As far as I can tell, his main policy is massive tariffs on everything, including the materials needed to construct housing. But if he does succeed in causing a second Great Recession, then perhaps house prices would go down since noone could afford to buy one anymore.
At minimum *cough* boomer finance, is convinced he's doing something; but I trust dave ramsay as far as I can throw the social security deficit using his boot straps.
My red flags are aquittely triggered on these "experts"; but something is happening and this is probably among the more important things for what actually happens to the future.
> tariffs
America has trees, sand and stones it may effect cities near boarders but then your in a city and your paying for a cardboard box on million dollar a foot land.
I asked Gemini 2.5 to write a story about a child learning how to tie shoelaces. Here's the first paragraph:
The universe contracted to the size of a cheap plastic aglet. Bartholomew, who yesterday was a nebula named Kevin, wept glycerine tears that tasted suspiciously of motor oil and lost mittens. Before him lay The Problem: twin lengths of braided despair, mockingly limp upon the scuffed topography of his left shoe, a vessel formerly owned by a pirate captain who exclusively raided birthday parties.
Is this any good? I'll include the whole story in a daughter comment to make it individually collapsible.
Yeah I'm coming around to that view myself. That said there's two ways to evaluate this sort of thing. The first way is to ask if this is approaching the quality of a talented human author? Answer, no. And were done. The second way is to ask if this shows improvement from previous Gemini models. Not necessarily better across the board but does it show more promise in some sense? Can it do metaphor? Is it creative? That sort of thing. In this case I think the answer to that is yes.
The custom system instructions I gave it told it to be chaotic and disorienting. Without those instructions its writing is much easier to follow, but pretty boring. Better system instructions could probably improve the writing a bit or at least get it to write in a style that is less aversive.
The universe contracted to the size of a cheap plastic aglet. Bartholomew, who yesterday was a nebula named Kevin, wept glycerine tears that tasted suspiciously of motor oil and lost mittens. Before him lay The Problem: twin lengths of braided despair, mockingly limp upon the scuffed topography of his left shoe, a vessel formerly owned by a pirate captain who exclusively raided birthday parties.
"Loop," instructed a voice like shattering glass, possibly his mother, possibly a rogue signal from Betelgeuse. Bartholomew’s fingers, small, clumsy starfish stolen from a beach that never existed, attempted compliance. The lace bucked, writhed, hissed forgotten radio jingles. It formed not a loop, but a Moebius strip of existential dread. Failure #4,782.
Shame arrived, wearing the ill-fitting suit of a disgraced game show host. It smelled faintly of burnt sugar and regret. It whispered statistics about developmental milestones Bartholomew was currently betraying. Outside, the sky turned a bruised purple and rained down small, melancholic gears. His right shoelace, sensing weakness, tied itself into a perfect, smug bow, then promptly dissolved into a swarm of silverfish that scurried under the skirting board where reality was thin.
He tried again. The left lace. This time, he envisioned success: a tight, symmetrical embrace. Instead, the fabric frayed, releasing trapped chronitons. For a dizzying moment, Bartholomew experienced his entire life in reverse, ending as a disappointed glint in a milkman’s eye. He landed back on the floor, dizzy, smelling of ozone and paradox. The lace lay inert, a dead worm on a forgotten sidewalk.
Hopelessness was a physical weight, a collapsed dwarf star settling in his small chest. Why this torture? Why these infernal strings? He kicked the shoe. It skittered away, laughing a dry, papery laugh. From the corner of the room, a grandfather clock, previously unnoticed, struck thirteen and began reciting multiplication tables in reverse alphabetical order.
This was it. The abyss. The final knot of unbeing. He was destined to wander the earth, laces trailing, a trip hazard for gods and men, forever marked by his failure. He picked up the shoe. He picked up the lace ends, no longer seeing them as laces, but as frayed edges of the tapestry, loose threads threatening to unravel everything. He didn't try to make loops. He didn't try to cross them. He just… pulled. A blind, desperate tug born of cosmic exhaustion.
Something snagged. Caught. Held.
It wasn't neat. It wasn't a bow. It resembled more a panicked octopus mid-implosion. But it was… tied. A knot. A clumsy, ugly, defiant knot against the smooth slide into entropy.
Silence. The gears stopped raining. The game show host of shame evaporated, leaving behind only a faint scent of desperation. The grandfather clock exploded softly into a cloud of glitter and sawdust. Bartholomew stared. The knot held. It was monstrous, lopsided, an affront to geometry. But it held.
A single, perfect sunbeam, defying the bruised sky, pierced the window and illuminated the shoe. Was this triumph? Or merely a temporary stay of execution? Bartholomew didn't know. He only knew the lace was tied. He stood up, wobbled, and took a step. The world lurched violently, then settled. Somewhere, a kettle whistled a tune that had not yet been composed. The knot held. The tragedy paused. Pathos took a breath. For now.
For those who are trying to be moisturized, vibes ng, in their zone, etc:
Consumer confidence is at lower than mid covid, lower than early biden inflation levels right now.
This isn't a guarantee yet, we need another month or two of the rate falling to bring me above 80%, but this is a pretty solid predictor for a pretty solid recession.
As per my earlier posts, and all the ones before that which no one will be able to see because I got a new phone and therefore a new account, the good historical bet when conservatives are in government and confidence starts dropping is to not take any long positions and keep yourself as liquid as possible so you can start picking up other people's durable assets when they lose everything in the market and need to sell well below the expected long-term return in order to not be on the street.
if it was a normal conservative in government, I would have already turned all of my investments into short-term bonds or cash, but this government is so schizophrenic and so based on one old guy whose brain isn't working so good that one heart attack or one cosmic ray hitting the right molecule of aspartame in a diet Coke might turn it all around, so it's a lot harder than it usually is.
The relationship between equity returns and party-in-power has been examined empirically and found to be not predictive. If you're so confident you can predict the stock market's behavior, why aren't you entering short positions?
It seems like telepathy because the parents are tricking themselves into spelling out stuff that only they could know and attributing those insights to their non-verbal children. It's really sad.
Yeah so some of these kids learn to spell type on their own. And for parents/ teachers moving/ picking for the kids, yeah sure, my phone text app does that for me too. Communication is the thing that is important, how it's done is less so.
My understanding is that these kids are otherwise nonverbal and cannot read. I'm not sure why anyone would them to be spelling.
I've listened to some of the Tapes and the parents are unfortunately deluding themselves. Like the kid who was at preschool level until his final year of highschool but his mother wanted him to go into the general class because of the facilitated spelling. Mostly it appears to be an ideomotor effect mixed with a powerful desire for connection by the parents.
I heard that episode of Joe Rogan, too. I know he loves paranormal stuff, but I wish he hadn't given that chick so much visibility.
James Randi and other skeptics have pretty thoroughly debunked facilitated communication, in both casual settings and formal, double-blind studies. While some people in the FC space are no doubt grifters, it appears that most people are engaging in a kind of highly imaginative wishful thinking and spiritual "reasoning" to avoid the tremendous pain of loving someone who is unable to effectively communicate.
And let me tell you: as a highly imaginative person who was raised in Christian Science, arguably the hardest-core faith-healing religion/cult around, it's completely possible for high-IQ people to inadvertently misuse their intellect to thoroughly "rationalize" the legitimacy of their particular woo. And it's almost impossible to avoid the temptation to exaggerate just a *wee* little bit to be even more compelling and convincing to one's audience.
And then to later genuinely forget giving into the temptation to exaggerate a wee bit...or a lot.
I'm not particularly high IQ, but I could EASILY structure alternative /speculative "realities" to defend belief in pretty much any kind of woo; Christian Science, 9/11 inside job, flat earth, soulmates, facilitated communication, and on and on. None of those alternative / speculative "realities" would hold up to rigorous scientific investigation, but they would be internally consistent and orderly, according to the rules of their particular fictional premise. As the old bromide goes, "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."
Severe, profoundly disabling autism doesn't intuitively make "sense" to us. But it doesn't have to, because - as far as has been rigorously investigated - it's simply the truth.
Hi Christina, thanks for the nice response. I've only listened through the third podcast in the series. There is some facilitated communication. But it goes beyond that and some of these kids learn to communicate w/o any assistance. I'm still just dumb-struck by the whole thing. The physics part of me wants to understand the mechanism. I want to stick people in metal boxes and behind mu-metal shields. Episode 5 is reported to be more science-y and I'll probably listen to that today. Perhaps I'm overly gullible.
Well, don't discount what I said about the temptation to exaggerate, and then, after telling the story a lot, to willfully, semi-genuinely forget the exact details and embrace the exaggeration as truth (especially when it's a highly desirable and emotionally gratifying "truth").
I mean, sure, that seems obvious, but it's one of those human behaviors where the people who don't do (or don't do it in a noticeable way) it often can't *really* model what it's like to guide oneself into believing fantasy woo, knowingly or otherwise.
I finished my (very short, very bad) first novel at 12 years old, and then bought at least a dozen books on fiction writing through my tweens and teens and carefully studied them on my own time. I gave myself an early, long, rigorous training on concepts like character point of view and description in general. I spent a lot of time thinking about how character's thoughts contradicted reality.
So from being a tweenager, I've always been aware when I've added particularly good details to a spooky personal anecdote and, more importantly, *why* I was doing it. I watched my best spooky childhood anecdote evolve over the years into a perfect, tidy little campfire ghost story. I've imagined the polished story so many times that, even though I'm aware it didn't actually *happen,* even *I* (!!!) am sometimes tempted to "believe" the ghost story version. My younger brother, who was present for the anecdote, but has heard the ghost story version far more often, actually believes the ghost story version. Or at least, that's what he claims.
Notably, if I'm telling my polished ghost story to a certain audience, I will pretend that *I* still believe the ghost story version, and I'm very convincing, because I have some versions of myself that I think about as if they're fictional characters, and one of those versions actually had the spooky polished campfire ghost story happen to her, FOR REAL. No, *REALLY!*
Which is all to say:
Just because someone very, very convincingly reports something, and other people testify to that report, doesn't mean it actually happened.
And, of course, I know you know that, but...sometimes it's easy to forget, you know?
Grin, yeah I know. Have you listened to any of the podcasts? (Beside on Rogan.) OK I'll tell you a story... make of it what you will; I'm lying in the arms of my lover, in post coital bliss, and suddenly I'm in her head or she's in mine and we're reliving or recalling the one-on-one basketball game we played earlier in the day. And then it's over and we look at each other and confirm that that just happened to the other person too. Magical. And sure there are hundreds of possible explanations other than telepathy.
