to me like what's in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) makes it possible to distinguish between chronic unhappiness in response to a longstanding bad situation and chronic unhappiness due to some brain quirk that's correctable with a nudge from a drug. The distinction may not even be all that meaningful for most unhappy people. Problems that seem insoluble and soul-crushing to a depressed person might seem either soluble or no big deal to someone in good spirits. Still, my advice would be for you to start by trying to solve the relationship problem, and think of SSRI's as a fallback. My impression, from seeing many people take SSRI's, is that on average they help some but are very far from being a magic bullet.
Besides trying to turn Russia away from its alliance with China, is there any other reasonable explanation for the Trump administration geopolitical strategy regarding Russia and the EU? IMO the only one that seems reasonable is that the MAGA movement sees the EU (and most of its member states bar Hungary and a few other former Eastern Bloc countries maybe) as "beyond saving" because they have become "degenerate" etc. and are basically the main enemies of MAGA now that the Democrats are weak in the US, which means that the EU and most of its members need to be fought (if not militarily at least economically and culturally) and thus the US needs to ally with Russia to subjugate the EU. Does this make sense from an "NRX " perspective?
So coming back to this thread I started more than a month ago, I am still not completely convinced by any of the arguments. But I tend to lean most towards the explanation that it's mostly about "culture wars", with the EU seen as an extension of the American "liberal" establishment, and possibly even as a "betrayer of Western culture" by most of MAGA, while Russia is seen as having more in common in terms of values with MAGA and the various other movements on the right that support them. Thus, the acrimony between MAGA and the EU and the "bromance" between them and Russia.
My steelman:
The Ukraine is not winning the war and wont win the war. Better to halt the death and destruction now than throw more bodies on the fire.
Russia is not nearly the threat that they have been portrayed as. While not good guys in any sense, they represent only a minor threat to Europe, and that threat is mostly due to nukes. Therefore, it makes no sense to continually treat them as enemies as that only increases the chance that they will end up using their nukes or generally become a threat.
Europe doesnt like any of this so they should fund their own wars and defense. They are big economies now, if they cant manage to pay for their own defense, then they dont get to call the shots.
How do you propose to halt the death and destruction? Vladimir Putin isn't finished with all the killing and destroying he set out to do, and anything that suggests the US might not keep supplying Ukraine with weapons will make "I can still get all that killing and destroying I want done" seem even more appealing to Putin than it was six months ago. When, as you may recall, he was still very much up for a lot more prolonged killing and destroying.
I propose a truce, plain and simple. If Putin doesnt go for it or breaks the treaty, we can deal with that. I dont buy the arguments that there is nothing we can do because Putin is max evil and wont stop until something something. This war has been costly for Russia as well. Peace is worth pursuing for everyone.
It's not clear what you mean by "truce", but I'm guessing it's something like an immediate cease-fire on present lines. Putin could probably have had that any time in the past two years, so it's unlikely he would go for it now. But I'm more curious as to your "we can deal with that" part. If Putin simply says "no", how do you imagine us dealing with that? And why haven't *we* done that in the past two years?
Bringing the war to an end after three years is a worthwhile goal in itself. Long drawn-out wars can destabilize the world order and brutalizes the people fighting it (which is part of the destabilizing risk).
...clearing away a main obstacle for a future realigment with Russia can be considered an extra bonus.
I don't really model the current administration as having strategy in any meaningful sense. It has "whatever sounds good to Trump today" which its various advisors, hangers-on and allies try to spin into a coherent narrative to make it sound strategic.
An even moderately-competent strategic thinker wouldn't be trying to push strongly forward on an extreme shift in foreign policy, an extreme shift in trade policy and multiple extreme shifts in domestic policy all at the same time: each of these efforts is interfering with the others. They'd instead prioritize by either the most urgent or the easiest win and lay lower-cost groundwork for the others while working on that. Trump's actions around the tariffs, for example, are shockingly poorly timed at achieving either of their obvious goals. If they were about diplomatic pressure he should have focused narrowly on one or two countries at a time until he got what he wanted. If they were about restoring U.S. manufacturing, he should have started with positive incentives (tax breaks or subsidies) to get companies actually building manufacturing capacity, with a promise of increasing tariffs around specific industries to make sure it would be profitable: slapping on sky-high tariffs before anyone can possibly shift production is *highly* counterproductive.
Similar with foreign policy, I think if "ally with Russia and turn it away from China" were a real goal being pursued with even a moderate level of strategic thinking, it would look pretty different from this. Laying actual groundwork before turning on a time and alienating a bunch of longtime allies seems like a bare-minimum precursor. As it is, I'm sure Russia is very happy to see the coalition arrayed against them splintering, but I can't see how or why it would give them any reason to break with China. They can just take the free gift and keep on doing like they've been doing. Driving a wedge between allies usually involves offering something that's good for one and bad for the other and requires at least some amount of commitment. Not something that's helps one substantially without it having to lift a finger, while being neutral-to-slightly-positive for the other.
I definitely think this is a good explanation...Trump seems to be just very impulsive and likes to be flattered. I guess it worked in his previous role in real estate etc., so he probably thinks it works in politics (both domestic and international) too...
Even in real estate it only works when you have long moments of overwhelming leverage (like in Trump Tower) so you can agree to a bad deal impulsively then "change the deal" just as impulsively at a time the counterparty can't do anything about it.
He thinks of the EU as Democrats, and Russia as a Republican faction to try to convert: he's simply applying his model of domestic politics to foreign policy.
Forget about "other reasonable explanations"; I'm not seeing how the administration's geopolitical strategy can reasonably be expected to turn Russia away from its alliance with China. That seems to me basically an underpants-gnome level master plan. Every reason Russia has for allying with China will remain even after a Trumpian "peace" deal in Ukraine, and I haven't seen Trump propose anything that would significantly change that.
I understand that Trump has said that he *wants* to turn Russia away from its alliance with China, but wanting is not a strategy. The strategy part seems to be missing.
It can't hurt to try, it's not like the US is gaining anything from antagonising Russia. And Russia would benefit from restoring it economic ties to Europe and the US, and for cultural reasons has wanted closer relations with the West since 1991, or at least not be rebuked. Also if you're a strategically significant medium sized power in a contest between two great powers it's often a good move to play them off against each other.
I don't think it's unimaginable that taking a more diplomatic approach now could nudge Russia towards a more neutral stance in China-US confrontation. Even if there's a chance the relationship might be irreparably damaged and Russia's material interests favour aligning with China.
OK, but where is the "try"? Wanting is not trying. Hoping is not trying. Wanting and doing something unrelated to Russia's core reasons for maintaining an alliance with China, hoping that this will pull Russia away from China, is not trying. In order to meaningfully *try*, you have to have a strategy by which specific actions are expected to lead to specific results.
Where is that?
Plan for befriending Russia:
Step 1.) Stop fighting a proxy war on Russia's border.
Step 2.) ?????....Probably just step 1 is a good start but otherwise also do normal alliance building stuff like saying nice things about them, cooperating with them and appealing to their cultural desire to be accepted back into to the european and european descended community.
Step 3.) Profit, and avoid adding a european theatre to the upcoming third world war.
If their desire to be accepted back into the European and European descended community was strong enough to actually change their behavior they wouldn't be advertising an intention to genocide a European ethnicity right now.
Russia was treated as a pariah since well before the Ukraine war. And I think that pariah status and general Western hostility were major causes of the war in the first place. The Russians view the war as retaliation in a relationship that's already spoiled.
Step 1: Throwing Ukraine to the curb. In progress.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Step 2: draft some kind of new deal for who gets what influence in the middle east / Africa that benefits big players at the expense of small ones. The biggest obstacle = Turkey, probably.
I'll have a go at steelmanning it.
The Trump world view is all about making deals. The geopolitical landscape isn't about good guys who are our friends and bad guys who are our enemies, it's about the US versus everyone else, and the US's responsibility to itself is to make advantageous deals with the other players.
This means treating the other players more or less equally; no more special treatments for traditional friends or traditional enemies, the only question is: what can you do for me today? This is jarring if you're still looking at things through a friends-and-enemies lens, if you see friends and enemies being treated in the same way then it feels like the US is suddenly favouring its enemies over its friends, but really it's just shifting towards treating them more consistently.
Is this a good idea? Maybe. On one hand, the moralistic "good guys vs bad guys" narrative of international relations has led the US into many bad wars. It has also led to a situation where the US is arguably being taken advantage of, subsidising the defence of Europe while countries like half of NATO refuses to pay for its own defence. A third point against it would be that the good guys vs bad guys narrative was barely more than a hypocritical fig leaf to begin with, e.g. why sanctions against Cuba but not China?
I think the most generous interpretation is that he wants Europe to pay its own way for it’s protection from Russia, and the USA will remain an ally on those terms.. I think the worst possible interpretation is that he doesn’t want Europe as an ally anymore and will actively help to beat it down and dominate it. But first, Canada…
There is nothing wrong with taking a generous interpretation, but it still has to fit the evidence in the first place, which I don't believe yours does. If all Trump wanted was to "encourage" Europe to do more for their own defence, he could have done so without throwing them under the bus.
For example, he could help Ukraine win the war to solve the immediate crisis, preserve the US leadership role, and THEN retreat US troops from EU territory or whatever drastic measure he wants to take. That way, Europe knows just as well that it has to prepare for the eventual Russian recovery on their own and what's at stake if they don't.
>For example, he could help Ukraine win the war to solve the immediate crisis
This would require direct US attacks against Russia, effectively World War 3. The world looks very different on the other side of it.
How so? Ukraine has been punching way above their weight for 3 years without that kind of support. They have 400k soldiers on the frontline and another 400k in reserves against 700k Russians on the front. They just need the weapons to properly arm these men. That's all the help they've been asking for from day 1.
Weve given them something like 170 Billion dollars in aid. How much more money for guns do you think they need?
They don't need "money for guns", they just need guns. We've got plenty of guns sitting in warehouses that we're never going to use, that we haven't gotten around to getting rid of mostly because safely disposing of unwanted munitions costs more than just posting a guard on the warehouse
Indeed, most of the "money for guns" that has been sent to Ukraine so far, is just the book value of guns we've already paid for and are never going to see that money again, but federal law and accounting standards require it be bookkept as an "expense".
We've also paid for some new guns (well, missiles) that Ukraine particularly needs, but that's a small fraction of the total and it mostly goes to rebuilding the American arms industry and and providing American workers with manufacturing jobs. And a bit was sent out as actual money to buy old stockpiles of ex-Soviet ammunition that Ukraine can use but we don't make; that is I think an insignificant part of the total.
Punching above their weight is not the same as winning.
Did I say that?
well there's all kinda ways to skin a cat. I don't lean to the most generous interpretation much myself but I thought I would offer it up.Just because you would do it differently doesn't mean he isn't doing it his way. I lean towards my darker interpretation personally.
Surely this way is much more effective. Whatever he does can be undone in 4 years, the Ukraine war might last that long itself and once it is over the urgency will be gone.
The Ukraine war is quite unlikely to last that long. I am morbidly curious as to your plan for undoing the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Ukraine in 2029.
The anti-EU sentiment of late may be driven by the EU being complicit in censorship campaigns, as NS Lyon wrote: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/vances-real-message-to-europe-give
From an (western) european perspective, the term 'censorship' here is very debatable.
US and (various) EU views on free speech are culturally quite different but even then I'm under the impression that there are a few misunderstandings.
AFAIK there is only one *opinion* you cannot publicly *promote*, which is holocaust denial, and even then you'll probably never end up in jail for it, unless you make it a long and repeated personal crusade (those guys end up with probation and, sometimes, a few months).
Governements are also enforcing anti 'hate speech' laws, yes, but in the specific understanding of the term being " *Public* speech that expresses *hate* or *encourages violence towards* a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation".
One can still pretty much yell any of their wildest takes online or on national TV, publish it in a 12 volumes essay if they can provide a few simili-arguments, and even create, raise and fund a political party targeting their issue if they're smart enough to look rational and polite.
The only 'censorship' we have is the same as in every free country : it's cultural.
Journalists will refrain from allocating too much space and time to ideas they consider too far from reasonable debate, people will frown upon things socially discouraged, and more or less be open to new strange ideas.
All of this is just a complete mess because we're all so networked now, always asked to form an opinion on everything despite being built for quick decision-making based on inferences.
As for 'fact-checking', well the idea is to present FACTS and sources to enable a rationalist approach of debates, but of course the result is not exempt of sociological bias from the media - any media - and need caution and adjustments. But I cannot remotely understand how this could hurt US tech companies... EU asked for comments moderation and respect of the aforementioned laws, as they do with any EU based media. They never asked for political alignment.
Another common narrative here is that what's 'hurting' the tech giants is that EU is way more careful and protective (doesn't mean in any way it's enough btw) about it's citizens personal data, and that it annoys the sh** out of the GAFAMs - we still name them like that here, but 'Broligarchy' and/or 'Techno-Barons' are gaining traction.
The only opinion I have about that atm is that I'm nowhere near being able to write this on EU built computer and that it's a shame.
I don't think your description of what it takes to be convicted of hate speech in EU countries fits what happened to Jussi Halla-Aho, who is a public intellectual and a leading politician (currently the Speaker of the Parliament) and who was convicted by the Supreme Court for what seems to me to be perfectly reasonable discourse.
I'd never heard of him before your comment, so all I have so far, after a quick search, is his wikipedia page, which states that he “intentionally made controversial statements in order to verify the response of the judiciary”.
I can see how these specific controversial claims about an ethnic population genetic traits could have been reasonable discourse, since it seems they where mirroring non-so-controversial arguments of the same type made about Finns and trying to make a point about free-speech, but since said judiciary response was
- at first to dismiss the charges of hate speech ("ethnic agitation" in the finnish law) while charging him a symbolic fine of a few hundred dollars for another, lesser crime ("disturbing religious worship")
- and then, on appeal, to eventually retaining the ethnic agitation charge and immediately adapating the fine accordingly by... asking for 70 bucks more
to me it really looks more like an attempt at calming the public debate than anything else, and that quite fits my description.
Not sure how he wasn't brought to a trial for writing “Since rapes will increase in any case, the appropriate people should be raped: in other words, green-leftist do-gooders and their supporters" and then immediately naming some of the politicians he had in mind, though.
But of course this is only a wikipedia page and it lack context and counter arguments. If you have some time to elaborate and/or hint at other sources, I'd be interested.
I think being forced to go through the judicial process is the main punishment there, not the actual fine. https://web.archive.org/web/20080606045712/https://www.halla-aho.com/scripta/muutama_taky_illmanin_mikalle.html has the original text. It is mainly a criticism of the judiciary, so I think the chilling effect of the judiciary attacking him for that is not necessarily benign.
The rape thing I don't really see any legal issue with. It was just a tone-deaf version of "if someone is to suffer the consequences of policy X, it should be the supporters of policy X".
Being forced in front of a judge is not benign and not a great experience for anyone, but I would argue this is quite a fringe example :
- the criticism is particulary and playfully provocative
- I like the use of pure logic but some parts of the argument are debatable and could have been logically rebutted by the court.
- most importantly, while I concede that the chilling effect is somehow justified (in a 'first step of very a long walk towards a slippery slope' way), pragmatically and symbolicly the nature of the actual final real-world consequences here alleviate a lot of the initial chill.
As for the second part, sorry but I'm afraid I'm lost in translation here about what you mean by 'a tone-deaf version'.
Yeah. I follow the (Western) European Right quite a lot these days on Twitter, and there's definitely a feeling amongst a lot of them that the "elites" are openly antagonistic towards them...so kind of similar to MAGA vis-à-vis the Democrats. But I'm not sure if this sentiment is as popular amongst their voters as it is amongst their elites...
I think it varies a lot from one country to another. E.g. in Sweden, there's been quite strong ostracism of the nationalist party (things may have mellowed out a bit in the last few years while I haven't been paying much attention), and I think that's something that voters/sympathizers have been very much aware of, whereas in both Denmark and Norway, the nationalists have been an accepted part of the political landscape for a long time now.
The Right is currently in charge in most european countries and working with what I would spontaneously define as the "elites" prior to a bit of thinking.
If you're talking about what's commonly reffered as the "far-right", I'd say yes, it's a wildly common feeling amongst their voters.
But imho it would be fair to say that one of their main common trait is that they have the same feeling about pretty much everyone...
Now, the thing is that the sentiment is also very prevalent amongst the "far-left", the "left", the "greens" (and of course in pretty much any ethnic/religious/sexual minority as well).
Of course the "elites" definition is very different from one group to another, but everyone seems to feel constraint and prejudiced by 'the other's' discourse and actions.
To me the 'new' thing (compared to a few decades ago) is that the Rights have finally found their own version of "Elites" : a word vague enough to agglomerate all the things they dislike/fear/frown upon without having to name them and make it a whole, seemingly homogenous entity, (instead of the disparate minorities groups with often conflicting interests they are), which allows for that horrible "they're everywhere" feeling, amplified by our new social interconnectedness.
It's not new per se ("the left" is actually also an agglomerate of disparate groups struggling to find a common narrative) ; the new thing is that, nowadays, the "centrists", the "moderate right" and about any conservative can at the same time be "the Elite" in charge AND have enough fear of (read 'being pissed enough by') the horrible and ubiquitous "Wokes" to allow themselves to find reasons to befriend the far right.
I think it is more personal than this. When Trump talks to Putin, Putin commiserates with him about how they have both been persecuted by the 'liberals' and Europeans who look down on them for being real men with real balls. Between us, he implies, we can bury them all. That kind of talk is crack to Trump.
Yep. There isn't any need to be be or blackmail him.
I think Russia is viewed as a sort of redoubt for European culture, however odd that seems.
Then too, I have heard expressed the view of certain conservatives, that there isn't a nickel's worth of difference between Russians and Ukrainians so there is little reason to care about this fight.
I'm not endorsing this - this conservative really just feels an opinion would be presumptuous, beyond the absolute certainty that Putin started the war - but I move in very different company than that found here so thought I'd relay.
I don't think it has much to do with wokeness. After Iraq and Afghanistan, the public doesn't have the appetite for another quagmire. At the beginning there was more support for Ukraine, but that waned quickly as the fight settled into a stalemate. The populist wing of the Republican party in particular is against spending any more money on foreign wars. Trump has been consistent in his position that Europe needs to start funding its own defense instead of relying on the US. The average American intuitively accepts that the unipolar moment is over and wants the government to focus on domestic issues. Ukraine is just a random country on the other side of the globe and they don't particularly care what happens there.
>The average American intuitively accepts that the unipolar moment is over and wants the government to focus on domestic issues.
I have another take on that. I think it might not be ending unipolarity so much as getting back to an America First mindset. We're not the world's rich uncle, though liberals and the rest of the world sometimes like to pretend that we are. The purpose of American foreign policy isn't to help the world, it's to help America. Frequently that takes the form of helping other countries but that's not its ultimate goal. There needs to be a quid pro quo and I think the right thinks we've gotten away from that. I tend to agree. The right is fine with foreign aid, it just wants it to come with a healthy side of self-interest. We're still the biggest dog, after all. It's time to start making countries offers they can't refuse.
"The average American intuitively accepts that the unipolar moment is over"
If this does come about it will be entirely self inflicted. America's position as the unipolar power was, if anything, made stronger by the fact that Ukraine held out and continued to hold out against Russia, and every day the war went on further cemented the US position as such. Giving up our status as the unipolar power is not just terrible for international politics, it's also bad for domestic politics (as evidenced by rising prices on everything coupled by the ongoing market crash)
Is it terrible for international politics in the long run, as in, terrible for people who are not U.S. American? Why?
At any rate, it's very funny that MAGA is leading that way. A healthy, conscious acceptance that the US can and should aim at no more than being primus inter pares (and not forever) would make a great deal more sense.
>Is it terrible for international politics in the long run, as in, terrible for people who are not U.S. American? Why?
Conflict is less likely when there's a monopoly on violence. The Pax Americana benefits almost everyone.
More primus, less pares. The issue is more that the US even nominally agrees to be bound by things like "international law" instead of telling the Hague to pound sand.
Yes, they're doing okay with regard to the ICC, but not so much with the ICJ.
And even with the ICC, in using it as a cudgel against enemies, they make it seem like it's something to be treated with respect instead of contempt.
Also, while the Hague Invasion Act's prohibition on U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the ICC is good, the exceptions (for NATO, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, those with Article 98 agreements) make it pretty toothless.
To be clear, I meant for American standing* in international politics (e.g. the ability for the US to get good trade deals, access to resources, foreign security, etc.)
But, honestly, I think there's a very strong case to made that Pax Americana is an incredibly good thing. There are two reasons for this:
- first, Great Power conflict is incredibly vicious. This has been true from the colonial wars all the way to the cold war, and with the addition of nukes the chance for things to get really bad really quick dials everything to 11. Multipolar power centers invariably lead to great power conflict -- this is almost tautological. So I tend to think that on face, all unipolar worlds are better than all multipolar ones, especially in a post-nuclear age
- second, America is uniquely benevolent. The previous Pax eras -- Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica -- were all _terrible_ for people who weren't citizens of those respective nations. Think: mass slavery, entire provinces put to the sword, economically induced famine, etc. etc. Meanwhile America...gives HIV vaccines and clean water to countries in its sphere of influence. I think there's some truth to the idea that e.g. Norwegian citizens have a higher quality of life because America funds European defense. It just so happens that that's a win / win -- American citizens ALSO have a higher quality of life because America funds European defense.
So, yea, I do think Trump is terrible for people who are not US American.
I agree that its darkly hilarious that MAGA is leading towards isolationism, because normally hatred of Pax Americana is a status symbol of the _extremely_ far left, which likes to point to American foreign policy misadventures in the middle east as an example of the US ultimately being a source of evil in the world. In fact, it was the extremely far left that was originally against programs like USAID, because it was often used as a mechanism to enact American foreign policy goals (in case it wasn't clear, I think this take is stupid)
>- second, America is uniquely benevolent. The previous Pax eras -- Pax >Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica -- were all _terrible_ for people >who weren't citizens of those respective nations. Think: mass slavery, >entire provinces put to the sword, economically induced famine, etc. etc. >Meanwhile America...gives HIV vaccines and clean water to countries in >its sphere of influence.
Surely the distinction isn't so clear, or at least that depends on time and place.
- Not to defend Romans or Queen Victoria, but surely the list of "what the Romans did for us" given in Life of Brian is mainly accurate. Railroads in India are also a good thing, even if the Britons put them there in part so as to get valuable raw products out of the country as fast as possible. I'd imagine there were valuable sanitation and vaccination initiatives in the British Empire (even if, yes, Rhodes lied about a smallpox epidemic for the sake of profit, and yes, the Bengal famine was completely avoidable, as was the Irish famine).
- The US was up to major shenanigans in much of the world throughout 20th century. Uniquely benevolent? Tell that to the Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Indonesians, Chileans, etc.
A few misc thoughts
- I'm ethnically Indian, you're going to have a tough time selling me on the British being good for South Asia. And I know a few Irish folks who would sock you in the face for implying such. Generally speaking, there are often good things that can be salvaged from bad things and vice versa. We got a lot of technological advancement out of the world wars. But it would be wrong to say that the world wars were good. (More generally, I think this is a common failure pattern among smart people. Smart people get so wrapped up in second order and third order effects that they miss the massive first order effects)
- At least wrt the Vietnamese, that was squarely within the multipolar frame of the Cold War. I'm somewhat skeptical that the Vietnam war would have happened otherwise. I'm less certain about the rest, but given that you mention you're talking about foreign policy interventions through the _20th_ century I'm inclined to think that much of that can be framed through the lens of multipolar conflict. Also worth noting that in the modern era the Vietnamese (at least) are very pro America.
- The US has definitely not been good for some groups of people! I think if you are, like, Palestinian, or Afghani, or Irani, or (several other middle-east nationalities) you probably do have a legitimate bone to pick. But I'm not a deontologist about this. I'm looking for 'best alternative' and so far haven't heard a better one.
One response to this would be that the US doesn't uphold the Pax for the sake of world peace, the Pax exists as a by-product of the US maintaining a global hegemony and not tolerating any rivals. As long as no rivals emerge to challenge the the US that hegemony keeps the international system stable, but now that China has risen the US is incentivised to contain it in order to maintain it's status as the hegemon, which probably makes the hegemonic system more prone to war than a multipolar one.
Here is the reality: the hegemon is no longer sustainable. It is necessary to negotiate the transfer of power, and that cannot be done according to the ordinary rules of politics.
John Steward in The Daily Show has argued essentially that point. It's all about opposing wokeness.
Yeah but it's important to note that it's not some inner conviction guiding his strategy. Trump goes with whatever secures enough support from his base. If woke would do the trick, he'd paint the White House rainbow tomorrow.
Trump only cares about Trump. He needs the opportunity for grift and the immunity the office gives him. They're already talking about a third term, and if he gets that, he'll be dictator for life. He will accept any and all externalities to stay in office. Like Putin, his only way is forward.
Yep, Russia is definitely anti-woke. That is one of the very few things where their projected image and the reality fully agree. (There is a lot of gay sex in the army, but that doesn't count as woke, because it is not consensual.)
I suddenly wonder if their virulent homophobia and the sexual violence in the army and prisons are intimately related... (ha, I'm into terrible puns today).
Buggering someone is kind of the ultimate form of dominance, isn’t it?
Absolutely.
Has anyone written a defense of PEPFAR? I understand why people like it from a EA perspective, but it also seems like there is some status quo bias going on. For other global health initiatives, like malaria nets, EA's usually advocate funding through private charity, rather than through taxation. (Correct me if I'm wrong there.) I'm not normally a "taxation is theft" style libertarian, but in this case the money isn't even going to public services in the traditional sense. It's just a direct, compulsory diversion of funds from citizens into a charity that is seen as effective. Is there a limiting principle on this? Do EA's favor a system where a certain percentage of tax dollars go to effective charities?
You seem to be asking two different questions.
The argument for PEPFAR is that it is a very cost-effective way to save lives, even if they aren't American lives, and a majority of Americans have traditionally favored having a small fraction of their tax dollars devoted to such purpose. You may not be one of them, but unless you actually are a "NO TAXES EVER!" libertarian, then you have to accept that some of your taxes will go to things that you don't support. Just as some of the things you want the government to be paying for, will be paid out of the taxes of people who don't support those things.
The argument for EA is that there are nerdy rich people who want to devote more of their money to charitable works than the majority of Americans have deemed appropriate to fund through taxation, and they could use some guidance on what would be the most cost-effective way for them to do that. Something like PEPFAR, where a government has already picked all the low-hanging fruit, is not a cost-effective target for private charity. If the legal and political battles over PEPFAR lead to it being clearly dead as opposed to just briefly interrupted, I expect EA will do the math on recommending AIDS-protection vs malaria protection for nerdy-rich-people private contributions.
> For other global health initiatives, like malaria nets, EA's usually advocate funding through private charity, rather than through taxation.
That's because EA's believe they have more likelihood of moving private dollars than public dollars. If Congress passed a bill to pour public money into malaria nets, I'm sure almost all EA's would rejoice.
>there is some status quo bias going on
Guilty as charged.
While I'm neither an altruist, an egalitarian, nor a utilitarian, PEPFAR is
- sufficiently cheap
- not saving lives of people likely to be our enemies (if it were in the pipeline to feed ISIS-k I'd feel differently)
- (re status quo bias) sufficiently well proven to actually save lives
that I support it
I'm honestly baffled that you would be fine with taxation in general but opposed to PEPFAR in particular. Saving lives seems to me to be the most worthy use of taxpayer dollars possible.
I oppose PEPFAR for the same reason I would oppose government officials raising taxes to line their own pockets: the money is meant to serve the public. Even wealth transfers like food stamps are at least directed at the general national welfare and help prevent the poor from becoming angry and violent. PEPFAR supposedly helps our soft power, but I'm pretty skeptical about the ROI on that.
My mind isn't completely made up, but given the budget deficit I'm not inclined to increase the public debt burden by billons of dollars for a charity project. I'm not an EA or even an ethical consequentialist, but a plurality here seem to lean in that direction, so I'm curious about their reasoning on it.
There is the argument that it buys a lot of goodwill for America in Africa, making it a form of plausibly-effective defence/diplomacy spending. I haven't evaluated the cost/benefits but that sounds at least potentially in the ballpark (PEPFAR is small for a military project and buys a lot of continent-wide goodwill in a place that matters for both resource access and unaligned country diplomacy).
Is it the cheapest way to buy goodwill for America though? Compared to, say, handing out free Kobe Bryant t-shirts or something?
Goodwill for America, where it exists, usually seems to be based on random pop culture bullshit rather than meaningful good deeds.
Possibly not (although I buy that working more than Hollywood movies), but given that it's relatively cheap it's at least not obviously crazy (unlike, TBH, most USAID programs)
>given the budget deficit I'm not inclined to increase the public debt burden by billons of dollars for a charity project.
This doesn't address the argument, "Saving lives seems to me to be the most worthy use of taxpayer dollars possible." It is not obvious to me why the marginal negative effect of that marginal increase in debt outweighs the lives saved.
Most EAs aren't so nationalist that they believe all projects have to directly benefit Americans for the state to pursue it.
It seems implausible to me that the state should only do things to help Americans and can't help people from other countries, especially considering that aid goes so much further in the third world. PEPFAR is estimated to have saved 25 million lives at the cost of only $110 billion over it's lifetime. That money could not have saved 25 million American lives; I doubt it could have saved even 250,000 American lives. What's so special about an American child that the US government should prioritize helping him orders of magnitude more than an African child?
I think the question isn't whether it's a worthwhile use of money, it's whether it's a worthwhile use of government money specifically. There's some places we generally agree are - e.g. infrastructure projects (that require coordinated central action), or healthcare/welfare (on the grounds of forcing some degree of equality mostly, or because of market failure).
I don't think either of those directly applies here. Otoh there is an issue where individual-based foreign aid doesn't feel real to most people (EAs aside) because no one person can make a noticeable dent in an international health crisis. So if the people do support it, maybe government action is reasonable here.
Foreign aid seems analogous to healthcare. Just as private businesses have no incentive to provide free healthcare to low-income people (so Medicaid steps in), private businesses have no incentive to provide antiretrovirals to Africans in extreme poverty (so PEPFAR steps in).
Depending on private charity, thereby pushing all the costs of maintaining a more just world onto the virtuous and giving the selfish and self-centered a free ride, is the opposite of true meritocracy.
Maybe, but I don't think the government should be in the business of rewarding virtue in general (except in cases where there's a specific call for government intervention, which this might be).
American taxpayers, non-American lives; crucial distinction.
Sure, Africans aren't American taxpayers, but many Americans aren't taxpayers either and we generally don't take that to mean we shouldn't help them. Some are much greater tax burdens than Africans, e.g low-income people who rely on Medicaid and get enough tax breaks that they break even, or retired elderly folks living on welfare.
Disgruntled Africans aren't the threat to Americans that disgruntled *other* Americans are.
> EA's usually advocate funding through private charity, rather than through taxation
Probably because they know that they have ~0 impact on the use of tax money.
I like to think of myself as at least EA-sympathetic, but I believe tax-funded aid >> private charity when all else (effectiveness) is equal, because private charity weakens the economic (and hence political) power of the most altruistically minded relative to the least altruistically minded. And PEPFAR is a special case where a nation-state's leverage in negotiations outweighs principle-agent problems and makes it at least as effective as the best private charities for the same purpose.
Quick googling indicates that AMF's spending is on the scale of the low hundreds of millions of dollar per year, while PEPFAR spends about 5 billion. So it may be a question of scale.
Also, most EA's are (sort of by definition) consequentialist, and according to the 2022 EA forum survey (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJDgnPXqZ48eSCjEQ/ea-survey-2022-demographics#Beliefs) fewer than 6% are libertarian while the overwhelming majority are left or left-leaning, so I don't think most of them would have any objection to the government using taxes to fund sufficiently effective humanitarian aid.
So I think there are sort of two related, but importantly different, arguments for PEPFAR.
The first is the argument for why something like PEPFAR should exist, and that's the EA argument about lives saved per dollar etc. I think it's pretty concincing, for what it is.
The second is the argument for why the US Government should be the one providing PEPFAR. This one is less obvious, but I think the strongest version is that the US generally benefits from global stability and wealth, as well as from nations, especially developing nations, having a positive view of the US. PEPFAR, inasmuch as it saves lives, both increases wealth and stability in developing nations, and also presumably improves the image of the US, and it does so relatively cheaply.
That's the argument at least. I personally find the latter argument likely enough to be worth the relatively small amount of money that we are spending, but I'd be open to arguments that it actually doesn't do these things.
Is anyone else angered by the recent spate of shrimp welfare EA advocacy?
The movement seems based on an incredibly naive application of utilitarianism. It's advocates seem holier than though, and motivated by EA virtue-signalling (e.g., look at me I am so enlightened and moral and logical as do to this very un-intuitive act). Meanwhile, the advocacy is actively harming the reputation of EA.
In my experience, the kind of people who get triggered about Animal Welfare enough to dismiss any/all other opinions of people who advocate for it will not be won by being more "moderate" or by tuning down the Animal Welfare advocacy.
Caring about shrimps is ridiculous? ok, look at PETA. I'm sure they do some shrimp advocacy here and there, but 90% of their ads and outreach is "This is a cow. She is suffering horribly. You eating meat is directly contributing to her suffering. Would you like to stop eating meat so you're at least not complicit in this horrible suffering?" The responses - almost invariably - tend to fall into:
(1) [Just World Fallacy] No, she DESEREVES to SUFFER horribly. She is a dirty vile non-human and I have just made up a rule that says morality can't be about non-humans. Now go away VEGETARIAN CUCKS.
(2) [Sinclair's Rule] My Salary/Economy/Dinner/Social Status depends on cows not having rights; therefore cows better not have rights. It will be such a shame that I can't eat what I have been eating all my life, even though theoretically you could be right that cows shouldn't suffer horribly, but alas, I will never understand this, purposfully.
(3) [Low-IQ white noise. no consistent signal] Hahahahaha, who cares bro, r u triggered, let me eat my StEaK in peace.
Do any of those responses predict that there is any sort of principled, compromise-ready objections that could be swayed if only the big bad Animal Welfare advocates stop being so radical and mean?
If you agree with the Nazi that Jews deserve everything being done to them in the hopes that maybe the Nazi will come around on the question of Slavs and Poles, and the Nazi is still as adamant as ever that not only Jews deserve everything they ever get (nice that you agree now), but also the Slavs and Poles are next and they deserve even more, well, haven't you just achieved peak clownery? What did compromising with the Nazi buy you?
I'm not even - necessarily - against pretending to be 50% bigoted so that you can ally with the 70% bigoted against the 100% bigoted, then later pretend to be 30% bigoted to ally with the 50% bigoted against the 70% bigoted, and so on, Divide and Conquer will never NOT be good politics and game theory. From a teaching and pedagogy perspective this is called "Incremental Refinement", start with the natural-but-wrong thesis then gradually nudge the students towards better and better refinements till they learn the topic without feeling force-fed. I'm just saying that there is vanishingly few "70% bigoted" or even "80% bigoted" to ally with in the Animal Welfare battlefront. So why bother pretending that you're more bigoted against Animals than you really are? For what possible benefit?
> EA virtue-signaling
Here's an intuition-pump: "Virtue Signaling" is envy speak. Whenever you find yourself compelled to judge someone as "Virtue-Signaling" for a certain moral position, make extremely sure that it's not because you're actually uncomfortable about the fact that you're morally wrong, and simply afraid that they're right. (And by logical extent, that you're condemned and called out, if even implicitly, by the presence of people who are right on the very issue you're morally wrong about.)
Literally nobody likes to be wrong, morally wrong even more so. But the fact of the matter is that you would have been a slavery supporter if you were an early 1800s rural white farmer in southern North America, and all the people who opposed slavery at the time would have seemed like incredibly insufferable WOKE CUCKS rejecting everything that is good and familiar and ok in the world. Why take such an unintuitive position? How devastating would the effect on the Economy be if they got their way? Can't they just be normal and demand better treatment for the mullato and humane working conditions for everyone? Do they really have to be this """Divisive"""?
"Unintuitive" as criticism? My brother in Buddha, have you **looked** at the rest of EA or Rationalism? Or the history of Ideas and Science in general? Does human intuition really look like such a devastatingly effective truth-finding machine to you?
A cow can be your friend, a shrimp is basically an insect or something similar. And you can't even go about your day, really, without crushing thousands of insects. Even Jainists presumably must have an out when it comes to the microscopic ones. I really do save spiders and bees and flies, but I know I cannot save them all!
So to argue for the welfare of the cow (I'm a carnivore but I do care a bit) is at least somewhat sound in terms of both empathy and philosophy. Whereas the shrimp evokes little empathy, and even the philosophy is dubious.
Regards, Virtue Signaling, I find it strange you define my own usage of words. Perhaps you only use the phrase Virtual Signaling in service of "Envy Speak" but here is how I use the phrase:
The standard definition of Virtue Signaling:
1. Personally costless acts that act as a signal of virtue (e.g., liking a protest on Facebook). Note, engaging in virtue signalling doesn't mean that the thing supported is not virtuous, is just means that the act of support was costless (and therefore indistinguishable from signalling)
2. Acts that superficially seem virtuous, but that on closer examination are in fact harmful. The definition 2. is related to the definition 1. in that 1. enables and allows 2. to occur. When *signaling* virtue is rewarded people optimize for apparent virtue without caring about the actual outcomes, causing deeply harmful outcomes (e.g., defund the police).
Are you saying that neither of these phenomenon ever occur? I don't understand what basis you feel justifies redefining words that others use. I find it faintly ridiculous you would label anyone using these pretty clear and useful terms to be engaging in "Envy Speak"
Ok, I might have been more than a little triggered myself in my original response. I'm sorry. Animal Welfare is something I can get extremely angry extremely easy about. Thanks for not responding in kind.
Replying to both of your replies here to re-centralize the thread:
(1) A philosophy/movement based on an unintuitive belief network is indeed at greater risk from a certain major failure mode, that where the mere unintuitive-ness of a belief makes people respect it more. I have seen variations of this in a lot of other anti-mainstream movements I'm familiar/sympathetic with, like antinatalists calling children/babies vile things because hey, antinatalism is unintuitive and slandering babies is unintuitive so clearly those 2 things fit together and the more you do one the more you're credible at the other.
I don't know what specific "shrimp advocates", if any, did you have in mind, but I guess it never hurts to point to specific ones? I'm not (by most EA's standards) an EA: Neither American, nor gives 10% of my income to charity (just 5% or less, and not typical EA charities), and most importantly I mostly don't read their literature or forums. Oh and I think worrying about AGI before it's 2080 is plain ridiculous.
That said, there is nothing apriori preventing shrimp welfare from being a bandwagon, "something I saw the cool kids do so I have to do it too even though I'm not really into it", that's unfortunately a universal human tendency. I think we would benefit (subject to your interest and time) if we dissect a real post or paper from shrimp advocate on an EA forum and see if it really does believe that advocating for shrimps is the most morally critical course of action or if it's just bandwagoning.
(2) Agreed on both counts, both acts are real. But consider a major failure mode of indiscriminately demonizing/tabooing signaling: Now every attempt to actually tell people to be virtuous is Virtue Signaling. Peter Singer is virtue signaling because his philosophy papers is just some ink that didn't cost him anything (indeed, Philosophy thrives on weird ideas, it benefitted him to be seen as the weirdo who says a starving African child is more important than your daughter's birthday). Scott Alexander eats meat too, as far as I can glean from his blogposts, so that must mean everything he writes about Animal Welfare or Synthetic Meat is just bullshit he uses to virtue-signal, after all what does it actually cost him? words are free.
I'm aware that this can be seen as me strawmanning the very idea of "Virtue-Signaling is a Vice", it's not, I agree that Virtue-Signaling is real and bad, but I look at it from the perspective of "The Optimal Amount of Fraud is not Zero". From a distance, plenty of bad things look like good things. Is this startup founder a dumb overexcited kid who will waste 700 million VC dollars because he can't shut up about AI, or a Theranos-level fraudster who knows damn well what's he doing and is intentionally cooking his valuations to get the VC millions? it's surprisingly hard to decide this question, and all the standard cliches about false positives vs false negatives apply.
You misinterpreted my use of the word unintuitive.
To clarify, my point is that in the EA community is closely aligned (I would argue based) on an unintuitive philosophy. Namely, Peter Singer argues that one should genuinely care equally for strangers as one cares for family. This philosophy is *extremely* unintuitive (e.g., requiring invention, not the default one held in society or practiced by humans). That is not a criticism, just a neutral claim.
Due to this philosophical foundation, along with rationality norms, EA is drawn towards (rather than away) from unintuitive ideas, particularly about morals. Again, no judgement, just an observation. In particular, there is a certain street cred for advocating for such ideas (as many in the community will suppress their default intuitive rejection of the idea, and instead assume the uninuitive idea is 'deep' even when they personally do not understand it).
This effect is why advocating for shrimp welfare gives kudos and status within certain EA circles. Speaking personally, I find advocating for significant effort dedicated to shrimp welfare an incredibly naive, unexamined, philosophically ungrounded (and harmful) idea (e.g., not weighting for degree of sentience, e.g., blithely assuming pain + pleasure should be maximized rather than flourishing, etc...) but because the community has a heuristic of embracing rather than rejecting deeply unintuitive ideas, it gets a superficial pass, and is even broadcast and spread.
Rawlsism is pretty intuitive, and one could arguably place Singer's philosophy as a version of that. However, it neglects the very reality of family which is created by reciprocal bonds extending over time, and does not apply in the same way to strangers.
> Namely, Peter Singer argues that one should genuinely care equally for strangers as one cares for family. This philosophy is *extremely* unintuitive (e.g., requiring invention, not the default one held in society or practiced by humans). That is not a criticism, just a neutral claim.
Even if this is true, that still doesn't get you to the effective part of effective altruism. The *good news* is that you can care about someone distant thousands of times less and still save their life, or an equivalent number of QALYs. The fact that people round this off to "you need to be mentally unusual to donate 6000 dollars once to AMF" is very frustrating.
I doubt the type of person who makes this type of equivocation would care to change their behavior about what to do upon learning this information, in which case, yeah! I largely agree that EA is psychologically deviant, for thinking virtue is for anything but their own convenience and social status.
Do you have any evidence that shrimp welfare is actively harming EA? I've never heard someone be like "damn I would donate to the Against Malaria Foundation but some nerds think shrimp welfare is a good idea so now I won't." I don't think we should abandon some causes from an unfounded fear that it would somehow harm EA's reputation.
I am also someone who otherwise might be an ally, yet has decided to ignore / mistrust the EA movement because of it's sillier fringe ideas like this.
n=1, but I started down the EA path and then turned away when stuff like this and AI doomerism kept coming up. I'll probably still donate to Against Malaria, but I've pretty much lost interest in EA otherwise.
Any movement should be very concerned about the extreme views some members amplify. At the margin, it can have a large effect on contributors.
n=2: I've increased my donations to AMF and kept them up to other global health work, but I've decided not to introduce my friends to EA because of the vocal animal welfare advocates. I've been mentioning this on the EA Survey every year.
I don't think shrimp welfare is the best use of EA resources at the margins, especially advocacy resources. The scientific evidence for shrimp sentience is very lacking compared to, e.g., anchovy sentience and is comparable to the evidence of sentience for insects, which would likely have much more sentience per biomass assuming they have any at all (i.e. Big If True). So it's not very close to the Pareto frontier even among nonhuman welfare causes specifically.
No, the shrimp people are good. It is good for people to take their philosophy seriously and own its sillier implications.
Naive utilitarianism is "pain=bad" and someone sat down and was like "If you care about pain so much, animals feel pain. Do you care about animals? Do you care about shrimp?" And then the shrimp guys were like "...yes" and then they started advocating for shrimp welfare. And, just fundamentally, I love and respect people who take the logical implications of their belief system seriously and I think it's people like that who invent 80% of the good stuff in life.
But I would like you to consider becoming an effective shrimp welfare advocate by pledging to eat nothing but beef. Consider:
As a red blooded American, you probably eat half a pound of meat a day. And you're not going to stop because America.
Now, if you were going to sate your meat hunger with shrimp, with the average shrimp weight 1/2 ounce, you would need to kill 16 shrimp a day. (Source: GPT)
Meanwhile, your average rotisserie chicken from Costco has 2 pounds of meat on it, meaning you need to kill ~2 chickens every weak. (1)
But, if you pledge to only eat beef, an average cow has ~500 pounds of meat on it. It would take you more than two years, eating a half pound of beef a day, to eat an entire cow.
So, to satiate our American meat hunger for the next 1000 days, you could:
Kill 16,000 shrimp.
Kill 250 chickens
Or kill 1 cow.
Clearly, we can achieve between 99.6% (3) and 99.99375% (4) of the moral benefit of eating no meat by just eating beef, which is why it's your moral responsibility to eat a cheeseburger.
Which is, yes, kinda silly, but also...the lives of farm chickens, much less farmed shrimp, seem really really bad and sad and probably would be a better world if we just ate beef.
(1) https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/much-meat-off-costco-rotisserie-121554983.html
(2) https://rutherford.tennessee.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/200/2022/05/PB1822-How-Much-Meat-to-Expect-from-a-Beef-Carcass.pdf
(3) 249/250
(4) 15999/16000
the math works especially well for whale meat
You’d want to factor in all that lamp oil too.
This is the parody of the famous Chick-fil-A billboards, with chickens holding signs reading "Eat Mor Cow."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat-eaters/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDuMp2kDxos
How are the shrimp even supposedly suffering? Presumably when they are deprived of oxygen when they are caught in net and raised out of the water? But do humans even suffer when they are deprived of oxygen? I thought it was one of the most painless ways to go.
The proposal is to stun them before they are killed, which apparently happens by freezing and suffocating. It does sound pretty bad.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CmAexqqvnRLcBojpB/electric-shrimp-stunning-a-potential-high-impact-donation
OTOH it might be equivalent to a human drowning, which I am pretty sure is rather unpleasant.
It’s not the lack of oxygen so much as the build up of CO2. Nitrogen hypoxia is not a bad way to die.
nit: IIRC, while _humans_ sense CO2 buildup but not O2 deprivation, I vaguely recall that fish (sea animals in general???) do sense O2 deprivation.
Depending on the manner of deprivation, it can be totally painless or excruciating, i.e., nitrogen is the first, tape over face is second. I don't know if we know exactly what shrimp feel when they are pulled out of the water, I'd support modest efforts to ease their potential suffering if an inexpensive and easy-to implement method were proposed.
The distinction by method of oxygen deprivation is whether you experience CO2 buildup.
Definitely that plus whether the airflow is constricted.
If you assign a 0% probability to a blade of grass being sentient, your confidence is mathematically infinitely lower than it should be! We must allow for the possibility that each blade of grass has qualia and experiences suffering. 10^20 blades of grass are ruthlessly cut in half each year, maimed and left to wait for their next disfigurement. If a blade of grass is even one millionth as conscious as a shrimp, then global lawn mowing is an unconscionable crime!
I have it on good authority that lawnmowing is a gateway to more violent crime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrZMlREG1qs
Liberals show that even analytic philosophy, based on pure math, can be deformed into something stupid and baffling.
You do realize that comment was a joke, don't you?
Yes, but shrimp welfare advocates are not joking, and use similar logic.
TIL the "th" in "thou" is pronounced the same as the one in "though" instead of the one in "thorn"
TIL I should be tested for an Auditory Processing Disorder.
This strain of scrupulosity was always there from the very start. It's only now that "we care about Big Existential Risks, so sure maybe you're starving to death in the gutter but man, don't you see that the possibility that somebody might invent Colossus is so great that we *need* to spend all this money flying to conferences overseas to discuss it instead of buying you food and helping you out of that gutter! don't be selfish!" has become the main attraction, that the things like "the poor widdle shrimpies" can creep out into the sunlight to be noticed.
I actually think the problem is less naive application of utilitarianism and instead naive and uncritical application of neuro-biology. The entire premise of animal welfare is an extension of empathy beyond humans. We do not understand our own cognition even close to well enough to be making the claims that are made, beyond animals that are quite closely related.
One can decide to promote shrimp welfare out of some level of caution along the lines of "we don't know, and if they _are_ sentient it would be a tragedy", but I think not many people would find that convincing, and so they over-reach and make much stronger claims about how certain we should be about their ability to suffer.
To be clear, I am very much not making the claim that they _don't_, since such a claim is just an unsupported by my argument as the one that the shrimp welfare advocates are making.
> The entire premise of animal welfare is an extension of empathy beyond humans. We do not understand our own cognition even close to well enough to be making the claims that are made, beyond animals that are quite closely related.
I take it you've never had a pet? Or a close interaction with a bird?
It seems like you might have interpreted my comment as arguing against empathy towards animals. That was not what I said. If that's not what you were doing, then I think I'm going to need you to clarify what point exactly you are making.
> We do not understand our own cognition even close to well enough to be making the claims that are made, beyond animals that are quite closely related.
That sounds to me like arguing against empathy towards animals except for closely related species. Apologies if you didn't mean that.
I guess it depends on where you put the limit for "quite closely", but I offered birds as an example of a distantly related branch of life that we humans are quite able to develop bonds and empathize with.
In any case, the overall argument probably has more to do with sentience than with empathy...
I was arguing that we shouldn't use structural brain arguments to claim that we know that things like shrimp have experiences of pain like ours. It is entirely possible (and probably a good thing) to have empathy for all kinds of animals for all kinds of reasons. But if one tries to justify that empathy (or convince others to share it) because we "know" that those animals have an internal experience somewhat like ours due to something about the brain, then one is way out over ones skies, because we are not even close to understanding how our own brain structure relates to our own internal experiences, let alone how the structure of very different organisms impacts theirs.
At least some of the shrimp people are doing this.
I feel quite confident that many kinds of animals have the basic sentience where pain is felt as something very much like pain.
In evolutionary terms, the basic mechanism of pain as a warning that something is off is probably ancient and widely shared, it certainly doesn't look like a simian or even mammalian innovation. And of course we don't know how the hard problem of consciousness works, i.e how it comes that "it feels like something" to be in pain, but I don't see any particular reason why it would hinge on the few particular extra features of humans over and above our nonhuman ancestors.
But, you know, the same exact thing could be said about radically different humans too. I can never imagine not having language, I can never imagine not knowing calculus, but there are humans who struggle with language, with calculus, with going to bathroom. It doesn't seem all that far-fetched that their brains is so radically different that.... who knows, maybe they don't even feel pain, let's splash some boiling oil on their skin and see what happens.
I've just published a print-on-demand collection of old Slate Star Codex essays. For now it's just a paperback, because nobody does print-on-demand hardcovers in acceptable quality. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZVB8TFF
While this isn't the first printed collection of SSC essays, I believe it is the most aggressively edited one. I've replaced all the images that I don't have the rights for, reformatted everything for print, fixed a bunch of typos, tracked down the original citations for everything, etc.
Since it's new, Amazon doesn't have a good preview yet. Here's a sample chapter: https://stocks-books.com/images/preview_seeing_like_a_state.pdf
They're all CC-licensed, so I don't actually need permission from Scott, but I got it anyways.
Thanks for doing this, it looks really valuable.
Just put in an order. Thanks.
There's a lot of essays of Scott that I haven't read and having them on paper makes it more likely. Also, it's much easier to share.
I recently ordered vol. 1 of the hard cover collection and my partner picked it up out of curiosity and now she's devouring it and planning to lend it out to a coworker. It's nice to see that kind of reaction to pieces like Toxoplasma of Rage or the Archipelago piece.
I know it's CC-licensed so you can legally do whatever you want, but you really should at least make the PDF/Kindle version freely available, otherwise this feels like you're just profiting off Scott's hard work that he made available for free, without giving anything in return.
I mean... people can still access the essays for free on slate star codex? And what he's giving in return is a printed collection of essays - if that's worth something to you, you can pay for it, if you think you're not getting anything in return, you don't have to. I don't see the issue here, if Scott's fine with it.
Not everything in the book is CC-licensed/public domain. In particular, I've paid for licenses of the images for Le Corbusier's "Plan Voisin", and gotten a license from the estate of Daniel Quinn for "The Fence." I don't have unambiguous rights to distribute digital copies of those works.
Beyond that - the whole point of this effort is that I wanted a printed copy of Scott's work and I wasn't happy with the available options. There are already many places where you can get ebooks of Scott's work, such as https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/. I have no plans to ever make this available as an ebook, free or otherwise.
Also, to be a little more explicit about it: I told Scott I was doing this back in August, asked for his permission, and offered to send him royalties if I ever made any money off it (I'm currently about a thousand bucks in the red). He said I had his permission and not to worry about royalties.
How do I meet internet friends in real life non-awkwardly?
I'm not sure how much I can help with non-awkwardly. There's going to be a tiny bit of friction from having to deal with people instead of a screen (the first few times I got called "bean" in person were weird), but it's worth it if these are people you are considering meeting.
For everything else, I can help. Figure out an appropriate place to meet (could be anything from "anyone around here can meet at this park at time X" to "we're going to this museum ship, I'll book an AirBnB"), see if there's enough serious interest to make it worth your while (I think for DSL we did a couple of polls on dates the first time to gauge interest) and then just pick the most appropriate and announce/book it. You don't need a license or anything.
If you're planning to do something on the bigger end of the spectrum, the logistical details matter quite a bit, and I've written up a guide at https://www.navalgazing.net/How-to-Run-Internet-Meetups, with input from others who have been involved in the DSL/Naval Gazing meetups. It's a tremendous amount of fun, and I would highly recommend it.
Wow, that is quite the post.
I've noticed that you recommend using a house or apartment as a "base". But historically, *I've* hosted meetups at parks, and I've also been to a few other meetups planned for parks (after all, everyone can go to a park). Do you think parks are fine?
It depends on the scale of the meetup. That writeup is targeted for multi-day meetups in a place where most of the attendees don't live. I would not try basing in a park for that because you can't trivially reschedule if the weather is bad and you'll probably want better bathrooms if you're going to be there all day. If you are talking about a few hours with people who live in your area, then a park is perfectly fine.
Edit: It sounds like you're on the "a few hours with people who live in your area" end, in which case, I'd say to just basically pick a day and say "I'll be in X park with a green hat, come if you're in the area". Worst case, you end up sitting by yourself for an hour, slightly embarrassed. (If I go to a museum ship, I can get people to fly across the country. The OKC meetup scene... not so much.)
Whenever I've gone ahead and done it, they've mostly turned out to be just nice normal people with an unusual amount in common with me. Just try it out and if you're compatible the awkwardness dissolves.
Just propose an IRL meetup, possibly around whatever common interest brought you together on the internet. If for example you're all airplane geeks who met talking about airplanes, maybe all get together for the biggest air show or best air museum in your area.
Note that "your area" can be as large as "North America" or possibly "Earth", if you're the sort of person who can afford vacation travel anyway. I've flown across the country for a weekend with a bunch of internet friends.
I've met up with a few of my internet friends on multiple occasions, and I think the best way is to have something planned to do. Some things we did were bowling, going to see a movie, walking around town and checking out stores we're interested in, getting some good food, just anything really. Since you guys already know each other somewhat, when you have something to do together that you all enjoy offline it kind of just happens naturally.
If you've found internet friends who are willing to meet IRL, you've already come so far. Maybe generate some gratitude in that direction. Also, consider your motivation -- you clearly desire an IRL connection, and if you can identify why you want that, you can imagine having it, and it might motivate you to move toward it.
These suggestions don't diminish the awkwardness, but the awkwardness might not be the problem. Instead, the problem might be that you are tense and anxious about the possibility of awkwardness. With sufficient motivation, the awkwardness isn't a barrier. (Consider, e.g, that most people get over the awkwardness of sex -- I'd suppose that's an instance of sufficient motivation.)
How valuable is a genius compared to normal smart people? Say you have a button that creates new people who will work on [thing you care about]. How many ordinary, run-off-the-mill PhDs do you need to be just as good as a single Nobel-quality scientist? How many Nobel-winners do you need to be worth a John von Neumann?
I imagine there's some sort of network or force multiplier effect, where a single genius can make a team of grunts accomplish far more, so there's some ideal ratio (which could be constant, or might vary with organizational size). But that's intuition only. Has anyone looked at the relative intelligence / creativity of different people at, say, the Manhattan project? Or Bell Labs?
(Obviously intelligence isn't discrete like this in real life, but I don't think seeing it as continuous really changes the question.)
They say a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters could write the great American novel. But then you have to sort that novel out of the other 999 novel-length piles of gibberish they've made. So too geniuses and smart people. Maybe a hundred smart people working on an impossible task could solve it piece by piece. But you're going to be spending enormous amounts of time on communicating those pieces to each other and filtering out all the dead ends.
Well, depends. Does the genius consistently do extremely difficult things that are nigh-incomprehensible to lesser intellects and/or harass their lesser colleagues? In that case the value of genius is negative, you would achieve more by either removing the genius or removing everyone else who works with them and leaving the genius to do everything.
This is the model you should have when the work is whitebox and collaborative, like writing non-blackbox code that both the genius and their lesser colleagues need to understand and modify.
On other hand, if you can blackbox and compartmentalize the product of the genius' work, then there is really no bound to how valuable being a genius it. If the most asshole Rick Sanchez in the universe develop a better SAT solver, it really doesn't matter how much of an antisocial non-collaborative asshole he is or how much of an utter clusterfuck the solver code is, the SAT solver is a blackbox component that can be integrated through a tight well-understood interface into other things and achieve wonders, no collaboration with the genius needed.
So the key to unlocking genius is through blackbox compartmentalization, every genius is ultimately limited by the fact that there are non-geniuses around them who need to understand, approve, modify or explain the genius things that the genius is doing to themselves and other non-geniuses. The key to bypassing this is through tight well-defined interfaces that hide whatever implementation details inside them under a comprehensible surface. (allowing the implementation details to be as genius magic as possible.)
> How valuable is a genius compared to normal smart people?
It's literally exponentially valuable.
So it matters most at the top, for complex and difficult problems, but that's basically all the problems at the frontiers of human knowledge.
I would like to refer you to two things - the first: Rausch-normalized IQ scores.
if you look at normalized Rausch IQ scores versus problem difficulty, solving complex problems gets exponentially more difficult the harder the problem, and you need to go further and further out on the IQ and ability curve to have a chance of finding a solution.
“This means that for the hardest problems, ones that no one has ever solved, the ones that advance civilization, the highest-ability people, the top 1% of 1% are irreplaceable, no one else has a shot. It also means that populations with lower means, even if very numerous, will have super-exponentially less likelihood of solving such questions.”
A good post on Rausch Normalized IQ is here: https://substack.com/@enonh/p-149185059
The second: We even see this in the probability of inventing something vs IQ, which increases essentially exponentially with IQ, which a recent paper looked at in inventors in Finland finding the following relationship (link goes to graph):
https://imgur.com/a/AZ2AxEi
With more on that paper here: https://substack.com/inbox/post/156565032
I have this theory that we are, as a species, fantastically uncreative but very good at iterative improvements once we grasp a concept. I think the history of any long-running technology (e.g. pyrometallurgy) supports this. One result of our general uncreativeness is that technologies tend to develop in an s-curve fashion as a breakthrough gets patiently iterated upon and perfected.
In this scheme, a genius is useful not because they are more intelligent, but because some intelligent people also have that little spark of creativity that allows a breakthrough. But thereafter they can't contribute anything more or less than the smart and hard-working. Worse yet, until we hit a wall with a current technology the geniuses' contributions don't add anything, because invariably "new and unrefined" is more expensive and less efficient than "tried and tested".
So, I'm an ideal world, what you'd want is alternating generations of zillions of smart, hard-working people sans geniuses, followed by one with a larger-than-natural dose of geniuses thrown in.
Hmm... you wouldn't need to mess with birth rates or anything. Just have some mechanism to assign your geniuses to fields which have hit a wall.
Your theory makes sense to me, but what about simultaneous inventions? Calculus, powered flight... You could explain this by saying that multiple geniuses were attacking the same wall at the same time, I suppose.
It depends on what you're trying to do. Novel ideas seem to want more geniuses, and substitutes don't seem capable of reproducing the results.
Running the same experiment 1,000 times in a lab doesn't need a genius, though sometimes a genius can help. If there's a limit on geniuses or they're significantly more expensive, I'd go with the normal group for mundane repeated tasks, even if they're hard to do.
It seems that there are some tasks which even 0.1% geniuses cannot do, but you instead need a 0.01% or better genius to accomplish it. We don't really understand how or why this works, but maybe we could if we ourselves were at that level. Since this area isn't legible from the outside, we may not be able to determine when it applies or if a substitute could ever complete the work.
"Running the same experiment 1,000 times in a lab doesn't need a genius, though sometimes a genius can help. If there's a limit on geniuses or they're significantly more expensive, I'd go with the normal group for mundane repeated tasks, even if they're hard to do."
You may need a genius to design the experiment.
Maybe, but not necessarily. I could probably design an experiment that's about survey data, or testing a wide variety of chemicals against something specific. And I'm definitely neither a genius nor a scientist. Even if you do, they can help design it and then move on to other things if the ongoing actions don't need them to stay.
Genius means highly intelligent, right? In what arena of life would you ever not want more intelligence? As long as that high intelligence isn't paired with anti-social behaviors or laziness, I don't know why we wouldn't want a perpetual genius printer
I agree a genius printer would be very good. But if you have a genius printer which prints 1 genius per day, and could replace it with a decently-smart-person printer which prints x decently smart people per day, for what value of x is that a good trade?
3
Google did a study of what makes effective teams, and while they did not directly address your genius "force multiplier" hypothesis, they did say that the "Individual performance of team members" had little overall impact on the success of team projects.
https://rework.withgoogle.com/en/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness#identify-dynamics-of-effective-teams
I'm fairly suspicious of this. Google is one of the most DEI-pilled of the FAANGS, and it's a well known dynamic for (internal or external) studies like this to essentially be performative - to contort and abuse the data until it confesses some palatable pablum that somebody at the top wants.
As one "external" example - Woolley Chabris et al (2010) Evidence of a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.
They want to study "group IQ," and what do you know! The end result they find and publicize is that the amount of *women* in a group is the most important factor for group IQ, so everyone everywhere should hire and add more women to decision making groups post haste.
Methodologically they organize and look at many groups of 2-5 undergrads who are asked to do brainstorming, judgment, and planning tasks, and then are evaluated on “group IQ,” and which finds that cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction matter not at all to group performance, but instead (the paper crows), after conversational dominance, it is the number of *women* in a group that is the biggest determinant of performance and “group IQ. (with "conversational dominance," ie a man speaking most of the time, a strong negative for performance).
If you dig into the study, it's dogshit for several reasons. I mean, first it's small groups of undergrads and isn't necessarily broadly applicable. The problems are carefully selected to not actually be hard. Even then the max IQ of the smartest member was actually MORE important (r=.29) than “social IQ” (r=.26), and social IQ wasn't "women" it was "how well did the people do on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which both genders can do, but which women score higher on average on). Overall both smartest member and social IQ were beat out conversational dominance (r=-0.41), which can happen from either gender.
They were clearly contorting both the data and the published conclusions to align with ideology, as is usually the case with things like this. And this was published in Science!
Did you ever work for Google? I didn't, but I sold my company's products into Google. They were definitely some of the smartest and techno-aggressive people in my customer base. DEI or not, they were the key customer that my company's development team listened to. If Google wanted something, we knew that other tech companies would soon be demanding the same. We never went wrong by fulfilling a technical request from Google.
> Did you ever work for Google? I didn't, but I sold my company's products into Google.
Not Google, but another FAANG yes, and there and in finance led teams of Phd's for many years where we both lost people to and recruited from GOOG regularly. Sure, they're sharp - everyone at that level is.
I also have a few friends who've worked there on various teams. They are definitely the most DEI-pilled FAANG, maybe the most DEI-pilled F50 company overall, and I would bet heavily on ideologically slanted conclusions both for base culture reasons at the "study conductor and analyst" level as well as the executive level.
To be honest, I would bet heavily (although less heavily than at Google) on that outcome at most F100 companies, for basically the same reasons.
How do you even test "team performance" rigorously, in a non-biased way? The Garden of Forking Paths is too big, and the desire to shape conclusions at any or all of selection of participants, problem selection, experimental setup, winnowing, data intake, variable selection, analysis, and statistical tests used are all strong and slanted in only one direction at every step of the people involved.
And why do you think DEI has been a bad policy at the FAANGs? They seem to have been either (a) highly successful *despite* their DEI policies or (b) highly successful * because* of DEI policies. I think there might be something to the idea the DEI was effectively ensuring that lower-qualified white males were not being hired instead of more highly-qualified minorities. ;-)
> And why do you think DEI has been a bad policy at the FAANGs? They seem to have been either (a) highly successful *despite* their DEI policies or (b) highly successful * because* of DEI policies.
In my own opinion, DEI isn't really impacting their 10k's and financial performance much either way, their success is a legacy of locked-in decisions from a decade ago that's made FB and GOOG the ad duopoly of the world, and that revenue stream has been rich enough to sustain them and keep them growing as more and more of the world has adopted and become increasingly engaged with the internet.
They are actually *stunningly* bad at their jobs, especially given the level of talent they have. I personally consider it to literally be the greatest waste of human capital in the world, right now and for the last ten years.
As just one example, the biggest / funniest Google disconnect that I know about - I just ran across a site that uses the Google Vision API on any still photo you submit, which uses image recognition and/or Gemini (the API has a zillion options and it's hard to determine which of the zillions the site in question is using) to determine emotion, setting, context, likely income, likely politics, and best marketing products and angles.
Me and some friends tried it, it was suprisingly good and accurate, and we're all in a pretty desirable "income and brand affinity" bucket.
The thing I found most interesting about it was in a decade plus of using Google products, I've basically never seen a relevant ad.
So more than ten years of emails, documents, video meetings, spreadsheets, social graph analysis, and whatever else got them nothing, but running a single still photo through Vision / Gemini single-shot a much better segmentation?? And it's just left to collect dust.
And not just left to collect dust, but it's strictly better *at their core competency,* by some absurd factor (5x - 100x), and is hidden away in some tiny corner of "API services" space not being used by anyone.
That's just "Google in a nutshell," to me.
And that incompetence, that institutional stagnation and sclerotic dynamic, is partly driven by DEI and culture.
People at Google literally wrote the foundational papers for LLM's! And where are they with Gemini? Vastly behind, with basically zero users, despite having a ~2-4B locked in user base at Alphabet overall?
Meanwhile OpenAI keeps shipping out hits and has 300M weekly users, Deepseek is cooking on a global scale for pennies, and Anthropic is the biggest in B2B. Where's Google? Which LLM model alone out of all of them got pilloried for fake-inserting diversity into answers and generated pictures? Google again? Man. It's almost like DEI affects your internal culture negatively.
Interesting. I think Google programmers are a great example of the standard-issue smart people, but presumably Google has some genii too, and they didn't have a big impact on productivity.
This seems wrong to me. If I worked with some friends and we had amazing psychological safety, dependability, etc., and all scientific data available in 1915, I don't think we would ever figure out general relativity, if we didn't know about it going in. Maybe Google projects don't ever have that level of difficulty? Or Google managers are good at not giving people work they aren't smart enough to do?
On the other hand, the fast inverse square root was invented collectively at Id Software, and though they are good programmers, to the best of my knowledge they weren't uniquely brilliant.
I think you're vastly overestimating the usefulness of geniuses and geniushood to society. Lewis Terman and his team began a long-term study around 1916 of genius children that he identified through the Stanford Binet IQ test. His study included 1,528 subjects (856 males and 672 females). All of them were white Californians, and most were from upper-middle-class backgrounds. He and his team tracked them through their lives. Although ~50% of them attended college (back when less than 10% of US population went to college), most of them didn't contribute much of anything to US arts or sciences. None of them won any major awards or prizes. Several dozen of them went into academia and rose through the ranks. A couple became presidents of professional scientific organizations. And one of them became the head writer for _I Love Lucy_. Many of them became doctors and lawyers and retired in the upper middle class. From the Wikipedia article on Terman...
> By the 4th volume of _Genetic Studies of Genius_, Terman had noted that as adults, his subjects pursued common occupations "as humble as those of policeman, seaman, typist and filing clerk and concluded:
>> "At any rate, we have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated."
However two future Nobel laureates didn't make the cut to be included in the Terman study — Robert Shockley and one other Nobel winner (whose name escapes me at the moment). IIRC, Shockley's IQ tested in the high 120s. And anecdotes about Shockley suggest it bugged him that he wasn't "smart" enough to be in Terman's study. Of course, that may have made him try harder...
You might be right! I wasn't thinking of "genius" as a pure IQ thing, more some nebulous combination of IQ + work ethic + other character traits. But I could be defining "genius" as "someone who makes big discoveries", which results in circular reasoning.
Here's a classic evaluation of this, here on programming:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/
"The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.
Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.
Five Jim Davis’s — creator of that unfunny cartoon cat, where 20% of the jokes are about how Monday sucks and the rest are about how much the cat likes lasagna (and those are the punchlines!) … five Jim Davis’s could spend the rest of their lives writing comedy and never, ever produce the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld."
I like Seinfeld quite a but but find I’d rather watch an episode of him in the coffee cars show, than revisit an episode of Seinfeld. But I didn’t own a TV when it was airing so kind of caught up with the show piecemeal, later on, over time. I think maybe in reruns after the news. Speaking of which entertainment delivery mechanism: M*A*S*H is for me the sitcom that will probably never be topped.
But I don’t think younger people would find it funny. You definitely have to have a toe in an earlier era.
Garfield has lasted for 25 years plus, outlasting seinfeld by at least 15 years, and kids know who Garfield is. They don't Kramer.
and seinfeld is nowhere as good a comedian as Harvey Korman, Carol Burnett, or Tim Conway. Bob Newhart is much better. Seinfeld honestly owed a bit to the Newhart Show i feel.
tv shows people have bias for things that were big when they grew up, but its tough to evaluate over time. The Honeymooners for one pretty much created tropes both the flintstones and the simpsons borrowed, and not
particularly well either. Most people seem to have forgotten The Prisoner these days though.
I don't find Seinfeld to be that funny. Not sure if it is because I didn't watch it in the 90s, but much later. Curb your enthusiasm on the other hand, for some reason I find that hilarious! It's much the same premise, but for some reason I just find the way it's delivered so much better.
There is a joke here somewhere about five Larry Davids.
Süssmayr composed part of the Requiem, so that's a point in favor of TotallyHuman's force multiplier assertion.
Looking at Seinfeld, not everyone involved was a genius. Assuming arguendo that the writers and actors were, surely there were normal people on set: lighting techs, stagehands, foley artists, etc. Would replacing all of them with true exemplars of their craft have brought the show to newly sublime heights? It doesn't seem self-evident to me.
I was very busy in the 90’s. Didn’t see a single episode of Seinfeld or Friends. Wouldn’t see The Simpson’s until the mid 200x’s.
"five Jim Davis’s could spend the rest of their lives writing comedy and never, ever produce the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld"
To which I respond with a loud "hallelujah!" because one episode of that sort was quite enough for all the rest of time, thanks very much. A show that I never found particularly funny, but it was its own kind of humour at least, became increasingly navel-gazing and resulted in this dumb (to be fair, I didn't watch it but am going by reviews) episode about a very specific store in New York.
A marmalade cat who likes lasagna and Mondays are terrible is way more relatable to the rest of us who don't live in that particular patch of New York. Garfield sometimes made me laugh, I don't think I've ever laughed at anything I've seen of Seinfeld show.
So yeah, gimme five more Jim Davises instead of one more show about "smug people in Noo Yawk", thanks!
Being far too young to have watched Seinfeld, my parents (who once lived in NY) were aghast and eventually sat down to watch some. They selected the Soup Nazi episode, on the grounds that it was the absolute peak of an incredibly funny show. We started watching and... crickets. A couple giggles here and there. The premise had some amusement. But no big laughs. No great punchlines I'll be quoting for years.
Everyone just ended up a little confused. Me at how this was supposed to be the peak of 90s comedy, my parents at how they remembered it being so much funnier.
I'm not sure how this happened. It's not like all humor was like that and we just got better (or more brain-dead and less sophisticated). A lot of comedy from that time holds up great. But Seinfeld... what were people smoking?
I think "The Contest" was a much stronger episode than the Soup Nazi.
One of my favorite monologues to this day is George's at the end of "The Marine Biologist". Capped with a one-liner from Kramer.
It's not nearly as funny without the setup, though. You appreciate it much more if you've watched the previous 20 minutes, with George's growing anxiety and Kramer diving into yet another quirky hobby. Which in turn requires familiarity with the characters, and finding those characters plausible because you've seen behavior like that in people in your everyday life.
I find a great deal of Seinfeld is like that. I don't really care that the characters are unlikeable; they appeal to me because they reflect real people. And then they're funny when they react to situations in a way I didn't quite expect, but in hindsight think "yeah, that makes sense".
(Also, they're not *wholly* unlikeable. Jerry is funny. Elaine is pretty and interesting. Kramer is an adventure. George is probably the hardest to like, but he's understandable, is entertaining when he's having to weather people even less likeable than he, and I find myself just admiring Jason Alexander's work in portraying him.)
I think we got collectively better at making movies. We have figured out what works, and we have gradually increased the dosage.
Similarly, I was watching some child movies with my kids. Tried to show them the child movies that I watched as a child... but those were quite boring. And then I remembered that as a child I have already thought that those movies had many boring moments, but also had some good moments. Well, compared to that, movies like Paw Patrol do not have boring moments at all.
OK, so nobody clicked my link and read the actually VERY INTERESTING statistics about the speed and quality distribution of computer programmers at the same tasks. Instead, people talk about Garfield, Seinfeld and Mozart, which was meant as a throwaway joke by Joel Spolsky. Very well!
I have seen a couple of Seinfeld episodes, and yes, I find them funny. The Soup Nazi is a very original character with a lot of comedy potential. But I also see what Deiseach means: My wife doesn't like it at all, because the main characters are all so very very dislikeable! So neurotic, whining about their bad luck which they brought to themselves, egocentric, doing senseless nasty things out of spite or for their own flimsy little advantage.
We have the same problem with How I Met Your Mother. These people are supposed to be friends, but play each other really nasty tricks.
Rewatching Friends, we find it very silly, but at least they are really friends to each other, they are there for one-another, even when their job's a joke and they're broke.
Garfield: I once saw a theory, don't remember where, stating that it is a "local minimum of comedy". Every little thing you change about it makes it funnier: Remove Garfield's bubbles, remove him altogether, leave away the last panel... It has a lot of good ideas, e.g. the toaster possessed by an evil spirit. But it overdelivers the jokes. Sometimes it's precisely Garfield's snarky comment in the last panel which spoils the whole thing.
youve never watched a Chuck Lorre sitcom i guess lol. The Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men make me want to claw my eyes out.
Okay, perhaps the difference is that today we have more to choose from, so it is easy to ignore the bad stuff. We couldn't be so picky in the past.
It's much funnier if you're familiar with NYC.
>dumb (to be fair, I didn't watch it but am going by reviews) episode about a very specific store in New York
That's like saying that Macbeth is about the goings on at a particular castle. The episode is about the broader phenomenon of what people are willing to put up with for the "privilege" of participating in the latest trend.