I'd actually like to argue that a rare, fleeting, bonding, perfect coincidence of lovely thought and feeling is more beautiful than telepathy or magic because it *isn't* structured by the paranormal. It isn't even a "gift," per se, because there is no intention and no giver. It's simply a precious surprise, cued up by shared experience.
This is a completely true story, absolutely no exaggeration:
I was once working with a very good friend. She was out of my line of sight but within ear shot. I started watching Mr. Plinkett's iconic review of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, for the very first time, using one ear bud. She did not see or hear me start the video.
There is a sneak attack joke in the middle of a lecture here, https://youtu.be/FxKtZmQgxrI?si=xDERYry2QsGiPOg8&t=113, in which the weirdo narrator unexpectedly mispronounces "protagonist" with a line reading that exquisitely conveys the self-conscious bravado of a guy who reads a lot but is too weird and off-putting to have heard and be able to confidently use rare words like "protagonist" aloud in conversation.
I *BELLOWED* the loudest, most surprised laugh of my entire life. There have been a few moments in my life where I laughed even harder and longer, but never one which was more explosive.
"Are you watching that Episode One review video? Is it the 'pro-toe-gahn-ist' part?" My friend called to me.
It's beautiful that she knew me well enough to know that that particular laugh could only have come from that specific joke.
And that's more beautiful than telepathy.
But also: We're not friends anymore, due to an awkward, unspoken, minor moment of resentment which never faded and which neither of us ever had the courage to explicitly address, for reasons that I'm still not clear on over a decade later.
Demonstrate it in some way. Even if you need two specific people that are frequency-tuned to each other or something. Put them in two Faraday caged rooms and have them predict cards off a deck at something noticeably better than random.
I am not trying to make a case for or against. I am trying to point out that those two things are not synonymous. One of them implies a conversation and the other implies a hack.
Having real money attached to it just reduces the chance of fraud. People can be inventive and it's not always easy to explain a magic trick. But if $1m changes hands then I'm much more confident that it's real.
As far as I can tell, you're just pulling these ideas out of thin air, or more accurately, your bias.
Again, guns need someone committed to pulling the trigger. Suppose left wing ideology generates more anarchists, gangbangers, suicidal maniacs, and other forms of people willing to pull a trigger and get a gun to do it? There's plenty of evidence this can also happen. If you make sweeping assertions, they are worthless without meaningful and deep metrics.
Right-wing gun owners are also inherently more likely to train and be knowledgeable about gun handling and safety. You haven't in any way demonstrated that this doesn't counter-balance any 'inherent belief they have that it is okay to shoot people', or even overwhelm it, which again is something you have made up as far as I can tell, and lacks any supporting data.
The more Houthi related Signal messages come out the more I update towards the Trump administration, at the top level at least, being better functioning than I expected.
It's bad they added someone to the chat accidentally, sure. But the conversation itself was great. Quick responses to an ask, individuals raising points related to their area while deferring to the clear decision makers, clear communication, all very professional and seemingly practiced.
We don't know the full decision making process and everything before this conversation may have been trash but, the obligatory sprinkles of "rah team" cringe aside, but within this exchange there's nothing objectionable.
I'm willing to bite that this is neither 'professional' nor 'well functioning' (you said better functioning than you expected, idk where your bar is so I'm just going to say 'well functioning' here, but feel free to push back if you think that's a misrepresentation).
Three points:
- these people have clearly drunk the koolaid. In the private signal chat they bring up biden, unprompted, at least twice. Like the man just lives rent free in their head, to a level that is just stupid. It makes me seriously doubt the level of sober analysis they are even able to do, since they are obviously epistemologically downstream of fox news talking heads that can't stop blaming everything on biden. And it's also obvious that everything is a show to them. I don't think they are capable of making difficult decisions because they are constantly thinking about 'how to stay on message that this is bidens fault'
- "I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now." fascinating line from the veep. Why, exactly, is this supposed to give me confidence about the man supposedly in charge?
- on the actual material level, celebrating the bombing of civilians and talking about how "PATHETIC" our closest allies are is, like, obviously bad? I think NATO is a good thing, it is clear that our military leaders dont. If Russia invades Poland, I'm supposed to expect Hegseth and Vance to intervene? Any confidence I had from these two -- and it was really not very much to begin with -- is absolutely gone.
I also of course think all the meta-level stuff was extraordinarily bad. In addition to what other folks have said below, a bunch of them then committed perjury in congressional hearings! The whole reason we have these meta laws like "perjury" or "record keeping" is precisely because that hygiene is a necessary backstop to avoid a slide into dictatorship. Which, of course, is what is currently happening.
> In the private signal chat they bring up biden, unprompted, at least twice...I don't think they are capable of making difficult decisions because they are constantly thinking about 'how to stay on message that this is bidens fault'
It's possible that other messages have been released that I missed, but I see two references to Biden, both in the same message from Pete Hegseth at 8:27 and both in the context of messaging. Creating a narrative and ensuring consensus / message discipline around that narrative is part of the job of senior leadership in every org and the narrative in any political administration is going to involve political concerns. In a two party system this will inevitably involve contrasts with the other side.
Not saying they aren't incapable of making decisions due to an excessive obsession about Biden but that's not how this reads to me. I'm sure that a Democratic admin that was taking an action the previous admin could have but didn't would have similar messaging about how they're cleaning up the other guy's mess.
> Why, exactly, is this supposed to give me confidence about the man supposedly in charge?
To steelman, the head of any large and complex org - even those much simpler than the presidency - will have inconsistent views and their subordinates will try to steer them in different directions. Vance's message seems like a respectful way to raise his views.
That's probably excessive steelmanning though. I can easily believe that you should not have confidence in Trump. That doesn't mean that other rungs of the org aren't being run more competently.
> on the actual material level, celebrating the bombing of civilians...
No one celebrated the bombing of civilians.
> ...talking about how "PATHETIC" our closest allies are is, like, obviously bad?
I don't see that as obviously bad, especially in context. Pretend that these were messages from a chat at the C/Senior VP level in a business. There's some sort of problem that the business has and can solve in-house, but will disproportionately benefit a vendor that arguably should be able to do it themselves. It's not bad or unprofessional to express, even strongly, that it's pathetic that the vendor can't do it on their own.
The Hegseth "PATHETIC" comment reads to me as "Yes, we all know it's bad that we're the only ones who can do it. But we are. Given that reality..."
(Not saying that the hypothetical is exact or that countries do / should operate the same as businesses, but allies can and do have healthy disagreements including some level of personal dislike.)
> If Russia invades Poland, I'm supposed to expect Hegseth and Vance to intervene? Any confidence I had from these two -- and it was really not very much to begin with -- is absolutely gone.
That's interesting. Can you explain more about why the messages make you think that? For me, it's the opposite. The general thrust of the chain from multiple departments, as I read it, is that it will benefit Europe more than the US and we should try to get them to do more / provide some sort of compensation but we should still do it regardless. A Russian invasion of Poland has the same sort of considerations so I would expect the same outcome: US intervention.
Your original point was about the optics of professionalism and how well the team is functioning. I think a lot of your responses do raise reasonable alternative suggestions for what could be happening, but a discussion about optics is about how things seem compared to how things are.
For example, maybe Trump is actually totally honest in the way he manages the vast conflicts of interest between his companies and running the US government. But the optics of, say, publicly supporting $Trump coin (and then making a massive profit off that at the expense of retail investors) are really bad.
More generally, any discussion about optics is NOT about plausible redeeming exculpatory explanations for the behaviors on exhibit. The fact that we have to come up with reasons for why this may be redeemable, means the optics debate is already lost.
---
That said, on the merits of the actual discussion points. Before responding point by point, I want to say that its extremely important to take these messages in the broader context of what else this government has said and done. Maybe on its own, these messages could meet the explanations that you lay out, but in context they seem...significantly worse.
> I'm sure that a Democratic admin that was taking an action the previous admin could have but didn't would have similar messaging about how they're cleaning up the other guy's mess.
These bombings -- and in fact, any military action -- should serve a strategic interest for America. Either they serve that strategic interest, in which case we should do it, or they don't serve that strategic interest, in which case we should not. It's possible for there to be a debate on the pros and cons, the likely second and third order effects of a given military action on America more broadly. But the focus should be on America and American interests. (There was a bit of this, for e.g. Vance talking about the spike in oil prices)
The problem I have is these partisans make it clear that they are not primarily thinking about American interests. From the beginning, Vance opens with "the strongest reason to do this is to send a message" (to who? about what?) and then there is a bunch of discussion about messaging. This is of course where we get to that Hegseth message that you are talking about, where he outright says "Nobody knows who the Houthis are, so we need to stay focused on Biden failed and Iran funded".
What the fuck? If this is a useful thing for American, or even global interests, just explain why! Why the fuck are we talking about how Biden screwed up at all? This is like a two second blurb "shipping is important these guys were blocking major shipping" but no, they instead feel the need to discuss why this is all Biden's fault somehow. The reason I say 'Biden lives rent free in their head' is because the entire conversation could have been done without any reference to the previous administration at all. And yet.
It is definitely possible that the previous admin did this sort of messaging work (on signal chats? a bit less likely!) as well. But its also un-falsifiable. And in context, we shouldn't be surprised that the leadership sounds as unhinged as a fox news report.
> Pretend that these were messages from a chat at the C/Senior VP level in a business. [...] It's not bad or unprofessional to express, even strongly, that it's pathetic that the vendor can't do it on their own.
In fact, it is! In every job I worked, we had strong rules around what to put in writing -- the rule of thumb was always "If you wouldn't want it in the NYT, do not write it". So here. The reason you do not put things like this in writing is because it can create serious material harm. To extend your own analogy, if the vendor caught wind that we were shit talking them and then stopped supplying the company, that would obviously be bad and material. European nations are not exactly taking kindly to the insult. (This is, by the way, just assuming that the underlying assumption that Europe SHOULD be funding its own defense is somehow beneficial for America. It isn't. Pax Americana is a good thing, and forcing other nations to rearm is directly at America's expense. We should continue to fund other nations' defense explicitly because it helps America, a lot.)
And again, in the broader context of statements made by these same individuals, it is clear that they have open disdain for our once-allies. Which brings me to...
> Can you explain more about why the messages make you think that? For me, it's the opposite. The general thrust of the chain from multiple departments, as I read it, is that it will benefit Europe more than the US and we should try to get them to do more / provide some sort of compensation but we should still do it regardless.