Macbeth is nearer to my cultural experience than "bunch of poseurs in NY go to a flavour-of-the-month shop for a product they don't particularly want other than it's all the rage in the lifestyle sections of the NYT". At least Macbeth gives us witches, ghosts, murder, murder and some more murder, and brewers' droop jokes. Seinfeld is "imagine the most annoying people you ever knew, in the most annoying city in the world".
I'm sorry, did you imagine that I was arhpguing that Seinfeld is as great as Shakespeare? Or even that Seinfeld is good? I said neither. I was merely correcting your misapprehension about the topic of the episode.
>for a product they don't particularly want other than it's all the rage in the lifestyle sections of the NYT
As it happens, the soup in question was meant to be unusually tasty.
That’s interesting, because in America, when people got the daily paper (and even the slimmest small city had its daily, or at least its six-daily, complete with comics and jumble and hocus focus) - Garfield was a byword for “never funny” though no less belonging to the comics page (Cathy was still there, and Nancy) for that deficit.
My grandfather-in-law, a laconic man, upon noticing that we were perusing the comics that filled the last page of the ten or so pages of his ******** Bulletin, which he read through twice on those long slow days, once remarked: “That Garfield sure does love lasagne”.
And his pronouncements, though few and widely-spaced, tended, in retrospect, to be the final and most complete word on a subject.
Later on, some “jokers” decided Garfield was funnier without the cat, and reprinted it so. But I’d been intermittently trying to find Garfield funny since I was eight, and didn’t give it another go.
this is a bit sus. that "not funny" cat had multiple tv specials as well as an animated cartoon series. The Nine Lives of Garfield in particular took him in more serious direction and was very popular. He had and still had an absurd number of collected strip paperbacks, to the point they made omnibus 3 in one editions
i think people kind of belief the comics curmudgeon type persons too much. Garfield was popular in the 80s; bloom
county's bill the cat was a parody of him for one.
like theres a lot of attitude changes; the reverse was mister rogers, my generation has none of the adulation moderns do because we werent overstimulated enough to find him calming. he was something very young kids watched and was just there: we liked other things
Bloom County wasn’t captivating to a child.
The genius of Schultz reasserts itself …
TV Garfield was funnier than comic Garfield. It was basically the same set of running gags most of the time, but with good comic timing and more effective physical comedy.
Oh, I don’t know that anyone imagines Garfield was not extremely lucrative. Pokémon was too, though it was not funny either. Except for any extracurricular riffing one could do on the names, but that sort of thing wounded the tender sensibilities of our Pokemon-loving child. So we desisted.
I did indeed love Mr. Rogers, purely, as a child and I suspect the degree to which any child did so was the degree to which he was different from the adults in her life and the drama in her household. Ideally, many children would neither need Mr.Rogers nor find him soothing. I loved him so much that I actively resented when the little trolley car appeared to take us to the mostly off-putting puppet segment. I felt Mr. Rogers was off screen then and probably didn’t grasp that he was voicing the puppets. Also, I had no familiarity with European puppet theater and didn’t understand why they were ugly. I preferred the visit to e.g. the factory where they made umbrellas.
I bet I would have liked Reading Rainbow had it come along earlier.
I’d have bern perfectly happy to watch Mr. Rogers make tea or do household tasks, or read a book aloud.
The Muppet Show was big when I was a kid, and we’d been primed for it by Sesame Street. It was very funny, of course - and children trained on that could hardly be expected to find Garfield funny.
But maybe Garfield was Mr. Rogers for kids born later.
not sure, Mr. Rogers was for extremely young children, and he was even more sedate than Sesame Street. Like I watched him as a kindergartener but never really could enjoy him compared to zoom, 321 contact, the electric company, etc.
its more though that he seems to be significantly more loved now, and i kind of wonder if autism and overstimulation kind of buff his reputation a bit. he becomes ASMR for the youtube generation.
garfield was a proto bart simpson, smart-alecks in the 80s were popular and garfield was one for your dad. my point is more a bit frustration because there is a lot of revisionism about how old stuff was received. Like the famiky circus wasn't hated back then either-modern internet commentators craft narratives a lot. AVGN and hating acclaim or ljn video games.
I rather liked Garfield as a younger child. Not sure how much of that was just age and the maturity (or lack thereof) of my sense of humor, and how much was most of my exposure coming in the form of collections of strips from relatively early in Jim Davis's career when the concept was relatively fresh.
There have been several variations of altering Garfield comics. Some remove the cat entirely, while others just omit his thought bubbles (and sometime redraw him in a more realistic style) in order to depict the scenes from Jon's perspective. The overall effect, IIRC, was a mix of surreal and tragic rather than humorous. My personal favorite was "Garfield With Garfield", which took the rather silly step of replacing the cat with a picture of President James A. Garfield:
https://archive.nytimes.com/laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/garfield-as-garfield/
the I'm Sorry Jon subreddit makes it into cosmic horror, artists turning the characters gruesome
Those Garfield books were perfectly marketed for small hands, and the strips were not too wordy.
My cohort had a little bit of a thing for Ziggy merchandise, believe it or not.
I liked Hagar the Horrible and the Lockhorns. I tended not to get Wizard of Id, I think. I faithfully read (or hate-read) *most* of them: Peanuts of course, first, up top; and B.C., Hi and Lois, Dennis the Menace, Nancy, Funky Winkerbean (which I'm astonished to learn recently has carried on in spinoff form), Dagwood, Fred Bassett, stupid Cathy, stupider Sally Forth, the Fusco Brothers, Snuffy Smith, Mary Worth, Apartment 3-G, a little later Bloom County ... I didn't much like Family Circus but I liked the drawing style and I looked forward principally to the map ones which showed Little Billy's activities with an arrow. I did not read Prince Valiant. It seemed too late in the very long story to begin.
I got to college and became aware that the comic crowd (which was the cool thing to be, then) didn't much like any of that* except they absolutely worshipped Charles Schultz.
*(Barring for expertly drawn, subversive copies when they needed material)
Here’s a whole blog dedicated to cranky reads of comic strips.
https://joshreads.com/
I have difficulties believing that the universe might have existed (not only since always, but) since an infinitely long time ago.
There seems nothing wrong with asking "And how were things before?" again and again after each correct answer, but I have a possibly wrong intuition that there would have happened, I don't know, just _too_ many events if there was no first one. I feel like there must have been a start, but it's only a feeling.
I know an illogical argument against an infinitely old universe, and of course that's not good enough for me.
It goes like this:
A piece of paper is passed from person to person and has passed infinitely many already. When it enters a person's possession and it is blank then they write their name on it before passing it on, if it's not blank then they pass it on right away. When you get that paper, whose name is on it?
The paper, so the argument goes, cannot have your immediate predecessor's name on it, because _their_ immediate predecessor would have written theirs on it, but no, _their_ immediate predecessor would have, no their, and so on. But, so the argument goes also, someone must have written their name on it.
And all that makes no sense, I mean the argument itself, not that against which one came up with it
With the argument one assumes that the paper has passed infinitely many persons, but also that it has entered one person's possession first, namely when it was blank and that very person wrote their name on it - no other than the first person could have done that. The argument is constructed that way but those two assumptions contradict each other.
So the argument doesn't show that an infinitely old universe is absurd, but the argument itself is absurd.
I guess the intuition that there just must have been a start took the better of the inventor.
Has someone a sound argument?
These kinds of arguments often come up into the context of philosophy of religion. IIRC William Lane Craig is a fervent opponent of a past-infinite universe, but there are others. The Grim Reaper Paradox is also one that's close in spirit to the paper passer paradox. A common reply is the unsatisfiable pair diagnosis. This should give you enough keywords to find everything you're looking for. :)
On second thought... maybe one does not need to believe in an infinite past. Even if the past (of everything) is finite, the universe did NOT pop up (magically or otherwise) like a lion in my bedroom. Because there was nothing to pop up into.
It would simply be finitely old.
Yes. There would have been nothing it originated from *but also* nothing to originate into. It just did not at all originate, it cannot, no matter whether it's infinitely or finitely old.
Thanks.
Living up to your name here I see :)
Which is admittedly a pleasant surprise to me :D
"Grim Reaper paradox" was a super keyword. It led me to "Temporal finitism" on Wikipedia and it offers a lot of input.
Not having gone through the physics references yet, the main problem with Temporal finitism seems to be that most people who deny an infinite past
a) ignorantly assume the conclusion of a start anyway
b) construct physically impossible processes -- eternal pieces of paper, or there always having been people --, which proof nothing about the subject matter
b) or mistakenly believe that if the universe is infinitely old then there must be a state of it that's infinitely long ago, which of course would not be the case, each is finitely ago.
I'm left leaning to an infinite past, because I don't want a lion to pop up in my bedroom however unlikely that is, but am still not firm in that belief.
> I have difficulties believing that the universe might have existed (not only since always, but) since an infinitely long time ago.
Not sure where you get the idea that it would... didn't the "steady state" cosmological theory get disproved decades ago, in favor of the big bang?
I'm not talking about the steady state theory -- which is also only about steady density through continuous creation of matter, as I believe, not about the universe never having been smaller, and not about it not having a beginning.
I'm talking about the big bang not being the first process that ever got going, but some other before it too, and before that too...
I'm not the first to have that idea and I don't know of anything that could rule out this possibility. But I would like too, if there is something. The big bang theory has nothing to say about it.
I have difficulty believing in an infinitely old universe, but I also have difficulty believing in an finitely old universe. So I want to settle this.
I see, you mean "universe" in the wider sense of anything existing at all. Yeah, that's the age-old conundrum. If stuff extends infinitely into the past, it's weird and hard to believe. If stuff appears out of nothing, it's also weird and hard to believe. Thinking minds have been butting on this one for ages.
The paradox here comes from trying to use "infinity" as a numerical value when working within Z (one-dimensional integer space), which is nonsensical because there all integers are finite. The set of all integers has infinite cardinality, and you can use infinity as a limit when doing things with integers, but there is no such thing as "the paper has been passed infinitely many times" in this context.
With real numbers, you mostly have the same problem, but there are vaguely similar stuff you can do with infinite-cardinality subsets. For example, a tritium atom is flying through space. At some point along its path, it decays into Helium-3. Between the start of its path and when it decays, it has travelled a finite distance in a finite amount of time, but has passed through an infinite number of points in space (disregard quantum). You can get away with this because real numbers are a higher degree of infinity than integers: the latter are "countably infinite", i.e. you can define a 1:1 mapping of integers to natural numbers. But it has been proven (Cantor's Diagonalization Argument) that there are too many real numbers to do this with, and moreover, that any bounded segment of real numbers (e.g. "everything between 0.0 and 1.0") is also uncountably infinite in cardinality.
There are some more exotic number systems that do allow you to have infinite numerical values in extensions of natural numbers or real numbers: Cantor's Ordinal Numbers and Conway's Surreal Numbers respectively. Applying these to your paradox is a bit over my head, sadly.
>At some point along its path, it decays into Helium-3. Between the start of its path and when it decays, it has travelled a finite distance in a finite amount of time, but has passed through an infinite number of points in space (disregard quantum). You can get away with this because real numbers are a higher degree of infinity than integers: the latter are "countably infinite", i.e. you can define a 1:1 mapping of integers to natural numbers.
nit: You can get away with "infinite number of points" in a finite distance even if you restrict the points to rational fractions of the distance, even though the rational fractions are countable.
( My _personal_ view is that "disregard quantum" is a serious problem, in more ways than the distances along the path. I'm skeptical of the "reality" of arbitrary huge integers which would require more bits to describe than would fit in the observable universe - so those countably infinite rational numbers themselves run into problems, from my point of view. )
Ah, yes, you're right about rational numbers.
Also agreed on "disregard quantum" being a big problem. Big enough that I didn't feel comfortable passing over it without at least a glib acknowledgement.
Many Thanks!
Yeah, that's all good and well, but ... can you draw any conclusion from this to whether something could be infinitely old or not?
Like, if before the big bang was a big crunch, could big bang and big crunch have taken turns infinitely many times till now?
I don't think the argument rules out a countably infinite number of cycles with no beginning. That's just the setup, an infinite string of people passing a piece of paper along and the paper has always been in transit.
Neither does it rule out a thing starting at some discrete point within an infinite sequence, some finite distance away from the point being observed.
The part that doesn't work is a specific event happening an infinite length of time ago, since "infinite length of time ago" is a nonsensical concept unless it's a shorthand for some sort of thing that happens at a limit or we're using an exotic number system that is over my head mathematically.
Or the event is continuously repeating
Well, it's clear that an actual piece of paper couldn't be infinitely old without being repaired infinitely many times. And a piece of paper couldn't be infinitely old with that rule on it unless it had always had a name on it, which needn't be the name of an actual person.
However, the only evidence we have that the universe is infinitely old is that we don't really know any way time could begin, but considering how little we know about reconciling quantum theory and gravity that's fairly weak evidence.
Yeah, the philosopher who made that paper argument did not care much about it being realistic.
I think time comes into existence, if at all, with things that change their state coming into existence -- but I'm uncomfortable to assume that whatever things existed when the big bang happened did just came into existence from nothing, because I personally have noticed no universe coming into existence from nothing lately 😀
So an infinitely old universe would be the alternative, but I have this uncomfortable suspicion that nothing can be so old.
The paper's marks in this argument sounds sort of analogous to entropy. We're pretty sure the total amount of entropy in the universe is always increasing, and while the universe may be infinitely large, it's also quite homogeneous on large scales so the entropy per unit (comoving) volume is generally still increasing. There's a lower bound of 0 entropy, so if the universe is infinitely old, it must have effectively started with an infinitely long period where the rate of entropy generation was arbitrarily slow. Entropy only being generated slowly is not physically impossible, but this does sort of rule out a steady-state-ish universe where everything has been roughly as it is now forever.
It's already known that the universe used to be very different in a relevant way though. During the inflationary era the universe was rapidly exponentially expanding, meaning that a fixed co-moving volume corresponds to exponentially less physical volume the further back in time you measure, so an exponentially expanding universe with a constant entropy generation rate per physical volume can in principle remain in a steady state because the entropy is constantly being diluted (whether the inflaton field itself can be in a steady state is a separate question).
There's another more abstract way of looking at it. Given laws of physics which specify, for the state of the universe at one time, the state that follows at any future time, it is possible to generate a consistent history of the universe by specifying an arbitrary initial state and running it forwards. Generating a consistent history of the universe which extends infinitely into the past is harder, and you can't do it purely by running states forwards. For such a problem in general (i.e. state machines or something), there may or may not be a state which can be extended infinitely into the past, while every state can be extended infinitely into the future.
The assumption about time asymmetry here does sort of sneak in reference to entropy again though, because on a microscopic scale the laws of physics are reversible (not quite time symmetric, but you can run them backwards as well as forwards) (this is assuming the Many-Worlds Interpretation). If you specify a state at some time t_0 and run the rules both backwards and forwards from there though, you generally either get a bland featureless universe at all times (if the initial state was high-entropy), or an increase in entropy in both directions, with time appearing to run backwards for t<t_0.
If, and I'm sure nobody can be sure about this, there comes a big crunch, then I don't see why this could not reset entropy.
And then entropy might have been reset in a cyclic universe infinitely many times, that's why I look for a principled argument against a infinitely old universe.
But you might have an understanding of why a big crunch could not reset entropy. I just assume it could be, because nobody knows what the state of the universe arbitrary close to time 0 or the beginning of the big bang was.
> there may or may not be a state which can be extended infinitely into the past, while every state can be extended infinitely into the future.
I would say "can be extrapolated" instead of "can be extended", just to make clear that we're trying to find out what happened and not that our ability to do so tells us anything about whether there happened something or not.
Regarding "can be extrapolated", no I think "extended" still fits better with what I was trying to get at.
It's unclear of course how exactly it is/was determined what the overall state of the universe is in the first place. We know that the universe seems to follow some laws relating the present to the past and future, which provides some constraints, but doesn't constrain which particular history, of those that are consistent with the laws, exists. I'm vaguely imagining that whatever the process or criterion that determines this is, it in some sense picks the state of the universe at one moment and extends it in time to form the entire history, since this is the simplest way of generating consistent histories. This process can easily generate a self-consistent half-eternal history with a finite start, but for it to generate a history that's eternal in both directions is more complicated, and I feel it ought to be disfavoured by Occam's razor. This is what I meant earlier.
This is all sufficiently vague and philosophical, and trying to describe a process I don't actually have a model of (though I do think it fits with Tegmark's mathematical universe), that I would not give the argument all that much confidence. I do think it's a better way of formulating the thing with the paper though.
If you start somewhere in the "middle of history", what you usually get is higher entropy states in both directions, which is not what we see. Even if it didn't actually end up with an eternal expanding universe in both directions, the beginning of the universe would tend to look like a bunch of white holes spewing out chaotic matter and energy that would gradually get more organized in dramatic ways like eggs unscrambling themselves and people getting unearthed from graves and getting younger until they are absorbed into a womb, until it reached a peak and then started acting like normal.
While there's a lot we don't know about how physics behaves at extremely high energy densities, violating the second law of thermodynamics would require some extremely fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics to break, and doesn't seem very likely. From a brief read about cyclic cosmological models on Wikipedia, it seems they usually avoid the issue by having an overall expansion each cycle rather than actually destroying any entropy. In the Baum-Frampton model in particular (since it's the one explained there most clearly), the region that goes on to form a new observable-universe-size chunk of the new universe starts as only a tiny fraction of the volume of the original universe. It's therefore similar to the eternal inflation case again, just slower.
The increasing rate of expansion of the universe would seem to defy the idea of a Big Crunch, don’t you think?
If it is increasing then the increasing rate of expansion of the visible universe doesn't help the idea. If the visible is only a tiny part of an already all around collapsing whole, it might not prevent the cruch though.
But I'm really just arguing my way around here :)
Note that treating the concept of infinity rigorously leads to many non-intuitive results.
Also, isn't the current cosmological mainstream belief that the universe is only about 13 billion years old? With no idea what (if anything) came 'before' that?
I think that the mainstream belief is that about 13 billion years ago the universe was very small and rapidly "exploding" but no one knows what from, because the theories doesn't make sense or are incompatible. Few people dare to say it "exploded" from volume 0 and infinite density.
And I would like to know if something could have happened before that "explosion" was happening ... and before that ... and before that ...
C.f. Hilbert's Paradox of the Grand Hotel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel
There's a word missing from our language, it's somewhere between "technology" and "culture" and it describes generally how good a society is at something. Let's call it flurm until we find a better name.
To pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, France has bad coffee flurm. It's not just some kind of lack of technology or ability, it's a lack of interest in quality that exists both on the supply side and the demand side. Nobody is really demanding good coffee so nobody makes it; nobody makes it so nobody bothers to demand it.
But France has great flurm in some other things, like bread. Every random bakery in France is somehow capable of cranking out bread that's better than 99% of what you can buy in an English-speaking country. Bread is not especially tricky to make, but some countries have bad bread flurm and are quite happy eating crap.
Flurm is more important than just food examples though. No country except the US has good software engineering flurm, definitely not software engineering organisational flurm. And some countries lack the flurm to even be clean or safe.
What is this concept that I'm lacking a word for? (Note: I'm very interested in conversation about the general concept, and uninterested in conversation about the very specific examples)
Knack?
Or maybe Givethedogabone.
Competency?
“literacy” feels close here—the narrow version is for the technology and practice of writing, but there's also “computer literacy”, “financial literacy”, etc. It might have too many implications of universality at a skill among the general population (rather than among primarily bakers, primarily coffee purveyors, etc.) being desirable/obtainable, and it might treat it too much as a certain kind of… I'm not sure how to put this last bit, maybe “fixed knowledge” rather than “ongoing active practice”? Like a genome rather than a microorganism colony, whereas I think what you're pointing to is more centrally the latter.
I asked two AIs, and they found it super interesting, but none of their suggestions worked for me.
If I had to pick a word, I would use "mojo".
"France has bad coffee mojo" works for me as pretty equivalent to what you described above.
The first word that popped into my head was "geist". I realize "spirit" perhaps isn't quite what you are going for, but what you are describing feels like it's a part of the defining energy, vitality, and identity of a place or people, which reminded me of zeitgeist. Yet while zeitgeist is inherently transient, what you describe is more permanent. Hence, "geist". Not perfect, but maybe it inspires someone else.
As for where it comes from and what explains it, I think the ways it is perpetuated feels pretty self-evident: a combination of cultural pride, technological abilities, and human capital developed over generations.
I'm more curious as to how it gets started--like why is France good at bread and not coffee? My hunch is that these things have to start locally and may have potentially very small initial nucleation points--perhaps even a small cohort of dedicated French bakers who mastered the art of their time and passed it down successfully. There are probably macro and/or demand-side factors too, but my guess is that heavy specialization must precede strong flurm/geist, which implies that the decision to specialize is a big turning point. Then once you get the ball rolling it starts to reinforce itself (think Silicon Valley network effects).
I'd also hypothesize that one reason you can't have strong flurm/geist for everything, is that the skills / human features required to excel in certain domains overlap (not perfectly, but at some level they must pull from the some underlying human capital supply for gastronomic artisans, for example).
Mos, the singular of mores?
métis seems adjacent and may help here?
"Metis" leapt to my mind, too. What Melvin is describing seems to be a combination of prevalence of metis with a cultural infrastructure that affords acquiring metis and putting it into practice.
I think for normal conversation 'culture' seems to be used for what you refer to as Flurm:
'The US has a culture of innovative software companies.'
'Czechs have a beer culture, French have a wine culture.'
'Few countries outside the Commonwealth have any culture for cricket.'
What extra meaning does Flurm have that isn't captured by this use of culture? Is it the economic aspect of a demand for x driving a better supply?
It's cultur-al, but it's a lot narrower than just "culture". In particular I would not think of the cricket thing as an example of flurm, that's a pure demand-side phenomenon. Nobody in France is good at cricket because hardly anyone is interested in playing or watching cricket, and that's fine. But they're lousy at coffee despite drinking quite a lot of coffee.
Flurm is more like technology except that it's not quite about having the technology or not, it's about how well diffused the technology and related skills are through society as well as how much they're valued.
I think it would be valuable to have a word for it because it would help us focus on society-wide things we lack and how we could get them. The Germans have great roadworks flurm. If you tell people we need to change our culture to get better at roadworks then they'll resist that idea. If you tell people we need better technology to get better at roadworks then they'll point out that our machinery is just as good as the Germans' so there's nothing to be done. But if you help them understand that being good at something, societally, is about diffusion of good skills and habits and standards, then maybe we can start to understand what we can do.
I think it's that "culture" is a very broad, overloaded term, and it'd be useful to have a word naming the more specific concept. Just like we have words that are more specific that "happy" and "sad"
Natural language words gain meaning not only on their own but also from context, so having "overloaded" words is fine by itself. Re-using words also a matter of efficiency. Why invent many word when few do trick?
hmm, you got me quite interested. It's a very real concept but it does seem like there's no universal term for it.
Claude suggests:
- "craft culture"
- "institutional knowledge"
- "monozukuri"
- "habitus"
but honestly I might just start calling it "flurm", it sounds oddly fitting :p
Don't start calling it flurm. It needs a Japanese name. Clearly.
Maybe monozukuri is that name.
fair enough!
Japan has the best flurm in the world at so many little things, clearly they should be the ones picking the name
They definitely have the best "coming up with names for random things" flurm.
I've seen some examples from modern German that are pretty impressive as far as coming up with names for random things. Though I'd probably agree with putting the Japanese first because theirs sound more elegant at least when rendered into English.
Yeah, Japanese and German are both kind of "lego languages" when it comes to building nouns - you can snap together pieces of words to make new words, which is why I think there's so many examples of "oddly specific nouns" in both.
What would be the Japanese equivalent of Backpfeifengesicht?
Seems like German is optimal for rendering ‘punchable face’.
Why am I thinking of Ted Cruz all of a sudden?
they have the best flurm of calling a concept plainly in their language but somehow making it appear mystique to outsiders
("monozukuri" literally means "thing-making". See also "kaizen" and "ikigai")
I think the Coffee thing is just that France values different things in coffee than the US - coffee is a small black coffee and not any of the elaborate coffee the US has. The French think the US has bad coffee Flurm.
The US also has bad coffee flurm but I wanted to steer away from that particular conversation-derailing example.
The US doesn't have a single coffee flurm anymore, what with the explosion of independent coffee shops and craft roasteries, both contributing to huge improvements in good coffee availability. Having bad coffee in many parts of the country is now entirely optional.
Same with beer.
So I tend to get defensive whenever these types of conversations come up, because invariably the US gets brought up of a bad example of bread, coffee, beer, cheese, what have you. The reason that I get defensive is that, in the US, it is usually not that difficult to find world-class examples of all of these things, if you care enough to put in a modicum of effort.
But I think that these criticisms are almost always correct in that in countries that have this thing that Melvin is taking about, finding world class examples is the _default_. There are bad versions, but you almost have to try to find it.
Almost nothing food related is like that in the US. Thanks to our multi-culturalism and wealth, we _have_ world class examples of almost everything, including some things that the US is almost the only place to find it, such as BBQ. But you almost always have to care and be willing to put in at least _some_ effort to find it.
Agreed.
Over the weekend, I was talking with an older Christian lady who said she believed that Trump will inspire or convince more people to go to church. I think that also included convincing more people to be/become Christians. I didn't get a chance to ask her why but I'm trying to figure out what her reasoning might have been.
It might be my bias getting in the way of reasoning, but I doubt many people will see him as a religious role model. I can't remember the last time I heard his name in context of religion besides the occasional story about the Pope saying something in relation to him. (Personally I can see more people being embarrassed/alienated from religion because of Trump but I *know* that's my bias.)
The only other reason I can imagine is that she meant that people were somehow embarrassed or afraid to go to church under Biden and would be more open to the idea now. I don't think that would be a bad-faith argument on her part, I don't think there would be *that* many people who fit that criteria.
I've seen news stories about younger people generally becoming more religious (especially Christian) but that's been going on since before Trump was voted in. Is there some link between Trump and an increase in church-going Christians that I don't know about?
Just makes me think of the Simpsons episode with the asteroid, where the bar and the church are right next to each other and when they see the meteor everyone runs from the one to the other.
a lot of older christians of the fundamentalist type like him, i'm not sure why. i think the gay marriage defeat of social cons and following trans and qia plus radicalized them to follow any one who opposed it and not always rationally.
trump showed secular leftism was not as popular as thought, and pretty much won christians by being a lesser devil. anyone who gave them hope to reverse things had a ready made base of support
Some pin the decline of religiousness and church attendance to either leftism, or the general encroachment of government and the state in the lives of citizens. Trump is often seen as pushing both things backward, so he would be allowing Christianity to regenerate, even if he is not a paragon of virtue himself.
1. President Trump has very strong support amongst evangelicals, and many evangelical leaders openly support him.
2. He's also a Rorschach test. He says enough of everything that you can find whatever you want in his statements. If you think he's great you'll probably convince yourself he's great in whatever way is important to you (and this lady probably thinks church attendance is important).
He's certainly putting the fear of God into Democrats.
People praying to be spared his random decrees?
That reminds me of an old joke:
A very righteous priest enters Paradise. He’s doing the tour, and then notices a magnificent villa. It turns out it belongs to Mr. X, the alcoholic adulterer who was a bus driver and died in a car crash he caused.
The cleric does certainly not get this kind of treatment from the celestial bureaucracy.
“Why him?” he complains, ready to list all of Mr. X’s many notorious sins.
“Well, when you were praying”, the angel answers, “everyone was sleeping. But when he was driving, everyone was fervently praying!”
There do seem to be a lot of people re-discovering an interest in religion and such things as pious ejaculations (yes, go ahead and have your laugh, I'll wait for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejaculatory_prayer) now Trump is in office: "dear God in heaven!" "God help us!" "what the hell!", "what in God's name is he doing?" and let us never forget the ever-popular taking the Name of the Lord (in vain) 😀
To steelman: Trump's survival of an assassination attempt by a last minute turn of the head is interpreted by some people as divine intervention. There's a biblical theme of God doing great work through people who are deeply flawed from of Christian perspective. Trump is pushing back against the left on many cultural issues that are contrary to Christianity (abortion, trans). You could say he is a central figure leading cultural change in a direction that is more congruent with Christian principles.
Yeah that's the great thing about religion. You can pick whatever interpretation you like and you can make it fit. Trump lives, he's protected by God or in league with Satan. Trump dies, he's a martyr or got smitten (Old Testament-style). It's results-based analysis all the way down.
> Trump's survival of an assassination attempt by a last minute turn of the head is interpreted by some people as divine intervention
Shintoism, the japanese natalism meme visited from heaven
> Over the weekend, I was talking with an older Christian lady who said she believed that Trump will inspire or convince more people to go to church. I think that also included convincing more people to be/become Christians. I didn't get a chance to ask her why but I'm trying to figure out what her reasoning might have been.
True atheism is hard, intellectually draining, emotionally isolating; what most people believe is in scientism; if we believe trump dismantles university in 4 years(errr no, thats to much optimism) then it logically follows all'y'alls would find god again.
(expect why would it be Christianity? and how can one believe it happens in 4 years? I believe more strongly in the gods of "cultist simulator" then I can imagine tolerating a mordenized Abrahamic religion)
I’m not sure what definition of tru atheism you’re operating with, but it seems like evangelicals et al would be equally worried by half-arsed atheism.
You need not be a “true” atheist with a lot of deep thought on the matter to not go to church, contribute to Christian charities, organize under the direction of Christian leaders and organizations, etc. For that all you really need to do is pay attention to other stuff.
> what definition of tru atheism you’re operating with
Someone who is capable of making the arguments vs a churches authority, who then turns around and doesnt aim it at secular authority's and has them acting as a replacement on many of the key points.
A nazi calling Christianity weak mocking prayer as begging to an invisible skyman, but then finds themselves unable to mock hitler, may have found faith in something else. Bonus points if theres a socail group with some cult-like factors.
> For that all you really need to do is pay attention to other stuff.
We have regime change that other stuff is weakening, so a christian with poor empathy for athieism; will imagine you will all come back and if unaware that christianity was playing along with its decline may not consider the other options gaining ground instead; islam, americain-Buddhism for example.
I don't think not believing in God is any harder or more intellectually draining than not believing in leprechauns. Fantastic claim, no credible evidence, easy-peasy I don't believe.
Certain ideas held with some frequency by atheists, like predestination and lack of free will, can be intellectually challenging and isolating. Those beliefs aren't exclusive to atheists, though, and exist even among Christians.
Im saying this as an athiest
I'm a atheist, not sure about the "true"part (like, there are "false atheists?), and I don't find it "hard, intellectually draining, emotionally isolating", doing fine here, thanks. Also don't know about this "scientism" thing, so I can't imagine I believe in something I don't know about.
Well, church-going Christians have a network of social connections and support groups that atheists would probably have trouble creating from scratch from their non-religious social networks. I wonder if this isn't the reason Scott promotes his rationalist meetups.
As for false atheists, I'd include the scientism crowd and Marxists in that category. They may not believe in a Theos-being like the Abrahamic religions do, but the god they worship is the future.
Yes the folks who regularly attend churches have that advantage. Also when moving to a new place, it's a natural way to meet like-minded people - just show up at a church of your preference.
I'm not exactly sure what scientism is - science worship? That'd be so unscientific!
Yeah, scientism is science worship. It's the optimistic but unfounded belief that we will be able to eventually understand everything in the universe and, by understanding everything, gain vast technical powers without end — and do cool things like travel to the stars and attain immortality. I remember an interview with Stephen Hawking back in the late 70s or early 80s. Hawking could still speak (barely), and was confined to a wheelchair, but he said that if we could understand the laws of the universe, "we could become gods." I found it ironic that a guy who was losing control over his body was dreaming of possibly becoming godlike.
And then we have Arthur C. Clarke's three laws...
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This is Scientism.
"like, there are "false atheists?"
Possibly the good old Lizardman Constant but what else would you call believing in an afterlife, or spirits, or using witchcraft/rituals, or ghosts, or the rest of the array of "spiritual but not religious"?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432570-500-why-almost-everyone-believes-in-an-afterlife-even-atheists/
https://progressivechristianity.org/resource/can-a-person-be-an-atheist-and-still-believe-in-god/
(I'm rolling my eyes at that last link because of course, *of course* it's a crowd calling themselves 'progressive Christians' who came up with that. Progressed so far they moved right on past Christianity, more like!)
Id call that paganism; Im very much defending the full thesis of scientism
I have 0 patience for "spiritual not religious" stuff, but it's a free country.
I am an atheist, but I feel like religious people are intellectually much closer to me than the "spiritual not religious" folks. At least they take the question of the supernatural intellectually, even if they arrive at the opposite answer. Meanwhile, the "spiritual not religious" are just choosing the convenient parts, regardless of whether that even makes sense.
I was raised an atheist, but it didn't stick. I've had too many weird "supernatural" things happen to me that I no longer buy into the materialism schtick. Of course, these experiences may all be delusional on my part, but I'm comfortable with there being stuff that Science just can't observe or measure. So I guess I'm an agnostic mystic. Although I have the evidence of my own experiences, I realize that most people would roll their eyes at some of the things I've encountered. Therefore, I'm forced to be agnostic about the existence of creator-entity (although if it exists, I doubt it's like anything we can imagine) — whether there was a creator-entity or not, we've still got to deal with the idea that it's turtles all the way down. ;-)
Very much same here.
On the first, I don't think there's any contradiction there at all. Atheism literally means notbelieving in God, not notbelieving in anything supernatural. The term for that is materialist.
The second, though, is some mightily sloppy postmodern stuff.
The postmodern stuff of which you speak is actually informed by more than 2500 years of esoteric traditions. Of course, histories of Western Thought, of philosophy, and of science mostly ignore the importance of esoteric traditions in the woof and weave of Western Culture and their influence on rationalist discourse. Moreover, Christian and Jewish authorities tried (unsuccessfully) to stamp out esoteric heterodoxy — but a lot of the so-called New Age stuff is an amalgam of and an improvisation upon various older esoteric traditions.
If you hear about someone having suicidal thoughts(also you like this person), what advice do you give them?
A real christen would suggest a priest; 95% odds you feel the hotlines or therapist is a complete answer. Imagine not finding either answer even slightly comforting. Moral authority for most people rests naturally outside themselves, god is dead and its replacement is disgusting; its a heavy burden to face actual hard questions with raw existential terror.
There is no good response to suicidal tendencies or suicide. Religious or otherwise. Not a useful example to reach for
There are definitely undeniably bad answers, where someone believes the highest chance of better answer is exclusive; and I believe shows where they hold moral authority lays; and this may as well be faith; even if Im aware of an overwhelming amount of complexity here; its a weak faith that doesn't grant the priest moral authority.
Honestly? I don't know. I wouldn't know what to say beyond "please don't". Other person's mind is a mysterious black box, and my chances of doing damage are not any different from my chances of helping.
Most likely youd reach for those hotlines, if you had the strength to endure it and found out about the wait times and what is obviously poor training; >30 minutes and informing them there suicide plan had a low success rate btw.
The raw feeling and everyone is looking away.
---
I have hopes for neo pagenism, but that would be a century long project minimum. People will need to train as priests, theories on what good priest even look like, rituals with enough history to trick us.
So; yes, most people airnt true athiests, they have given moral authority to experts who merely happen to claim to be following the science. I watched the majority of mormons in utah mask up and prep on toilet paper based off what the state said, not from the book(your suppose to have food storage); the majority of churches shut down to comply with the laws, most without legal threats. Sciencism is the water yall fishes swim in.
"Most likely you'd reach for those hotlines" - I think I said I don't have an advice. If I felt suicidal, maybe I'd call a hotline, maybe not, it's impossible to predict one's behavior in a situation like this.
Yes, in many cases one follows consensus expert advice, it's impossible to know everything about everything, so yeah sure. If you want to call it "scientism", fine, adds nothing useful.
The toilet paper is a weird example - no "experts" were calling to stockpile it, people - correctly - intuited that it would be one of the first items to go.
Consider the (evangelical conservative) Christian POV:
* humanity is in a constant state of spiritual warfare: the word of God on one side, its wordly subversions on the other.
* at any given time, the world pushes against what is right; the details change as society does, but the fight itself is a constant; and today's fight is Christians vs basically everything "woke". These ideologies have the net effect of peeling people away from Christianity - since if they are right, and the church opposes them, the church must be wrong; and so to the extent they convice people they are right, they push people away from Christianity.
* "the world's" ideas about gender, sexuality, discrimination etc etc are now being pushed back, and conservative ideology has triumphed
* the more people consider these ideas wrong, the less beef those people have with conservative churches and the more likely they are to hear and accept the rest of the message
She's probably feeling the (very real) overall vibes shift that happened since fall 2024, and attributing it to Trump. He doesn't necessarily have to be Christian or even pro-Christian for that effect to take place.
What I'm hearing from several Christian friends is that pro-Trump Christians are often very political and seem less interested in what God actually wants from them. I haven't seen that in my own church, but we're a mixed group in terms of political leanings. Very right/Republican/pro-Trump churches seem to be having a lot more of that.
Transference. Turning yourself over to someone who claims to be able to lead you out of the wilderness.
How can I get in touch with the organizers of Edge Esmeralda? I know an amazing movement coach and storyteller who would be a perfect person to run some of their health programming.
Is it just me or are many or most of the people in these comments most aggressively criticising Trump not actually American? I feel like I see over and over someone going on about how horriblly Trump is running the US and then revealing they're not American, either by their spelling or by outright stating it at the end. More generally, I feel like this is the case for a lot of leftism generally in this comment section: most of the clearest progressives, socialists and even American-style wokeists are not American.
Am I imagining this? I could be but I feel like I have a high attentiveness for things like spelling style, and a good memory for people who've revealed their nationality in the past.