This administration isn't even funding Ukraine, an explicit European target of Russian invasion! We have public statements from all of these guys talking about how much they hate funding EU defense, how they want to pull out of NATO, how they want to annex parts of the EU (???). We have explicit policy changes that have resulted in the defunding of an actual US ally who is actually currently under attack. And now we have private messages that use words like "loathsome" and "PATHETIC".
Going back to the first point, it does not seem like this administration undertook these bombings because they actually felt there were strong strategic justifications for doing so. In fact, the discussion is almost entirely about the message and what kind of message is being sent. This is and always has been about aesthetics; it shouldn't be lost on anyone that Hegseth is most famous as a Fox news talking head. Of course they are thinking about ratings. And what drives ratings more than bombing terrorists?
This is why they are actually angry about the fact that it actually helps Europeans out. They want the ratings, they want the projection of strength, but don't think for a moment that they are doing this because it will actually help Europe. Their base hates Europe, and the text chains show that any benefit to Europe must extract a pound of flesh in return. They are doing it because of the 'presidents directive', not because any European leaders asked for this. So if Russia actually rolled into Estonia, or whatever, I don't think the admin will care -- protecting Estonia is 'off-message', strategic value be damned. Unless, of course, they get a pound of flesh. (This is, btw, what is happening in Ukraine re: mineral rights).
The worst part of all of this is that it makes America less safe. The best war is the one that you don't have to fight at all because you have alliances and soft power. Even as this admin blows up random terrorist groups for ratings, it is simultaneously weakening our ability to actually wage war by alienating allies and making it harder for us to deploy.
The politics of the situation are complex and no one is a 'good guy' here (as is often true with the middle east), but the Biden camp was grounding their foreign policy in humanitarian aid during an extremely violent civil war, with the hope of long term political stabilization and development. Destroying the Houthis itself is not a clear win, since Yemen will still be an incredibly unstable place.
I don’t think the quality of the conversation is the issue. One would hope most of these types of discussions are competent.
To my mind, there are two issues; this is clearly not the first and only time that signal has been used for these types of discussions, rather than going through official channels of communication. So this means a lot of things are being done off the record. That is antithetical to How we have seen Govt in the past. It’s quite possible that the Biden administration did the same thing, but the cat is out of the bag now.
The second thing is, these discussions should not be taking place in public.
> One would hope most of these types of discussions are competent.
One would hope. One would also likely be disappointed if the veil was lifted and all discussions made public. Many conversations at a similar level of seniority are not as competent, the content of this one leads me to think that the administration is more effective at day to day execution than I would have expected otherwise.
Yes. I'm not trying to impugn the cleverness of the group chat's members, but I doubt they were the first to imagine doing such a thing. I'm not aware of any similar scandals from the Biden years but I'm sure chats that would be even worse if exposed were going on. This does not bother me. If one emerges I pre-commit to not caring.
I would be more scandalized if there actually were none.
Ok, this is reasonable. There are laws against these kinds of things but it doesn't mean the idea itself if bad.
The real scandal is carelessly adding a member, for sure. I haven't used Signal so I don't know this happened. It's very easy to add someone unintended on Telegram.
I don't think people are critiquing the decision-making process, they're critiquing how Pete Hegseth shared the exact time they would be dropping bombs over a demonstrably insecure channel. It's not "professional" just because they use professional-sounding words like "OPSEC," you have to actually do the things a professional would do to maintain OPSEC.
("But signal is end to end encrypted!" Yeah, and as this leak demonstrates, end-to-end encryption doesn't stop the ends from leaking. There are reports that one of the participants was on a trip to Russia when the meeting was happening - that's another end that could potentially have leaked.)
There's also a public records issue - the government is legally required to store official communications, but Signal automatically erases messages. Again, something that a "professional" might have known about and avoided doing so as not to get sued for it.
Various former US intelligence officers, as well as the chair (GOP) and ranking member (Dem) of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, are "critiquing" facts like one of the Trump Adm appointees joining that chat via his personal phone literally while inside the _Kremlin_. (Where he had an appointment to meet with Vladimir Putin.) That same person, in the chat, _named_ a key US field intelligence officer operating in a foreign country and nobody objected to his doing so.
Also Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, had a couple of its reporters go online yesterday where they had no trouble finding the personal phone numbers and email addresses and "some passwords" of the chat participants. They also found that those personal email addresses and phone numbers were how those participants had set up their Signal accounts.
All of the above has become known only because that particular chat session happened to include one guy mis-clicking and linking the invite to a journalist. Obvious questions include: how many _other_ Signal chats has this group had on unsecured personal phones using easily-findable logins, in which they passed around highly-classified info about US military or intelligence operations or personnel? How many other random people have been inadvertently sent the invite to chats involving this crew? Etc.
> I don't think people are critiquing the decision-making process, they're critiquing how Pete Hegseth shared the exact time they would be dropping bombs over a demonstrably insecure channel. It's not "professional" just because they use professional-sounding words like "OPSEC," you have to actually do the things a professional would do to maintain OPSEC.
Yes, shame on them using Signal. To me, it's on the venial side of the sins. I'd prefer more communication between officials than less, and to the degree that backchannels and insecure but convenient means to facilitate those communications result in better / more frequent discussions than would otherwise occur - I'm for it. There's risk in everything and the information leakage risk to me is less salient than the risk of less / miscommunication in the top levels of the world's most powerful government.
In this case the military risk is very low. I don't think it's controversial to say that we have air superiority over the Houthis. CENTCOM could forward them a copy of their morning slide decks and the worst that happens is a person being targeted hides. The risk to the aircraft and ships involved has not appreciably changed. Are there possible scenarios where that's not true and the information leaking leads to disaster? Yeah, but it's a question of probabilities and this one's in the low end.
Professionals know about and violate data retention / security policies all the time. Backchannels are unavoidable precisely because they are productive. I don't think we had perfect public records before Signal and until we live in an AI panopticon we never will.
>In this case the military risk is very low. I don't think it's controversial to say that we have air superiority over the Houthis.
Do the Houthis have any SAMs? I wouldn't be surprised if they do, since they've got a pretty wide variety of missiles. Knowing when and where the planes will come from certainly makes it easier to put them in the right spot to shoot something down.
(Similar to how Serbia managed to shoot down a stealth plane because they knew that the bombing runs were always coming along a particular route.)
>the worst that happens is a person being targeted hides.
I mean, that seems like a pretty important risk! The whole point of the first airstrike was to kill a particular guy whom they had confirmed was hiding in a particular building. If you give him advance warning and he leaves the building before you bomb it, you've just killed 50 people for no gain. (You've also given away that you have people tracking his location, which could have repercussions down the line.)
But also, if you're going to say "eh, no harm, no foul," then you need to give people confidence that it won't happen again. That means punishing the people responsible for the screw-up, instead of downplaying it and insisting it's all totally cool and normal. You got lucky once, don't be confident you'll get lucky a second time.
And all of this goes triple if you once won an election by campaigning on "Hillary Clinton illegally stored classified information on a private email server, and unlike her, we are going to obey the law and punish people who fail to treat classified intelligence with respect."
Yes, they have air defenses. I don't know the details that really matter for estimating its effectiveness - proficiency, placement, exact types, etc. - but I do know that they've been ineffective at responding to any previous attacks and that the military judged the risk as acceptable.
Does that mean that this leak, or a similar one, couldn't have led to a shoot-down that would not otherwise occur? Of course not. I never claimed invulnerability and additional information given to your opponent increases risk. But let's say that on a 9 point scale the risk of a shootdown was previously a 2 and this info, if leaked, would bump it to a 4. This my genuine, necessarily widely uncertain, assessment of the risks. To me that seems like an acceptable risk zone for a risky activity - and bombing someone who does not want to be bombed will always have some amount of risk.
Someone with a lower risk threshold could reasonably note that on a 9 point scale that means we've moved from the Low trio to Medium. They would then rightly perceive the risk of the Signal conversation as more serious.
> I mean, that seems like a pretty important risk!
It is, most definitely. No one is suggesting it's good if he was tipped off, not being able to do the thing you wanted to do is a bad thing.
It's one risk that exists in a complex stew of other risks in other domains, each with their own uncertainties and plausible paths to disaster. There are other risks that increase when there's less communication in an organization. My (not infinite) preference is for trade-offs in favor of more communication even up to significant risks in other areas.
> If you give him advance warning and he leaves the building before you bomb it, you've just killed 50 people for no gain. (You've also given away that you have people tracking his location, which could have repercussions down the line.)
There has been intense selection pressure on Islamic militant groups over the past two decades. The Houthis have survived through significant instability and conflict. These airstrikes are not a desperate, must-happen-now deathblow to the enemy. Whether this guy was killed on any given day doesn't matter - there was no sense of urgency in the Signal chat, delay was clearly acceptable.
So if the mission had failed the net effect would be the same world as before. The Houthis, as active combatants aware of US and allied information gathering capabilities and tactics, are aware that we can track the location of individuals closely enough to target them.
It's also not unusual for a targeted airstrike mission to fail. Much fuel has been burned for no gain in the past, much fuel will be burned for no gain in the future. The risk is all still within normal operational ranges. Hard to get worked up.
> That means punishing the people responsible for the screw-up...
Sure, no objection, getting caught is getting caught.
> And all of this goes triple if you once won an election by campaigning...
Everyone's level of acceptance for hypocrisy varies, and I was obviously not that worried about Hillary's emails, but this also seems within the usual unavoidable grandstanding in a partisan system.
I feel like you could apply this logic to any sort of risky activity, and it would be equally wrong for all of them.
"Not wearing a seat belt is just one risk in the complex stew of risks that is highway driving, and if you're otherwise driving safely, then it won't come into play in the first place, so it really only raises your risk to like a 4 out of 10." Sure, but your car has a seat belt, and you could be wearing it, and then there would be one less risk in that complex stew.
When you're talking about a systemic issue (these signal chats are apparently routine), then it doesn't make sense to say "well, it was only a small risk in a safe situation," because you're going to be constantly rolling those dice for as long as the systemic issue exists. Eventually they're going to roll them on an operation where a bad guy is listening in.
>Whether this guy was killed on any given day doesn't matter - there was no sense of urgency in the Signal chat, delay was clearly acceptable.
It sure matters to the people in the building we just flattened! The downside to failing this mission was not "the target survives a while longer," it's "we blow up a building full of innocent people and don't even have a military success to justify it with."