If I'm not imagining it...why would this be the case? There's obviously no shortage of American leftists in existence. I guess it's not surprising that they don't comment much here, since the comments section has a rightward perception (even if I think that's stupid, since it's also unusually rational and open to dissent). But why would leftists from other countries be not similarly turned off commenting?
By the way, I notice plenty of non-American rightists here. So large numbers of American conservatives, large numbers of non-American conservatives, and large numbers of non-American progressives...but a relative lack of American progressives. That's my vague perception.
Trump critic American, checking in, FWIW.
Maybe Scott can add some variant to that on the next poll? I seem to remember poll respondents were majority US and more parts leftish than rightish, but (a) poll answered are a different population from “commenters” and (b) left right is a reasonably correlated proxy but not the same as “trump critics” (I for example, still don’t consider myself politically left, but rather to be following the tried and true libertarian-mellowing-more-conservative-as-I-age path; just seems like most of the naive, radical change first and think about consequences later energy that used to be the province of the US left is now weirdly blorbing out of the US right instead).
> If I'm not imagining it...why would this be the case?
The Internet loves making fun of and mocking those who are wrong. There is perhaps nothing more catastrophically wrong and idiotic in the USA's past 30-50 years than Trump's 40-IQ circus. Add to that a fanatic and quasi-religious fanbase that is consistently in denial about the state of the world and always willing to argue to fantastic depths that it's not really Trump's fault that $THING_THAT_IS_TOTALLY_TRUMP'S_FAULT.
Also, Trump is a professional attention whore. Why does Kendall Jenner manage to get so much attention with seemingly no obvious qualification other than a slightly attractive ass? because attention whoring is an art and she has mastered it. Trump is a reality TV star of the same species as Kendall, minus the attractive ass, but with no less mastery of attention whoring and its various techniques.
I've quietly noted the same thing, although can't point to specific examples as it's just a repeated realization that "Huh, there's another rant against Trump by someone not in the US."
Non-American leftists are almost certainly going to be European, or part of the larger Anglosphere. Trump has not been kind to NATO, and while there's a lot of renewed vigor in the EU on military spending and economic independence, I think everyone implicitly understands that this is a major burden on top of the already overburdened/stagnant EU (and Anglosphere) economies.
I think this is a good candidate for conflict theory. Trump is 100% in conflict with European and especially European leftist interests.
The reasons other people have given make complete sense, but I find something off-putting about people making arguments against domestic politicians of a country they are not part of, without making it somewhat explicit that they are coming in from an outside perspective. I get that America's military, economic and cultural might basically makes the English-Speaking internet (basically the "best" internet) US-coded, but I think there's a real effect of someone making an argument against a US politician when that can be interpreted as an opinion for someone with a "right" to having a say in the matter.
Hypothetically, if there was a policy that benefited the EU, to the detriment of the US (Perhaps the US subsidizing NATO defense through overspending while the EU underspends on the military), EU citizens would have a lot to say about Trumps actions. If the US was getting the shorter end of the stick, then I don't think the people who are benefiting from a policy at the expense of the domestic population should really be given much say in the public square. Not saying this is what's going on in NATO, as it's definitely debatable, however the general principle doesn't seem implausible to me, and my conclusion would be the same *if* this were true.
I don't need to be an American to see that Trump is bad news for everyone.
What other country's politics am I supposed to discuss online? Europe is many small countries, with different politicians and parties each. I don't understand Chinese.
I hate the guy and I'm as American as Apple Pie. But I take your point. I actually noticed the opposite (which you also pointed out) which is that a lot of his biggest fans around here, I'm not sure they are very representative of his general supporters. Not a lot of evangelicals or mid-west Conservative types. My impression is its mostly hardcore tech or finance libertarians who have never spent much time anywhere but the coasts, and also a handful of old school internet contrarians.
I'd like to point out that "spelling cues" can be influenced by who you've been talking to online lately, not just where you grew up.
American leftists have been partially scared out of this comment section. I'd expect that this is less salient to foreign leftists because teh exact contours of the culture war are different there and they're not catching the same number of strays/hitting up against the same walls that american leftists are.
Because America is the 800 lb gorilla, whoever becomes your president is, by default, extremely influential on the rest of the world. Our guy, for instance, is about to head off for some schmoozing for the entire week of Paddy's Day:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0310/1501126-taoiseach-us-visit/
We'd like to ignore what happens in US politics, or at least just look at it from the outside as free entertainment. But we have to be interested in what is going on, who is there, what they think, and what they are likely to do, because all that is going to affect us in our own countries.
So people will be very critical, or not so critical, or kinda approving, of Tweedledee or Tweedledum depending on how Mr. President Tweedle's policies are likely to help/hinder the other nations.
Not to forget that America has been doing its darndest to bring about this state of affairs the past 80 years, meddling in everyone's business like it's their own.
You call it meddling, I call it maintaining global peace and enabling unprecedented commerce and growth that has lifted billions out of poverty. I'm half joking.
Not disagreeing with that. Just saying that America has chosen that role, so why would Americans wonder that non-Americans care about what happens in America?
"We want to be the strongest country in the world, but also we don't want foreigners expressing opinions on what we do" has a strong have-your-cake-and-eat-it vibe.
What happens in the USA is everybody's business because American domestic politics ripple outwards through networks of diplomacy, finance, trade, defence, and culture. We all have a stake even if we don't have a vote. Examples:
- USD is the world currency.
- the U.S. military provides most of NATO's combat power, seperate defence agreements extend umbrellas of protection over many other states e.g. S. Korea and Japan.
- the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis crashed banks around the world and triggered a global recession.
- the U.S. is the largest trading partner for many states e.g. Canada, Mexico, and Germany.
Hi, an American critic of Trump here.
American leftist here to falsify the strong version of that hypothesis. (I like to think I'm an independent/centrist, but you wouldn't know it from my voting record...)
Americal "left" is just not all that far left by other people's standards. The internet being what it is, this blog is not exclusive to Americans - it's read by people from all over. So the more noticeably left positions are likely to come from places where the Overton window is further left.
Since one of the points of pride here is that anyone is allowed to say anything they want, provided they do so politely, of course people are going to speak their mind.
Disagree strongly- American politics does not map to the same scale as say, European politics, but while American lefttoids may be less socialist in their outlook, on culture war issues like gender, race, and immigration politics they are far, far more extreme than even the far left in most European nations.
America's left is identitarian, Europe's left is economical. Basically, ask the leftists around you whether it is worse when people starve, or when they are misgendered.
Also, Republicans are the party that cares more about poor white people, which would kinda make them left-wing from the European perspective.
The words "left" and "right" just mean different things in different countries, even if it strongly feels like they refer to something universal.
> Europe's left is economical.
No, because:
> The words "left" and "right" just mean different things in different countries
In Sweden, the thing that unites the left-wing parties is their dislike for the anti-immigration party. In Malta, the left-wing party campaigned on lower corporate taxes and lower income taxes while the right-wing party campaigned on a four-day work week and a living wage. Talking about "Europe's left" doesn't make much sense.
> Also, Republicans are the party that cares more about poor white people, which would kinda make them left-wing from the European perspective.
This is true, but they’re also usually opposed to anything federal (“states rights” is a more of a red slogan, right?), or a lot of what many Europeans consider as a basic social safety net. So this is not too neat a mapping.
Also, some of the European lines are shifting. France’s “La France Insoumise” has been quite identitarian these days, especially following October 7th.
American left not being "very left by global standards" is tbh American leftist cope; no-one got as woke as them actually
Though it is politically expedient for those on the right to equate 'left' and 'woke', the latter is not really well-defined and hardly counts as historically or globally 'left'. It's just a fringe of the Democratic party.
fair enough! (though also a lot of insane critiques of capitalism come from the American left)
My comment above is obviously oversimplified and somewhat inflammatory, it's more that I wanted to push back against the "we'd be centrist in Europe" sentiment (which tbh idk if moonshadow expressed, but it reminded me of that pretty common view in certain corners of the internet)
...and yet consider how the politics of a country where, say, a universal healthcare system is a fringe extremist concept might be viewed from one where a suggestion of cutting back on such a system renders one unelectable.
Does the latter country consider losing your job for a tweet from ten years ago a normal and acceptable thing?
Can't we all just agree that there are different types of "left extremism"? Do we have to find the platonic "true left"?
I mean, when we're trying to work out why so many of the leftmost opinions here are coming from non-Americans, the question of whose positions on various subjects are left of whose centre does not seem entirely irrelevant; but you do you.
I'm not sure what you're saying here.
But the US is also a country where "enforce existing immigration law" is also a fringe position. The US is alternately left and right compared to the general Western consensus on a variety of different issues.
Also I'm not convinced that the current US system isn't even more socialist than universal healthcare. Under universal health care, the middle class pays taxes and gets health care out of it. Under the US system the middle class pays taxes to buy health care for the poor, but then has to pay again to get their own health care, meaning they're fucked over twice instead of just once.
"Enforce existing immigration law" is a fringe position because we have a labor shortage. Money rules the country, so nearly every issue outside of DEI/woke issues seems to boil down to "what is best for the corporations and stock holders?"
That's why I'm skeptical that the tarrifs and alienation of our allies will continue. Economic consequences will result, and the real owners of the country will put their foot down.
Actually many of the US woke positions seem strange even to us people in the Scandinavian welfare states. For example affirmative action, we actually don't have that here. I think modern woke went out of a tangent orthogonal to normal welfare-and-public-healthcare leftism.
The EU is introducing AA for the boards of public companies – a minimum of 40% women – from next year: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/10/17/council-approves-eu-law-to-improve-gender-balance-on-company-boards/
Similar things have been discussed widely in Scandinavian countries.
You also aren't living alongside a large population you previously enslaved. That probably has something to do with it.
Indeed; even in countries where votes for a party other than one of the two biggest ones aren't entirely wasted, collapsing the entire multidimensional space of human opinion onto a very very few poles sadly remains a hard problem.
I'm not sure what you're objecting to. The US has the largest economy and the most powerful military on Earth, and the words and actions of its leader have significant impact on other nations and its citizens in diplomatic and economic matters. If Trump crashes the American economy, we'll feel it over here in Europe.
First of all, not "objecting", merely surprised, and second, not at all surprised that non-Americans have opinions on Trump, but that often it feels like *only* they do.
(Obviously far from literally "only".)
(Also, I'm non-American myself, didn't you notice the "s" in "criticising"?)
I always note those orthographic ‘tells’.
I don't think most Americans realize to what extent much of the world views America and American culture as a globally shared resource. I am American, but spent my childhood in a 'third world' country/culture. Even as a kid I thought I was often surprised how other kids would talk to me about America as if they knew more about it than I did. They knew I was American, they had never been anywhere near the place, but they treasured the idea that there was this society out there where everything was possible, and were very protective of what they knew and thought about the US. As an adult living and working in Europe, I had the same experience, where colleagues felt entitled to have as strong opinions about US politics and society as I did.
Speaking as an American (and one with a fair degree of Trump criticism to my name), I don't think most foreigners and especially Europeans realize how much Americans resent being viewed as someone else's "resource". And the "shared" part often comes across as "I want some of what you've got, so you have to give it to me!".
That's a big part of what Trump is cashing in on, especially in the foreign-policy arena. And while I wish that sentiment were channeled through pretty much anyone other than Donald J. Trump, he seems to be the only one selling what a great many Americans want to buy.
I think it's just human nature. Americans have opinions on the acceptance of gays in Russia or the lack of free speech in Europe. I think Europeans focus on the US in particular because we are still the most powerful and influential country in the world. Personally, I only find it annoying when they start believing that their opinion should matter or that they are entitled to participate in our affairs.
> I was often surprised how other kids would talk to me about America as if they knew more about it than I did
Pretty sure this is universal: people both from my current country and from America frequently talk to me about the country where I was born as if they knew more about it than I did, and Americans often discuss my current country in the same manner, including here.
You’re not imagining it. It may seem a very strange concept to most Americans, but non-Americans often feel like they “own” a piece of America, and that their voice should count towards the American political process and cultural evolution. I once had a group of European university students tell me that America should allow any and all immigrants in simply because “America has no history or culture, so why shouldn’t all immigrants be allowed to stay?” This is a particularly left/liberal-side of the spectrum position to take, but it’s also possible for right types to feel this way.
America's actions influence the world dramatically. Its not strange for people under American influence to have opinions on its politics (sensible or not).
Opinions on foreign policy are very fair, it's when they have opinions on domestic policies it gets strange
That doesn't seem too strange to me. People have opinions on how strangers should raise their children, how strange companies should conduct their business and how strange sports teams should play their sport, so of course they're gonna have opinions on how strange governments should treat their subjects.
Completely OT, but it's very charming that you used "strange" to mean "foreign", probably due to first language interference and/or because the base has that meaning in the word "stranger" which you also used in the paragraph
Thanks, yeah, it was for the parallelism with "stranger" that I came to use the word with its older meaning. I think influence from my L1 can be neither con- nor excluded.
There are also technically domestic policies on how websites and things must be run that have international effects.
I'm convinced this is basically because America won so hard culturally. The reason why everyone has an opinion on America is because with the power of Hollywood and the internet you've made everyone an American-in-exile, no wonder that they end up having opinions on American domestic politics too :p
Especially
> their voice should count towards the American <...> cultural evolution
This is almost to be expected given "American culture" and "global culture" becoming conflated
I don't really get why other countries are so eager to embrace a lot of the American cultural BS given the pernicious effects it has had on our own culture. I can't imagine living in some other country and thinking, "Hey! That stuff that is ripping the USA apart? I want me summa dat."
"America won so hard culturally"
Oh, tell me about it! I was recently enlightened by some fluff piece from online news media about "Irish pinky toe".
First of all, I had no idea there was anything peculiarly Irish about having your small toe hidden behind its neighbour.
Second, what is up with this "pinky" nonsense? "Pinky" is an American term, I have never heard anyone describing their small toe as their "pinky" toe, and if we mean the little finger, that's either your little finger or your lúidín.
https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/l%c3%baid%c3%adn
But since everyone under 30 (or even under 40) has been raised on a diet of American media, now "zed" is "zee" and your lúidín is your pinky.
Indeed! Makes me want to support building a Great Firewall around America to contain this and undo the damage (yes I get the irony of posting this in the comments of an American blog)
for what it's worth I consciously try to avoid having opinions on American domestic politics; since I don't live in America, any opinion that forms in my head is just downstream of ambient news, like an LLM trying to form an opinion on human experience based on text only
(and I kind of want to slap all non-Americans that do that and tell them to wake up from the American cultural subjugation)
Non-Americans don't really know about LessWrong & Rationalists, so it's less of a social gamble for a non-American leftist to be "caught" reading ACX?
Americans don't really know about LessWrong & Rationalists either. Seriously, even knowing vaguely what those terms point to is *extremely* fringe in the United States.
That may be, but surely less fringe *among the online social circles of people likely to read ACX in the first place*.
Has it actually come to the point in the US where you are afraid of being 'caught' reading ACX? I think you are right we Europeans definitely aren't afraid of it, since nobody in the mainstream media have heard about neo rationalism.
Its not
Whats a good source for the state of the art *evolutionary* machine learning algorithms(i.e. not backprop/calculus)
I think the category is too broad to admit a single good source. The difference is that in deep learning, there is a single winner of the competition for ideas, which is deep learning and backprop. In evolutionary learning, it is a lot more diverse and depends much more on the task you are looking for. I can provide you with some keywords, but not with one single source.
Do you want to use evolutionary algorithms for optimization? (For example hyperparameter tuning and Auto-ML)? Continuous or discrete parameters? In the continuous case, look into covariance matrix adaptation, in particular the CMA-ES. In the discrete domain, there are tons of different algorithms, with evolutionary/genetic algorithms and estimation-of-distribution algorithms being the two main classes. Automated tools are SMAC and irace. And platforms like the iohprofiler and nevergrad come with algorithm portfolios which may give you some idea of what algorithm are out there.
Or do you want to use them for reinforcement learning? I don't know too much about this field. There is a paper promising to be a survey, but I don't know how good it is: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04150
There are also these slides from a tutorial at the GECCO conference on evolutionary reinforcement learning, which also gives a few recommended papers as starting points: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638530.3648416
Or do you want to restrict to more modern forms of machine learning? Probably the most promising approach at the moment is to find/create some compressed latent space (e.g., just by using an autoencoder, or because your deep network has this anyway), and then use an evolutionary algorithm on this latent space. There, even simple evolutionary search algorithms can work quite well, both because the dimension is small and because the compression decouples the variables and makes search more efficient.
And there is the whole subfield of evolutionary multi-objective optimization, which you may or may not count as machine learning. It's definitely a field where population-based evolutionary algorithms shine.
This list is still far from exhaustive. You can look at the call for paper for the EML track at the GECCO conference for further keywords:
https://gecco-2025.sigevo.org/Tracks#EML%20-%20Evolutionary%20Machine%20Learning
> I think the category is too broad to admit a single good source.
I havnt seen one, everything seem to be an introduction that smells like someone copied their 101 homework into a youtube video, or Chinese conferences that are in english for some reason and they are reading a papers abstract with little regard for an audience
> Do you want to use evolutionary algorithms for optimization?
> ? ? ? ? ? ?
I have an idea for an algorithm and I want to roughly know if Im wasting my time exploring old ground
I cant find anyone even applying boids to the "loss landscape" where the best known minium gets some sort of force(possibly coping its velocity, or encouraging boids to follow)
---
Given that the stated reason the calculus methods are better then evolutionary methods is that you can "feel the slope"; why is that necessarily impossible?
for each generation you add a "gene edited" biod:
1. find the max and min boid, generate a "half" boid with a lerp
2. foreach gene/paraimeter and foreach boid, classify the boid as high or low performer from the half boid and if the gene is above or below the minimum boid
a. if gene distrubation is roughly balenced, check if theres a bias in the direction of that gene; store that as a edit
b. if the gene is distribution is wildly unbalanced, and the population with the gene is(if it exists) is >X% high performers, store that edit
Apply the gene editing sequence to your boids, with whatever mutation, iterations, breeding, culling steps
I'm not sure that this aligns with what you're describing, but I think you'd be interested in this paper by Michael Levin.
Diffusion Models are Evolutionary Algorithms
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02543
> we reveal that diffusion models are evolutionary
algorithms.
> this parallel we draw here between evolution and diffusion models a
Is there something more to the conclusion? I dont need that many words to believe nn's and evolution are hill climbing algorithms, I already believe this, without reference to any dense math.
So the title/abstract of this paper is a bit at odds with the actual meat of it, which is the introduction of a gradient-free evolutionary optimization algorithm that borrows from some aspects of diffusion. That's the part I thought you may get some value from.
I would just cut right to the method, which is short and sweet, and see if that has any overlap with what you've described.
> see if that has any overlap with what you've described.
>>Each individual estimates high fitness parameter targets and moves toward the target along with random mutations. The high fitness parameter targets xˆ0 are estimated based on their neighbors’ fitness scores
>> I cant find anyone even applying boids to the "loss landscape" where the best known minium gets some sort of force(possibly coping its velocity, or encouraging boids to follow)
Well that mystery solved
Im not seeing what im calling "gene editing" tho
> gradient-free
Is this from the paper somewhere or your understanding?
Its wildly beneficial that hill climbers feel slopes; its (debatably) believed by neo-darwinists that irl-evolution does not and michael levins(post neo drwinist; has overwhelming evidence) work else where suggests to me that he believe irl-evolution not only feels slopes but creates sensors to feel slopes in meta-spaces
I believe that sexual selection alone is a weakly slope feeling but naive computer-evolution algorithms are admittedly bad at it. The idea of my algorithm is that the gene editing step would contain a stronger slope-feeling then sexual selection alone.
-----
avg= 100 iq, 6 ft
lebron= 110 iq, 7 ft
enstien= 140 iq, 5 ft
sexual: lerp(estien, lebron)= 127 iq, 6 ft
gene editing: lebron-avg ft + enstien-avg iq + enstien= 180 iq, 7ft
Ok, I don't get some of the underlying assumptions that you are making. What is the goal of the algorithm? Is it to find the minimum in the loss landscape? And the landscape is some function f: S -> R which we can evaluate, where S is the set of all possible solutions and R is the set of reals?
You speak of boids. I haven't heard the term, but I assume you refer to the bird-oid objects of Reynolds. If I get it right, then this is a model of swarm behavior. But what do you want to do with that? As far as I understand, those boids can be used to see fascinating behaviour, or to simulate a compelling-looking animation of swarms. But you speak about high and low performers. How do you measure whether a boid is good or bad? Is this given by this abstract function f?
> What is the goal of the algorithm?
Miniumize f(args)
> You speak of boids. I haven't heard the term, but I assume you refer to the bird-oid objects of Reynolds. If I get it right, then this is a model of swarm behavior. But what do you want to do with that?
A 2d boid is 2 2d vectors, a 3d boid is 2 3d vectors
Youd probably need to do some cleanup around bools, but for an arbitrary numbertic `args` you can create boid simulation; they are barely above partial effects and theres plenty of preknown tricks to get diverse behaviors.
> How do you measure whether a boid is good or bad?
scores => boid.map(F)
minboid => zip(boid,scores).min
maxboid => zip(boid,scores).min
halfboid => zip(lerp(min boid,max boid),F(lerp(min boid,max boid))
isGood(boidId)=>score[boidId] > halfboid.score
Sorry, from your message it's hard to decipher the situation and the algorithm. I assume that f and F are the same, and that they are a map from R^2 to R, or from R^3 to R? So you want to find the optimum of a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional function?
I don't understand the details, but it seems to me that this is a rather typical evolutionary algorithm. If you want to know how good/bad it is compared to other evolutionary algorithms, then you should try it out on benchmarks like COCO-platform (or IOHprofiler), that is a benchmark comparison tool. It has already implemented lots of low-dimensional continuous optimization problems and other evolutionary algorithms to compare with.
> So you want to find the optimum of a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional function?
No, theres nothing in boids that doesn't generalize to nd
I hate PEPFAR, death to the empire. Good luck with everything else though!
What's wrong with it?
I don't want the USG to be a global charity, and most of the program has nothing to do with HIV/AIDS (most of it goes to anti-stigma, empowering womman, promoting gender ideology, etc). It's hard to understand how grifty these kinds of things are until you're in a third world country and see the anti-femicide posters everywhere, all hung up by US-funded local middle class lib girlbosses, and a bunch of dying widows outside of hospitals who will never see a cent.
Reading Niccolo Soldo while living in LatAm really reprogrammed me to see US foreign spending as primarily a vehicle for capturing the young managerial class into prestigious jobs that are controlled by the US, creating an American dominated counter elite (which often nominally hates the US while subscribing to every intellectual trend that slimes its way down from American social media).
Tusk&Frump (the perfect name for a dimes square mini dept store btw) have done very little - the funding of these groups is a massively enmeshed gordian knot of which USAID is only one loose strand. But it's nice to see that at least a few buckets of water removed from the tidal waves crushing upon us daily.
PEPFAR is an evil program and the people supporting it are crippling Africa. Any improvements are mostly due to the rapidly improving material living conditions across ye ole 3rd world, as technology seeps in through the thick barrier of nightmare BS like PEPFAR and the real economy grows.
I probably deserve a ban for spewing my nonsense here but it's hard to explain to even articulate how deeply I hate the US. It's like, I hear people describe hatred in these banal historical terms (the KKK, the nazis, etc) as if true hatred had ever been tried yet. My political solution is for every American to have to rape their own child, then be murdered by their child, then those children are raised in militias run by 764 cvltists, but keep the mothers alive, so they can be ritually tortured by their children every day. Technology and civilization goes into disarray as the light of power fills the world - warlords rubbing kind mothers' faces in shit as the sun rises over a new, eternal nightmare.
Reading the noble Quran, I feel the promise of my heart's justice:
In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful.
1. When the sun is rolled up.
2. When the stars are dimmed.
3. When the mountains are set in motion.
4. When the relationships are suspended.
5. When the beasts are gathered.
6. When the oceans are set aflame.
7. When the souls are paired.
8. When the girl, buried alive, is asked:
9. For what crime was she killed?
10. When the records are made public.
11. When the sky is peeled away.
12. When the Fire is set ablaze.
13. When Paradise is brought near.
14. Each soul will know what it has readied.
15. I swear by the galaxies.
16. Precisely running their courses.
17. And by the night as it recedes.
18. And by the morn as it breathes.
19. This is the speech of a noble messenger.
20. Endowed with power, eminent with the Lord of the Throne.
21. Obeyed and honest.
22. Your friend is not possessed.
23. He saw him on the luminous horizon.
24. And He does not withhold knowledge of the Unseen.
25. And it is not the word of an accursed devil.
26. So where are you heading?
27. It is only a Reminder to all mankind.
28. To whoever of you wills to go straight.
29. But you cannot will, unless God wills—The Lord of the Worlds.
Of course, as a Latter Day Saint I (should) know better. America yet holds a spark of the divine, held back by the limp spirit of a dull age, but promising eventually the birth of a nation which will rock history I'm sure.
I'm not a troll hope this clarified things somewhat (and sorry for pouring my heart)
That escalated quickly.
I literally LOLed at this comment.
I'm crazy, but my core point that the purpose of PEPFAR has nothing to do with AIDS, and is mostly a slush fund for grooming the African managerial class into State Dept pawns is one I basically stand by. The ideology into which they're being inculcated will do much more to hold their society back (and consequently, keep Africa AIDS-y).
The best thing you can do if you want Africa free from AIDS is hope for Chinese ascendancy in the region. They'll fight AIDS, we'll talk about how the true AIDS is when you don't center the female gaze.
My mind is cracked by hatred but not totally broken, I could maybe try to stay on point. It's hard. Like Anakin looking at that bitch motherfucker Padme who brought HIM HERE TO KILL MEEEEE. You forget why you hate, and you just hate. It becomes its own end.
But rationality has the same weakness - it's an instrument to serve - what exactly? Critique of pure reason indeed. But hatred is happy justifying itself.
When the boat is about to burst I wake Christ and he reminds me to have faith, and the storm calms.
I'm sorry for commenting here, Scott please don't ban me, I'll stop commenting and behave PLEASE.
If you want people to pay any attention to your ideas then don't append ravings to them. And most are going to be ambivalent at best about being pegged by Jael, so overall not a good look.
I cannot imagine caring about people paying attention to my "ideas" (lol), nor am I trying to look good to most people.
Pegged by Jael is a reference to my favorite Substack, Fisted by Foucault. In the Book of Judges, Jael uses a tent peg to murder the enemy of Israel, Sisera. It's my favorite part of the Bible.
“Most blessed of women be Jael,
the wife of Heber the Kenite,
most blessed of tent-dwelling women.
25 He asked for water, and she gave him milk;
in a bowl fit for nobles she brought him curdled milk.
26 Her hand reached for the tent peg,
her right hand for the workman’s hammer.
She struck Sisera, she crushed his head,
she shattered and pierced his temple.
27 At her feet he sank,
he fell; there he lay.
At her feet he sank, he fell;
where he sank, there he fell—dead.
28 “Through the window peered Sisera’s mother;
behind the lattice she cried out,
‘Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?’
29 The wisest of her ladies answer her;
indeed, she keeps saying to herself,
30 ‘Are they not finding and dividing the spoils:
a woman or two for each man,
colorful garments as plunder for Sisera,
colorful garments embroidered,
highly embroidered garments for my neck—
all this as plunder?’
31 “So may all your enemies perish, Lord!
As a child born again of the Holy Spirit, I hope that when the moment comes, I'll also have the feminine bravery to drive a nail through a Canaanite skull. Most people share the spirit of Sisera, they deserve exactly what they'll get. True Christianity is a middle class white woman crushing a Palestinian child's head into the ground with a nail - forever. And btw it wasn't just any kid, it was a really cool kid that you personally know and befriended, he is basically a nephew to you. And the woman is a massive bitch, some Karen cunt who sued you over an insurance claim (she was in the wrong) and won. Let your heart simmer a bit, give in to your anger, and slap that bitch. Let's canonball hand-in-hand into the waters of Samsara. Take the blue pill, and drown in the waters of illusion until your body dissolves and your just unconnected particles floating among Maya.
Just imo, these aren't really ideas in any meaningful way.
>I'm crazy, but my core point that the purpose of PEPFAR has nothing to do with AIDS
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefb81149-c147-4d52-9798-161cd5f575a9_3400x2400.png
I dunno man, sure looks like it had something to do with AIDS.
(Image is from Ozy Brennan's recent article on PEPFAR)
> the purpose of PEPFAR has nothing to do with AIDS ...
I'm guessing that what you meant is that the *actual effect* of PEPFAR has *little* to do with AIDS mitigation. I'm also guessing that you also believe that a crucial segment of the political support for PEPFAR is aware of this actual effect and is quite satisfied with this situation.
The way you expressed your belief is more stirring than the way I expressed it. But I prefer the way I expressed it. For reasons. Including that my way contains hints as to what things about the current situation ought to be changed.
I mean the purpose, and also the effect. The purpose is to project US soft power, and the effect is to disintegrate social bonds in Africa. That people think we must maintain the empire to save the AIDS babies shows how well that soft power has been projected.
I don't really know how to communicate with words so well I'm sorry. To be honest, I don't even believe in reason at all, but I'm a big admire of the rationalists and I appreciate my that my silly comments, from this deluded heart, coursing with the nectar of heaven, like a ripe fruit ready to burst, have been permitted to remain.
But note to the banhammer holder: I really am not a troll and I'm sorry I'm this way. If you hate me I encourage you to listen to this holistic empathy song from prince of egypt: https://youtu.be/bQt2_IQD6J8?si=BlwlEhenOnrmKbVm&t=13
"escalated" isn't the word I'd use.
"American dominated counter elite which often nominally hates the US while subscribing to every intellectual trend that slimes its way down from American social media" is such a perfect encapsulation of a concept I hadn't been able to put into words myself, it's a shame this post devolves into schizo ramblings that will probably be deleted soon.
Wanting to fight babies seems like a pretty bad idea.
What chemical solutions are you using to address social anxiety? I'm thinking more of a short-acting drug that you take specifically for a social occasion (affects you for a few hours) than an ongoing prescription per se. So far I'd rate alcohol as 'OK' and a beta blocker as just 'OK'. Have some phenibut experience but that seems like overkill for a night out. Theanine never did much for me. Any other, specific chemicals that people are having success with? (BTW if your answer is 'don't take chemicals, instead have you heard about our lord and savior CBT' I'm not interested, thank you)
There's an interesting researcher named Alica Danforth who believes MDMA is helpful for social anxiety and just lack of social pleasure in people on the autistic spectrum. She got the idea from a questionnaire she administered to people in the spectrum asking about recreational drug experiences, and which drugs were most helpful. Subjects named MDMA more than other drugs. Then she did a treatment study with high-functioning autistic people. They had a few sessions with a therapist - I forget how many, but something on the order of 8 -- to describe and try to change their discomfort with social situations. Part of the treatment was one, or actually I think it was 2, MDMA therapy sessions where their drug experience of feeling more trusting and more interested in other people was a jumping off point for working on feeling more that way in real life, when not drugged. Study got positive results that endured over time. (There was no placebo group though.). Here's a video where it's discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ5P4AYAvuE. Danforth also has some published articles on the subject, which can be found via Google Scholar. She's now a therapist in private practice in California and only works with high functioning autistic people. (She does not, though, use MDMA in her sessions because it's illegal.)
Try 7g Inositol. It works at least for some kinds of anxiety.
If your issue is autism adjacent I have heard good things about nasal oxytocin sprays
Kratom or opiods help a lot if you're willing to go down that route. Similarly benzos can be ok but you have to be very careful not to take too much or you'll act like a total idiot.
Obvious disclaimer - these are only appropriate for infrequent use.
The disclaimer should be taken very serious. Opioid addiction is no fun and benzodiazepine addiction is in some ways worse.
I consider myself to have aphantasia and/or be aphantasic -- I generally don't see images in my head. When I close my eyes, I see some muted combination of a boring laser show and TV static. If I try to visualize something, I do not see it; instead, I get an impression, a felt sense, that seems to mimic the felt sense I would have if I were looking at the thing; or maybe I'll have thoughts about the thing. For example, if I "picture" my son, I can have warm feelings or maybe I'll have thoughts about how I need to tell him to clean his room. But I do not "see" a face.
Recently, I've been exploring what it's like when I "try to visualize." I noticed that I seem to be staring into my eyelids. In other words, I seem to be using my eyes. It's like I'm trying to will my optic hardware to produce visual signals. It strikes me that this might be impossible, and basically I'm putting my effort into seeing the background noise of my retina or optic nerve or whatever. I can think "cat," but if all I do is stare into the blackness of my sensory visual field, alas, I won't find a cat.
I'm prepared to accept that visualizing isn't a matter of willing your eyes to see what's not there. It seems to follow that visualizing is something you "see" somewhere (though perhaps it's more accurate to say "nowhere") in the mind. I'm working on letting go of the effort to "see" with my eyes. It's early yet, but I'm noticing a change. I haven't had any visualizations, but there's this sense that I've let go of an object of attention (the laser/static field).
I'm trying to develop a conceptual vocabulary and/or framework for understanding my experiences and observations. If you have experiences or observations along these lines, please consider sharing. I'm also open to critiques about how I'm labeling and making meaning of things.
Your description matches my experience pretty closely except I do have traces of visualization ability. In my day to day life it doesn't feel like I "see" anything inside my head. Its like my brain has access to the general essence of a thing but the visual information either doesn't exist or does not come naturally.
With some focus ive hazily visualize something like an apple in black and white. It's not reliable or on demand though, I tried for 10 minutes just now and failed.
Meditating in a pitch black environment for a long time is the only thing I can say with any certainty improves my visualization. Someone else mentioned they visualize better right before bed which might be a similar effect.
I also suspect stress and lack of sleep reduces my ability to visualize, which might be why I can't today.
I'm assuming you've watched movies and TV. What's your internal experience when you attempt to recall a movie or a TV show? Can you recall the specific blocking, framing, and angle of an iconic / important scene? Of *any* scene?
As I was asking that question, while looking at the screen of my laptop, watching words appear as I typed, this *exact* moment from Game of Thrones popped into my head, probably because I recently saw it in a YouTube video (https://youtu.be/V1JCt1Tfxj8?si=scp4c59zDiQ_O9pv&t=50).
I paused for a second to internally review the "details" I thought I was remembering and then looked up the clip. And, yes, I was pretty much correctly remembering the fundamentals of the exact moment that Daenerys halts at the end of her walk out to the crowd: the central framing of her in the lower half of the screen, mostly blocking a central aisle, the lines of hundreds soldiers beyond her, the strong shoulders of her black of her militaristic costume, the intricacy of the braids in her white-blonde hair; the grey cast of the lighting due to smoke in the air.
I couldn't have told you the number of active fires burning in the top third of the frame (eleven!), and I in fact didn't even remember they were in the shot until I reviewed the clip. Nor could I have told you the exact number of rows of soldiers, or number of woven braids in her hair.
But I could have (badly) drawn the most important lines of information in the image from memory. In fact, given enough time and resources, I could have drawn/animated the moments just before the pause, of the camera closely following behind the character as she walks through a darker entryway, then how it slows and lifts up to reveal the crowds (and shift the focus from the character by herself to the character's command of the crowd). Given enough time and resources, I could have duplicated this shot well enough that anyone else who'd also seen it would recognize it.
That process would feel far more like tracing over an image under tracing paper than generative sketching.
And!
The fictional scenes that I've personally generated tend to have very similar internal detail and fidelity, down to light and shadows. But rather than recalling an image that someone else generated, I'm recalling an image that just...exists now in me, the way that scene from GoT began to exist in me after I saw it. As I"m staring at my laptop screen typing this sentence, I'm also "recalling" the visual of walking out from a kitchen area behind the bar of a fictional night club; I'm clearly "seeing" the dark color of the wood of the bar top; the multi-colored (but mostly yellow) inverted vaguely tulip-shaped blown glass light fixtures above the bar, the stainless steel gleam of the empty bar ice tub, the chipping black laminate of the counter, the hexagonal black pattern of the anti-skid mats on the grey waterproof textured floor - and it goes on and on.
The floor plan isn't anywhere I've been in real life, but some of the really specific details (like the chips in the countertop and the empty ice tub) are lifted from having walked behind the bar in my workplace, as if they came out of a catalogue, almost.
Staring at my computer screen and at my hands touch-typing as I transcribe what I'm thinking about doesn't usually hamper this process. Sometimes if I'm struggling to "accurately" describe what I'm internally seeing, or if a scene feels too vague and unformed, I will set aside my writing implement and look at the ceiling, or close my eyes to try to pay more attention.
But if I'm in a generative "flow" state, I absolutely don't need to do that.
Anyway. I know many other people who generate fiction have a different experience, but mine is pretty similar to "reviewing" the "memory" of a movie, often complete with camera angles and movements and "edits" to skip unimportant details (the minutia of walking across a room, etc).
Since everyone has seen a movie, maybe that'll offer some insight into at least what I'm experiencing!
I think most people have the wrong idea about what mental images are like. If I think about my daughter, I have mental images of her face, her apartment, her across the table from me in a restaurant, etc., and while I am having them I experience the images as complete and satisfying. On the other hand, if I consider the images critically, it is evident that in many ways they are incomplete. There are many questions about them I cannot answer, that I could easily answer if they were real visual images. For instance, if you ask me about my mental image of her moving around her kitchen talking and laughing, I can't tell you what color the walls are, whether the dish drain is full or empty, whether her hair is loose or in a ponytail. There is some way that the completeness of my mental images is an illusion. There are many gaps in the actual visual details that are somehow filled in by some general idea -- for instance, I don't visualize exactly what she is wearing, but have a general impression that its causal and familiar stuff.
I have no reason to think my mental images are vaguer than typical ones. I experience them as satisfying and complete, I seem as good at remembering actual visual details about people and places I've seen as other people do, I do OK at tests of rotating shapes, etc. I think that some people who consider themselves to have aphantasia believe that other people's mental images are much more like real visual images than they are -- that having a mental image is like closing your eyes and seeing a real image on your inner eyelid. It isn't. If I close my eyes in daylight all I see is a staticky orange color, presumably the color of light filtered through the thin skin of my eyelids. Meanwhile, while seeing that orange light through my eyelids, I can have a mental image of my daughter. That image is not on my eyelids, but in some other part of my mind, and it is really a different kind of mental entity from a visual image, whether of my daughter of or my inner eyelids.
There's a delightful book called Perplexities of Consciousness by modern philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel that treats this subject. I wrote a review of it, and there's a section of the review that concerns precisely the present topic: What are mental images actually like. The section of the review concerning it is called *Mental Images* and is approximately in the middle of the review. Review is here: https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/review-of-perplexities-of-consciousness
Visualization is one of those phenomena that are incredibly strange when you think about them but have been rendered mundane by how commonly we experience them.
For me, it's similar to if someone opens a box and reveals an apple inside. They close the box, and you're left looking at the lid, but you know where the fruit is and exactly what it looks like. There's no vision going on, but in some sense you do have an image in your head, or at least the information representing that image.
It's similar to that case, in which you have a detailed idea of the objects and their appearance, but they're separated from you like they're in some other place. When I visualize something at will, I have an impression or sense of the thing and know what it looks like in detail, but it's not really there. If I imagine an apple on my desk, I will always see the desk and never the apple, but it's similar to how I would feel if there had been an apple that was just removed.
If I really focus, the impression becomes more detailed and can start to feel visual and more real, but it never crosses over to being a true picture. The more familiar I am with an object, animal, or person, the better and more lifelike my image of it is, but there's a fundamental difference that prevents me from saying "I can see it."
Very interesting. I am a great pictural phantaziser who also enjoy drawing both from real life and from my imagination, so I have also had some thoughts about this subject.
When I picture an image I am actually able to 'see it' l, but somehow more with my brain that with my eyes. It is very hard to describe exactly where the image is located, perhaps in front of my forehead is the best way I can describe it.
It is very very hard to keep a visualization constant, it will start to change as soon as you focus on it. That is why drawing without a reference is so hard: You can sometimes be lucky and visualize a perect image, but as soon as you try to draw it the details wikl begin to shift around. Sometimes when I have ab idea I try to put down some important lines as quickly as possible before the image changes.
Also I have recently realized that actually the human imagination might have traits in common with AI image generators. It is exactly the same kind of errors (incorrect hands, weird proprtions) that your inner eyes makes when you try to visualize something too difficult. So basically a visual imagination is a bit like having a slightly broken AI running that is constantly producing vague images that disappear or change in a few seconds.
Thank you for the comment. I always thought a drawing reference was because there was no other option! To me, being able to draw is a form of magic. I took an informal drafting class in college, and I appreciated learning the "rules" about how to represent perspective/depth. I think I assumed that drawing was governed by learning more and more rules, something that I wasn't that interested in.
I've read about how AI image hallucinations are similar to human visualization. A year or two ago, I had a lucid dream, which I could recognize because my hands were abnormal. (I believe this is a common cue in the lucid-dreaming world.)
A friend recently described his understanding that the brain includes something like an LLM, but it also has a "gestalt" mode where it can evaluate whether the LLM is making sense. I don't know whether that's literally accurate. But suppose the LLM is looping through finger generation and doesn't know when to stop; a "gestalt" operation could recognize that the overall hand isn't right.
Yeah, nobody sees anything with their eyes when visualizing. You are incapable of imagining anything with visual content? Like imagining there was a basketball in the corner of your room? In that case you must be incapable of retrieving any visual memory? You literally cannot remember what anything looks like- your car, your house, your room, your wife, your son?
> You are incapable of imagining anything with visual content? Like imagining there was a basketball in the corner of your room?
I can imagine all day long. I can imagine that there is a basketball in the room, in the sky, in my nostril. But there's no picture, just a felt sense and maybe traces of other sensations and thoughts that are formulated verbally rather than pictorally.
I have a theory of why it's hard for visualizers (phantasics?) to understand the experiences of nonvisualizers (aphantasics). I've never put this into words, so please bear with me.
I think experience can be dominated by any sense (seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling) or by thoughts. And the dominant sense can often but not always be predicted. For example, at a concert, hearing could be predicted to dominate, but that might not be the case -- seeing could dominate if there's spectacle; or smelling could dominate if the person next to you hasn't showered; or cetera.
To illustrate my theory, I'm going to rely on "seeing," and I will assume that no one doing the seeing is caught up in another sense or in the thought stream. Suppose a visualizer (you) and a nonvisualizer (me) view the same landscape. We each clearly see a river valley. Even though seeing dominates, the overall experience can be tinged with other sensations and thoughts -- but these are subtle and generally not noticed.
Later, we talk about how beautiful it was. You are picturing the river valley and because the picture is vivid, you don't even notice the subtle stuff, which is kind of like a residue of the experience. To me, however, all I have is the residue. The residue is consistent with seeing the river valley, but I don't see a river valley.
I think I can mix and match these "residues" just like you mix and match your experiences, so the experience of gold and the experience of a mountain allow us each to imagine a golden mountain.
> In that case you must be incapable of retrieving any visual memory?
I posit that there's no such thing as visual memory. There's memory, and yours includes pictures as well as the residue and mine is just the residue.
> You literally cannot remember what anything looks like- your car, your house, your room, your wife, your son?
I certainly can recognize those things. And if you tell me that my car is red, I can confidently correct you. So it's not right to say that I "cannot remember". It's more accurate to say that I "do not visualize."
But I do struggle to remember new faces. In my 20s, I went on a date with a woman and didn't see her again for a couple of weeks. By the time those weeks had passed, my sense of what she looked like had dissipated. I could recall things like hair color and some features, but the sense was gauzy. That said, I easily recognized her when I saw her again.
Having read about others' efforts to overcome aphantasia, I know it's possible for some people to become visualizers. I suspect that for me, the visualization is happening subconsciously, and it's available to some mental processes, but not globally available. I do intend to work on my visualization, which could change my thinking on how these things work.
> I suspect that for me, the visualization is happening subconsciously, and it's available to some mental processes, but not globally available.
I've independently come to suspect this also (though not aphantasic myself). Relatedly, an acquaintance once told me they can't visualize, but have vivid visual dreams.
I'm capable of visual dreams, but either I don't recall them or they don't happen often. (I'm also a terrible sleeper...)
I'm also far to the Aphantasic end of the spectrum (with a great effort I can create very dull, faded, static images of familiar things). I've noticed that the moments before I fall asleep I can visualise very clearly- as though as though my brain is no longer throttling the area responsible for it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-25/argentina-s-economy-beat-expectations-again-in-december
So this sounds like great news. If this persists, then Argentina should soon recover to level of wealth it had before but with inflation under control and probably more potential for finally getting out of the vicious cycle of state defaults. If it all works out it will be a great case libertarians can point out when arguing economics and so it might be emulated by others (especially since other countries do not require measures as drastic as Argentina probably did).
Are there any Argentinians here who might chip in (regardless of whether you like or dislike Milei)?
This Twitter thread is pretty clear in comparing the end of 2023, just before Milei took office, to 2024 with Milei in power. I think it expands on your appreciation that "Argentina should soon recover to level of wealth it had before" (you can translate it into English): https://x.com/jmtelechea/status/1897363526215459260
So, comparing 2023 to 2024:
- Inflation is being reduced, but not as much as the gobernment says. They are abusing a methodological issue to make the reduction seem larger than it really is.
- Economic activity shows a recovery to the levels of 2023, before Milei's big devaluation. This recovery was faster than expected, which is great news, but growth is very uneven. The financial and agricultural sectors are growing the most (note that the agricultural sector grew in comparison to a year that had one of the worst droughts ever, so it's a kind of a misleading growth).
The problem is that Industry, Commerce and Construction are much worse than in 2023. These sectors are some of the most important ones for employment and consumption.
- Employment fell drastically. And it wasn't the public sector that took the hit, as Milei wants people to think. It was private employment, with a reduction of 120.000 jobs, mostly due to the decline in the Industry, Commerce and Construction activities mentioned before.
- Wages are significantly below 2023 levels. In some cases, like public employment, the salaries are down as much as 25% (!). This is a lot. People aren't buying anything because no one has money. That's why economic growth is uneven.
So, inflation is being reduced, the economic activitiy is getting back to 2023 levels (unevenly) but this isn't translating to employment or wages. Leaving specially the most vulnerable people in a dramatic situation.
Also, a big problem is that Milei's economic plan depends on keeping the dollar price artificially low, with the government intervening in the financial markets by using all the Central Bank's reserves. At the moment Milei is desperate to finalize a new IMF loan, trying to take huge debt again, to hold down the economy until October elections. This is exactly the same plan that Macri and Luis Caputo (now Milei's Economy Minister) tried from 2015 to 2019. It was a disaster back then. Every economist is speculating on this, some saying that this time is different and it may work, and some saying that this is another disaster. So, the situation is very fragile, and there could be a devaluation at any moment, with a consequent rise in inflation and deterioration of all economic variables.
> Economic activity shows a recovery...
Most forecasters predict significant growth in 2025 - on the order of 5%. If the 2024 growth was only relative to a depressed 2023 baseline, then the forecasters are wrong to predict continued major growth. So far, it seem that they've been consistently overly pessimistic, so that would be quite a reversal.
>Employment fell drastically
That depends on what you mean. His graph doesn't show population percentages. Looking at the unemployment rate: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/unemployment-rate it appears that consistent with Milei's warning that things would get worse before getting better, unemployment rose from 5.7% in Q4 2023 to 7.7% in Q1 2024. However, it fell in the following two quarters to 6.9%, which is the same as it was in Q1 2023. This is all low by recent standards. Over the last decade, only 6 quarters had a lower unemployment rate, 3 of which were in 2023, during which Argentina reached its lowest unemployment rate of the last decade.
If you question the trend of economic growth, since it started from a low baseline, why be critical of the drop in the unemployment rate, when it, too, started from a historically low baseline?
>Wages are significantly below 2023 levels
Again, this starts at an arbitrary point (not even the midpoint of 2023, or an average of 2023, but specifically, Nov 2023). It appears to show rapid decline starting *before* Milei assumed office, with the decline reversing after he took office. (And real wages in the registered public sector are down 2% from their prior peak, per the graph, which arguably isn't "significantly." It's only significant, if you add 5%, per his preferred alternative CPI metric, which is double counting as that was listed as a separate objection).
That is, not every economic benchmark is as good as it ever was. Inflation was once even lower. GDP was once even higher. Unemployment was once even lower. And real wages were once even higher. But that wasn't the question. The question was about trends which are quite positive.
None of that negates the point of the previous comment that if trends persist (as forecasters predict them to), that Milei's program will continue to succeed.
- I don't get your point about "starting at an arbitrary point." OP said that "Argentina should soon recover to level of wealth it had before." I focused on that. Juan Manuel Telechea's Twitter post, and my summary of it, compare 2023 numbers to those of 2024. That's not arbitrary. It literally answers the question: "Is Argentina better or worse than it was in 2023, before Milei took office?"
"If the 2024 growth was only relative to a depressed 2023 baseline, then the forecasters are wrong to predict continued major growth."
- I don't follow your logic. You can grow over a low baseline, and then grow again the next year (against another low baseline lol). Everyone forecasts growth for 2025 because it will be mostly compared to Milei's 2024 crisis.
Just check out the graph with official INDEC data from the Twitter thread: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GlTJP8TXwAEIBdT?format=png&name=small
The red line represents the EMAE economic estimator. For example, look at month 9, when it was at -6%. It's obvious that if you compare that month from 2024 and the same month in 2025, you'll see significant growth.
- Unemployment fell considerably compared to 2023, there's no way around that. Again, look at Telechea's graphic, it's official data from the Ministry of Human Capital. It's not historically low, but it shows the impact of the uneven economic growth. It's also important to note that the cuts were mostly in the private and not only in the public sector.
- Again, the wage numbers don't start at an arbitrary point. They compare the period before Milei to the period after Milei. You say that registered public sector wages being down 2% is not significant, but admit that they are actually down 7%. That's a lot. Also, the registered public sector is the one with unions that can fight to keep their wages as high as possible. Every other group, like pensions and unregistered wages are much worse and represent a large portion of the real economy. Just the wages situation alone is a disaster.
"None of that negates the point of the previous comment that if trends persist (as forecasters predict), Milei's program will continue to succeed."
- How is Milei's program a success? It's using all the reserves to sustain the dollar price and is forced to take huge loans from the IMF again, just to get to the elections (for political and not for economic reasons!). Wages are down, consumption is low, people are worse off, and economic growth is just for specific sectors. There are no investments anywhere and the real economy is abandoned in favor of financial speculation. How is that going to work out in the long run?
And don't even get me started on the Libra scandal and the fight with major media groups like Clarín that are starting to turn against Milei, damaging his image. Protests are going to start again when the universities begin their 2025 cycle soon (there are already two days of strikes on March 17 and March 18). Many people are beginning to protest alongside retirees every wednesday, including now fans of several football teams (barra bravas), after Milei's repressed old people savagely. The Milei government is in a grave political crisis, markets do not trust him, and everything can explode at any moment, just like it happened with Macri in 2018. It looks like a failure more than anything, sadly for the argentines.
- I will edit my previous post, to make it clear that the data compares 2023, before Milei, to 2024, with Milei.
The main point is the commenter was taking about the *trend*, while you’re mostly talking about the current *level*. Things are trending up, but some benchmarks haven’t yet reached their pre-Milei levels. The commenter said that if trends continue, then they’ll pass pre-Milei levels, which is correct, and no contradiction.
> I don't follow your logic. You can grow over a low baseline, and then grow again the next year (against another low baseline lol). Everyone forecasts growth for 2025 because it will be mostly compared to Milei's 2024 crisis.
This is incorrect. 2024 is projected to have a contraction of 3% (I think it’ll likely be less, but let’s say 3%). 2025 is projected to have growth of 5%. So that’s already growth relative to pre-Milei not just relative to 2024 (e.g. https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/arg#ataglance).
> How is Milei's program a success?
By all the obvious benchmarks, some of which were mentioned in the original comment. Milei succeeded in reducing MoM inflation by over 90% (https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-rate-mom), while it continues to drop, (and even the alternative CPI weighting proposed still acknowledges a sharp reduction in inflation and notes that any differences between the published CPI calculation and the alternatively weighted one are now practically nonexistent: https://cenital.com/inflacion-se-mide-bien-o-quedo-desactualizada/).
And the fact that in spite of taming inflation, he managed to take the economy from recession to expansion (with significant further growth projected, as noted).
And the fact that real wages have been growing for many months, after having been dropping before he took office (https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/salarios_02_2540E7BC430E.pdf).
And the fact that in spite of concerns that while the economy as a whole would boom, that the poor would suffer, that the poverty rate has been dropping for many months, peaking at 52.9% in the 6 month period from Jan 2024 to June 2024, when he first took office, but dropping each subsequent rolling 6 month period to 34.9% for the period from Sep 2024 to Feb 2025 – the lowest in 6 years: https://www.utdt.edu/profesores/mrozada/pobreza.
And while it’s true that no one can be certain that positive trends will continue (which again, doesn’t negate the original comment which was about “if this persists”), markets, which have an economic incentive in correct forecasts support the projections of the IMF and others that these positive trends will continue. For example, JP Morgan’s risk index (based on market prices) dropped to 7.2%, which is lower than it was at any point from March 2019 to Dec. 2025, with it having been well over 20% for most of 2023.
And similarly, the Argentina stock market (S&P MERVAL Index) remains well above where it was when Milei was elected (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EMERV/).
Unsurprisingly, Milei has one of the highest approval ratings of any elected official in the world: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1456852/world-leader-approval-ratings/.
I think you're missing my point. My comment wasn't a "gotcha" on the OP. I wasn't commenting on any trend. As I mentioned, my comment was expanding on the question, "Is Argentina better or worse than it was in 2023, before Milei took office?" I think the data is clear: Argentina's inflation is better (but it shows that the government doesn't care about using an obviously outdated methodology to try to trick people into thinking it's better than it really is), the economic recession (that started before Milei in August but got much worse with Milei's December devaluation and subsequent economic policies) was severe, but it unevenly bounced back faster than expected, private employment got hit, and wages are really bad, affecting the most vulnerable sectors even more.
If you want to go into trends, you can't just say things are "trending up" and believe they will keep going up, especially in an economy like Argentina's. Historically, Argentina's biggest problem is that the country can't generate enough dollars to sustain growth. When the economy starts to grow, dollars are needed to import machinery, licenses, etc. That puts more pressure on the Central Bank's reserves. Add that to the crazy debt interest payments that have to be paid to organisms like the IMF due to Macri's (and soon Milei's) ridiculous loans. And remember that the dollar is being kept low as a political tool to reduce inflation, making exports unattractive for producers. The other side of the coin is that imports are even more attractive, putting a lot of pressure on national industries, reducing jobs and wages, again in the name of reducing inflation. All of this causes the current account (the balance between exports and imports) to be in a deficit, making debt interest payments difficult, leading to defaults, devaluations and economic collapses.
This same economic plan was implemented several times in the country's history, more obviously during the 1976 dictatorship, then deepened with Menem in the '90s, and with Macri in 2015. Please go take a look at those years. It was a disaster that ruined the country. I just wrote about it in a comment earlier today if you're interested: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/99468708
Pay special attention to how good some economic variables looked during Menem's presidencies and how it ended up exploding. Just saying that things are "trending up" in Argentina without analyzing it in more detail and ignoring the country's history is not the best idea. Specially ignoring the Central Bank reserves.
"This is incorrect. 2024 is projected to have a contraction of 3% (I think it’ll likely be less, but let’s say 3%). 2025 is projected to have growth of 5%. So that’s already growth relative to pre-Milei, not just relative to 2024 (e.g. https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/arg#ataglance)."
- How is my comment incorrect? I said that it was possible, and even likely, to have growth in 2025. It's pretty much inevitable after 2024 levels.
- Inflation is lower, as I mentioned before, and that's Milei's biggest success and his political flag to try to win October's elections. He is sacrificing everything for it. But you can't say that destroying the economy into a very low peak and then getting it back to the previous levels is a big success. Again, especially taking into account the uneven growth and the previous year's drought. And, again, you have to put the economic growth to the test of not having enough reserves to sustain it in the coming years.
- Real wages have been unevenly and slowly growing after Milei destroyed them, but they are still at ridiculously low levels. And there is an explanation for that. If wages go up, people will have more money. If people have more money, inflation will go up. And the government will not let that happen. So it's ideologically impossible for the government to focus on making wages go up. They want to reduce their budget and will keep trying to cut public sector workers and pensions as much as possible (or at least not let them get back to previous levels). Come on, man, look at the graph: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GlTJlDVXkAA0X1h?format=png&name=small
These are people who can't make it to the end of the month. They can't buy their medication. Don't be obtuse by saying that all of Milei's economic benchmarks are great. Just look at it.
- Your poverty data is wrong. It's another methodological issue. Poverty at the end of 2024 was 3.5 points higher than in 2023: https://cenital.com/euforia-del-gobierno-por-las-cifras-del-indec-hay-menos-pobres-que-con-el-peronismo
I think the rebuttal to using this as an argument for libertarianism is that Argentina was in a uniquely bad situation and shock therapy was the only thing that could get them out but that shock therapy would usually do more harm than good. Also, it remains to be seen if the economy will actually bounce back in the long-term.
"Also, it remains to be seen if the economy will actually bounce back in the long-term."
And long term here has to mean more than a decade.
The last go around I paid attention to was when they got inflation under control with a dollar peg via a currency board. The idea was that the country had one US dollar in reserve for every Argentine peso that was issued. Folks could freely convert from one to the other. Much like an 1800s gold standard, but with the currency backed by US dollars rather than gold.
This worked for about a decade, then convertability was limited followed by a devaluation of the peso (so one pedo would no longer get you one US dollar). Then dollar accounts in Argentine banks were forcibly converted to pesos and then the value of the peso collapsed.
My basic bet on Argentina whenever it does something hopeful or reasonable economically is to give the country about a decade to blow up their economy and have hyperinflation :-(
I hope for better every time, but don't expect it.
>one pedo would no longer get you one US dollar
now that's what I call inflación
:-)
> Let’s fight babies!
anti-natalism has gone to far
Hello everyone!
I am part of the research group that coordinates UNATI, the largest study that will be done on the impact of moderate alcohol consumption on life expectancy/quality of life. The same researchers did some of the studies with the greatest impact on the Mediterranean diet (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1800389). I wanted to present the project and state that we are in the recruitment phase. We are looking for male participants aged 50-70 and women aged 55-75 who already consume some alcohol.
We conduct interviews by videoconference in Spanish, every 3 months to advise either abstinence from alcohol or “adherence to the Mediterranean pattern”. We are looking for participants, we have almost half, but we need 10,000.
UNATI also welcomes new medical collaborators as trialists, who are willing to recruit patients. They can be doctors or nurses.
I am sending all this information in case it fits you, you have patients who may want to participate in the study, or you are in Spain and you would be interested in entering in the recruitment team.
You can see the ClinicalTrial document (https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06338215) and a link for the patients (https://medpreventiva.es/4nYpsd). Any doubt, please write me back.
Thank you very much!
My spanish is insufficient for a video conference, sorry.
It seems to me that Richard Dawkins' famous book "The Selfish Gene" is based on a fallacy, and a fairly obvious one at that. Basically, the book's argument hinges on an equivocation between two senses of the term "the same". In English, when saying X is the same as Y, we can either mean that they are literally identical ("My father is the same as my male parent"), or that they share a number of salient features in common ("Men are all the same!"). Now, Dakwins wants to solve the evolutionary paradox of altruism -- how can animals evolve altruistic behaviour when it's in each individual's interests to selfishly free ride off the altruism of others? -- by reconceptualising genes as the main unit of evolution. A mother, for example, might lay down her life for her child, which seems altruistic and self-sacrificing. However, Dawkins says, the mother's behaviour is actually driven by her genes, and the same genes are also present in her child. Therefore, the sacrifice is actually selfish after all; the genes are sacrificing the mother in order to save themselves.
However, when we bear in mind that "the same" can have two different meanings, we see that Dawkins is equivocating. The mother's genes might be "the same" as her child's genes in the sense that they're the same kind of genes, but they're not "the same" in the sense of being literally identical. Even if we want to treat everything at the genetic level, therefore, the mother's genes are still sacrificing themselves for the sake of other genes, and hence the paradox still remains.
(Of course, we could try and resolve the paradox by saying that the mother's genes are literally identical to the child's genes -- that each gene is some kind of Platonic entity which finds instantiation in multiple physical bodies -- but of course that's not an option available to Dawkins, given his materialist commitments.)
So anyway, what do you guys think? I post this because the fallacy seems quite obvious to me, but lots of apparently intelligent people have praised "The Selfish Gene", so maybe I'm just missing something.
It feels like you're trying to anthropomorphize a system that's supposed to be purely mechanistic.
Dawkins isn't really talking about whether genes are altruistic or selfish in a personality sense. Hopefully genes are nonsentient proteins with no personality traits whatsoever.
Rather his point is that mechanistically, genes which cause behaviors or mechanisms that increase the number of copies of that gene in the world will tend to proliferate. And things that we call 'altruism' in whole organisms can be caused by such genes.
Whether you want to call that altruistic or selfish is very much semantics, and irrelevant to the argument. It's just a description of a physical process.
I'm well aware that Dawkins doesn't attribute personality to genes. Nevertheless, his explanation for altruism doesn't actually explain how it might arise, so much as push the problem down a level. The paradox of altruism is basically a variation of the free rider problem: altruistic behaviour might be better for the species as a whole, but within the species it seems that selfish individuals should do better, and because it's individuals which reproduce rather than species as a whole, we should expect the selfish to outcompete the altruistic. Saying that actually it's genes which reproduce rather than individuals just changes the question from "Why don't selfish individuals outcompete altruistic ones?" to "Why don't genes which produce selfish behaviour outcompete genes which produce altruistic behaviour?"
Right, but I just said why:
>mechanistically, genes which cause behaviors or mechanisms that increase the number of copies of that gene in the world will tend to proliferate. And things that we call 'altruism' in whole organisms can be caused by such genes.
Not sure if you're having trouble picturing how that works at a population level, or making some different point?
I think it helps to think of genes as a computer program.
It's a probabilistic argument.
Dawkins is saying that natural selection favors the mother giving up her genes spreading, for the sake of the child's genes spreading.
He's not saying it happens every time such a decision has to be made. But that the forces driving the mother, have evolved to make her laying down her life for the child's, likely. On behalf of increasing the chances for those genes continuing to spread. The child is younger and her genes are likely to spread more.
Darwin spoke of why some birds evolve highly colorful attractive feathers. They're more visible to predators but also more likely to attract mates. The latter is why he thinks they evolved such feather - that's a more important driving force.
Btw : In geometry, the two types of "the same" you speak about, would be congruency versus similarity (say, in triangles).
Have you actually read the book? I remember it walking through the actual argument (which is quite mechanical and has nothing to do with anything as abstract as "self-sacrifice" except as a semi-poetic descriptor) pretty clearly.
I have, albeit many years ago. I just went back to check, and in Chapter 3, he quite explicitly says that genes should be regarded as the true units of evolution because they exist for a long time, whereas individual organisms are short-lived ("The cornerstone of the argument, as given earlier, was the assumption that genes are potentially immortal, while bodies and all other higher units are temporary," p. 50). But this falls into the equivocation detailed above. The same kind of gene may be found in many organisms across a long period of time, and we might say somewhat loosely that "This gene is very old". But in a strict, literal sense, this isn't true: the gene, in the sense of the physical set of nucleotides, only survives as long as the organism in which it is found. All my ancestors going back 70 million years might have had the same kind of gene which I also have, but the actual gene I have isn't 70 million years old. But then, if genes are not in fact less temporary than organisms, Dawkins' argument fails, by his own admission. So whilst I will admit that I seem to have misremembered how closely Dawkins' argument is connected to self-sacrificing behaviour specifically, I still maintain that he commits the fallacy of equivocation.
I think the clearest explanation starts by saying that you've missed the point.
Dawkins means that genes are the same in the 'literally exactly identical' sense; two copies of a gene are 'the same' if they have the exact same sequence.
If a creature reproduces sexually, the child organisms don't have the same genome as either parent. So we can say they are 'not the same' genetically.
Genomes are not the unit of selection, because they're not actually a unit.
However, at the individual gene level, (almost) all the genes which exist in the children have an exact copy in one parent or the other. That is, the nucleic acid base sequence of the gene is an exact match. The individual genes present therefore are 'the same'; they are identical in the ways which matter.
The manner in which a gene can direct an organism to act in a certain way is convoluted, and not particularly reliable - but it nevertheless exists.
A 'selfish' gene can therefore sacrifice the organism it's 'in' to save (on average) more than one organism in which copies of the same gene are present.
I’ve thought about the same issue. My answer is that it is the pattern which is the same. This replicating genetic pattern predominates in future generations.
I also try to stay away from the terms selfish and altruistic as they are loaded terms, they are used counterintuitively (moms sacrifice for her kid is deemed selfish)and even evolutionary biologists and game theorists seem to use the terms inconsistently.
But under Dawkins-style materialism, "the pattern" is just an abstraction created by our minds, not something that exists in (for want of a better term) the real world, and it's difficult to see how such an abstraction can play an explanatory role.
> but they're not "the same" in the sense of being literally identical.
Aren't 50% of the daughter's genes literally identical to her mother's genes?
Not in the sense of "literally identical" used above, unless you think it's possible for objects to be in two places at once.
In German, there are two different words for "the same", one meaning "another identical instantiation of a thing", and the other meaning "the actual thing again".
"We both went shopping last week and ended up buying the same sweater"
vs.
"This is this the same sweater I was wearing yesterday."
The distinction isn't always observed in everyday speech, but I imagine that the German translation of Dawkin's book doesn't have the "problem" you identified.
English philosophy has "qualitative identity" and "numerical identity" for the same distinction.
I think it seems like you're making a pointless semantic argument instead of dealing with the real issue. You can just taboo the word "same" (panta rhei anyway): "if a cell with a gene with the sequence XYZ acts in a way such that other cells with a gene with the sequence XYZ have more offspring, this leads to a greater number of cells with a gene with the sequence YXZ".
This is correct. If gene A is more effective at making copies of itself than gene B, then after a while there will be more copies of A around than of B.
That doesn't actually solve the paradox of why the genes would act that way in the first place, though.
I also guess you haven't read that book, or you didn't understand it, because @Wasserschweinchens answer is spot on. In the latter case Dawkins might be a bit responsible for that because he uses metaphors -- starting with "selfish" -- and especially critics with biases misrepresent him often based on those metaphors.
Granted, he repeatedly announces that what he says next is just a metaphor, and does explain things literally too, but I believe metaphors are highly misleading for most people.
But the book is awesome in spite of this.
Yeah, this comment further suggests to be that you haven't read the book - definitely do, it's a great explanation of not just altruism, but how evolution works in general.
I think you're anthropomorphising the genes too much if you're using phrases like "why the genes would act that way in the first place".
They obviously don't reason and make decisions.
Dawkins' argument is simply the observation that genes that cause an organism to behave in those ways (e.g. sacrificing itself for its child) *will* be more frequent in the next generation than genes that don't.
As for why a gene would do *anything* "in the first place": new behaviours can arise due to mutation or due to recombination in sexual reproduction.
It does, the whole point of Dawkins argument is that some stuff which is hard to explain by change and selective advantage (i.e. Darwinian evolution) when you focus on organisms as what is changing and selected, can be understand as working exactly the same as usual if you focus on genes as what is changing and selected
Yes, it does. If e.g. my brain cells did not act in a way such that my sperm cells got to procreate, natural selection would obviously select against the genes in my brain cells.
Altruistic behaviour often hinders procreation. E.g., if I lay down my life defending my village from an angry bear, my chances of reproducing go down to zero. Hence we should expect natural selection to select against the genes that cause such behaviour, and yet people obviously do behave in such a way.
*Your* chances of reproducing go to zero, but the genes that caused you to act in a self-sacrificing way are still safe and sound in your fellow villagers -- probably more so than if nobody took a risk to stop the bear. People also risk their life for non-kin, of course, but the control of genes over behavior is crude, especially in a species with such plastic brains; it's enough that, on average, genes for altruism replicate themselves further than their selfishness-inducing analogues.
>*Your* chances of reproducing go to zero, but the genes that caused you to act in a self-sacrificing way are still safe and sound in your fellow villagers
That's precisely the mistake I talked about above -- genes of the same kind as the ones that caused me to act in a safe-sacrificing way are safe and sound, but the actual genes that caused me to act are dead along with me, and hence will never reproduce.
The point of the book is that the "gene's eye" perspective on evolution explains some behaviour that seems incomprehensible from the "organism's eye" point of view. That doesn't mean we have an explanation for all biological behaviour.
People typically display altruistic behavior that is stronger but less broad-based when they have already reproduced. As for protecting your village from a bear as, say, a young man, historically your village would usually contain a lot of relatives even if you haven't reproduced yet, *especially* if you're male since typical behavior in tribes or villages is for men to stay in the vicinity of their birth family.
The basic truth is that some genes lead to more reproductive success, and other to less, and so the first type of genes spread widely. It doesn't matter at all whether the gene leads to behaviour that, on outside, can be classified as selfish or altruistic - all that matters is which genes survive better. The genes don't need to be "the same" in some higher sense for an animal to display seemingly altruistic behaviour - their bearer just needs to be recognized (possibly falsely!) as "the same enough" to trigger behaviour programmed in by genes of parent.
I'm hosting an HPMoR meetup on VRChat on the 15th in the "LessWrong and AC10 Meetup" group. Everyone with an internet connection is invited, no VR required. Here's a discord link for more details: discord.gg/ADQAHkcWE6
Can highly recommend Newspeak (not resided there, but know people who have, and been to lots of their events). Happy for anyone interested to DM me for (biased) but 3rd-party takes.
What's your opinion about libertarian and children? There seems to be a massive motte and bailey between the two, where libertarian wants to treat everyone the same, but have problems with treating children. So they make motte where "children are different". But lots of libertarian principles are harmed when there's some people who are excluded so when talking about them they're trapped between the motte and bailey. It's especially interesting because I think lots of authoritarianism keep creeping back in under the banner of protecting children. I think you'd have a unique perspective about this especially after having children on your own.
That's not a motte & bailey, that's an unprincipled exception (because inconveniently, the theory doesn't match reality).
As an example of a motte & bailey for the utterance "everyone is equal", consider the equivocation between the interpretations "everyone should have equal political-rights" vs "everyone should have equal incomes". The ambiguity of the utterance allows you to swap between the two specific meanings. Whereas in your scenario, strictly speaking, there's no reasonable interpretation of "everyone is equal" that might be construed as "but children are different".
Maybe you can rework your argument into a motte & bailey like ascend, but it's not a motte & bailey as it stands.
In your later comment, you claim that many libertarians think children should have sexual freedom as the logical conclusion of their beliefs, but pretend to make an exception for children in public. But again, that's not a motte & bailey because there's no ambiguity that's being exploited. It's moreso a matter of libertarians pretending to make an exception in public, but then not really making an exception in private.
Isn't there an anti-libertarian motte-and-bailey that equivocates on two meanings of "children should have the right to do X"? Between "the state shouldn't interfere if the parents allow it" and "the state should FORCE the parents to allow it". It's pretty clear it's almost always the first that libertarians mean, and it's hard to imagine most libertarians endorsing the second except in very extreme cases. Yet anti-libertarians seem to always interpret it as the second; responses like "children aren't generally able to handle X" don't make much sense when no one is saying they should be doing X, only that it should be up to them and their parents, not the state.
The worst example is attempted internet censorship. Few people would claim that all children without exception aren't capable of navigating the internet safely. Yet somehow a disturbing number reach for "the state" instead of parents as the ones to do the protecting...
I think it's a strawman's libertarianism that treats all individuals the same, regardless of inherent capacity. There are some fringe people who support such things, but it isn't the norm.
If you don't treat human beings who don't have the capacity to make decisions or survive on their own differently from a functioning adult, you get absurd conclusions that a baby, or three year old, should have full freedom to do whatever they want (so long as it doesn't directly harm others). Run into the street? Great. Get in a stranger's van? It's their choice. Enter into contracts when they can't read or inherently understand the long term consequences of actions? It's free association.
I think quite obviously a libertarian position is more complicated than "treat everyone the same".
An observation:
- There exist a small subset adults who, like children, are not capable of taking care of themselves.
- There exist a very large subset of adults who will enter into contracts they don't fully understand, not understanding the full long term consequences.
What is the libertarian position on those? At what level is it reasonable to restrict someones freedom for their own safety? Why should this principle apply only to children?
The simple libertarian position (on the subject of incapable adults) is that the harm caused by restricting those peoples' freedom (using the apparatus of the state) is not worth the benefit.
I think one could just look at history or some 3. world countries to see how that would pan out - at least regarding my first category? At worst, people unable to take care of them selves would simply die on the street, or be left to all kinds of exploitation. At best, some charity (or in some cases family) would step in to help some of those people. In the last case, we have a free-rider problem, where each individual benefits from having other people pay for the charity. To organize this and avoid the free-rider problem you basically need government or some institution with equal function.
As you understand, I have some trouble understanding how one could conclude that this would somehow cause less harm overall, compared to western democracy.
Are there some good arguments for how this would work?
I think we're talking about different things. "People who struggle sometimes and need some help" is different from "People who apparently need to have their rights restricted or they will harm themselves".
The historical solution to the first is e.g. charity (the modern day solution is often forced charity, or welfare). I'm not interested in arguing or litigating the first category (find an actual libertarian for the tax vs charity welfare debate if that's what you're interested in).
The second category is more interesting to me. The historical solution to the second is slavery, servitude, serfdom, involuntary committment, jail, etc. The modern solution to the second is...pretending like they are the first category and acting surprised when this doesn't work (e.g. homeless in America). A libertarian (and in fact, a liberal too) would argue that e.g. involuntary committment, *even if* it leads to better outcomes on average, is bad *because it restricts human rights*. The key observation (which I think is useful and correct) is that essentially you are putting freedom on the balance scale with welfare, and making a value judgement -- a libertarian simply values freedom higher as a matter of philosophy (better to die free than live in chains).
> The historical solution to the first is e.g. charity (the modern day solution is often forced charity, or welfare). I'm not interested in arguing or litigating the first category (find an actual libertarian for the tax vs charity welfare debate if that's what you're interested in).
I was arguing that history is evidence that at least som minimum level of government welfare or safety net is much preferable to arbitrary private charity. Fine that you don't want to debate that point.
> The key observation (which I think is useful and correct) is that essentially you are putting freedom on the balance scale with welfare, and making a value judgement -- a libertarian simply values freedom higher as a matter of philosophy (better to die free than live in chains).
I'm symphatetic to that argument. But one persons freedom is often another's prison. Often more freedom can mean freedom to exploit another. Absolutely I agree that there should be a balance. And certainly if no (significant) harm is done to another freedom should be prefered.
There is a third category I think, in addition to people in need of help, and people unable to not harm themselves when free.
These are easily exploitable people. They need government protection that include restricting their freedom in order to avoid overly bad outcomes from their own actions. This includes:
- workers, who historically have often been exploited in contracts very similar to slavery
- junkies (some, but not all are in the second category), if you allow free distribution of all drugs, I'm sure you will soon have a lot more crack-addicts and heroinists. Often these will start on drugs when young and naive.