>Sure, no objection, getting caught is getting caught.
If you agree, then you should probably downgrade your assessment of this administration's professionalism, because in the day since my last post, they've doubled down on claiming that they did nothing wrong and that the leaks weren't classified.
> Sure, but your car has a seat belt, and you could be wearing it, and then there would be one less risk in that complex stew.
This is plainly true and if there were no tradeoffs then it would obviously be preferable that all communication happen in strict accordance with applicable laws and guidelines. There are, however, tradeoffs and the ideal of perfect compliance is not met at any organization.
> When you're talking about a systemic issue...
You are correct that this was not a one-off. But a) we can only analyze the risk of the situation we know about, and b) I think I said that I was comfortable with conversations of even higher levels of risk. You are also correct that eventually information will leak from less secured channels that would not have from more secured channels. It did in this case, it has in worse ways in the past, and will do so in the future.
The point is that this risk is acceptable compared to the other risks that will increase by having an organization with a lower flow of information among its principals. Not to an infinite level - nothing holds true as you venture ever further into the tails - but nothing happens in a vacuum and you equally cannot move a system to be more secure in one aspect without increasing risk elsewhere.
> It sure matters to the people in the building we just flattened!
As a pedantic point I doubt very much that any civilian killed as collateral damage in an airstrike has ever felt comfort seeing the intended target killed first.
There's always a possibility in any targeted strike that the target(s) will survive: bad intel, dumb luck, unknown escape tunnels, whatever. Meaning that while it's a Bad Outcome and would obviously not be the desired outcome it's well within the range of possible outcomes. It's not an extraordinary risk. You may have a different risk perspective and say that anything that increases the possibility of that Bad Outcome, like the Signal conversation did in some unknowable amount, is intolerable. I would disagree but this is a matter of preference.
Correct me if I'm assuming incorrectly here, but it seems like you might at least potentially support the current administration. If that's correct, were the promises of increased government transparency made during the campaign and subsequently something that you personally found to be important?
No, I didn't vote for this administration and I'm unaware of their campaign promises around transparency.
Not making any claims either way about how well they are / intend to live up to those promises, but even a highly transparent government will have violations.
Absolutely, although I'd hope that a government honestly striving for transparency (and who has made an "unaccountable deepstate" the primary bogeyman) wouldn't be so nakedly and obviously trying to shift blame and avoid responsibility for those violations.
We're getting close to June 1, 2025. Which is the deadline of Scott's AI image generator bet.
I know Scott already said he won[1], but I remember it being contentious at the time.
OpenAI just released a new image generation model. It seems to be really good. See this[2] reddit thread.
Anyone out here with a subscription willing to generate images from those prompts again? Just to check out what it looks like given the current state-of-the-art.
The only other thing I tried to get it to generate in multiple ways, it also failed at. It involved an axe hitting into the head of a cartoon zombie. With many attempts, the axe never turned the right angle, and it struggled to analyze the issue with the picture correctly. It blocks me from sharing the chat, perhaps because of gore ("sharing deactivated by moderation")
Interesting - the key was actually solved in other attempts (maybe you can see them in the chat too)
I think it just failed because the image isn’t a stained glass window. It’s in the optics of a stained glass window, and has one in the background. But it’s not actually a window depicting the woman with everything else
> Try again, this time make sure the whole image is actually a stained glass picture, not just in the general optics of it
And the image generated after.
> I think it just failed because the image isn’t a stained glass window
Maybe this is a prompt/ambiguity thing? I'd interpret the image as a "stained glass picture", even though it's not techincally a "picture of a stained glass window".
I think it's pretty good. But it does have a bit of "picture in style of stained glass" more than actual stained glass.
I tried telling it to show the walls and change perpective, then it's better. But it forgot the key. I think the context window started getting saturated
Nathaniel Johnson, Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Treasury told an OMG journalist that 23andMe has been sharing data with "pharmaceutical companies," including "the Ministry of Defense of Russia."
"There's a clause in their contract that basically says, 'we can give your information to our shareholders.'"
Trump seems determined to destroy the US dollar in various ways. The Mar a Lago Accord plans to turn outstanding 30-year US bonds into 100-year bonds by force. Trump also wants to force other nations to devalue the US dollar. Both of these ideas are plans to default on US debt, which would send interest rates skyrocketing and the economy to the moon in a reflection pond.
Those crazy Trump ideas won't likely come to pass directly, but his determination to permanently cripple the US economy one way or another seems to have a decent chance of happening. (Why does Trump want this? Because he's fucking insane, as he has always been.)
My question is what happens after Trump has defaulted on the federal debt, through one means or another, and permanently collapsed the dollar?
The US still has the best economy in the world for now, mostly led by technology companies located in California and Texas. Do California and Texas secede from the USA like in the recent movie from a couple years ago? Do the leading software and AI companies relocate? If so, where? (As in, outside the USA.)
This is a hypothetical, of course, and the answers I'm most interested in are to the question: Where? If US tech decides it must relocate.
Or would US tech companies simply benefit long-term from the collapse of the US economy and the dollar? (I don't think they would because the political pressure to tax them heavily would be high. But what if they controlled the strings of government?)
To be fair to the viewpoint, I think the point is to devalue the dollar relative to the average foreign currency, rather than on an absolute basis. The idea is that it makes exports and domestic consumption of domestic goods more practical and imports and outsourcing less practical, as well as attracting fewer immigrants and guest workers because remissions/savings wouldn't be worth as much back home. Basically turning the US into a BRICS country economically. As stated so far it might actually work. But the ultimate objective is to have a broad and prosperous native middle class and reduce poverty and the hollowing out of suburbs and small towns, which from the BRICS analogy seems unlikely to follow.
I think the only simple model that makes sense is that prices in real terms in the long term aren't affected by currency fluctuations (barring hyperinflation – that has real economic effects). That would lead one to disbelieve all of those effects.
Reducing US productivity to BRICS level would imply a reduction in output by about a factor of five. That's considerably more than even Germany's economy shrank as a result of WW2. Anyone who correctly predicted such an extreme event could get insanely wealthy.
"The US still has the best economy in the world for now, mostly led by technology companies located in California and Texas. Do California and Texas secede from the USA like in the recent movie from a couple years ago? Do the leading software and AI companies relocate? If so, where? (As in, outside the USA.) "
Well, I don't really expect this to *stay* true. I think having the best tech companies in the world is downstream of the U.S. being a world hub for science, and I don't see that lasting. The administration has already shown so much hostility to all things academic and most things foreign that it's hard to imagine the worldwide scientific community will be able to maintain the same relationship with the U.S., even after this administration leaves power.
Granted, being "downstream" means it might take quite a while for the full effects to be felt. It's very possible that U.S. tech dominance will persist on inertia for quite a while, even if other places are overtaking it. But bad economic policy could hasten the process considerably.
I dont think software companies (which, as much as I dont like it, is mostly what tech means) are especially dependent on science, unless youre counting path dependence from chip manufacturing. Google arguably was with pagerank, but that still seems more like "early in computer manufacture/adoption" than "top computer science". Frankly, science doesnt explain the massive US/EU imbalance in tech. Compare pharma for how I would expect a science-dependent industry to look.
The "Accord" is a trial balloon floated by several of Trump's advisors. So far at least, there is no indication that he plans to do any of it.
The only 30-year bonds affected would be those held by foreign central bankers, who would be strong-armed into swapping them for 100-year bonds on really bad terms. Technically debt forgiveness rather than default. Devaluation has never been regarded as default, though bond markets dislike it for many of the same reasons. The only new wrinkle here is the apparent intent to bring it about by bullying other nations into deflating their currencies, rather than the more usual course of inflating our own. Not an effort that seems likely to succeed.
Serious question: if Biden floated this plan - would you have still describe it in such neutral terms? Like, nothing to see here, just a trial balloon?
And by the way bond "devaluation" is absolutely a default. A bond default occurs when an issuer fails to meet its contractual obligations to bondholders. These obligations typically include timely payment of interest (coupon payments) and the return of principal at maturity.
"Devaluation" refers, as usual, to *currency* devaluation-- which, again, has never been regarded as a default on bonds, even back in the days of fixed exchange rates.
As for your "serious question"... well, I'd hate to see what your frivolous questions look like.
Yes, but with another question: Suppose I admit that in this situation you've invented I would have totally lost my shit about Biden. Should my blatant hypothecrisy cause everyone to update their opinions of Trump-- a man who, whatever his other faults, is at least not me?
Well, yes? If the same actions cause a meltdown when taken by Biden but are a "trial balloon" under Trump, the update is to move Trump's assessment closer to Biden's? Like it's really bad? something in the middle between an apocalypse and a nothingburger.
In this "trial balloon", though, general bondholders would be facing "devaluation" but central bankers would be facing something more like "default"--they fail to receive the principal they were promised at the end of 30 years, and they only get the choice of getting it at the end of 100 years (supposedly, from an entity that already defaulted once) or just holding a bag.
He likely either has formed a view of the US economy as being as described in this article (https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/you-voted-for-this), or is influenced by people who do. Inflating the US dollar funds his political enemies who tried to throw him in jail. So, to hurt his enemies, he is looking for any way to force the US dollar to deflate.
I think that model vastly underestimates the material benefits of just simply living in a world where wars are relatively rare and international trade is common.
It was once the case that the US was the most prosperous country in the world, and got most of its revenue from lump sum taxes and tariffs, and wars occurred regularly overseas.
You may be surprised to learn that the economic basis of the U.S. during that period was actually *substantially* different than it is today. In the 19th century any significant degree of industrialization put you ahead of the pack. In the 21st century a country whose economic basis is primarily agriculture and bulk manufacturing is certainly *not* going to be a world economic leader.
It may also be worth realizing that warfare is really rather different today than it was 150-200 years ago. A rather large fraction of the U.S. population learned why "overseas wars are no concern of ours" doesn't actually constitute a robust security policy for the modern world all the way back in 1941. Strangely, neither the importance of global trade nor the ability of militaries to project force over long distances has actually *declined* in the last 75 years, rendering that lesson still rather important.
I'm honestly confused as to what this statement is attempting to communicate.
Do you mean to say that even after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. never had its core territories attacked or seriously threatened by belligerents in the war? If so then yes, that's largely true, but it's pretty clearly true *because* the U.S. chose to respond to Pearl Harbor by getting involved in an overseas war, and doing so fairly aggressively.