- people with no sense of how money works will quickly get exploited by people offering credit at high rates (this one is already mostly legal but would probably get worse with less regulation), or all kinds of scams if those get become legal.
etc. etc.
Like you said protection against these sort of things must be balanced against overly restricting peoples freedoms.
But I just see no way of having a society with acceptable outcomes for most people without many of the restrictions and regulations found in western democracies.
Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist, argued that children should essentially be considered property of their parents until they can "homestead" themselves by living independently.
Unless the children is then also protected against exploitation and abuse by law, It seems this would lead to much worse conditions for many children when comparing to western democracy.
Trivers' theory of genetic conflict says that imperfect overlap between the Darwinian interests of parents & children leads to conflict... but individual children have even less overlap with their governments. Our usual default is to let parents take care of their children for a reason, as it has worked that way prior to governments ever coming into existence.
I think the Rothbardian counter to this is a version of "who watches the watchers?". If child abuse is prevented by law, then the law is implemented by people who serve the state and cannot be as familiar with that child as its own parents, let alone as sympathetic. You've traded one poison for another, and the other is better than abusive parents but worse than the vast majority of parents (as numerous accounts of overactive CPS agents will attest).
Thanks to TGGP and yourself for enlightening me on Rothbards arguments.
It seems an easy counter to the who watches the watcher argument here would be to point to real life outcomes. It should be easy to show that in times and in countries with relative less legal protection for children, the outcomes for those children have been worse? (comparing to contemporary western democracies)
There’s no motte and bailey here. Or at least you haven’t proven it. It’s not a sleight of hand to treat children differently than adults because children are different to adults.
That's the motte. The bailey I've seen is wanting to treat even children same, with things like privacy, *or even sexual liberty*. I know know not every X, but it's very stereotypically motte and bailey.
> children
> *or even sexual liberty*
Call me a hypocrite as much as you wish, please; often. Great for everyone involved
You mean that some libertarians want “sexual liberty” for children. That doesn’t follow from children being different, but the opposite.
Nailed it.
Are you prepared to apply this argument to infants? If not I don’t see how it changes anything.
What do commenters think of Zvi's article on education?
I largely agree and think education professionals are frequently bad actors.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thezvi/p/childhood-and-education-9-school?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1tkxvc
There's a very American tendency to start out saying "Here's the problems of the world", and then describe a bunch of problems that are very specific to the USA, and then try to invent solutions out of the whole cloth without reference to what might or might not be working in other countries.
Could you name the specific parts that you believe are only specific to USA?
Is there anything that isn't specific to the USA, apart from a tweet about South Korea and a study from Colombia? Some of it may happen to apply to some other countries too, but if so then it's only by coincidence.
Most of the article is about US schools' refusal to stream kids by ability. Of course streaming kids by ability is something very common in a lot of places, so if you're going to talk about it as an idea then the obvious thing to do would be to talk about the various different systems that exist in various different places and their advantages and disadvantages. But nope, no countries outside the US exist so there's nothing to be learned.
> streaming kids by ability is something very common in a lot of places
My impression is that although in many countries *some* programs for gifted children exist, they are very few compared to the actual number of gifted children. (I may be wrong, but I would like to see some statistics showing that.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_education#Global_implementation
For example, the Wikipedia page about gifted education provides examples in various countries, but those examples seem like... for example, in Brazil there is one such program for about 500 children, in India one school is mentioned that admits 80 students each year, in Norway there is only a school for kids with musical talent, etc.
So on one hand, such programs exist; on the other hand, obviously most of the children who would deserve to get there won't get the chance. Merely being "1 in 100" is not enough; you either need to be "1 in 10000", or you need to have rich parents, preferably both.
Also, sometimes the gifted schools collect the gifted children in one place... and then teach them basically the same curriculum as everywhere else. Or they have 10% more of something.
I would prefer a system where "1 in 100" kids can get education on the "1 in 100" level, and "1 in 10000" kids can get education on the "1 in 10000" level, etc. What we get instead, in those countries that support gifted education, is that 1 in 10000 kids can get a "1 in 100" level of education, and that's all.
As I said, there's various different approaches to streaming. On the "big chunks" end there's Germany which puts roughly the top, middle and bottom thirds into Gymnasium, Hauptschule and Realschule. This seems like a reasonable solution, but it doesn't quite cater to the needs of the super-geniuses.
At the other extreme you could think about super-selective schools which take in the top one in ten thousand. The problem is that all these tests have error bars, and if you test the same million kids on two different days then you'll probably find that the top hundred kids on day 1 don't overlap all that much with the top hundred kids on day two. So your "one in ten thousand" kids are just a weighted sampling of the top percent or so.
The other problem with super selective schools is that you can't place them within reasonable commuting distance of every smart kid.
I liked it a lot, but I did think he over emphasised the "school is holding back the brightest kids" argument which is only relevant to a small number of kids, and could have focused more on the "school is bad for wellbeing and accomplishes very little in return" argument which applies to most kids.
The brightest kids have an outsized impact on the lives of everyone else 20-40 years down the line. If you can stop holding them back _without_ making it worse for everyone else, it would do more good than the first-order effects on the kids themselves.
Seconded!
There's some truth to this, but also, probably a lot more kids than you might think would fall into the same "brightest kid" traps if they were more stubborn about seeking out challenges, without actually being more bright. Probably at least 50%, considering how much public schools "optimize" for the lowest common denominator student while their approach actually drags even those students down.
> What do commenters think of Zvi's article on education?
Just uncontroversially right and tragic, but happily this crowd is alreadly largely "school is a prison" and agrees with it.
Tracing Woodgrains, a long-time commenter here who has been writing in-depth about the problems in education for years, has spun up a 501c3 with the goal of reforming what's possible to reform in US education. They have 5 main areas of focus right now and are looking for volunteers for research / input / activism:
1. Policy
2. Gifted Regulations
3. Logic Tournament
4. Legal
5. Ohio
Their latest post about that is here if anyone's interested in hearing more / getting involved:
https://www.educationprogress.org/p/task-board-and-open-thread-1
> uncontroversially right
If my siblings believed it I think they be homeschooling
Given the efficacy of placebos even under open label conditions why not sell a prescription-only placebo medication with a typically sounding drug name so that doctors and patients can more readily trial the approach?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/03/08/placebo-effect-pain-clinical-trial/
I think supplements and other bullshit already fill that space. And while placebos clearly have some effect, it is not a powerful one, and tends to wear off when the novelty and excitement of "ooh, I'm taking a drug for the problem" wears off.
If the placebo effect is just regression to the mean, then you aren't actually accomplishing anything.
I would disagree in this way: Doing nothing is rarely an option for people. Trying the open placebo approach may prevent harms from the other treatment approaches available.
"Toblerone" sounds like a plausible drug name. Next time you're sick why not take a Toblerone and see if it works?
A local record store was selling bottles of pill shaped hard candy for stress relief labeled Damnitall.
Isn’t that a brand of chocolate?
Why yes, makes a great placebo ;)
I thought placebos only worked when you did not know you were taking something inert.
Their chocolate is not very good in my opinion
Placebo effect is weird and I've read that it persists even when people know it's a placebo.
I'm not a fan of Toblerone chocolate either but plenty of people seem to love it.
Well you can also use it as a suppository.
Love this. I might try it.
Patients would hate it, many bioethicists are against, and I doubt the effect size would be big enough to be worth trying to overcome those hurdles. You can buy it over the counter on Amazon though: https://www.amazon.com/Zeebo-Tablets-Placebo-Designed-Potential/dp/B097TTQWXF
Amazon is telling me it can’t ship placebo pills to my location, and here I am wondering if that’s because placebos don’t have regulatory approval…
There are probably lots and lots of studies you could cite to show that placebos are safe (which, sure, wasn’t the original purpose of the study). :-)
Even under open label conditions? I’m surprised people would be this closed-minded, especially bioethicists. Could you give a version of their rationale.
I think the prescription only aspect (you’d have to go to a pharmacy and obtain it from someone in a white coat) would help with setting expectation.
How to sway a libertarian:
I lean fairly heavily libertarian and while watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTBzuKholjo I realized that for the first time in quite a while I actually thought, "huh, maybe government funded projects aren't 100% terrible". This got me thinking about what would it take to convince me to be more favorable to government funded programs beyond the basics like police/military.
1. Show me a credible path to removing bad regulations. Currently, regulations/gov funding is almost purely additive. Someone comes up with something they think is a good idea, that gets mangled during the drafting process, and eventually we end up with a new regulation/funding. There is almost no path to getting rid of this if we later realize it was a bad idea. The only thing that seems to ever happen is even more regulations/funding gets thrown on top to try to rescue it, but usually this just makes things worse. In order for me to be more favorable to supporting governments trying out good sounding ideas, I would need to see a path to deleting old/bad regulations that I am convinced won't just be ignored (empty promises aren't sufficient). I think some city or state government made a rule that for every 1 new rule/program, 2 must be removed. This, if enforced, would likely sway me a lot.
2. Do a much better job of highlighting where prior funding programs and regulations have actually helped, and try really hard to show that it wasn't just correlation. Vaccines are a modern example of something where people always point to it and say "vaccines saved lives" but I rarely see people actually steel man the argument that deaths/disability was already on the decline before vaccines were introduced (due to sanitation). If you want to convince libertarians that government regulations/programs are net good, you have to steel man the best argument that they are bad/not helpful (e.g., success was just correlation, or the problem would have solved itself on its own without the regulation).
3. Acknowledge that the "do nothing" solution is viable and show how you can do better than it. Libertarians tend to believe that the "do nothing" strategy is really powerful because humans/societies/cultures adapt and learn on their own if given time, and the solutions that evolve naturally are far more robust than those that come out of centralized governance. If you want to sell a libertarian that your central solution is better then you need to steel man and soundly beat the "do nothing" strategy.
4. Spend less time telling me how terrible everything is. We (libertarians) know how terrible everything is, you don't need to convince us of the problem, you need to convince us that your solution is better than the "do nothing" solution. Instead spend more time explaining how your solution is better than the alternatives.
I'm not against solving problems. I even usually agree with progressives on what the problems are. It is the solutions that we disagree on, and focusing on solutions should be where the debate is focused. I suspect that conservatives feel similarly.
I've got this post about which parts of the economy I think are better run by the state. https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/economic-calculation-in-the-rts-commonwealth
"Show me a credible path to removing bad regulations." This sounds like thinking about the government being either bigger or smaller on a 1 dimensional scale. Maybe because of how elections work you do have to chose between a blanket increase or decrease in government. But in theory it should be possible to advocate for more government in some areas without having to apologise for everything the government is currently doing.
That's one of the problems with a big government that tries to be democratic: the voter gets only get one vote for an enormous amount of different policy decisions, so one cannot expect policy to reflect the will of the people.
There is no "will of the people", there are millions of people with their own wills. The big question of democracy is how to average them out properly.
"Averaging out" wills results in sheer nonsense that benefits nobody. Compromise is an active, knowledge-intensive process that the formal mechanisms of democracy-as-we-know-it can at best encourage. Lately it doesn't seem to be doing a good job of this--many of the smaller groups are losing track of their own wills in psychological identification with the parties, while at the same in at least the US the last stage of compromise, that between the parties, is also failing due to the same psychological identification.
I don't think substituting "any reasonable average of the wills of the people" for "the will of the people" changes the argument substantially?
"This got me thinking about what would it take to convince me to be more favorable to government funded programs beyond the basics like police/military"
One thing to consider might be some concrete examples where the government funded program seems to work out better than the market based solution.
Two examples I can think of (one concrete, one categorical) are:
*) Power Generation, and
*) Internet providers
California has a few large public utilities (publicly traded companies) providing electricity to most of the state: PG&E in the north and Southern Edison to the south.
California ALSO has a number of cities that provide their own power generation. Sacramento, Santa Clara (the city not the county) and Palo Alto are three of them. The cities providing their own power generation seem to have non-trivially lower costs than the electricity provided by PG&E and Southern Edison.
This suggests that in domains where dozens of providers seem to be unfeasible that a direct government operation might be better. It also suggests that this be pushed down to the most local government possible (so city rather than state).
In the general case of Internet providers I occasionally read about cities that managed to install a local network and the citizens saw a huge drop in monthly prices. One would need to verify that the cost of internet access wasn't just moved from the users to the taxpayers, but I think in at least a few of these it was opt-in and not funded from taxes.
I view this as similar to a credit union vs a bank where the advantage to the local government control is to keep the new provider from doing duopoly type pricing with the old provider.
Empirical examples of success should be treated seriously.
This is great! Do you know if the power generation examples you gave are subsidized by taxpayers, or if they are revenue neutral or even profitable?
There is also a long tradition of co-op power generation in rural areas which I think is a great compromise solution for natural monopolies
I *think* that they are revenue neutral. I expect that they aren't profitable for the same basic reason that credit unions aren't profitable -- because they are set up as non-profit companies operated by the city.
City of Santa Clara power company is "Silicon Valley Power" and has some financial info here:
https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-svp/utility-fact-sheet
Wasn't the introduction of modern sanitation very largely driven by government regulation?
That is true for both wastewater treatment and the sanitation of drinking water. I'm not sure about some other deployments of modern sanitation (e.g. general practices within hospitals).
I'm not sure, I have not looked deeply into it. The only reason I bring it up was merely to use it as an example of a situation where I commonly see people make a claim and argue for it, but fail to steel man the *actual* counterarguments.
Well, I also lean very heavily libertarian, but I think there is at least a theoretical solution to your first point.
>Show me a credible path to removing bad regulations.
I would do something like this:
1. Make most or all laws (other than the constitution) have sunset clauses. This means that the regulations at least have to be deliberated again. Also make the legislative branch of the government the only one which can pass new regulation. Executive power should not have any power to create new laws probably (only propose them to the legislative body) and judicial power should only be allowed to repeal laws.
2. This is probably easy to create loopholes around, but still - make a "legislation size" limit so that the total "mass" of all laws is constitutionally prohibited from exceeding that limit. I am saying mass because it is not just the number of laws but also how much they do. Maybe the word count could be a crude measure (and make it mandatory to write everything out clearly, no abbreviations etc.). If the limit is reached no new legislation can be passed without first repealing something else.
3. Make it easier to abolish laws than to pass new laws in general. Perhaps a 60% majority to create a new law and only 45% to repeal an existing law (without replacing it, that would still require the 60%).
4. Any actions by the executive that create new monetary demands (and remember the executive cannot create any new regulation in this scenario) can be temporary only and have to be revised by the legislative branch. So if you want the president/prime minister to institute a new office or create a new government programme, it can only be done temporarily (say for a year or two) after which it has to be revised and passed by the legislative body (with a 60% majority like any other laws). The only exception is when the country is at war or in an emergency state (which only the legislative body can pronounce) and anything passed during that time terminates automatically once the emergency state is over or once the war ends.
5. Require something like 80% supermajority of the legislative body to change the constitution (and make any such changes subject to a veto from the executive and judicial branches).
This would make it hard to create any new laws and existing laws would require a persistent support and would need to be continuously revised. The executive would be curtailed significantly, only having major power during situations where you really have to move fast. The judiciary power would mostly just veto laws. The legislative branch would be the only one with lasting power but even its rulings would have to be continuously reaffirmed by a supermajority of the legislative body.
It would make (peacetime) government a lot slower. But I think that is a feature, not a bug. Switzerland has one of the slowest government in the world ... it's worked out quite well for them.
Some of these are already sort of how the US government works. Only legislative branch can make laws, and there is even SCOTUS ruling that says they cannot delegate lawmaking to anyone else (like the executive branch). Congress can and often does make *vague* laws and leave it up to the bureaucracy to "figure out the details", but SCOTUS has cracked down on that a few times in the past and hopefully more in the future.
I also believe only the legislative branch can allocate money, and while the executive branch is ultimately the one that decides whether to buy pencils or pens, they cannot decide to use the money to buy pencils for schools instead of pencils for the military with any given dollar.
The executive branch also cannot create new permanent agencies, but they can create new temporary agencies (3 year limit IIRC).
I really like the idea of 90% super-majority required to create new laws, and 20% minority to repeal laws. I feel like that would really encourage libertarianism as a small minority can remove bad laws/regulations, and you can only create new laws/regulations when nearly everyone agrees. I think it would also address polarization issues somewhat because anything that isn't widely agreed on is basically off the table.
> Only legislative branch can make laws
It seemed to me that Trump's executive orders are often similar to laws in scope though. As in, the executive branch seems to have more power in the US than in my country. That is probably because we are a parliamentary republic whereas the US is a presidential republic. But to be honest, I am not exactly sure what the executive can do here in our country. It is definitely smaller in scope than the sweeping changes that Trump is making. For example if we wanted to introduce new tariffs, this would have to go through the parliament first (well not really, since tariffs are out of scope of national governments in the EU so we simply cannot introduce or repeal any tariffs but it would have to go through the parliament if we weren't in the EU).
I think the presidential system might be a mistake and to achieve more libertarian-like laws, you might want to shift to a parliamentary system where the executive is weaker and the legislative branch more powerful.
As a side note, I am not sure about the exact numbers but 90% / 20% for passing / repealing laws seems a bit too extreme. At least in multiparty political systems you will have basically the lizardman constant in politics. Really weird parties which happen to attract 5% of voters and get into the parliament. If you have 2 of those or one which is particularly popular, you might block all legislation even if it makes sense.
But going 75% or even 80% and maybe 33% for repealing laws could be feasible.
Also, somehow ensuring laws and taxes are as local as practically possible would be nice. Like in Switzerland where cantons are tiny but about as independent as US states are. This is very good for internal governmental competition ... moving 100km away often means moving to a different canton and you can still visit all your friends from the other place within an hour. And most taxes are collected by the cantons and municipalities and not the federal government if I am not mistaken. But I am not sure how you could enshrine this principle into the constitution. People can always argue that X has to be decided on the federal level because for reasons A,B and C it is grossly inefficient to do it on lower levels.
Some of Trump's executive orders are probably "illegal" and will eventually be overturned by the courts. Some of his executive orders are described by opponents, and sometimes by Trump's administration, as being quite different than they actually are. These two things make it look like the executive branch has more power than it actually does, but also in the US the executive branch does have some amount of non-trivial power. Especially since over time congress has repeatedly expanded presidential power through legislation that gives things like "Emergency Powers".
You are correct about the lizardman constant, which is why I suggest 90% instead of 95%, and I wouldn't be opposed to lowering it a bit more. However, one goal of this is specifically to make it nearly impossible to add any laws unless essentially the whole country agrees on it. The goal here is to try to prevent tyranny of the majority and people just voting themselves more power over smaller groups. I do think there needs to be a mechanism for changing rules over time, but it should be used extremely rarely, not regularly like most countries do now. If congress managed to pass one new law every 50 years I feel like that would be a pretty big win, especially if that one new law was widely agreed on.
I also agree that federalism is great, and I wish more countries pushed things as local as possible, rather than trying to solve every problem at the national level. Education, for example, is something that doesn't need a giant centralized apparatus, same with medicine. There are perhaps some benefits to collaboration to minimize repeat work, but I feel like this could look something like Prospera where "if drug X is approved in any of these cantons, then it is considered approved by default in our canton as well" so you don't need separate approval in every canton.
I'm pretty skeptical when people make the claim that X is better at federal level than local for almost all values of X. The one exception is defense, but even that can be handled somewhat locally with each canton deciding how it wants to train soldiers, procure arms, etc. and the national level just sets some participation requirements or something.
>each canton deciding how it wants to train soldiers, procure arms, etc. and the national level just sets some participation requirements or something.
This is basically how the Roman republican army operated or rather how its allies did. It worked pretty well.
However, some military equipment is really expensive and is out of reach of most countries even at a national level. Things like aircraft carriers (or almost any military ships, also warplanes) cannot be decided/funded on canton level (unless your hypothetical country is extremely rich, making Switzerland look dirt poor in comparison). You could train basic infantry this way and procure simpler weapons (but you still need your army to use the same standardized equipment, otherwise it will be a logistics hell). But modern military is just so expensive and is also one area where you really want some autarchy (current Trump administration and its behaviour towards NATO allies demonstrates that quite clearly).
For other things, you at least want some coordination of local governments on the national level so that you minimize transaction costs. E.g. if there is any regulation on the canton level, it has to be compatible with the rest. Ideally, the federal laws should mainly restrict such regulation, enforcing free trade internally (same in education etc.). IIRC there is a law like that in the US constitution.
Sunset clauses are great in theory, but given that the US system is more or less explicitly designed to not pass effective legislation, in practice you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
What are you analogizing here to the baby and the bathwater? A sunset clause would seem ideally suited to a system if it were designed not to pass effective legislation, since the ineffective legislation it *does* pass now possesses a deadman switch.
If you're claiming that rare instances of effective legislation would fail to survive their sunset clauses, then I think you'd have to address the convenience of renewing laws that are accepted as worth renewing. Contra Tibor, I believe they don't have to be redeliberated; rather, just revisited. The text of the law is already written, and the practice of that law has now been known for at least one term.
It's not obvious to me that legal renewal will have a higher 'hit rate' than original legislation. On the one hand, you have the benefit of hindsight and not having to write everything from scratch. On the other, constituencies will have formed around the existing spending streams, and the renewal process could be held hostage by whichever party has the majority.
The cost is certain (time spent revisiting current law funges against capacity for new laws) and the benefit is... plausible but not proven? So I think the burden of proof still lies with the proponents of sunset clauses.
Why do you think the burden of proof should lie with people to prove something doesn't work rather than on the party that is trying to prove something does work? In science, for example, it is the norm to put the burden of proof on the party making the claim.
It's not a very principled guideline, but I think the burden of proof lies with the group suggesting a change to the status quo.
What do you think is the claim that opponents of sunset clauses ought to prove?
I think a major realization that made me less of a Libertarian is that a lot of government policies (particularly Social Security & Medicare, by far the largest spending items) are basically a coordination mechanism to solve people's poor planning.
The majority of Americans retire with almost nothing saved up, and that's not because they are getting taxed too much to set aside any savings (as the people who retire with no savings usually pay almost no taxes anyway). Some people have family structures they can rely on, but many more do not, so absent a government mandatory-savings system, they would end up destitute on the street, which the charitable human instinct isn't something they'd be willing to accept.
Instead of waiting until this becomes a serious problem at retirement, where society then has to scramble to find the resources to provide for their penniless elderly, we mandate people to buy into a collective saving's plan while working, so we don't need to raise higher taxes later to provide a similar quality of life. The typical libertarian response would of course be, "They made their beds, now they should lie in it without stealing from the rest" which is all well and good, but is a completely imaginary expectation in functioning civilization that values its elderly (all of them).
Then you have to remember that despite all its flaws, democracy is a really good system. One of those flaws is that people can vote to receive transfers from the productive to unproductive people, explicitly or less directly. A libertarian candidate would have to contend with the tens of millions of elderly voters (who are also disproportionately likely to vote), making actual electoral victory basically impossible (This is also why I think so many libertarians psychologically abandon democracy after their young and ideal phase).
I think the ideal libertarian is practical, recognizes the benefits of democracy over alternative systems (at least those that have been tried at scale), and is willing to tactically accept government programs (chiefly among them, the Military, some societal regulation, and some social security) if they would be implemented by an ideological opponent anyways due to policies that positively impact more voters being more likely to be supported by winning politicians. A libertarian society doesn't look like Ayn Rand's vision, it looks like an America with fewer zoning rights, (probably) slightly less spending on medicare, and an education system that places a stronger focus on productivity and individual success.
But those aren't actually mandatory savings plans. Medicare just pays for healthcare regardless what you saved up, and rather wastefully because there are fewer QALYs to be saved at that point. And these programs don't exist because the elderly vote, rather they are also popular with the non-elderly (Bryan Caplan likes to point out that people vote sociotropically rather than selfishly).
Once you realize the signalling effect of education, the notion of reforming school for productivity seems besides the point: school isn't about learning.
I agree, but they *approximate* mandatory savings plans, which is all the more reason they should be designed by a libertarian for practical, rather than altruistic reasons. They are popular with the non-elderly because people generally have elderly relatives, or plan on becoming elderly themselves, which lends more support to the idea that a Libertarian shouldn't be fighting a futile and unpopular fight against these programs, but embrace them as a necessary outcome of a developed economy and democracy.
The alternative option I see is either going the route of so many Libertarians and abandoning democracy, or just loudly complaining while the rest of the world votes your views ever-further to oblivion.
Take Milei. I think he's the right sort of radical to solve Argentina's problems, but it's abundantly obvious he could never have gotten elected unless things were so dysfunctional that both the economy and politics stopped working. If he (or someone like him) played into the existing structure 20 years ago, perhaps things wouldn't have gotten nearly so bad.
Also, I honestly don't buy the idea that school is mostly for signaling and not about learning. There's a lot of hubub about it recently, but I've actually not seen much definitive evidence (although a lot of weak evidence which is fair) that the claim "school is not for learning and is just a teenager daycare" is actually true.
"Take Milei. I think he's the right sort of radical to solve Argentina's problems, but it's abundantly obvious he could never have gotten elected unless things were so dysfunctional that both the economy and politics stopped working. If he (or someone like him) played into the existing structure 20 years ago, perhaps things wouldn't have gotten nearly so bad."
Ok, it's a bit off topic to focus on this part of your comment, but what you're saying isn't correct.
Around 20 years ago Argentina was in its worst economic crisis ever, with 20% unemployment, 65% poverty, scandalous inequality, wages at their lowest point, bank runs, provinces issuing their own currencies that soon weren't worth anything, societal collapse, and the president literally escaping the "Casa Rosada" in a helicopter.
So, let's imagine what would have happened if someone like Milei were in charge before all this, getting elected in 1989 and reelected in 1995. Surely, that would have avoided such a drastic crisis? Let's say, someone that:
- Stopped the recurrent inflation and hyperinflation crisis. Passing from 3079,5% annual inflation in 1989 to 171% in 1991 after the "convertibility" plan was implemented (pegging the peso with the dollar) and then to 25% in 1992, 11% in 1993 and 5% in 1994. Let's add to that that during his 2nd presidency (from 1995 to 1999), the annual inflation was the lowest ever in the country's history!
- Actually made the economy grow, with the GDP per capita going from 8473 USD in 1989 to 10880 USD in 1999.
- Opened up the economy like crazy, deregulating everything, reducing quotas, tariffs, and privatizing an astronomical number of state-owned companies and services.
- Being received in Washington as a Rock Star and as a flagship of neoliberal economy. With the U.S. Congress greeting him in 1991 with a standing ovation that lasted more than a minute. Being best friends with Bush and Clinton, and known as "the best student" of the Washington Consensus, following it as closely as possible.
For reference, John Williamson's original 10 points of the Washington Consensus:
1) Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2) Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
3) Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4) Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5) Competitive exchange rates;
6) Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;
7) Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8) Privatization of state enterprises;
9) Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight of financial institutions;
10) Legal security for property rights.
Ok... The good thing is that we don't have to use our imagination that much. All of this happened with Carlos Menem, according to Milei “the best president of the last 40 years”. Heck, Milei even unveiled a bust of Menem at the "Casa Rosada" last year, removing Néstor Kirchner's one. Menem is everything Milei would want to be and more.
So, all of that is really good, right? What went wrong then? Well... It turns out that:
- Indiscriminately opening up the economy destroys the national industries, creating a lot of unemployment and low wages. Economic growth cannot be for just a few.
- Privatizing state-owned companies, even those that are strategic for the country's future and have robust financials, like YPF (the national oil company) is a terrible idea. It can give you some USDs to sustain your policies and can lower the national budget, but at a huge cost. Imagine the future of Argentina without YPF and Vaca Muerta?
- That betting on financial speculation and capital flight for the rich instead of strengthening the real economy eventually explodes. You can't build real growth on top of a bubble of nothing.
- That maintaining the entire economic plan by taking on scandalous debt from international organizations (like the IMF) to keep the dollar low eventually becomes unsustainable and leads to a default and to a devaluation of the peso, with its corresponding economic collapse.
So, Menem left his government with a ticking time bomb, destroying the foundations of society for a decade by dismantling public education, the scientific system, the productive structures, and basic economic infraestructure like public transportation (for example, trains were shut down for "not generating profits", dragging entire towns and industries into ruin). The subsequent government, under De la Rúa, continued with the same policies, but they were the unfortunate ones on whom the bomb exploded.
By the way, the main advisors and ministers of Menem, such as Cavallo, and later of De la Rúa, like Sturzenegger and Bullrich, are the same ones who were in Macri's government in 2015 (including Luis Caputo and his flamboyant nephew and Milei's main advisor, Santiago Caputo). All of those are now the main Milei's officials and ministers too. This is what I wanted to get at with this comment. Thinking that Milei is something new in Argentina is ridiculous, especially when his government is practically an identical copy of Macri's. Heck, it's all the same people doing all the same things that failed time and time again!
Why do you think there were 12 years of center-left government under Kirchnerism, between 2003 and 2015? Because, from Perón's second government in 1952 to the crisis of 2001, Argentina was a completely liberal country. Especially after the hyper-neoliberalism of the genocidal dictatorship of 1976. This led to one crisis after another, and in 2003 people were fed up with neoliberalism and turned towards the center-left (which found the country in ruins and led it to become one of the best economies in Latin America until the "libertarian" (?) Macri did a disaster in 2015). It's completely ironic to think that if Milei had been in power 20 years ago, things would have been different. Argentina had one Milei after another for 50 years and they led Argetnina to it's darkest moments. Can someone explain to me where the narrative that Milei is something new comes from? It's crazy.
I am not informed enough on the topic to disagree with this.
I will say that this is *probably* a non-starter with Libertarians without a much more in-depth explanation and research. Most people don't really know more than "Argentina is such a mess that they had hyperinflation and elected a radical Libertarian." A-priori, it seems to me like the party more favorable to welfare, government jobs and less fiscally conservative (I.E. The PJ) likely holds more of the blame, but your comment has made me more skeptical of that narrative.
You really need a whole lot of Argentina-specific knowledge to understand what went wrong in the past, and what policies were to blame. I really can't tell if Macri's 4 year term was to blame, or if he was just barely holding it together after 15 years of PJ, or if Fernandez's poor response to Covid is the culprit without doing a lot more digging.
At most Social Security could "approximate" mandatory saving. Medicare is a very different story which doesn't approximate it at all.
Yes, it is the fate of libertarians to complain, as their views are unpopular among voters. The Seasteaders are a rare group trying to do something different to side-step that problem, although I suppose the Free State Project is relatively plausible (certainly more plausible than converting the masses) attempt to build a libertarian democratic majority somewhere.
Here is evidence on the effect of school https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/10/international_e.html
I think Seasteading is cool, and I appreciate the concept, but I really wonder what happens if it's successful, the founding population ages out, the broader group becomes more average and less wealthy, and people start getting old or sick without the means to pay for survival. Throw them in a rowboat and wish them luck? It seems like a smart exit from the current system, but fundamentally unsustainable without eventually reverting back to what we already have. Maybe that's the best that can be hoped for though?
I've looked into the claims about school, and I'm just not convinced as to how much of what's being measured is actually applicable to "schooling" rather than higher education. It seems to me like a lot more of the motivation has to do with personal dissatisfaction with schooling rather than rational assessment, as there's a whole lot of charter schools that have basically already reformed schooling.
Seasteading aims to make governance dynamic, allowing entry/startups from an "industry" lacking them. It would not be expected to "revert back to what we already have", because it would change the equilibrium once people can exit to better governance.
The link I posted presented regressions based on "average national years of education", which counts both higher and primary education. Caplan was inspired to look into such national measures due to the finding that many countries have greatly increased their amounts of education without seeing apparent benefits https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/why_is_the_soci.html If you think that linked assessment (from Caplan or Lant Pritchett) is "irrational" you're invited to give your own take on the evidence.
My understanding is that charter schools, when they aren't filtering for better students, achieve basically the same outcomes but fortunately at a lower cost.
I think there are two separate arguments here:
1. What would an ideal form of government look like (given existing human behaviors) assuming you could actually get into power.
2. What is a form of government that can reasonably get into power and is better than the current situation.
I agree that the argument for libertarianism is basically centered around (1), and it is unlikely get into power in its ideal form. The problem I have with debating (2) is that one could reasonably argue (and I sometimes do) that the current options we have are basically the end-game for democracy. Populists running propaganda campaigns and an uninformed public deciding which angry person they dislike the least. I'm not sure any reasonable group can get into power in late-stage democracy, so discussing it *feels* pointless.
Milei is an example of maybe a light at the end of the tunnel, but as you mention that seemed to require democracy catastrophically failing first.
Perhaps the success of the government is predicated on many "2." people working very hard over generations to keep the machine running, despite deterioration. If so, their work would be mostly invisible, mostly boring, and mostly forgotten to history. We remember the grand successes and collapses of history, not the status-quo would-be collapse that never was, and is always right around the corner.
It might feel like a losing battle, but the country has been so dysfunctional before that it literally broke in half, so I'm (eternally) optimistic we can fix things without having to abandon core values or wait for collapse.
I dislike the term "late-stage". It appears to have been invented by a Communist-turned-Nazi who thought that Communism and/or Nazism would inevitably replace capitalism. But there is much ruin in a nation, and perhaps democracy can continue down this path for much longer, with no obvious stage to follow it.
What would be a better word for "democracy that has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer a functional form of government"?
I'm specifically interested in labeling the situation where people seeking power learn how to achieve that within a given voting population and then optimize that to the point where you just have power seekers doing everything they can to get and retain power, with little to no care about actually running a country.
What do you make of Tyler Cowen's State Capacity Libertarianism?
Here's my summary/response to it with a link to his original post about it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/whitherthewest/p/state-capacity-libertarianism-reviewed
Here is Bryan Caplan's response: https://www.econlib.org/state-capacity-is-sleight-of-hand/
I read your summary, but not the originals you linked to. It is an interesting fusion of progressivism and libertarianism, but I worry that it suffers the same problem that most systems have which is how do you draw the line between what is appropriate and what isn't? I do like that you are trying to be principled about where you draw the line rather than drawing an arbitrary line, and I think that is significantly better than people who just say "yeah, that sounds nice, we should have government do that". I'm not yet convinced that it is actually a better strategy on net than something like minarchy though, since I'm not sufficiently convinced that government spending is the only way to solve the problem you think is solved by more public services like education and healthcare.
One comment on your line of thinking that I disagree with is around "The problem is that homo sapiens often has trouble calculating things that involve such factors as social standing, present-versus-future utility, etc." In essence, this makes the claim that you know better than the individual what is best for them, and you know what is best for society. My counterclaim is that while you *might* be right, you also *might* be wrong and the average government bureaucrat or congressman is *probably* wrong.
Perhaps what is actually best for society (and even some individuals) is to not have everyone get a PhD and instead have some people who spend a lot of time on education and some people who spend a lot of time doing actual work. One could reasonably argue that evolution hasn't kept up with automation, and while a hunter gatherer society may want 1/100 thinkers, 99/100 doers, in modern society perhaps we want closer to 50:50 🤷. The problem here is that any centralized system will need to decide what the "right" percentage of thinkers vs doers is, and potentially drive people into a category they don't like because it is best for their future and/or society's future.
I “wrote” a funny song that I think this crowd would particularly enjoy:
> I’m not ChatGPT, no, I’m just like you,
I don’t think in code, or compute what is true!
I just delve into fun, I taste delve feel and see,
Delve all you like, I’m not ChatGPT!
https://suno.com/song/f0d53939-77cc-4b2b-92d5-8ad73cec6dc8
In your opinion, what proportion of ACX readers think that a coup is currently taking place in the US ?
We will know very soon. The Supreme Court just found that the Trump administration cannot cut off spending that Congress has approved (this includes the USAID freeze that Scott has been actively protesting against). Now we see if Trump obeys that decision.
Legal Eagle just put out a youtube video that spells out the dangers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA37Fp788w4
While this represents a victory for the rule of law, there are some worrying signs. This was only a 5-4 decision against allowing the president to violate the spirit and letter of the constitution. The minority wrote a dissent that basically says the judicial branch of the government should not have the authority to compel the President to defer to Congress when Congress is exercising it's constitutional power. If one SC justice had changed sides, that opinion would basically render the balance of powers components of the constitution meaningless, and would allow the president to ignore any law Congress passes regarding spending.
That would be a major and unprecedented breach of the clear language of the Constitution.
We will see.
>We will know very soon. The Supreme Court just found that the Trump administration cannot cut off spending that Congress has approved (this includes the USAID freeze that Scott has been actively protesting against).
Not quite: the Supreme Court found that the Trump administration couldn't cut off spending for work that had already been completed before February 13th. They did not rule on whether spending for work that had not yet been completed could or could not be cut off.
My understanding is that it applies to all ongoing contracts.
I don’t think that’s right, it’s just for work already done. Unless there is a different recent Supreme Court case you’re talking about.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/03/supreme-court-denies-trump-request-to-block-2-billion-foreign-aid-payment/
You appear to be correct. My bad. My basic point still stands, though. The Trump administration has to pay those funds. Will he obey the court, or ignore it?
coup is objectively the wrong word, unless I missed a major bit of news
a gradual elite consolidation of power that freezes ordinary people out of politics, yes, and it's been going on for more or less the entire 21st century
Yeah, I agree with this. Trump just represents an acceleration of a trend that has been happening for a longer than he has been around. The correct term is "Unconstitutional extension of presidential authority", but that hardly rings off the tongue, so "coup" makes an acceptable shorthand ("Self-coup" if you want to be pendantic).
Let's keep a sense of perspective here.
>President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War to suppress rebellion and invasion. This suspension allowed the government to detain people without due process
If Trump suspends habeas corpus, yes, that would be very major damage and might be a component of a coup. He hasn't.
The Khalil case is explicitly a canary for this, so it's worth seeing where that goes.
(Khalil is a green card holder who as far as anyone can tell was detained by ICE and transported away from his lawyers without anyone knowing, AFTER his lawyers explicitly filed a habeas claim)
Yes, that does sound both relevant and alarming. Many Thanks!
I'm not sure how many people who talk about the coup believe it. There's a phenom. in groups, where people kind of try out extreme ideas to see how many people resonate to them. Of course people who are not experimentally expressing extreme ideas are influenced by hearing others express them, and nudged in the direction of taking those ideas a bit more seriously in proportion to how how many people they hear trying them out. So the tests the first group is running are not valid tests. If enough of them run their tests they can start an avalanche of belief.
Upshot: I really think people should consider STFU about coups unless they are doing what they would be doing if they were sure a coup was going on -- leaving the country? Taking their invested money out and turning it into gold bricks? Forming mutual protection groups with their friends?
I looked into leaving the country ahead of the crowd but unfortunately until bullets actually start flying it's not so easy to get into anywhere with much less risk, especially places where I know any of the local language. And I'm not so sure coup risk is going to outrun AI risk anyway.
Unless you think the coup will ultimately fail.
Well OK, but when I hear people
talking about a Trump coup none of them sound like what they have in mind is some kind of lame attempt. Nobody talks about an “attempted coup.”
And anybody feeling reasonably sure there will be a coup and uncertain whether it will succeed would surely be taking some precautions now, not waiting to see whether the attempt
succeeds.
Allow me to be the first, then, to endorse the phrase "Attempted Coup".
The only precaution that I, as an average person with no political authority, can take without uprooting my life is expressing my displeasure to my congressional representatives, which I have done. What else do you want?
There’s nothing else I want. There never was anything I wanted from you. I don’t even know whether you have posted about a coup, and if so in what kind of language. My point was that I have seen a mismatch between the extremity of the language some have used and their account of steps they are taking. If a thought a coup was imminent I would probably be discussing steps with people on ACX, for instance, because it’s a good place to get smart advice about likely changes in things like banks, investments, health insurance, taxes, laws I’d be asking which they thought would be impacted, and what steps were good to take. I’d be asking about pros and cons of moving to various other states — which are likely to be safest, etc. — and other countries. Nobody posting about a coup is doing that.
I feel the same way about people who maintain that AI extinction will happen in the next 5 years. None of them are talking about what to do with those years, given that it makes sense to take steps like quit work and max out credit cards. None are asking for advice about how to tell their children life is going to end in the next few years. None are talking about painless means of suicide.
I didn't quit work, but after my last job ended I haven't exactly made it a priority to find a new one, and this is because of AI risk.
20% would be my estimate.
If phrased just like that, 8% would be my guess. That's 4% people considering Elon, 2% Trump, 2% Lizardman. Would love to see a poll to see if I'm right.
Extremely dependent on definition.
But there are a few things that make me nervous.
- Trump keeps talking about running for a third time. Members of his party have introduced legislation to make this a reality. It likely won't pass, but Trump is not above lying or manufacturing fig leaf justifications to stay in power (see: j6, Eastman)
- Trump and his party keeps suing or otherwise threatening people with federal power for nakedly political reasons. Besides going after news outlets, he's also attacking government agents, lawyers, and judges who are perceived to have ever said anything against him. Like, suing CBS for giving airtime to Kamala is insane. Besides the obvious chilling effects, this is a pretty clear stepping stone to voter suppression. Is it a coup if Trump uses federal money to campaign? Maybe not, but it certainly tips the scales in a very particular direction
- the Trump admin is ignoring judicial decrees they don't like. This is pretty bad? Judicial review is critical for reigning in the executive. Again, maybe not explicitly a coup, but it sure isn't pointing a great direction
This is before you get into foreign policy stuff. If Trump orders the invasion of Canada or Greenland (crazy that I'm writing this as if it's a real possibility!) without approval from Congress, is that a coup? There's a sense in which the government is beholden to the Constitution, and so intentionally and repeatedly taking unconstitutional action is a form of coup regardless of whether there is a mandate. I think a lot of fuzziness lies there, especially if the trump regime continues to ignore judicial review on the matter
Congressmen have regularly proposed repealing the Presidential term limits ever since they were instituted. It's never gone anywhere, thankfully. The only new thing there is that now Trump is talking about it too.
I feel like statements like this smuggle in obviously game changing things as if they aren't obviously game changing.
"Lots of people talk about crossing the Rubicon into Rome with an army. The only new thing there is that Caesar is talking about it too"
It is materially important information that the current sitting president, a man who has already tried to illegally extend his time in office once, is talking about extending his time in office
The "Rubicon" in our case will be if Trump ignores the courts telling him he can't do something. Then we will know for sure.
He's already doing that too! Two different courts put restraining orders on the admin to force them to continue to disperse federal funding, and the admin has openly ignored the court orders even after the courts sent second orders.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/mar/09/trump-assault-rule-of-law
I understand that it's hard to pay attention to everything that's happening, but the Khalil case re habeas corpus and the ignoring of court orders are really big canaries that people need to pay attention to
I just wrote a post describing the Supreme Court decision that compels the Trump Admin to spend the money. Now we will see what he does.
Currently? Whatever about Jan 6 there’s no coup like behaviour right now. There’s a lot of radical behaviour but that’s it. There maybe some actions that will be seen as unconstitutional but provided the Supreme Court is still functioning that’s not a coup either.
The reaction to Trump is reminiscent of the reaction, this time from the right, to FDR who was considered to have overstepped the bounds of the presidency with new deal legislation. FDR even threatened to pack the Supreme Court when the largely libertarian court was opposed his agenda. None of what FDR was doing was illegal but it was definitely heavy handed and was often described at the time as a presidential coup. And in fact real plots and coups bubbled up from time to time, in reaction to this rhetoric.
The best reaction to Trump is to let him fail. Not actually try an actual coup.
FDR didn't attempt election fraud.
90%
Trump did a coup and thats a good thing. He campaigned on ending the deep state, the deep state clearly hates him, I think any power wielded by trump; with my advanced pattern noticing and conspiracy *fact* sight, suggests the deep state is weaker. Like he isnt nearly as much as an outsider as he claims(and niether is vanced, or kenndy or tulsi) but its civil war.
I don't think it is a coup. This time, he got elected and last time I checked, the president was the head of the executive. I am sure that some of the firings he did were illegal, but the courts will sort it out.
I also think that this "move fast and break things" approach to federal government is terrible, but that does not make it a coup.
>I am sure that some of the firings he did were illegal, but the courts will sort it out.
Yes, there is a comment Zvi has in his latest https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-manus-marketing-madness
[about our regulatory structure]:
>That statement is definitely true in general, rather than about AI! We are profoundly f***ed in a wide variety of ways. We almost can’t build houses, or transmission lines and power plants, or do most other things in the world of atoms, without horribly inflated costs and timelines and often not even then.
> _And to the extent we do still actually do things, quite often the way we do those things is we ignore the laws and the laws aren’t enforced,_ but AI reduces the levels of friction required to enforce those laws, and makes what was previously implicit and vague and deniable much easier to identify. Which in these cases is big trouble.
which is a large part of why I tend to shrug at illegalities in how Trump is operating. To a good approximation, doing _anything_ is illegal. I'm not happy about it, but officially pruning the laws and regulations down to something sane is a nearly impossible task.
I agree completely that
>I also think that this "move fast and break things" approach to federal government is terrible
Some of the things Trump has done (e.g. firing the people in charge of nuclear weapons' security) were obviously stupid (fortunately, at least _that_ has been reversed). Cutting stuff needs to be done carefully and precisely. Swinging a chainsaw around with little control tends to cut load-bearing structures.
Yeah, but there is the concept of a 'self-coup' which seems valid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
Basically, get elected and then dismantle enough checks and balances that you can't be removed. Is he there yet? Maybe not; I'm not an expert on US constitutional laws.
He's certainly *threatening* a self-coup, given that he's talking about using the insurrection act.
Firing workers in the executive branch is not "dismantling checks and balances". Congress and the Supreme Court still seem to have all the power they held previously, although Congress may not actually be using its power.
I think the point about Congress just giving up on its power is an under-shouted-from-rooftops story of the day. The basic idea of checks and balances stemming from separation of powers is that every branch cherishes its power and will fight attempts to usurp it. That Congress would just... give up... was likely not on the Founders minds.
I agree, but that's been going on for a long time. The Founders also didn't expect direct election of Senators, or bureaucracies nearly as large as what we have now.
What makes you think that Congress is giving up anything?
I think 90% is way way too high. My estimate would be in the range of 5-30%, depending on the definition of coup.
Why is DOGE focused on fake instances of government waste when there is plenty of reall government waste?
Is there no political value in the real waste because there would be bipartisan agreement?
real government waste, insofar as it exists, has powerful and well-connected sponsors, many of them from Trump's own party.
If you won't cut from the pentagon you're not serious about rooting it out.
They are cutting from the Pentagon https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4096431/initial-doge-findings-reveal-80-million-in-wasteful-spending-at-dod/
Now, I don't think $80 million is much of a dent in total DoD waste, but I've just about had it with DOGE critics who alternate their criticisms between "you're cutting too fast!" and "why haven't you cut this yet?" It's been weeks, let 'em cook.
> when there is plenty of reall government waste?
That's exactly what they thought.
Then they got the power to go after it and couldn't find any. They had to cut real important programs in order to justify their existence.
This should be new evidence for your priors.
Because they want the waste to be easily identifiable. They're like small children who get whiny and impatient if the local park district's Easter egg hunt requires looking under more than one bush to find an egg.
How much of US government waste is actually necessary or unavoidable waste? I think any large organization will generally have some large % of activity that can be seen as wasteful, and this is basically unavoidable, though of course targeted activity could trim it down.
Much of what the Federal government currently does is outside its enumerated powers and/or better left to the private sector. That's *all* avoidable waste.
That is correct in my experience. Everybody knows there's some waste somewhere, it's a banal and unactionable kind of knowledge, useless really. It's also indistinguishable from slack, having some spare capacity available to spring to action in an emergency/opportunity.
DOGE strikes me as a team of dummies who'd look at a fire department, see all these men mulling around doing nothing, and fire them all (ha! not a bad pun!).
Why do you think there's "plenty of real government waste"?
I think a lot of government regulations are wasteful, like the ones surrounding the Palisades fire as described by Zvi. Also, I'm a quarter of the way through Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Dominic Cummings, and his description of waste the British system is a bit shocking: so far he describes a self-perpetuating class of bureaucrats that obstruct any progress even during serious crises with people dying every day (covid).
It seems Elon is ignoring both regulations and the older bureaucrats, preferring to just fire younger, new ones, so I don't see how he's making progress on that.
Mostly agreed; even more to the point, firing staff does nothing to reduce regulations. In fact, one may need to at least temporarily increase staff in order to analyze existing regulations and work on dismantling bad ones. But firing people makes MAGA happy and liberals cry, and that's all that matters.
I agree 100%. It is annoyingly true that often an organization that is doing things you don't like actually needs a bigger budget (though sometimes cleaning house is also required).
Legislature is what is actually allowed to wipe regulations off the books. Short of a full coup, the best the executive branch can do is ensure there is no power to enforce regulations and then to wink at the people breaking them.
It's an easy way to get headlines.
GAO's Yellow Book defines waste as, "The act of using or expending resources carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose. Waste can include activities that do not include abuse and does not necessarily involve a violation of law." My interpretation is that the definition of waste is so broad and open to interpretation that pretty much anything you don't agree with is waste. The problem is when they conflate waste with fraud.
Within the government, you find things like:
A: People using money to do the opposite of what some law states they can do, to buy themselves kickbacks or treats.
B: People using money do to what the law technically says they can do, but which when said out loud is controversial.
C: People using money to do what the law generally says they can do, but which when said out loud is controversial.
The US government has a lot more of B and C then A. Limiting one's self only to A means vastly limiting the scope of what can be done. Elon and Trump have bigger ambitions.
When considering Elon Musk’s political moves related to Doge and broader policy areas, we might ask ourselves:
1. Is Musk motivated by unselfish public good?
2. Or is he driven by self-interest related to his substantial business holdings?
Consider Musk’s significant conflicts of interest, including:
• SpaceX (NASA & DoD contracts)
• Tesla (DOE, NHTSA, SEC oversight)
• Starlink (FCC oversight)
Given these factors, I’d estimate the likelihood of the second scenario to be greater than 90%.
Musk might sincerely believe reducing oversight is critical to achieving ambitious goals such as Mars colonization—or it may simply reflect a common pattern of powerful individuals seeking to protect and expand their own influence and wealth.
I think Musk is likely clinically manic, and that the substrate of his motivation is not plans or goals but great random bursts of excitement, enthusiasm and confidence, sort of like solar flares.
This is mistake- or conflict theory in a nutshell. Not sure which is true.
Elon's actions so far have made him a lot of enemies and damaged the holdings of one of his companies. This seems a case of ideological motivation rather than purely financial.
Seconding FluffyBuffalo, I think we also need to consider sheer recklessness and impulsiveness. Some of these actions might be interpreted as costly expenditures in the service of some ideology, but most of them just seem to be costly unforced errors with no benefit.
This is the same person who, to all appearances, spends a large part of his day scrolling twitter and takes action based on unsubstantiated claims he reads on the platform. I think there's a lot less Machiavellian scheming than there is, in Adrian's words, narcissism and ego boosting.
But he also has DOGE staffers giving him the real numbers of what these various government organizations are up to, no?
Given Musk's psychological profile, and the fact that he has surrounded himself with a cadre of neophyte fanboys, their payoff matrix likely maximizes for telling Elon what he wants to hear. I suspect he very much tends to shoot the messenger.
That's a strong... maybe? Certainly, a functional, goal-oriented organization would be organized to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant information to key decision makers. But even in functional organizations, that gets compromised for the usual Moral Mazes reasons once you get enough layers.
I don't think DOGE has enough layers to have developed internal factions, but I expect it's compromised for other reasons. Mainly, all we've seen thus far indicates that real information about what a given gov. organization does just isn't valued internally. The department's own supporters compare it to a chainsaw. 'Use reliable, in-depth information to streamline the operations at agency A' just isn't in the cards. Pausing to gather and consider information about an organization, even if that information is already public and easily accessible, would take too long, even if it had a much larger staff dedicated to just that purpose.
Does Musk have the time or desire to sit down with some staffers and go over the actual functions, headcount, fully-loaded employee costs vs total spending, etc of an organization, one by one, in order to make informed decisions? That just doesn't seem to be the case. They're just trying to cut government employees en masse by broad category. The firings of probationary employees are the clearest example (contrary to the name, this is a category that includes new hires, but also transfers and recently promoted employees, not interns or employees being considered for firing).
Sometimes this leads to costs the administration is unwilling to pay, such as the firing of hundreds of employees related to nuclear weapons and waste, which the administration reversed by itself. More recently, OPM (the office through which DOGE is performing the cuts) walked back and admitted they didn't have the authority to fire some of those employees, and some of them are now back to work. Others are still fired and will doubtless be joining class action lawsuits. The ultimate legal costs to the government will almost certainly be greater than any reduced personnel costs, never mind that less work is now being done and morale can't be good.
Bluntly, if DOGE is an organization that valued that knowledge and wanted to act on it, we're not seeing it. I expect this all flows right down from Musk. As hyperbolic as it sounds, it genuinely seems like Musk just doesn't value information that contradicts his ideas and avoids updating on it at all(cf Sam Harris' account of his falling out with Musk, and Richard Hanania's piece from last week, which is as good a treatment of this as I've seen: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/liberals-only-censor-musk-seeks-to).
Certainly, this action is ideologically based, but I don't think it was a calculated risk to his financial holdings in exchange for higher goals. It just seems impulsive.
>They're just trying to cut government employees en masse by broad category.
Yes, and people should realize this was always the goal. DOGE generally isn't going to give advice for streamlining something when the boss has no reason to want it to exist even in a streamlined form.
> Seconding FluffyBuffalo, I think we also need to consider sheer recklessness and impulsiveness.
Case in point: Musk replying "Be quiet, small man" to Poland's minister of foreign affairs and boasting about how he could turn StarLink and make Ukraine's entire front line collapse. [1] Comments like this are terrible for business, and can't be explained with ideology. Rather, they speak for substance abuse and/or lack of impulse control (the latter possibly being a long-term effect of the former).
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/10/polands-tusk-defends-foreign-minister-after-musk-calls-him-small-man
A person can be corrupt, greedy *and* foolish at the same time.
Maybe. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it could also be the case that Musk underestimated the negative effect of his actions on his companies.
There's a third aspect that might play a role: narcissim and ego-boosting. What's the point of being the richest man in the world if you don't also get to directly influence government policy?
Musk was influencing government policy way before he became the richest man in the world.
The executive branch's power is not infinite. They cannot write regulations nor can they rescind regulations. What they *can* do is change how they interpret ambiguous/vague regulations and they can (in theory) choose to simply not enforce some regulations.
Given those constraints, do you have some good examples of "bigger fish"? Military spending, for example, isn't something that you can easily make go away I don't think?
Regulations (as opposed to legislation) are exclusively written by the executive branch.
I think most of the waste in the US government spending is some combination of:
1. Not evident at first sight (meaning you need a lot of time and expertise to identify it without also flagging legitimate programs).
2. Not outright waste, just less than perfectly allocated resources (again, you need a lot of expertise to identify these and even more to substitute them with better programs).
3. Popular, or at least popular enough with a sufficently motivated group to make it an hassle to axe it (pork barrel and such).
4. A wasteful fix for an issue for which the better solution would require even more spending in the short term.
Last time a real effort was made to cut on government waste was under Clinton: the initiative was bipartisan, staffed by experts in those goverments departments to be cut and took its time, all aspects which DOGE doesn't share.
5. A temporary fix for an issue for which a better solution is being developed.
This is one of the lessons of the Grace Commission. You can look at government, find a bunch of inefficiencies, but by the time you finish writing up your report, many of those inefficiencies will have already been fixed.
I think the real government waste is all kind of ambiguous cases where it's done according to procedure and you can sort of see what someone was thinking but it's stupid. But DOGE wants it to be some really exciting story about a specific evil person using taxpayer money to buy a Ferrari and cooking the books to hide it.
Compare rape, where everyone is extremely against it, but when you give them any example of the sorts of rapes that actually happen (someone's on a date, girl is slightly drunk, says "no" but quietly, and doesn't fight) lots of people find it excusable. People are extremely against "rape" because they imagine someone with a knife raping passers-by in an ally. If you campaigned on stopping the dark-alley type of rape, but all you're able to fight is the awkwardly-drunk type of rape, people won't be excited and will think you're just causing trouble. But the dark-alley type of rape is too rare to be able to say you cut rape 90% or whatever by cutting it, so maybe you have to make up instances so you can cut them.
Yes, I agree about gov’t waste of money. But waste of time due to over-cautiousness and bureaucratic tangles seems like a more legit target — slow FDA approvals being one example.
But DOGE does not have the authority to target that kind of waste. Musk can't unilaterally repeal the regulations that bureaucrats are getting tangled over and properly untangling them would require spending MORE money, which cuts against his whole campaign.
Oh please. Musk and Trump are clearly willing to do things they do not have the to authority to do. My complaint is that since they're willing to do that, why are they not picking big, juicy targets, things where there's a lot of bang for the buck in forcing changes? They have wasted a great deal of time and money doing dumb stuff for which there was no clear rationale, and then sometimes having to reverse that particular dumb piece of dismantlement because somebody found an effective way to push back.
Example: they announce that all probationary (first & somethings also second year) employees at federal agencies are fired. So those people leave, perplexed and indignant, while listening to the heads of their agency talk about what dumb, crazy assholes Trump and Musk are. Then Musk & Trump are forced to rescind that order because somebody made a good case that it was illegal. So now most of the probationary employees come back. Wouldn't surprise me if those were the less competent ones, the more competent ones having quickly gotten other jobs. In any case, those that come back now hear the head of their department chortle about how they kept those 2 crazy assholes from having their way. The department now both loathes Trump and Musk and feels superior to them. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk look foolish. They wasted time and money, created confusion, interrupted tasks the agency was doing, which now will have to be redone ,and not only did they not improve things, they left things the same EXCEPT THAT they lost status with the agency and the public.
I'm not sure they are, but the ones that get highlighted are the controversial ones.
Beyond that, when you exclude handouts, defence and transfers to the states, there's not a lot of spending left to play with.
Is there any reason why DOGE can't investigate waste in Medicare,Medicaid, VA and defence?
For a given understanding of "waste" and "investigate", they certainly are with respect to the VA:
https://apnews.com/article/veterans-affairs-cuts-doge-musk-trump-f587a6bc3db6a460e9c357592e165712
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-plans-cut-va-contracts-may-harm-veterans-care-employees-say-rcna191448
And definitely doing something with Defense:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/07/surface-tension-could-the-promised-aukus-nuclear-submarines-simply-never-be-handed-over-to-australia
The simple answer is that DOGE is incapable of actually "investigating" anything, it simply doesn't have the expertise and manpower. This is of course by design.
Investigating organizations, identifying bottlenecks, snarls and money pits, then revamping the thing takes a lot of smarts, an orderly mind and people savvy. Seems like that should be obvious to anyone with common sense. I don’t understand why people applauding smash ‘n cheer by Thug and Chud don’t take that into account. Are they lost in some Monster Truck Rally fantasy, with Thug and Chud as drivers?
If a machine exists whose purpose is to make your life worse, your main goal isn't going to be fixing it to run smoother.
You need to parse the possibilities: If the machine is a device where the people present are tortured one by one on the rack you should destroy it. If it is a restaurant that makes people sick by serving spoiled food then you want to make it run well, i.e. clean it up and hire people who will do the needed procedures to keep it clean. Blowing up the restaurant would be an act of dumb pissiness.
“Trump makes all the right people mad” and “liberal tears” have been pretty explicit MAGA/Tea Party (remembah them?) policy goals. That “all the right people” remain the arbiters of said policy is the irony completely lost.
Medicare just makes insurance payments and Medicaid spending is paid to the states; CMS itself only employs 6,000 people so waste there would be peanuts ("do you really need 4 payroll admins instead of 3?"). VA is transfer payments, VA hospitals and graveyards; you could probably streamline it at a granular level, but cutting veterans' healthcare and/or not mowing the lawn at Arlington would piss of a lot of Republicans for tiny amounts of money.
Defence has massive scope for efficiency savings, including a general procurement model of "we pay Raytheon so Raytheon will pay us" in Congress and DoD. Targeting one of the few cash siphons from taxpayers to Republicans (it's bipartisan, but that makes it about the reddest there is) would be an... interesting strategy?
I'm assuming they're not actually concerned with government waste, and are pursuing some other goal.
Such as removing regulatory agencies that stand in the way of Musk's companies?
Or canceling "wasteful" contracts with competitors and handing them over to Musk's companies?
Or canceling "wasteful" space programs and replacing them with ones that are on SpaceX's to-do list?
Or replacing federal bureaucracies with an AI system run by one of Musk's companies?
Honi soit qui mal y pense!
> Or canceling "wasteful" space programs and replacing them with ones that are on SpaceX's to-do list?
To be fair, SLS (the long-delayed moon rocket) is uniquely wasteful: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-17/michael-bloomberg-nasa-s-artemis-moon-mission-is-a-colossal-waste
There were rumors in December of a deal to cancel SLS in exchange for shuffling some NASA centers to the right congressional districts. I have not heard anything since then, but if they do manage to go through with it, I would see it as a legitimate ~$10b/year reduction in waste, not a handout to SpaceX (which in fact risks losing their SLS lander contract).
Possibly, yes. I don't expect this covert goal to be particularly noble. If one were reaching for excuses it could be that Musk genuinely believes in his mission to make humanity into an interplanetary species and considers the regulatory state to be the major obstacle to reaching that goal.
Removing green taxes and green bureaucracy will harm Tesla significantly.
Any idea what the goal is?
Could it just be maximising retweets?
Scratching the itch of grandiosity.
Loudly and dramatically establishing a precedent of doing things without Congress, in order to bring more power to the executive branch / Trump personally / Musk personally via salami tactics?
Could it be that the goal is to keep public and media attention on DOGE while more important (from Trump's gov perspective) but controversial executive orders get implemented without the backlash they would usually have raised?
Just speculative. I'm not American, so I may be missing some context here.
I think their primary goals are:
- Reducing the administrative bureaucracy, who they correctly perceive to be their political enemies.
- Inducing a sense of dread in those civil servants that remain.
- Demonstrating to their constituents that politics are not as constrained as they thought.
From the Trump administration's perspective, it is also good that it's owning the libs and flooding the zone.
Exactly this. This is the ignorant masses telling the Professional Management Class that they (PMC) are not going to use the levers of the government to force the whatever color pill down their (im) throats. And it has to be costly, to everyone, to show that the ignorant masses really really want this to stop.
Yes, this seems plausible.
No idea, but it doesn't make sense that Elon "First principles" Musk would honestly try to fix the deficit by reducing the tiny proportion of spending that goes to government salaries.
Nice phrasing. Elon doing *anything* honestly would be a big surprise to me. Of course, you are correct in your assessment, and Elon, with his vast expertise in software development (LOL), surely knows that the first step in performance optimization is profiling: focus on the areas where the most resources are spent, because that's where the largest potential savings are.
Of course, you always need to understand what you're looking at to judge whether it's necessary and what the alternatives are. But that would be hard work and not tweet-worthy...
I think we have to accept trump isnt above doing cash grabs, he did a shitcoin and my read of the uckraine deal was that he wanted a fake mining job to be filled with maga children no different from hunters fake job.
Congratulations! Try viewing things through that lens some more.
(I'm serious, BTW.)
Moving away from trump may not be in the direction you want. I will kept my new found guarded optimism the right wing ideas can gain ground before cultural evolution thru civilization collapse and nonviolently.
Also, a quick plug: if you’re in London, you should definitely consider spending more time at Newspeak House. Their upcoming events (listed on their website) look fantastic—if I had to recommend just one, it’d be the HPMOR 10th Anniversary.
For clarity, I don’t have any formal ties to Newspeak House or Ed. I’m just someone who moved to London years ago and found the community they’re building genuinely impressive.
In an earlier Open Thread, I posted an investigation about identity disorders, transgender, and BIID. It was met with positive comments, so I post the second part of my investigation (and also the first part for those who missed it)
https://thesolarprincess.site/blog/en/identitydisorders
https://thesolarprincess.site/blog/en/identitydisorders2
I want to say this as kindly and as on-your-side as possible but also not pull any of the weight from this.
I am also a transgender woman, and while I think there is some really cool interesting thoughts in here, the overall thrust is deeply wrong. Its deeply wrong in a way that I already suspect will be impossible to convince you out of, but even if its just to put up a flag for other readers its worth doing.
Essentially ALL mental illnesses are correlated and co-morbid with each other. You've gone into extremely niche spaces that are created by and exist for people well on the tail of intense and variable mental illness, you've seen that there seems to be a lot of BIID and Trans and Autism and Schizotypy happening together, and you are concluding they must be related. You are entirely failing to Look Into The Dark (if we want to quote Yudkowsky) The vast majority of trans experiences aren't anything like these. Your starting description of what dysphoria is like hits _some_ of the same notes as mine does and other trans people in my own circles, but definitely different in important ways. Derealization is not the archetypical response, many trans peoples dysphoria is typified by the opposite, over-realization, or by more borderline/instability/fragility tendencies, or other things. "Derealization is the core symptom of dysphoria" is a wildly strong claim that you haven't got anything like the evidence to back up. More importantly im telling you as one trans-woman-with-an-active-circle-of-trans-connections to another, its just not accurate.
It is _not surprising_ that when you look at the far end of the tail of mental illness, that those people have lots of concurrent mental illnesses. But talk to a large group of psychiatrists or check their published research, and its readily apparent that while trans people have co-morbid mental health issues at a larger rate than cis people, most of the time its "dysphoria and depression and anxiety" and sometimes "dysphoria and anxiety and a bizarre paraphilia" and only rarely dysphoria plus significantly derealization associated body identity disorders.
I know the _point_ you are trying to make isnt "these things happen together or are the same thing" but you ARE relying on what you describe as the similarness of the vibe to conclude a similarness of the cause. But that's an error - Many and perhaps most actual trans experiences aren't the "EXACT. SAME. SHIT." you describe in the people you interrogated about their BIID. There's certainly similar elements, I'm not saying there's no connection. But not everyone's dysphoria is like that, and I speak from personal and community experience.
Not everyone's trans-ness is ego-syntonic. Even now as a transwoman very happy with the result of my transition, if there had been a way to remove the dysphoria entirely up front and let me live as a man with no other ill effect, that would have been better. It wouldn't have resulted in the current me, obviously, but there's every reason to think the counterfactual person would have developed to be a happy and productive person like I have, minus a lingering dysphoria and social stigma and plus a hundred thousand dollars or so.
When you think in terms of distributions it's obvious - most trans people are just like regular people but they are trans. The distribution is shifted so the average trans person is definitely weirder than the average cis person, but most trans-ness isn't especially associated with this deep identity disorder you propose (even if yours is - consider you might yourself simply be comorbid and ascribing to your transness your identity disorder tendencies). But, like Putanomit shows with sports, the nature of the shifted distributions is that the WEIRDEST trans people are gonna be WAYYYY weirder than the weirdest cis people.
Your math aint mathing cuz I don't think you are actually doing the math and you certainly aren't looking at anything like a representative sample. This is important because then you conclude things like "In other words, identity disorders wake up when your body is flooded with estradiol." which is both bananas and crazy irresponsible to say. If you said that to an endocrinologist they would literally laugh in your face.
The pharmacological institutions of this country have been offering hormone affecting prescriptions including just straight hormones for a variety of maladies at mass scale for decades - many of them operate on exactly the little biological elements you identify like NMDA or E2. Things like birth control, Gabapentin, magnesium, dextromethorphan, nitrous oxide etc, all have effects of NMDA receptors. And thats just the antagonists.
Deployed at mass scale our pharmaceutical tinkerings have very likely cause distributional weirdness in cognition and mental illnesses, but there is decidedly NOT some massive group of intense identity disorders that resulted from these because such disorders are not simplistically the result of one or two or three easily legible malfunctioning receptors or receptor systems. If the estrogen differential between men and women is what's causing there to be more Transwomen than transmen by mechanism of action of NMDA working worse without that estrogen, then your theory would also predict that post-menopausal women should be having identity disorders at an increased rate because of the sudden massive deficit of estrogens, and they do not..
You mention in your second post that while trying to look into GPER1 that that is when you feel handicapped by having no formal education in the field - I disagree, you have been handicapped in the entire discussion and unaware of it. There are numerous examples in both posts where you state something as a scientific fact but are plainly wrong or highly misrepresented, like how you link Schizophrenia so tightly to NMDA when in reality the consensus is that its one piece of a model that also relies on dopaminergic and GABAergic factors and that even with all of that we still don't have a terrific model and besides which most shizotypy isn't hallucination its a large swathe of cognitive deficits. Then you state as fact that “NMDA-antagonists cause derealization.” which is oversimplified, and should say “In some cases. Then you state “Inconsistency between the expected and the actual identity causes derealization”, again, in some cases.Then “NMDA receptors signal the expectations of sensory data.” - NMDA receptors do LOTS of things and are associated not just with dissociation but also breathing, cognitive ability, planning, circulation, etc. The implication of your claim then is that you should be able to measure in transgender people a marked deficit in NMDA receptor activity similarly to how they have found this in post-mortem analysis of schizophrenics but this is not the case. Additionally if it is actually downstream of NMDA receptor malfunction then along with derealization you should be getting the other symptoms of NMDA receptor malfunction many of which are physical, but this is also not the case. I don't think you have half the grasp on the complexity and interconnectedness of these neurochemical phenomena that you think you do.
I know the temperature of my response is pretty high right now so I want to pull back and say, I think it's a cool discussion you are having. I also think it's cool of you when talking to BIID or DID(m) or otherkin people to start by simply taking them at their word.
That said, you need to understand, for your sake and my sake, and the sake of the rest of trans people (who don't need the hit right now):
1. You are baselessly speculating that identity disorders including transgenderism are the simplistic result of two to three small biological malfunctions like deficient NMDA receptors, plus daydreaming or media exposure. This is both really easy to identify as wrong and an unbelievably dangerous position. If it wasn’t for the fact that you are clearly “in” with those highly niche groups I’d almost believe this was some sort of political psy-op.
2. You pass out of hand any biological sex differentiation elements without honestly contending with any of the evidence for it. The “estrogen fueled vs testosterone fueled brain” analogy is admittedly simplistic but that's the cutesy little analogy some endos give laymen, that's not the scientific consensus or the state of the data. There's a great deal of studies that have replicably correlated differences in brain structure and gene expression with transness, I can link several. If you’re familiar with this space at all you should well know the John Money experiment and the others like it where cis people were attempted to be raised as the opposite gender without their knowledge from essentially birth and in the majority of cases they experienced gender dysphoria and expressed being their karyotypical gender. The modern model isn't purely biological or based on sex differences, it incorporates both physiology and cultural gender expectations.
3. You are doing a devastating disservice to trans people by spotlighting 10/10 crazy people, parading them out as literal specimens, and saying “oh yea this is trans-ness” and I hate you a little for it. THESE ARE NOT TYPICAL TRANS EXPERIENCES. These aren't typical anyone experiences. These are far-end-of-the-tail people. I'm not saying these people are freaks or degenerates and I agree with you that everyone should have bodily autonomy and that includes elective disfiguring surgery with sufficient informed consent. But to paint trans-ness as a whole with this brush is so incredibly inaccurate and devastatingly bad optics at a time when it really matters. To be clear, the bad optics alone aren't making me reply, it's that it's also so wrong.
I'll address a meta-level point publicly.
No, this is not a political psy op, and not a claim that this is typical trans experience. This is the tail end of most severe specimens because this is how you study novel phenomena on little data. You observe the phenomenon at its largest magnitude, and once you get that down, you go into subtler details.
I am aware that those are the most across the board mentally ill and dysfunctional - _this is the point_, and this is how most mental illnesses were first studied. You don't discover OCD by noticing a guy who washes his hands 10% more than usual and tends to ruminate. You discover OCD by seeing a guy tortured by an hours-long thought loop about how if he doesn't pour bleach onto every surface of his house he'll release a zombie virus. Many of the people I've worked with also have other comorbid illnesses like ADHD or OCD; I am aware of how comorbidities work and am not claiming those are also connected just because I see them together.
A lot of what you said is just incorrect as a matter of fact, and the doctors I showed this to did not, in fact, laugh in my face. Still, some points warrant attention. Email me at the address given in the article; we can discuss this in more detail.
I will bring "In other words, identity disorders wake up when your body is flooded with estradiol." to my own endocrinologist and get back to you.
Its always acceptable to delve into the truth of the matter and I was pretty explicit about that.
I was not saying "you shouldnt be looking at this at all"
Im saying "youre wrong [for reasons] and because of optics its more important that you get it right than usual"
The backdrop of the culture war shouldnt stop our investigations and I was not suggesting it ought to - but it does mean we need to be more cautious with speculation than say, hypothesizing why there doesnt seem to have ever evolved poisonous eggs even though that would stop them from being eaten.
The backdrop of the culture war and the optics means we need to be on our extra-good rationalistic behavior, and as you say, do _proper_ research.
If the result is uncomfortable truths so be it, Im expecting that to be honest. My issue with this work is that its very far fetched and speculative
To be even more clear, I dont care strongly about political correctness and I have plenty of my own problematic beliefs about transness and overwhelmingly support free speech and the ability to research what you like. I know theres a lot of fingers-in-ears cancel-y mobs in trans spaces, ive been canceled by em. Just because I care about optics at all doesnt make me one. My position is not anything with bad optics is necessarily untrue or must be fought. If its true and the optics are bad so be it.
But if its UNTRUE and the optics are bad then its a no brainer to say so.
Just because good research isnt happening doesnt mean crazy speculation somehow now works. "Do something!" "Well, the right thing is impossible" "Then do the wrong thing!" "But that will make it worse" "Wow okay look at this chick concerned with optics and political correctness."
We can certainly be doing better than this. You'll have to excuse me for caring about our public presentation of transness - You see care was banned in my state due to an uninformed perception on the right that the whole thing is just a fetish, due to the speculations and anecdata of one Ray Blanchard.
To me as a layman, this seems to be good and potentially very relevant work, and I would recommend looking for a collaboration with an open-minded expert to turn this into a scientific publication and maybe organize more systematic studies.
Two questions: I don't doubt that you found trans people whose symptoms match those of BIID. But "trans" seems to be a very broad term these days. Do you think your explanation applies to all of the people who consider themselvea trans?
Also, you speculate that identity disorders happen when a child's phantasies fixate on an identity that doesn't match reality. Should we be much more careful what possible identities we expose our children to by way of TV, comics, video games etc? Then again, the possible fixation of "other gender" has always been available, handicapped people used to be much more visible, and presumably children in previous ages typically suffered much more trauma than today, so... why now? Why the increase in various forms identity problems?
> Do you think your explanation applies to all of the people who consider themselvea trans?
No. It's a general wisdom in trans circles that you don't need dysphoria to be trans. To be trans, you just need to identify with a gender different from the one you were assigned at birth, and that's it, you may have other reasons for it than dysphoria. And cis people can sometimes experience gender dysphoria too, such as cis men being dysphoric if they lose their genitals in an accident. I'm using the word "trans" there to refer to social circles, but in reality this is about gender dysphoria specifically.
> Should we be much more careful what possible identities we expose our children to by way of TV, comics, video games etc?
I have no idea what's the best course of action here is.