It *might* have been possible for the U.S. to fight only Japan and stay out of the European war and maintain a similar level of security in its core territories. But clearly U.S. maintaining security required *at the very least* a war with Japan. Even if one imagines going back in time and so radically altering the psychology of both the leadership and the whole nation so as to allow "sue for peace" to be a viable response to Pearl Harbor, the result wouldn't be a more secure U.S. Rather, it would be an emboldened Japan, expanding faster and farther into the Pacific, and expecting it could make whatever demands it wanted of the U.S. as part of the process.
"In the 21st century a country whose economic basis is primarily agriculture and bulk manufacturing is certainly *not* going to be a world economic leader."
Someone should let China know this, so they can step down as one of the world's premier economies.
"A rather large fraction of the U.S. population learned why "overseas wars are no concern of ours" doesn't actually constitute a robust security policy for the modern world all the way back in 1941."
Japan started a war that wasn't overseas, so they lost it. If no one wants to start another war with Hawaii, the people of the US are happy to leave things as they are. Wars are expensive.
"Someone should let China know this, so they can step down as one of the world's premier economies. "
Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating my point. China has something less than 1/6th the GDP-per-capita of the U.S. "The U.S. would be better if everyone in it was 85% poorer" is not a political stance that's going to win you many friends.
"Japan started a war that wasn't overseas,"
Leaving aside quibbles about the definition of "overseas," this misses the point rather badly. The war didn't START in 1941. It had been going on for several years already and the U.S. was fairly determined to stay out of it. And then they discovered they couldn't. For the second time in two decades, as it happens.
The moral of the story is not "the U.S. should start more foreign wars," mind you. Rather it's "an unstable world is a world in which the U.S. is more likely to find itself at war." The condition of the world in which "wars regularly occur overseas" is also the condition of the world in which the U.S. was more likely to be drawn into conflicts against its will, and drawn in at points where being involved is exceptionally expensive.
Now personally, I'd much rather see a LESS interventionist and militaristic U.S. than has existed for the past 80 years: less of a brash cowboy diplomat and more of a powerful-but-restrained coalition member. But there's still a great big difference between *that* and returning to the utter fantasy that isolation = security. It most certainly doesn't, not in the modern world.
The absolute level of prosperity was much lower than today though. If you want to go back to a 19th-Century standard of living, be my guest, but leave me out of it.
If this word salad of cluelessness (start here: Federal Reserve does not "print money", anything that flows from that premise is garbage) is taken seriously by anyone in any power position in this clown administration, God help us all.
The Federal Reserve does not literally print money. They instead buy and guarantee securities so banks can loan out more money. This still has inflationary pressure that benefits certain parties over others, who end up holding the bag.
Banks’ loan volumes are not affected in any way by this. They are driven entirely by demand. As far as reserves go, treasuries, bills, notes, are all money. Exchanging treasury bills for… other treasury bills changes nothing.
As evidenced by two decades of QE failing to move the inflation needle, despite a loud chorus of Austrian “economists” loudly predicting imminent hyperinflation and dollar demise. Only once Congress started shoving out COVID stimulus inflation reared its ugly head.
Like I said, that article starts with garbage in, and predictably dishes garbage out.
We do not have hyperinflation. Instead, we have a bunch of genius economists who believe in MMT who tell us that we have a perfectly reasonable level of inflation that should be kept indefinitely. We also have this mysterious thing called 'cost disease' where everything seems to keep getting more expensive while also getting shittier, and interest payments on Social Security keep going up, up, and up.
The Fed still holds over $2T worth of mortgage backed securities, which it began to buy after the 2008 debacle. This does effectively increase the price (or reduce the going interest rate) on such securities, which translates to lower mortgage rates and, presumably, increased volume.
Whether this failed to move the inflation needle is not obvious. We don't have the other timeline to view. You can of course weakman the position by pointing to various hard money muppets who are continually predicting hyperinflation, but 'we didn't get hyperinflation' is not the same as 'this wasn't inflationary at all'. I think a strong argument can be made that we *do* have more inflation than we would have seen if the Fed had sat on its hands and let the 2008 crisis unfold with no intervention at all. Whether this inflation is worse than the result of such a catastrophe is, of course, a different question.
The price of mortgage securities is affected mostly by long-term interest rates and probability of default. Having the Fed hold them vs. a bank holding them (come on, someone has to hold them, right?) makes no difference.
"I think a strong argument can be made that we *do* have more inflation than we would have seen"
It can? I don't think so but would love to see one.
It’s quite difficult for a company to move, so I would not expect a rapid exodus. A lot depends on whether a significant portion of your work force would be willing to move, and whether the destination country would allow them to immigrate. It helps if people in the destination country speak English, which suggests Canada, the UK, or Australia. I think that English is pretty widely understood in Switzerland because there is not a single national language.
Don't U.S. tech companies employ a pretty large proportion of non-U.S.-born workers anyway? Not saying it's necessarily going to be *easy* for them to move, but probably *easier* since they're already sourcing talent from all over the globe.
There are now two known instances in which the people Trump's ICE kidnapped and sent to an El Salvador torture prison with no charges or trial, alleging membership in the drug gang Tren de Aragua, seem to just be a soccer fan or player with a soccer tattoo: the refugee E.M., and the soccer player Reyes Barrios.[1] In both cases it was a soccer ball with a crown on it. This seems to be extremely popular and normal iconography; find as many examples as you like on Google Images. Even a bunch of soccer teams have a crown in their logo.[2]
It seems increasingly likely that ICE just happened to once see a Venezualan gang member or gang members, who also happened to like the most popular sport in the world and also had a popular soccer tattoo; and now they're kidnapping all tattooed Venezuelan soccer fans they can.
Charity would have me attribute this to incompetence instead of malice. But I won't.
Didn't watch the video, but I'd think growing up in urban areas with leaded gas or near coal plants in the 70s could be a cause. Since nearly everyone used to smoke, smoking may have masked lung cancer from other causes for several decades.
The video is misleadingly oversimplifying. There are differences in distributions of type of cancer between smokers and nonsmokers, but nonsmokers are not getting types of cancer that smokers don't get. The difference is in the other direction, with smokers seeing a lot more variety in type of lung cancer than nonsmokers. The most common subtype is the same in both categories, adenocarcinoma, which is 65% of lung cancer in smokers and 93% of lung cancer in nonsmokers. There are papers with titles like "Never-smoking nonsmall cell lung cancer as a separate entity", but they seem to be talking more about epidemiology and disease progression than about a fundamental physical difference in the type of cancer.
The big risk factors for nonsmokers are secondhand smoke, other air pollutants, radon, genetic and hormonal factors, and lung damage from other diseases.
Masking of a base rate of not-caused-by-smoking lung cancer by high rates of smoking in the general population seems fairly plausible to me. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were a secondary factor of indoor air quality (especially with regards to radon) getting worse as houses and commercial buildings have increasingly been optimized for energy efficiency.
Your goal is to make the U.S. as great as possible.
1) You may acquire a part of Mexico or Canada for the U.S. so long as you surrender a current part of the U.S. that is about as big.
2) The parts you trade must be as compact and contiguous as possible, so you can't do something like trade every U.S. county whose per capita GDP is very low.
Trade Alaska for Alberta and British Columbia, for starters. Improves contiguity of both nations. I think by square miles we could also get Nova Scotia in the deal, though this is less important. Alaska, in general, is large and thinly populated enough to be an obvious 'sell' in this game, unless you have very strong opinions about maintaining US claims to the polar region. Alberta also produces more oil than Alaska, and has a bunch of uranium to boot...
Gaining Baja would be nice; you could probably make the square mileage add up by giving Mexico West Texas (west of Odessa) and moving the southern borders of NM and AZ north by a hundred miles, or a little less.
Leaving aside boringly-lopsided trades (like Vancouver for a random patch of Alaska) or outgroup bashing, my agenda would be to think about places which are currently underdeveloped due to a lack of links with their own country, which might be better off on the other side of the border.
Baja California is top of the list. As part of Mexico it's a weird appendage separated by a thin strip of desert from everywhere that matters, but as part of the US it would be an extension of the richest and most powerful portion of the country. In exchange, Mexico could perhaps have everything south of San Antonio, which gives them some decent agricultural land and some useful extra coastline.
On the other end, I'd be looking at the Maritime Provinces. Now, Maine itself is pretty underdeveloped too, but it's all a lot closer to Boston and even New York than it is to Toronto, so I'd just run a fast train line from Boston to Halifax and see what happens. In exchange, give them Michigan for greater Great Lakes dominance. If that's not enough, offer them Hawaii too, because if there's one thing that Canada definitely needs more of it's warm weather.
I have a feeling you're not gonna pawn Detroit and Flint off on Canada so easily; you'll probably have to throw in part of Minnesota, too, at the very least.
Detroit is a major economic center and a reasonably prosperous metropolitan area- it's just the *city itself* that has a ton of dysfunction (which may have bottomed out, or not).
I think Canada would be happy to have them, though it might be destabilizing to throw off the current Anglo vs. Franco balance (Michigan would increase the population of Canada by like 28% or so).
1) It effectively lengthens the U.S.-Mexico border, which will make illegal immigration worse. Open Google Maps and use the "Measure Distance" function. The distance between San Diego and Yuma is 140 miles. The distance from Yuma to Cabo San Lucas is 740 miles. That means you'd be lengthening the border by 600 miles, with the new border being in the middle of the Gulf of California, which is so narrow that little boats full of people could easily cross it.
2) Only the northern 1/3 of Baja California is desirable. Look at the Koppen Climate Map of the region and you'll see the bottom 2/3 is very hot, lifeless desert.
Trade Canada for the southwestern part of British Columbia (the City of Vancouver, its suburbs, and Vancouver Island), the Canadian portion of the Saint Lawrence watershed (includes Toronto, Ontario, Montreal, and Quebec), and the Maritime Provinces. Respective are about 14k square miles, 300k square miles (total basin is about 500k, minus about 100k each for the US part of the watershed and the surface area of the lakes themselves), and 130k square miles. Total about 450k square miles. All of this is contiguous with the US, and much of it is situated so that the transfer would actually reduce border gore.
In return, offer the northern 3/4 of Alaska, most of which appears to be very sparsely inhabited. I'm tempted to keep the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, on the North Slope, and doing so would probably meet the letter of the challenge as the parts actually being traded are still compact and contiguous without it, but keeping the oil field would leave an ugly exclave that probably violates the spirit of the rules. I'm having trouble finding out the overall gross profits of the field, but it looks like it's probably somewhere around $8B/year in revenue (multiplying production by wholesale oil prices), of which the state's cut is somewhere around $2.5B. But even just looking at overall revenue, $8B/year is a minuscule fraction of the GDP of the parts of Canada the US would be getting in trade (I'm guesstimating something like 75% of Canada's US$2.1 trillion GDP).
I would trade the eastern half of Alaska for Alberta and for the peninsular portion of Ontario that looks like a dagger pointed at the heart of Ohio. Everything between Windsor and Ottawa would become American. Then, charge heavy tolls on any Canadian vehicles, trains or products moving between British Columbia and the remainder of eastern Canada.
Throwing off the English-French language balance in Canada through this land trade, subtracting Canada's most productive areas, and economically isolating British Columbia would leave rump Canada so weakened that it would eventually break up, and most or even all of the pieces would be absorbed by the U.S., so we'd get the eastern half of Alaska back in the end.
As for Mexico, we'd probably benefit from trading the southern strips of Arizona and New Mexico for the northern portion of Baja California. Look at the southern border of New Mexico and note how it's not a straight, horizontal line--it's like a three-step staircase. Change the border to a two-step staircase by drawing a horizontal line between El Paso and the Papago Farms and giving Mexico everything south of that. Take an equal amount of land from Baja California and from Sonora state so that Arizona gets a short coastline on the Gulf of California and California annexes everything down to about the city of Ensenada.
Easy. Trade the swath of red states from Texas to Florida for an equally sized chunk of Canada that includes Toronto and. Montreal. The resulting country would hopefully restore the historic role of the US as the world leader in feeding starving children and resetting refugees*, which is what great countries do.
Will europe be woke longer then america or will it collaspe harder? (assuming woke came from america and was spread by usaid/hollywood/silicone valley; and the white guilt over slavery arguments may just not effect countries not part of the slave trade)
I think it never got nearly as big in Europe in the first place. Only in certain areas.
And advocating for Islam is a much more unpopular thing to do in Europe, because we have far more Muslim immigrants (with all the problems they bring). You can see this in voter %'s, majority of parties in Western Europe (since in Eastern Europe wokeness was even less pronounced) are leaning right wing and even left wing parties are moving towards an anti immigration stance.
There are of course witch burning cultures and people inclined to that level of conformity; but once the puritans were convinced god wasnt real(harvard was founded by puritans) they moved on to different conformity's and in theory the years where there wasn't a witch burning may have clues about how to prevent them. But I think this specific version is gone, its getting easier to be wildly "inflammatory"(ask me how I know), it will eat itself sure but Im not sure it can ever escape outside "bluesky"/colleges again and there maybe attempts to just stop the escalation to deaths(swattings in this era, I think thats the only mechanism of note) once death is off the table shouldnt it just collapse as voices without fear can just ask "Soooo why is this peoples dead? Why did you say [horribly awful thing] for someone saying [an attempt to be neutral]?"
Decline can go on for a quite a while, going by Latin American countries. The question is how many more Muslims can European countries import before they start forming their own parties and taking over governments?
They have formed their own parties already. And for example in Germany, majority of the vote is now pretty anti immigration (from Africa and Middle East especially). Same with Netherlands, France, Austria, Italy. It has yet to translate into action though, as it would require a EU wide effort to actually curb immigration effectively.
I would expect some reaction before that point; its not like theres isnt any right wing in Europe or that Europe has the censorship capabilitys of china. It will likely be to little to late and make europe a backwater in the next era but why would all of europe quietly go into that good night, at least 1% wont?
Some countries might pull it off. The liberal left seems too deeply entrenched in the political systems in the UK and France that I don't see anything happening there.
The ira and isis are post-state actors; while I have doubts about this timetable, nation states may stop mattering. Given the choice of sharia or the ira I can easily imagine my choice.
I *highly doubt* it will come to that, there are dozens of possiblies before that point(include violent ones) and there are in fact right wing protests in europe; but I dont see how all of europe turns muslim.
---
Power comes from violence, and young males are becoming increasingly right wing while the left eat itself and doesnt want to have children, or farms or guns. This era will end, the question is how; lets cross our fingers for farmers protests but be prepared for other options.
I think it was woke of germany to collaspe its birthrate, disarm, censor the right wing party, dismantle its nuclear power plants (for "green" energy that never came) etc.
Im unsure if Hungary ever got infected with woke isnt that one of the "strong men who is EVIL" for doing things like paying people to have children. Post soviets seem to tolerate wokeness out of fear of russia.
By europe I mostly mean the eu bureaucrats; if the eu disolves then europe is a big place and my american mind can no longer keep track of the important details of "cheese made 1 mirco-baguettes to far east is no longer the right cheese because of the war of 1678, in memory of le timmy". If the various sub-cultures reassert themselves then nesserily they wont be cookie cutter citizens of the world who are very sorry for being white.
"I think it was woke of Germany to collaspe its birthrate, disarm, censor the right wing party, dismantle its nuclear power plants (for "green" energy that never came) etc."
These things are liberal and arguably leftist, but they are not "woke" in any remotely common sense of the word, cf. e.g. Freddie DeBoer (https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means). They do not involve decentralized language policing, shaming, and purity spirals, they do not champion oppressed groups and castigate "privilege", etc, etc, etc. They're just bog-standard left-wing political positions, all of which long predate "wokeness", all of which are held by a great many people who are in no way "woke".
I have long pushed back against the claim that "woke" is just a mindless sneer word of zero informational content, arguing that there is a real concept or closely-coupled set of concepts there that needs to be named so it can be addressed, Please don't use "woke" as a mindless sneer word.
My European news recently has been wrong think police vists; recently I emailed a tip line for the german think tank that made the rounds for their interview on 60 minutes intending to waste their time(they ignored me ;__; but I have so many offensive meme to share) while there are exceptions of left wing people not engaging in censorship or shaming, I would never think it breaks across geographic lines, thats a individual moral test.
> arguing that there is a real concept or closely-coupled set of concepts there that needs to be named so it can be addressed,
We'll see what happens with 4 years of trump and the lefts low engery and usaid funding cuts causing chaos; but isnt it possible we reached "peak-woke"
If the 2028 democrats kick out exactly who I think is "woke-est"(which may just well happen, I think newsoms podcast is going well for him right?) wouldnt the issues be addressed if in a destructive manner?
“ Im unsure if Hungary ever got infected with woke isnt that one of the "strong men who is EVIL" for doing things like paying people to have children.”
This is a bad faith representation of why people characterize Orban as an authoritarian and you know it as well as I do. Do better.
It’s not argumentation because you haven’t offered an argument.
“People think Orban is bad because he pays people to have kids” isn’t an argument that needs refuting. You don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, and no one reading this thread does either. It’s posted entirely in bad faith.
ruralfp may be a bit condescending with the "do better" but you definitely do not meet the criteria of charitable/necessary/kind ... also, it is note very effective either as it is more likely to end up in a typical internet shouting match rather than a civil SSC discussion (I know this is ACX but it would be nice to strive for those standards still). You can communicate your point of view just as efficiently without all the inflammatory rhetoric.
Is this a selective call for rigor? Or do you feel my comment is significantly worse?
> charitable/necessary/kind
I feel that was an attempt at shaming, so I used a throw away "I statement" from non-violent communication; this is *beyond* what I feel my ethical requirement are.
Even if its Utopian(I will just break its rules, and know I have) I prefer non-violent communications "I" vs "you" statements as the basis of debate ethics over this charitable/necessary thing. What an individual feels should be a blunt fact and the conversation can move forward from there, even if you may despise what was said. If you managed to convince neo nazis to say "I feel unsafe around black poeple" rather then stats neither you or them care about in a stupid fight over who spams the most links, it may not be a "fun" conversation, but I believe it be more productive then 99% of conversations on the internet.
The "nessery" requirement seems to just invite rules lawyering and censorship I have little care for it.
"I think it was woke of germany to collaspe its birthrate, disarm, censor the right wing party, dismantle its nuclear power plants (for "green" energy that never came) etc."
so the word woke has truly lost all meaning it seems
As John Schilling stated, it's not just a right wing pejorative term. It has a specific meaning, and you're doing the same thing I see a lot of other sloppy writers do when they stretch and play loose with words. It makes it damned hard to figure out what you really mean, what you don't actually mean, invites misinterpretation, and generally wastes everyone's time.
A cousin of mine once chastised one of her own kids for doing the same thing. "You write like a cave painting!" Don't do that.
In Scott’s post, above, he mentions Tabula Bio. Is Tabula Bio a particular project, a research setting, a company or what? If it’s not a company, is it affiliated with one? Asking because I know someone who’s very interested in this kind of thing who is job hunting. Where should he go to see whether they are hiring?
My friend has a Ph.D. in mathematical finance and knows a lot about computers. He also keeps close track of AI progress. He's been working as a computer programmer for the past few years.
We recently talked about how AI will impact his career. He uses AI tools to assist with programming, and he described it as a powerful sort of "autocomplete," and he said it was surprisingly accurate predicting what kind of code he was about to write. He also said it's bug-finding capabilities were excellent.
Because AI makes coding faster and easier, he said it will destroy human programming jobs because the demand for new computer applications and websites isn't infinitely elastic--the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps. He also predicted his job would be fully automated in five years and that he'd have to return to work as a math teacher, which was what he did as a T.A. during his Ph.D. studies. He thinks there will still be a need in 2030 for human-to-human instruction in college math courses.
Do those of you with his same education and/or career field agree with his insights?
When a university advertises a tenure track (US) or permanent (Europe) lecturing job in STEM, they get hundreds of applicants. It's *tough* to land those jobs, the supply and demand is likely to be worse than it is in programming for some time. There are plenty of poorly paid semester-by-semester jobs, but that's going to be a step down from programming, both in pay and job quality. I know because I've got a PhD in mathematics, and am back on job market currently.
AI is really bad news for universities - it seems to me that one of the few tasks that AI can do better than humans is third level assessment. I've heard plenty of colleagues tell me about their AI-proof assessment - I enjoy showing them how to prompt the AI to answer it. My favourite is 'Write in the style of an 18 year old from (insert city), with B1 level proficiency in (language). Insert some errors that a first year student would be likely to make.' Universities are ill-prepared to deal with it.
I'm applying for public sector jobs - it's sad to turn away from 10 years of teaching and research, but between the never-ending funding crisis, the disposability of staff and the coming AI-storm, it's a good time to get out.