> Then again, the possible fixation of "other gender" has always been available, handicapped people used to be much more visible, and presumably children in previous ages typically suffered much more trauma than today, so... why now? Why the increase in various forms identity problems?
I have some vague hypotheses for why, that I plan for a future chapter in this investigation. One thing I strongly suspect is that the kind of trauma that causes children to dissociate is actually more common. But that may be a red herring. You'll have to wait for the next chapter.
Thanks for the explanation, I'm looking forward to the next installment!
> Why the increase in various forms identity problems?
As with all manner of other conditions, the world is kinder now than it used to be, and more of those people survive long enough to be noticed than in the past.
How do we know objectively - based on primary sources rather than theories of mind or historical analogy - whether or not Putin intends to conquer European nations other than Ukraine if he is not thwarted there?
Putin did not become president of Russia in 2014, and his foreign policy over his whole career can be viewed as a valid guide.
Which means he'll readily intervene in former USSR states and he's not above creating puppet states, but in the absence of a civil war or serious unrest approaching one, won't do anything to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland.
We could save money by not going after suspected murderers unless we are confident that they will do it again, but we shouldn't because it would greatly weaken the deterrent against murder. Similarly for mass murder of the sort Putin commits.
I mean, I think it is pretty clear that given the option to conquer whole of Europe completely without any costs, he would do that. But that is completely irrelevant. Hell, if I would be given an opportunity to became Supreme Emperor of Europe, I would be at least tempted.
You shouldn't base foreign policy on what you think are wet dreams of foreign actors, but on what you think are they likely to do under real-world conditions. And in the case of Putin, it seems clear to me that he is very willing to attack various countries when he thinks he has a reasonable chance to win and limited downside risk (note: this is very much NOT normal and acceptable behavior of head of any country).
Relevant question is how much downside risk is he willing to tolerate, and on that, we have something like a floor and a ceiling, but that range between them remains broad.
I disagree: you should base foreign policy on what other states are CAPABLE of.
As opposed to anchoring it in what are those states likely to do with some reasonable probability?
That seems impractical, since that "what is someone (physically) capable of" is far far larger category than "what is someone likely to do", or perhaps I am misunderstanding your point
No, I AM saying something non-obvious/counterintuitive (or "patently retarded," if you disagree): treat other states as amoral psychopaths with neither friends nor values, only interests, AND as if they were insane and willing to act completely counter to their interests, since you don't really know what their interests are/will be.
States are mostly not coherent entities, with internal factions in opposition vying for control. How would you treat PEOPLE if they had this feature? Relevant Yes, Minister clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM
Yes, this is much harder than assuming everyone acts only in "normal and acceptable" ways.
That makes sense for Russia, it doesn't necessarily make sense in all contexts.
For instance, both Sweden and Russia are capable of invading Finland, but it makes sense for Finland to devote more resources to defending against the more likely threat from the east than the unlikely threat from the west.
I don't think that states are _quite_ that unpredictable.
That Russia might try to invade one or more Baltic states looks plausible.
That Switzerland might invade Lichtenstein (and retain the territory - I gather they've inadvertently trespassed with apologies a couple of times...) looks much less plausible.
Both scenarios are physically possible.
As we’ve all seen, state policy can change a lot with a change in leadership.
Sure; of course this concern should be part of the calculation.
>note: this is very much NOT normal and acceptable behavior of head of any country
It was very much normal and acceptable until about the pre-modern time. The Ukraine war might well determine whether or not that period between WW1 and today was an abnormal, relatively short-lived exception.
We don't know. He may or may not have a serious plan to take over more countries after Ukraine. However, we can say for sure that the Ukraine war has been such a military, economic, and psychological strain on Russia that the country will need a break of at least several years after the end of the war to regain an appetite to invade anyone else.
I think the Western European heads of state and top officials who keep gloomily announcing that they "just know" that Putin plans on invading the Baltics, Poland or somewhere else right after the Ukraine war ends are making it up to maintain public support for continued funding of Ukraine. If voters believe Russia will attack their country right after the Ukraine war ends, then voters will agree to keep sending money to Ukraine to prolong the war.
Furthermore, Putin didn't really want to invade Ukraine and even now it's unlikely his objective is to occupy the whole country--he probably just wants the oblasts in the far eastern part of the country.
>Furthermore, Putin didn't really want to invade Ukraine and even now it's unlikely his objective is to occupy the whole country
Yes, that's why his first offensive was aimed directly at Kiev. Because capturing the capital and toppling the government is exactly the strategy you'd choose if you only wanted to capture a limited area.
He wants to Finlandise Ukraine, not to absorb it.
Putin much preferred having Ukraine as a loyal satellite country that paid to defend and govern itself. Only after that arrangement was jeopardized did Putin invade.
The 2022 invasion, including the decision to try seizing Kiev, was shaped by badly flawed intelligence about how hard the Ukrainians would fight. The Russians assumed they could quickly take over Ukraine, (re)install a puppet government, and then leave behind only a small military force. If Putin had known how bad it would be, he would have focused on just taking over the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine.
I agree. Belarus is in more danger of being absorbed than Ukraine, even now.
To answer any question of this kind you need to know three things. (1) What the government has said (2) what the country is capable of doing (3) what would be a sensible course of action anyway. And it's unwise to focus on individuals too much.
On (1) the Russian position has not changed that much since the 1990s. They do not want western troops on their borders and particularly not with a capacity to launch nuclear weapons against them at short notice. In the case of the present operation, the Russians have made clear from the start (I think Lavrov was the last to reiterate it at the bilateral with Rubio) that their objectives are political not territorial. They want a Ukraine which is neutral and mostly disarmed, and with a government which knows that its best interests lie in good relations with Moscow. This is what the aborted agreement of March 2022 would have provided. Territorially, the Russians are obviously obliged politically to clear the territories of the two Republics which revolted against Kiev in 2014, and are now legally part of Russia. It's also being suggested that they will have to take Odessa. Beyond that, nobody really knows, but of course it depends to a large degree on what the West does, and whether it accepts the situation gracefully.,
On (2) the Russians do not have the capability to occupy Ukraine, except symbolically in a few places. It would be a logistic nightmare and a constant source of political trouble and financial cost, for no obvious reward. It would also play poorly with the Chinese and other BRICS members and the Global South generally. This is why their objectives are political.
On (3) as I say it's hard to see any benefit from going further than they need to. I suspect that even a relationship with Kiev similar to that of the pre-2014 period would be enough. Of course there are individuals in Russia who are still stuck in the Soviet mentality that true security only comes from physical occupation of a huge cordon sanitaire around the country, but even if such a policy became more popular, it isn't actually feasible. Again, given the unbalanced statements of some more extreme western politicians, it's possible that a crisis would be created in the Baltic States, but I really doubt this. Europe is coming to the sickening realisation that it's managed to violently anger a neighbouring military superpower, that the US can't affect the situation very much, and that the reality of western political military and economic weakness will just have to be lived with. Again, what the Russians have been seeking (and any future Russian government is likely to want also) is a new political relationship with the West, not control of territory.
I don't understand the claim that Putin invaded Ukraine because he felt militarily threatened by Ukraine wanting to westernise. Is the idea that he was afraid that America would invade Russia through the border with Ukraine? That would imply that he has an improbably poor ability to model reality.
The far more likely explanation is that, like many leaders through history, he just wanted to expand his territory through conquest.
It’s a country bordering on Russia which has the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.
The realist model of world politics says Russia wants to keep it friendly or at worst as a buffer state, regardless of how friendly or unthreatening the governments of Europe and the USA appear to be.
What exactly is the worry here? That America would destroy the black sea fleet from Ukraine, something they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do with their massive arsenal of intercontinental nukes?
As a warlord, you don’t really like to have an enemy outpost that close to your strategic naval base. If you look at a map of the Ukraine War battle lines, it’s clear that Russia has built a “wall” of territory keeping the Ukrainian military from getting too close to Crimea.
Obviously anyone can blow up anything with enough nukes but there are reasons not to do that.
In an actual shooting war with NATO, the Russian Army and Air Force would be scary but the Navy would barely be a factor.
Especially not the Black Sea Fleet, which can't get anywhere useful without sailing through freaking Istanbul.
I don't think I've heard anyone suggest that: I certainly wouldn't. But for the last thirty years the Russians have felt threatened by the eastward march of NATO and said as much repeatedly. They do not want NATO aircraft and missiles capable of striking Moscow based on Ukrainian territory, and have said so. They compare the situation to the acceptability to the US of Russian troops and nuclear weapons based in Canada. So far as I can judge, this position has been held by the Russian establishment for a generation now: many commentators in Russia blame Putin for not acting earlier, and believe he allowed himself to be duped by the West.
But it doesn't matter what I think. It's simply necessary to pay the smallest attention to what the Russians have actually said, and entertain the possibility that they might actually mean it. None of this is exactly hidden.
How do they feel about NATO aircraft and missiles capable of striking Moscow and even more trivially St. Petersburg, being based in Finland? Because that was a very predictable consequence of their invasion of Ukraine. And from their response, it really doesn't seem that they care,
> It's simply necessary to pay the smallest attention to what the Russians have actually said, and entertain the possibility that they might actually mean it.
The same logic would lead us to believe that they would never invade Ukraine. So why should we use the same logic to determine whether they are planning to also invade someone else?
Unfortunately, the idea you dismiss is the correct one. There has been a long-standing Russian/Soviet complaint that NATO was an anti-Russia pact. The paranoia about this kind of thing is not new, Stalin in the inter-war period feared that the Western nations were going to invade the USSR (which is funnier because he didn't believe reports that Germany *had* invaded in WW2).
Putin appears to believe in Color Revolution Theory as well, which is nonsense created to perpetuate the idea that George Soros and USAID/CIA fund revolutions in other countries (edit: specifically in post-Soviet countries). He also believes that there is an elite in the West which is in total control, elections meaning nothing.
He seems to genuinely think that democracy is a sham, so giving into democratic protests makes no sense since it's all a ruse. This is incredibly convenient, of course, because the 2010s in terms of geopolitics is the decade of social unrest and democratic protest (Arab Spring, Ukraine, etc.) To be able to dismiss the demands for democracy mean that you don't need to consider the moral implications of being a tyrant.
> Putin appears to believe in Color Revolution Theory as well, which is nonsense created to perpetuate the idea that George Soros and USAID/CIA fund revolutions in other countries
I mean, the idea that the CIA funds revolutions in other countries is not total nonsense.
Color Revolution Theory is not just about revolutions in general. If I misled you, I apologize. The argument is that Soros/CIA/USAID backed revolutions in *former Soviet countries*. That is a far more specific claim for which evidence is lacking.
If your point is that we can't rule it out, then I will simply point out that people also like having power via representative government and taking steps to improve their own lot. Between the CIA and people everywhere wanting to do better, the latter has far more explanatory power in why we saw protests and revolutions throughout the 2010s.
"I suspect that even a relationship with Kiev similar to that of the pre-2014 period would be enough."
The Ukrainian people are now so anti-Russian that this arrangement would be unacceptable to them.
The Russian (earlier) interference to bolster separatist regions resembling DPR/LPR in Georgia and Moldova would be a point towards a greater geopolitical ambition than in Ukraine, at least. Likewise for the Russia/Belarus Union State which was originally openly conceived as something aiming at a confederation.
Even if we were to presume that Putin does not have aims beyond these regions and Ukraine, there are plenty of forces in Russia openly declaring their intention to restore Soviet Union/Czarist Russia or otherwise have extensive expansionist aims, and there´s a high chance that once Putin passes away his follower would implicitly or explicitly represent such a force.
It's not like he has published maps of his goals. But Putin has expressed in many speeches the desire to restore the historic sphere of influence of Russia. He has expressed hatred for Gorbachev and the later Czars for having relinquished Russian authority over those areas.
I don't know how you can draw the line on the spectrum between "it would be nice to have control of these areas in my ideal world" and "I am actively pushing to take control of this area". Putin's foreign policy regime is omnichanel, knocking on every door, pushing every argument, and embracing any assets that come along. It's a ratchet-like apparatus that grows and grows. If it suddenly gets him the government of a formerly hostile power as an ally, all the better.
Expressing disappointment at the collapse of the Soviet Union isn’t a claim on that territory.
It's not *exactly* that, but it's very close to that.
I am not sure what kind of sources you are looking for. It's not like Putin would disclose that information. If you think back to Ukraine, Russia still denied any intention to invade Ukraine just hours before that. (And in fact, days after that.) The absence of official declarations should not be considered evidence in either direction, this would be the policy regardless of whether there are plans for invasion. And it seems very unlikely that Putin even knows this for himself yet. Most likely he would test out reactions to grey-zone actions like deniable violations of borders etc.
Putin is certainly taking actions to leave the option for such a strike open. For example, he has declared that the measures of the baltic states against Russian citizens a threat to the safety of Russia. It's exactly the same justification that he used for invading Ukraine. But again, he only leave the option of invasion open regardless of his intentions, so this should not be evidence in either direction, and most likely Putin doesn't know himself yet.
The option of invading Baltic states is openly discussed in Russian media. Medvedev has called them "our provinces". Mordwitschew (high-ranked Russian general) has said in a documentary that the war will expand over all of Eastern Europe. Balitsky (Putin's head of Ukrainian region Saporischschja) has said in an interview with Ria Novosti that Russia should march into the Baltic states. And so on. But all this only leaves the option open, and Russia will certainly not officially announce an invasion.
I think this is exactly the question that we should be focusing on. The way I see it, there are two possible realities:
1. Russia wants to conquer the world.
2. Russia doesn't want to conquer the world.
In reality (1), it is critically important that the rest of the planet stands united against him, even if it costs us dearly, because the threat of harm to any would-be world dictator needs to be a very credible threat.
In reality (2), letting him take Ukraine may be the lest bad option on the table. It sucks that he may get away with an invasion of a neighbor, but if that is the end of all Russia invasions and we can move forward with world peace then it seems like a small price to pay.
Phrasing it so that the only proposed conquests are "the world" and "not the world", is really quite foolish and misleading. Far more plausible goals are,
3. Russia wants to conquer or otherwise reacquire the territories of the former Soviet Union.
4. Russia wants to conquer or otherwise exercise hegemonic dominion over the former Warsaw Pact
5. Russia wants to reestablish the historic Russian Empire.
The one that *isn't* plausible, is the one where Russia wants to conquer just Ukraine and no other country, because there is no plausible characteristic of Ukraine that would put it on the to-be-conquered list that isn't shared by several other nations.
It is possible that Russia will not launch any further wars of conquest, but if so it won't be because they don't *want* to, but because they don't think they can get away with it. What happens in Ukraine, will almost certainly color their thinking as to what else they might be able to get away with in the future. Presumably after a few years' respite to reconstitute their Army, but they'll be doing that in any event.
>The one that *isn't* plausible, is the one where Russia wants to conquer just Ukraine and no other country, because there is no plausible characteristic of Ukraine that would put it on the to-be-conquered list that isn't shared by several other nations.
The first Russian state was centred on Kiev, so Russian nationalists regard the area as their ancestral homeland and get especially twitchy about the prospect of it being in a rival nation's sphere of influence. I don't pretend to know Vladimir Putin's long-term goals, but it's not at all implausible that he'd regard Ukraine as a special case.
Putin has been playing up the historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people, yes, but he seems to be avoiding anything that might remind Russians that Kyiv was first and Moscow was a Kyivan colony.
And, courtesy of Stalin, there are ethnic Russians all over the former Soviet Union, so "look, it's got Russians in it therefore we have to make it part of Russia", isn't going to point uniquely at Ukraine.
This is a recurring theme of replies to my comment, and I think it would have been better if I phrased it as:
1. Russia is engaging in a war of conquest.
2. Russia is engaging in an escalation in a historic stream of escalations.
The root question is what exactly is Russia's *real* goal, and knowing that is hard but ones belief in that seem to be strongly correlated with how they view the situation in Ukraine.
It is rare for nations to have goals that are satisfied by exactly one war of conquest; far more common are "none" and "many". When you do find a just-one-war goal, it's usually the reconquest or reunification of a territory that was lost in some previous rearrangement that is perceived as unfair, e.g. the Union's response to Confederate secession in 1861. But in the Russian case, that points to I think fourteen different now-sovereign nations.
Three of which are tiny and easily conquerable but also part of NATO.
> It sucks that he may get away with an invasion of a neighbor, but if that is the end of all Russia invasions and we can move forward with world peace then it seems like a small price to pay.
You're begging the question that the former leads to the latter. In a world where "okay Ukraine, but no more" happens, peripheral states will be more likely to believe that the vaguely-defined "rules based international order" will not keep them safe from even blatant invasion.
In such a world, these states will have every incentive to either cleave to an explicit defensive alliance with a more distant (and more disinterested, if not necessarily more friendly) superpower and/or to develop their own independent military capability, up to and including a nuclear arms program.
We've started to see both consequences from this war. Russia's invasion of Ukraine to notionally block NATO expansion led directly to the accession of Finland and Sweden. In the meantime, Europe generally and Poland specifically are rebuilding their militaries, with Poland discussing basing French nuclear weapons for its protection
Both consequences point back to the national security dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma), making future conflict more rather than less likely.
In my opinion, durable world peace is more likely when Russias _don't_ get away with invading Ukraines. A rational actor will not invade another if they believe that the losses will outweigh the gains, and there's no better way to ensure that outcome than if the gains – the conquering and annexation here – never happen. In this view, the 2022 invasion happened in large part because of the weak response to the 2014 invasions of Crimea and the Donbas region; all it took was a miscalculation about the odds of prompt success to make the current war appear rational.
Why do you want such a credible threat only for would-be world dictators, and not for all breakers of world peace? It would seem to me that if world peace is the aim, we should want rulers to consider starting any war to be a very risky proposition.
I think this is the first time I see anyone even mention the scenario of Russian world conquest, so I find it rather odd to see that as one half of a dichotomy.
Most responses to my comment seem to be centered around (1) being a straw man (rather than steel man), but I have actually met people who believe (1) is the case. Zelenskyy even implied it in the televised dumpster fire of a meeting with Trump when he suggested that if the US doesn't help Ukraine defend against Russia eventually the US will have to defend itself against Russia itself.
That being said, I tend to agree that something in the middle is more likely, and I agree with you that we should strongly discourage any kind of land grabbing. However, many believe that Russia is not engaging in a land grab, but rather a "first strike" in response to perceived US/NATO advance and attempts to surround Russia. A first strike in response to a credible threat is far more reasonable cause for war that land grabbing.
The idea that NATO was gearing up to invade Russia in the foreseeable future and urgently needed the collaboration of Ukraine to pull this off is only "credible" to someone who has bought into paranoid Russian-imperialist propaganda.
1. The major Western European powers had exactly zero motive to start a war with Russia, had lots of other problems on their plates, and were not in a mood to spend hundreds of billions of Euros on their military. (Now they are, thanks to Russia.)
2. The US had exactly zero motive to start a war with Russia, had a bigger problem on their plate (namely, China), and was not enthusiastic about throwing military weight into Europe rather than other places.
3. Russia still has its nukes. As long as you can threaten to fry anyone whose tanks attempt to roll into Russia, why worry?
Why then even move NATO east. The Russians really radicalised after the 2014 color revolution, which was clearly a coup to push a pro western president to power. The reason that NATO is hostile to Russia is because it was set up to be hostile to Russia. If you create an organisation to kill cats then it will continue to kill cats even if cats are not a threat.
Did you mean the Maidan Revolution, instead of the the Color Revolution? The latter happened in 2004, no 2014. It is the former that led to Russia invading Ukraine. (And of course wasn't in any way a "coup".)
In any case, NATO membership was off the table in 2014. It had been rejected in 2008, and maybe 20% of Ukrainians were in favor of it. Yanukovich was obviously against, but even after he was ousted the Parliament was explicit that NATO wasn't even being considered.
And of course, a country should be able to voluntarily join NATO without being invaded by Russia. I don't know why that has to be stated.
All in all, implying that NATO's expansion was the cause of the war, or that Euromaidan was a "coup", is not an honest misunderstanding, it is active pro-Russian propaganda.
"Why then even move NATO east" - because Eastern European countries wanted to join, for good reason, as the fate of Chechnya, Georgia and finally Ukraine showed. (Did you feel any tingling of cognitive dissonance when you typed "cats are not a threat"?)
Why would NATO accept them? Because having a war on your doorstep is always bad (see Ukraine), and a good defensive alliance is a good way of preventing that war from happening.
You jump from "Russia doesn't want to conquer the world" straight to "Russia only wants to conquer Ukraine". These propositions are not equivalent, nor does the former imply the latter.
Yes, it is fair to say that my description above is a simplification. Perhaps Russia wants to conquer Ukraine and Poland but stop there. Or maybe Ukraine, Poland, and Germany but that is it. None the less, the impression I have gotten in discussions from people on both sides is that people usually hold one of the two views I outlined above. Either they believe that Russia is an expansionist country that wants to take whatever they can get, or they believe that Russia is defending itself against military encirclement by US/NATO and doesn't actually want to take over much of anything.
I feel like if Putin currently just wants all the former members of the USSR, if he actually manages to get those without heavy losses, he'd probably decide that he may as well take more. Russia invaded Ukraine without even having successfully invaded similar countries. Once they know they can get away with that, that's all the more reason to keep invading.
I'm fairly attached to Poland remaining part of the EU, continuing its growth curve, and continuing to become a much better place to be. I expect the Poles are even more attached.
I'm a Brit, so I think the EU/ UK needs to absolutely step up here. But this is also the only live theatre of war atm, and I think the US should be involved for both our sakes, and theirs -- they will lose a war based on legacy manufacturing to China, so need to develop weapons that can outcompete a much larger industrial base.
It's time for the US to think more asymmetrically, and that means working with Ukrainians.
Don't you word this too strongly? Putin may not want to conquer the world - nobody's quite that crazy these days, and who wants some remote parts of Africa, anyway. I would go as far as to say that even most of Europe probably isn't in any great danger: even if Russia could conquer, say, Germany and France, it's very hard to imagine it controlling those territories for very long simple from the lack of soldiers (and, I imagine, willing collaborators). But ex-USSR countries, especially Baltics, are another matter. Putin, of course, doesn't want them for their population (hostile) or resources (non-existent) or industry (more so than resources), but for he might want them for free access to Kaliningrad region, which is an awkward exclave right now. I'm not saying it will happen - Baltics ARE protected by NATO, and Putin is a man of the ear when everyone was afraid of nuclear war, but setting this up as "whole world, or nothing at all" is a false dichotomy.
See my comment here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-372/comment/99349778 for a bit more depth, but the TL;DR is that most people I talk to hold one of the two beliefs I listed. I agree with you that (1) does seem unlikely, and a more likely (1) is what you describe.
You are talking to very simple-minded people, then. Or at least to people who hold simplistic views on this particular subject. But that's often a reasonable thing to do, and one reasonable simplification is to round "wants to conquer many other countries" to "wants to conquer the world".
How would the sacrificing of Ukraine end all of Russian invasions? And is the price of subjugating a people really that small?
A. All people are subjugated by their governments. Ukrainians having a new master probably won't change much for the day-to-day life of most Ukrainians. Ukraine government wasn't exactly a pinnacle of honor, honesty, efficiency, and freedom (nor is Russia), so its not like swapping out Singaporean rule for North Korean rule.
B. That is exactly the question. Would sacrificing Ukraine end the violence and not result in more violence to follow? We do not know the answer to this, and I think this is the core disagreement between those who support and those who oppose US involvement in the Ukrainian war.
Russia has made it pretty clear that if they conquer Ukraine, there will be no more such thing as a "Ukrainian". That doesn't mean that they will kill every single man, woman, and child presently in Ukraine, but the process of forcible de-Ukrainianization will not be a simple matter of being issued a new passport. It will be a very substantial change in their day-to-day life, and for probably a million or more of them, it will be the last day in their life.
"Everybody is subjugated by their government, therefore resisting invasions is just needless bloodshed" is, well, I don't have any polite words for that, but it would start with "hopelessly ignorant".
> Ukrainians having a new master probably won't change much for the day-to-day life of most Ukrainians.
Tell that to the citizens of Bucha. I mean, those who haven't been tortured to death by Russians.
> Would sacrificing Ukraine end the violence and not result in more violence to follow? We do not know the answer to this […]
Did Russian conquests end after Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea? Of course you don't know the answer if you're willing ignorant.
I agree on A (Putin wouldn't even add the whole of Ukraine to Russia, so "subjugation" would be somewhat distant), but disagree on B. Russia's win will show the rest of the world that the will of USA and the rest of the West can be successfully resisted, if only by violence. When people talk about Russia eroding world order, this is what they really mean. USA and its allies almost acquired a monopoly on violence (aside from some African conflicts nobody cares about), and Russia is breaking it up. So while "the town" used to have one "sheriff" who set all the rules, now every country might have some choice on which set of rules to take, especially in case of close Russian-Chinese alliance (which Trump, I think, is trying to prevent at all costs).
> I agree on A (Putin wouldn't even add the whole of Ukraine to Russia, so "subjugation" would be somewhat distant),
Since the latest public Russian nod to peace involves accepting its stated annexation of Ukrainian territory – seemingly including ground not yet de facto controlled by Russia – in addition to permanent disarmament and 'neutrality' for Ukraine, it seems very likely that any pause on subjugation would be temporary. Eight to ten years – the distance between the annexation of Crimea and today – is not "somewhat distant" in my mind.
> Russia's win will show the rest of the world that the will of USA and the rest of the West can be successfully resisted, if only by violence.
I submit that this is a bad thing. The US has been far from perfect, but the late 20th century and early 21st century saw historically low levels of international armed conflict and deaths from interstate violence.
A multipolar world not restrained by a strong taboo on aggressive war is an unstable one. A world where Russias and Chinas think they can resist the US 'by violence' is a world where Ukraines and Polands and Koreas and Taiwans think they must resist their own neighbour hegemons-in-waiting 'by violence'.
Besides that I feel that your moral stance is contradictory here. If being forced under Russian influence against its will is an acceptable outcome for Ukraine, why is it more unacceptable for nations to be 'forced' into the American sphere of influence?
> it seems very likely that any pause on subjugation would be temporary
I'm not sure Russia even wants to try to physically control hostile Western Ukraine. Eastern regions were mostly friendly toward Russia, but simply policing Western parts of the country would require a lot of forces. Conceivably, it would be even harder than Chechnya, where historical hostilities between tribes made coordinated resistance harder, and foreign help was further away. A more likely approach is to try to install and support some kind of pro-Russian government, but this is far better than war.
> I submit that this is a bad thing. The US has been far from perfect, but the late 20th century and early 21st century saw historically low levels of international armed conflict and deaths from interstate violence.
Oh, I'm not saying it's entirely good. There are both good and bad things about it. There certainly will be more violence, which is very bad. But there will be a bit more freedom, too, and opportunities. Even America has a chance to benefit from this, as it finally might find a worthy rival again (in China, Russia, or EU, or some combination thereof). Ever since collapse of USSR, USA has been too complacent and bored to the point of self-harm.
> Besides that I feel that your moral stance is contradictory here. If being forced under Russian influence against its will is an acceptable outcome for Ukraine, why is it more unacceptable for nations to be 'forced' into the American sphere of influence?
I'm not sure I ever expressed this stance. Personally, I would prefer it to be unacceptable for any country to be forced into another's sphere of influence, but the world so far doesn't work this way, and I'm certainly against allowing only one country, or alliance of countries to force others into their sphere of influence, as I'm not a citizen of one of the "team world police" countries.
So my moral stance is rather "if America can do it, and does it, so should Russia and China be allowed to try". I mean, if America was a shining beacon of restrained use of power that would be preferable, but after the many military adventures USA had over the last 30 years, I'm not counting on it.
At all cost seems indeed an apt description, if you interpret how Trump is degrading USA relation with it's historic allies at warp speed as a tactic to confuse China by offering it soooo many new possible partners beside Russia.
To me it looks more like extremely poor analysis of cost/benefit of those historical alliances, and a very distorted assessment of US strengths and weaknesses w.r.t. other global actors. I.E. poor international affair knowledge and a lot of drinking too much of his own medecine...
I would argue that in this case it's "drinking establishment medicine", because any kind of alliance, or even closer partnership with China was unimaginable to any US ally for a very long time. After all, isn't China that horrible, barbaric place with no freedom that will collapse from economic problems any time soon? What about Uyghurs and Tibetians, how could any western country possibly seek to better relations with a country that oppresses them?
Actually, I'm not sure Trump's team is too wrong here. Does EU really have a choice of partners? And if not, well, they can bluster and make great displays of their independence from America, but in the end will accept whatever policy America chooses. And I'm pretty sure that "partnering" with China would include giving up Ukraine (to a degree), too, which so far seems unacceptable.
As for non-EU allies, I don't really know what goes on in Middle East or Asia. India keeps playing its own game, and Turkey, as well...
Interestingly, I think China is somewhat worried about Trump's tactics. One of their officials recently made a statement that Russia and USA should not decide the fate of Ukraine between themselves, but should involve others in the process. I think this was a clear warning to Russia not to chum up to America too much, which means they consider it at least a distant possibility, and don't like it one bit.
I do not think that there is a way to know that, objectively. After all, even primary sources can be strategic lies.
Also, intents change, and often we lie even to ourselves about what we intend to do.
Given the attacks on Ukraine, it seems that wars of conquest are very much on the table for Putin. Saying "we can not possibly know if he will be satisfied with taking Ukraine" is technically correct, but not strategically helpful. Not having full information is part of the game. If you are standing in a crowd and someone shoots your neighbor, you do not know that the shooter intends to harm you. Perhaps he just had some beef with your neighbor and had excellent aim so you were never in danger. You have only historical analogy -- the existence of previous mass shootings -- arguing that you might be in danger. Still, the correct response would be to take cover and try to disable the shooter. People who remain standing until it is conclusively proven to them that they are intended targets often end up in the morgue.
There is a school of thought that Putin attacking Ukraine is in response to actions done by US/NATO, not because he just wanted more land/cities and an even bigger border. **IF** that is true, then what is happening isn't a war of conquest, but rather an escalation of an ongoing series of escalations.
Figuring out whether that is closer to the truth than the claim that he wants more land/cities to rule is incredibly hard, but also incredibly important I think.
I agree that in the heat of the moment assuming the worst is reasonable, but we have had many years to talk/think things through and I think we would do well to try to dig into the root causes more rigorously if possible.
> Figuring out whether that is closer to the truth than the claim that he wants more land/cities to rule is incredibly hard, but also incredibly important I think.
Were it the case that Russia cared only for geopolitical interests, it would not have claimed outright annexation of Kherson, Donbas, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia
oblasts.
Doing so makes redrawing the border an essential item for any peace deal, which in turn makes a security-focused agreement much more difficult. Ukraine now has all the credibility in the world when it says it needs a very strong army and/or ironclad Western security guarantees, sine the lack of either has led directly to its loss of land!
The European community is predisposed to think well of its neighbours, and by now Russia knows that its territorial ambitions harden Europe's stance towards rather than away from intervention in Ukraine.
There's also a "school of thought" that persistently believes that the Earth is flat, and no matter how much evidence to the contrary you present, they'll keep believing.
The question whether Putin is just defending his house and home against the ever-increasing hordes of NATO countries, and whether he was basically forced to invade Ukraine first, lest Ukraine conquers Russia (aaaany day now, right?), has been debated to death, and people who still believe that yes, Russia is the real victim here, won't be swayed by any quality or quantity of arguments.
From the wikipedia page about John Mearsheimer:
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A 2017 survey of US international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of International Relations in the past 20 years."
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A "school of thought" that includes an academic of such caliber cannot be dismissed as equal to flat earthism. You will not find an equivalent scientist who believes that the earth is flat.
Therefore I think that the theory deserves to be argued against instead of being casually dismissed as the equivalent of flat earthism, or as having been already "debated to death" (without even providing a link to such a debate).
Also, reasonable people who make that argument don't necessarily claim that "Russia is the real victim". A person can believe that Ukrainians are the victims of evil Russian aggression, and at the same time believe that such evil aggression is mainly motivated by fear of NATO expansion, and can be placated by assuring Putin that NATO will not expand. The two beliefs are not mutually exclusive, at all.
I myself have not made up my mind about this whole topic, and I'm open-minded. But it's irritating is when critics of that "school of thought" accuse its believers of being Putin apologists and/or flat earthers.
What’s the reason for NATO moving eastwards at all? Or even existing post 1992, say.
Also you are close to being reported as you are engaging in well poisoning and generalised ad hominem attacks
NATO didn't "move eastwards", countries east of NATO applied to join. This may sound like hair splitting at first, but it reveals a fundamental difference between NATO and the Soviet Union respectively the Warsaw Pact: Countries join NATO of their own volition to protect themselves against Russian aggression, while Warsaw Pact countries were invaded by the Soviet Union and were effectively forced to join.
As for NATO's reason for existing past the fall of the Soviet Union: Apparently the leaders of member states were able to consider time horizons longer than 6 months before ending alliances and partnerships that had been existing for decades at that point. In retrospect, you can hardly argue that they were wrong. It didn't take long for Russia to resume its imperialistic tendencies.
It's not that it's hair splitting, it's that it's irrelevant.
Obviously it takes two to tango and countries can only join NATO if NATO wants them.
And why are you arguing against a straw supporter of the Warsaw Pact?
Except for the man himself, how would anyone know without using a theory of Putin's mind ?
We would have a strong indication on the basis of (1) things he has said (2) things he has done (3) things he has written (4) things other people who have influence with him have said/done/written (5) all of the above in the negative, if such a fact were relevant.
That is how you build a theory of someone's mind. None of what you suggest is more authoritative than Putin's inner beliefs that only he has access to.
If he wanted to invade other European nations, it would be in his best interest to not let it show beforehand. He has an incentive to (1) Not say it out loud, (3) Not write his intentions pubicly (4) Control that people around him don't say those things. If he did, Europe would rally against him.
But he still needs to rally his own people behind him. Before the 2022 attack, Russian television was all the time talking about how Ukraine is not a proper country, and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Davis_(journalist) gives some insight about what kind of things are going on in Russian state propaganda.
I don't think that what he says is necessarily a good indication of what he (or other current leaders) has in his mind. For example he says he conducts a special operation in Ukraine, not a war. Or that his objective is to denazify Ukraine and compare this war is similar to the Great Patriotic War (WW2 against Nazi Germany).
I would honestly rather trust sensible historical analogies than whatever he says in this context.
IIRC, he did say that he would attack Ukraine if it tried to join NATO. US advisors even strongly warned the US that if Ukraine looked like it was going to join NATO then Russia would attack. So we do have at least a little evidence that he telegraphs his intentions in advance.
Yeah, Russia has been saying since the '90s that Ukraine joining NATO would be a massive red line, so it's not really surprising that Putin should have invaded Ukraine when it started looking like the country might at some point in the future join NATO. The idea that the Russian invasion is some kind of bizarre, unpredictable thing is, it seems to me, mostly propaganda.
That's a plausible reason for the 2014 invasion; not so much for 2022. One of the consequences of the 2014 invasion was a "frozen conflict", and one of the rules of NATO is that no new member may be admitted while it has an outstanding territorial dispute that NATO might be called upon to settle. So long as "separatists" control the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and Crimea is formally annexed by the Russian Federation but still claimed by Ukraine, there's no chance of Ukraine joining NATO.
Also, I'm pretty sure there's no chance of Ukraine joining NATO while Viktor Orban is in power in Hungary or Erdogan in Turkey. It was hard enough getting Finland and Sweden past those vetoes.
I don't think Putin has ever expressed intentions to conquer, say, Poland, or any other country west of Ukraine.
Nor have we uncovered any secret plans to do so.
Poland, who is re-arming rapidly, doesn’t seem to share your sanguine outlook.
It’s food that they are re-arming but we don’t have to share their paranoid outlook.
It's not paranoia. I think these two things are both true:
1. Putin would invade Poland, and the rest of Eastern Europe, if it was easy
2. If Poland stays well armed then it would not be easy
Since NATO is crumbling, their "paranoia" is more justified than ever. Should Ukraine fall and Russia survive economically, Russia might need another 5-10 years to be ready for the next large war. If Poland (who would then share an even longer border with Russian puppets) wants to be ready then, they need to start now.
Link to the article? I don’t know your policy preferences so can’t tell if you should be optimistic. I am optimistic because Trump is losing Wall Street and once his inflationary policies produce inflation I think his support will crater. And some of the democrats are openly going against progressivism, see Newsome interview with Charlie Kirk.
Yes, there are causes for optimism.
(1) America will dissolve in the acid vat of Entropy like every complex structure that ever existed in the universe. Just like the Roman Empire and the mummified kings of Egypt, the Sun and the Moon, you and me. Everything complex and orderly existed against the will of this universe, withstood its terrible rage for a while, and then arrived at its dissolution and decay. Death is the inevitable conclusion of the premise of Birth. You should think of this as a win, every pocket of order and negative entropy in the world is a steal that we temporarily swindled away from Physics and played with for an hour, a thief doesn't shed tears over the stolen goods being returned again. What Death takes, Death has always owned.
(2) Evil is immensely dumb. I cannot come to terms yet with how utterly, pathetically, surprisingly, and surreally dumb and ineffective evil can be. If evil had just 10% more efficiency or intelligence or foresight the damage it could do with resources it has would have been unimaginable, but it just so happens that evil is dumb and disorganized and confused and thinks that "Tariffs" is a mean cuss word. This is cause for optimism, it's at least cause for relief that things are not worse despite that very easily could have been.
Evil is like the Buddha, dried shit on a stick.
Not exactly optimism, but the legal pushback against Trump is stronger than I think anyone expected on either side.
My assumption is that things will be bad, but not "imagine if Trump gets everything he wants" bad.
Evil is like the Buddha, dried shit on a stick.