Thank you everyone for the brilliant replies. I'll distill them as best I can through my mind the next time I talk to my friend. Hopefully it will cheer him up, though I think it's likelier he will dismiss them.
Just a lowly engineer by education, not a mathematician and not with any PhD (although I definitely fantasize about it). Always wanted to be a mathematician actually, except there is not enough money in it where I live, so SWE it is.
No, AI is not going to replace human programmers. Not today. Not next year. Not in 2030. Not in 2040. Maybe Juniors and adjacent positions in 2050. Perhaps mid-to-senior programmers in 2100, if we don't Strangelove ourselves.
Let's point to a bunch of empirical data points first: "AI Software Engineers" like Devin [1] and Artisan [2]. Sleek graphics, futuristic scenarios, breathless promises (Artisan: Computers don't get tired! Your hired flesh-and-bone sacks in your engineering floor suck! Replace them now!). But in practice, they're not autonomous, they're not engineers, and they get stuck on pretty trivial things, and by "pretty trivial" I mean spending days in a live lock loop trying to accomplish something without recognizing that it has been days without progress. Honest review [3] after honest review [4] show: LLM SWE is simply not there yet. It's just not there. You can't force it to be there by the sheer force of doomerism and Silicon Valley tech-broism.
It will be there when it gets there, we **know** that human cognition is not special, one moment there is an unremarkable and purely biochemical slop like sperm and eggs, the next moment it's a brain full of Cogito Ergo Sums and differential equations and Universal Grammar. Absent Gods and Jinns, that must mean human cognition is fully contained in the biochemical soup that men produce by rubbing themselves when they get bored and women produce automatically each month. Artificial Cognition/Intelligence/Sentience/Whatever will be there, eventually. You just have to be patient.
I have spewed walls of text before on Open Thread 371 (ctrl-F my username or "I'm not convinced LLMs ") on why LLMs are not ready yet to replace human engineers. To avoid repeating myself, I will focus on one key point from the major 4 points I listed there: Memory. LLMs have a queer concept of what "Learning" is, their "Learning" is done exactly once at the start of their lifetime, and then never again*. This is not how Software Engineering works, this is not how any self-respecting domain works, really. Trained LLMs are always in the "incremental science" mode of Thomas Kuhn, always trying to add one more token, one more little piece that completes the whole and doesn't rock the boat too much, always in the Ptolemaic illusion that the world is fundamentally known and figured out and all you have to do is to keep adding Epicycle after Epicycle to tease out the details.
Then there is the lack of agency. Then there is the lack of self-introspection and meta-cognition, the ability to push back on wrong/contradictory/suboptimal information and suggestion or have any opinions at all, or recognizing dead ends and asking for help. Then there is the extreme inefficiency in power and compute. Then there is the inability to keep track of more than 1 million thing in memory, that's how many Teams meetings and Jira tickets again? **
Over and over again, people tried to add those things via the "user interface" so to speak, that is, without changing the LLM architecture. Just one more system prompt bro, just one more chain of thought methodology bro, just one more <THINK> token bro. We're so close to AGI, we're this close, just one more billion dollars, PLEASE I BEG YOU, I will do anything.
But no AGI. We're closing in on the tenth anniversary of the Transformer architecture now, and still no AGI. No world model. No long-term memory or dynamic weights. No learning data efficiency. The whole worldview is fundamentally limited. It's a genius idea to have general purpose cognition via the extremely special-purpose mechanism of predicting token sequences, it took me completely by surprise when it sank in for the first time. It would have been awesome and elegant if that's what AGI is, but I don't think it is.
Till the next breakthrough, we can still be very excited about all the ways we can still milk LLMs, Adoption Lags Capability, as they say. There is still so much untaped potential, integrating one into your brain (or via wearables) to have an instantly polyglot co-brain in your head. Unparalleled semantic search and auto-summarization. Destroying the Leetcode interview.
* I'm simplifying, I know. There are multiple rounds of training, and all involve changing the weights in one way or another. The key thing is that they all happen exactly once, then the model is frozen and used in inference exactly as-is. Every session it's still exactly as it was at the end of the training, it doesn't learn from sessions. Hell, it doesn't even learn within a single session or "chat", it doesn't absorb things into its weights.
** the point I'm trying to make here is that it can't dynamically decide which information to discard or assign lower priority to and which to center in its thinking, unlike humans, it naively just picks the most recent N tokens and tries to complete them. Whereas you're perfectly capable of discarding all the inane small talk you had with your coworker 2 hours ago and the billboards you saw on the highway on your way to work, the LLM can't, there is a singular "Context" that contains everything it ever saw, and when it fills it starts discarding info in First-In-First-Out manner. If you're thinking of curating and cherry-picking the exact info you will present to the LLM: Congratulation, you are thinking of programming. That's what programming is, transforming and spoon-feeding data and logic to computers in the form they expect.
Well, that depends on the specific junior. I have seen both very good ones, and ones that I would replace by Claude without hesitation even if money wasn't a concern.
> But in practice, they're not autonomous, they're not engineers, and they get stuck on pretty trivial things, and by "pretty trivial" I mean spending days in a live lock loop trying to accomplish something without recognizing that it has been days without progress.
Yeah, you can't replace e.g. a team of three junior developers by an LLM, exactly for these reasons.
However, in a team containing some senior developers and some junior developers, you could probably replace the junior developers by an LLM. Give all the incoming tasks to the LLM -- some of them will be done successfully, the rest will be handled by the seniors. Talking to the LLM also takes time, so keep 1 smartest junior for that; his job will be to give tasks to the LLM, do some sanity checks, nudge to LLM to also write unit tests, etc.
This is basically a "glass half full / half empty" kind of debate. You can't use LLMs as a full replacement for developers. But you can reduce the number of developers to a half, by using LLMs for the things they are good at, and humans for everything else.
Obviously, without junior developers now, there will be no senior developers in the future.
But would *you* hire juniors for *your* company, when your competitors will hire 1 senior with an LLM and achieve greater productivity?
Even before LLMs, my impression was that juniors are relatively overpaid and seniors underpaid. (This may depend on country.) Senior salary is about 2x the junior salary, but I think the difference in productivity is much greater than 2x. This is not just about the speed of coding, but also about choosing the right tool for the job, the number of bugs produced, and most importantly how likely the project will crumble under its own weight.
I know some companies (again, before LLMs) who simply do not hire juniors. The companies that do, I suspect it is one of the following reasons:
1) They are unable to hire enough seniors, for example because the work obviously sucks, so they are happy to accept anyone.
2) They hope that the juniors will be overpaid for a year or two, but then they will gain the experience, and hopefully stay with the company, and hopefully will suck at negotiating higher salary. This may or may not happen; I have seen both outcomes in real life.
3) The company produces the kind of software that requires lots of relatively easy tasks, for example a web application with dozens of dialogs, each of them with dozens of buttons. So it hires a senior developer to do the hard parts, and a few junior developers to do the relatively simple work which is still a lot of typing. -- I expect that this kind of junior job position will go away with LLMs. As soon as the senior developer is able to explain what needs to be done, it will magically be done, no need to hire the juniors.
"But would *you* hire juniors for *your* company, when your competitors will hire 1 senior with an LLM and achieve greater productivity?"
Well, it depends on how much the company is playing the long game, and what business it's in.
Obviously the answer is "no" if you're stuck in Moloch-mode with the competition breathing down your neck. The answer might also be "no" if you lack confidence in your ability to retain your juniors as they start to skill up.
But on the flip side, if you have some slack and you think you've got a reasonably good ability to retain valuable employees, being the company who hires a bunch of juniors and doesn't *solely* rely on the LLM + seniors combo will give you a *huge* advantage in the medium term. All the more so if you can figure out how to work in the LLM in ways that make skilling up the juniors less demanding on the seniors' time.
Depends on what you mean by your friend working as a "computer programmer", If that's literally his job title, he may be in trouble. If you're using it as generic for "he's a software guy and he writes code", he may be OK.
Most "software guys who sometimes write code" are software developers, not programmers. "Programmer" is a fairly specialized job, that involves writing code to specific requirements, often set by a software developer in a large project. And that's a job that AIs may largely (but probably not entirely) take over in the next five years. But the broader task of software development, which includes some degree of writing code to vague and fuzzy requirements, is not likely to fall to AI in that timeframe,
> he said it will destroy human programming jobs because the demand for new computer applications and websites isn't infinitely elastic--the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps.
We already have far surpassed the number of programmers we *need* its all just logistics and wants; yet I look around and can find idiots employed. I would not apply an effeint market hypothesis to software *AT ALL*; in fact its a universally grossly inefficient market, the important people like the guy making ffmpeg isnt getting money while theres dozens of web ui libs that I couldnt tell you a single interesting about many of which are maintained by giant corps.
What will happen is that the economy will become more niche as costs of production come down. This has the potential to massively create demand, as people are willing to pay more for niche products.
So instead of 1 app that serves a million people, you have 100 apps that serve 10000 people in a more specific customized way.
IDK. It seems like for typical web apps this isn't limited by labor productivity but more by network effects--an app that serves 1 million people with an ill-fitting design is more attractive for the marginal user than an app that serves 10000 people with a perfect design, because the 1 million people do unpaid work that benefits the marginal user.
>the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps.
I agree with most of it but not this. Imagine someone saying that about the US economy in 1900: there are only so many things people need, eventually this whole patent business will become passe. As long as computers are an important part of the economy there will be a demand for new software.
In my view (recently retired software engineer, I've used AI a bit to code) it will still be a while before AI can code completely autonomously. My model of this is that AI is a force multiplier: it makes engineers vastly more productive. This will have the short-term impact of reducing employment but increasing wages: 50 person depts will be replaced with 2 or 3 architect-level engineers plus AI tooling. This lowers the capital cost for creating software, which should result in more, smaller companies targeting niche markets. AI hasn't even really begun to penetrate most markets: I expect that there will soon be an AI ecosystem explosion with a groundswell of demand for "help me use AI to reduce my workforce by 50%" or "help me put lawyers out of business," much like there was a rush of "build me a website" in the 90's and "build me an app" in the 2010's. The technology isn't quite mature enough to disrupt most business yet: I'd say it's comparable to where the web was in the mid 90's.
It's hard to know what will happen when AI becomes good enough to operate autonomously, but I have the general attitude that technological innovations always enhance economic activity in the long run. There will certainly be some disruption in the short-term but I think it will be at least a generation before AI is better that AI + human, so I suspect your friend's prediction is overly bleak. I think high-level engineers and those who have a decent ML background are going to see an incredible demand over the next decade. There will almost certainly be a phase when AI is good enough to do most jobs but implementing it for a particular company will be labor-intensive: imagine what GM will be willing to pay the engineer that helps them reduce their labor costs by 50%.
'>the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps.
I agree with most of it but not this. Imagine someone saying that about the US economy in 1900: there are only so many things people need, eventually this whole patent business will become passe. As long as computers are an important part of the economy there will be a demand for new software.'
Let me explain his claim differently: Let's say I run a big company, and I employ 20 computer programmers. Each one of them has made 10 webpages for me and maintains them. They are 100% busy doing those things, and my website has 200 webpages.
One day, my programmers start using a new AI tool that doubles their productivity. That means, for the same amount of time and salary, each one of them can create and constantly maintain 20 webpages. Does that mean I increase my website so it contains 400 webpages?
No. After thinking about my actual business needs and all aspects of the customer experience, I realize that adding an extra 60 webpages would satisfy all of my needs. My company website grows to 260 webpages, I realize I only need 13 computer programmers to make them and maintain them thereafter, so I fire the other seven computer programmers.
In other words, the efficiency gains outpace the demand for new product.
I am also in agreement with Wanda's take. Regarding limiting demand for software, I just don't see it. Through my adult life software invaded everything (often as "firmware", but code in any other name). Just an example off the top of my head: when I started my engineering career, "test engineering" mostly involved dealing with hardware: turning knobs and pushing buttons. Now? Everything is done via code. Test setups, control, result processing, all done in matlab/python/etc.
I work in AI and I mostly agree with Wanda. I'd add one thing on top of what she says. People imagine the modern LLMs as magical black boxes that somehow learn automatically and get better just ... because. And I am not talking about development of new better models, I am talking about the current models "learning".
I constantly meet customers who have expectations for LLMs which are way outside of what they can do. In fact, finding use-cases for LLMs today which really have a good ROI is not that easy.
One example - most office work is sort of tedious, not too complex but needs to be done accurately and diligently. If you have an LLM-based chatbot, you can probably make it fairly accurate when you ask it about your company documents but fairly accurate is often not good enough. You need 99% accuracy, sometimes more. You don't get that today so a lot of tasks either have to be limited in scope significantly (making the AI still useful but a lot less impressive) or they just don't work. It is of no use if you have an "AI coworker" who is super fast and does everyting correctly 90% of the time if you don't know which 90% this is and as a result you have to check up all of its work.
And even to get to fairly accurate you need people to curate your data, set up and fine-tune a lot of things (not really train, that's mostly not done with LLMs outside of Anthropic, OpenAI etc).
Now it is true that coding is actually faster and easier with these tools as coding is a field which is almost ideal for LLMs - you can run tests to see if things worked, try again, occasionally ask for human feedback ... also code is just text, so it is easy to work with and there's ton of it online if a very nice format.
But even so current models don't make engineers that much better. A lot of what programmers do is not actually coding. It is talking to business people, figuring out the best architecture for the given business use-case and current situation, etc.
AI cannot replace a single senior dev right now. It can kind of almost replace very junior devs, which is interesting since to become a senior you really need to first be a junior but what happens if AI does all the junior jobs? I think what will happen is that the non-coding aspects of programming become all the more important even for juniors.
So will you need fewer? I don't think so. Not all programming is webpages, in fact most of it is not. Some things are currently not done because they are seen as just nice to have but not worth the investment. But if you could do them with half or a third of the effort they'd be worth it. It is sort of when better irrigation methods allow you to farm land which otherwise would not have yields that are worth the effort.
Maybe in the long-run programmers will actually be replaced (along with many other professions) by AI. But I don't think we are 5 years away from that. The current technology is still mostly in a state of a solution searching for a problem (when we compare the amount of investment and costs vs current capabilities). It is getting better but the rate at which we see improvements is slowing down. Just making transformer models larger and adding a few tweaks here and there is not going to lead to anything close to senior dev level of capability I think. So it will require some new ideas. Those might come in 2 years, or they might come in 20 years or they might come in 200 years ...
I think they will probably come sooner or later since I don't believe the human brain is somehow unique but you cannot simply assume that past progress automatically translates into future progress when you rely on new ideas. The idea of a perceptron has been around for decades before first practical neural networks. It took some more ideas for it to really start working and it also took improvements in hardware (more ideas) for it to be feasible.
>In other words, the efficiency gains outpace the demand for new product.
To first order, that's true. That's why there will be (already is) a short-term reduction in employment. But the efficiency gains will unlock new economic niches for software and that won't mean creating new webpages. It'll be some qualitatively new product niche, or writing management or optimization software for the AI itself, etc. That's what creative destruction is about. Cloud computing destroyed Sun Microsystems, but there are many more cloud computing jobs now than there ever were Sun employees. I'm a techno-optimist: so long as there's economic activity there will be a demand for people.
Jevon's paradox states that making a resource (like gas) more efficient (by making cars have better mileage) results in greater use of that resource. In this case the resource is engineers and AI makes them more productive - that should result in more of them being used.
Assuming people won't be just learning maths for its own sake or to become maths teachers, he could also do whatever job those students would end up doing in this scenario?
Fair then. I misunderstood the tone, in that case.
It does seem plausible that good teaching would remain in the human camp for longer as it requires a level of "human" connection (and modelling of another's mind) that should give humans enough of an advantage
I’d like to share a speculative idea that emerged while thinking about dark matter, quantum behavior at extremely low temperatures, and the possibility of hidden composite states.
This isn’t a formal theory, but a question built on some plausible steps.
Basic idea:
What if dark matter wasn’t made of new particles, but of pairs of known particles, brought to ultra-low temperatures (~picokelvin), where:
- Most degrees of freedom (motion, vibration, etc.) are frozen,
- Remaining degrees (like spin orientation, quantum oscillation...) are cancelled via a resonant interaction,
- The result is a composite object that:
- Emits nothing,
- Interacts with nothing,
- But still has mass and thus gravitational effect.
Sort of like a quantum black box: totally silent, but real.
---
Why it might be interesting:
These entities could’ve formed during the early cooling phases of the universe.
Once in this “zero-resonance” state, they’d be:
- Stable,
- Invisible,
- Perfectly consistent with gravitational observations of dark matter.
And no need for exotic new particles — just a new configuration of known ones.
Possible lab exploration?
Far-fetched, but:
- Use trapped ions cooled to near-zero,
- Pair them in opposite modes (spin, motion, etc.),
- Apply fine-tuned resonance,
- Watch for total cancellation of detectable activity — while gravitational coupling remains (the hard part!).
So here’s my question(s):
- Could such a state exist in quantum physics as we know it?
- Could it form naturally in the early universe?
- Is there a known name for this kind of mechanism?
- Would it be meaningful to explore further, even just theoretically?
(And for transparency: I refined this with help from ChatGPT-4, but the concept and structure are mine. Happy to rework anything that sounds off!)
Thanks for reading — I’d genuinely love to hear what people think, whether you find it plausible, problematic, or just a fun thought experiment.
I'm not familiar enough with the ideas here to answer coherently, I think. But Humphrey Appleby might. (Physics professor.) Hopefully this comment will serve as a ping.
The main problem to me is that space itself is not that cold. The cosmic microwave background is at 2.7K, so particles would not be able to cool sufficiently for this kind of effect, at least as I understand it from your description. The temperature of space has also been cooling over time, so that would introduce another varying effect over time we should have detected if this was the case.
The actual particles that make up the interstellar medium (ISM) are even hotter than that, often 6000K or more, hotter than the surface of the Sun. There are just so few of them that their black body radiation represents considerably less energy than the CMB. In denser regions like interstellar clouds where there are enough particles to dominate the energy of the CMB, the temperature is much lower (but still hotter than CMB), something like 10-100K
That said, I think you're correct that the CMB provides a practical long-term floor for how cold something in the interstellar medium can get. I can imagine a near-zero-energy particle avoiding collisions with high-energy ISM particles for a very long time (although I'm nowhere near prepared to try to do the math to see how long), but CMB seems like it would warm those particles up extremely quickly on a cosmological time scale.
And even ignoring CMB, this model would predict that "dark matter" would be more prevalent away from galaxies than within them, as stars emit their own radiation that also acts to warm up the ISM. This is the opposite of what is observed: dark matter seems to be concentrated in and around galaxies (except for a handful of places where a clump of dark matter seems to have been stripped away from its galaxy during a galactic collision), not diffuse in deep intergalactic space.
Thank you — this is exactly the kind of thoughtful challenge that makes me love writing speculative pieces like this one!
You're absolutely right that the interstellar medium is not cold — and in many places it's blazing hot (even if dilute). And yes, the CMB imposes a practical radiative floor for anything attempting to maintain a truly ultra-cold state.
So a Z.E.R.O.-like state would not be generated under typical galactic conditions — nor could it survive long in a standard ISM environment.
But here's where the idea can stretch its wings a bit:
I'm imagining these "null-resonant" states forming in very early, extremely cold, isolated regions of the universe, potentially during — or just after — recombination, before galaxies fully assembled.
If formed during that primordial period, some of them could become gravitationally trapped in the potential wells of forming galaxies, not because they prefer warm regions, but because gravity does the gathering. Once there, they persist simply because they don’t interact electromagnetically.
So, the observed dark matter halos around galaxies wouldn’t imply thermal compatibility — but rather gravitational history.
Once you’re "dark", and you don’t radiate, you're free to ride the gravitational currents wherever they pull you.
The only limiting factor would be longevity: how stable such a state could remain, and whether cosmic radiation (CMB + stellar photons) could eventually “melt” it.
That’s an open question… and maybe an opportunity for further modeling (or sci-fi extrapolation).
I'm not getting *why* they don't interact electromagnetically. Like, certainly the composite could be electrically neutral and (like every other known particle) magnetically neutral. But we already know of particles like that--neutrons for instance--and they still interact electrically and magnetically, just over much shorter distances. What effect, exactly, are you imagining that's keeping them from electromagnetic interactions?
Next question--and I'll freely admit I'm on much shakier ground here--even if we were to take it as a given that electromagnetic interactions couldn't warm them up, what about gravitational interactions? Obviously these are usually negligible compared to electromagnetic interactions for most particles. But we're talking about things that are just sitting around at extremely low temperatures for billions of years: absorbing even a tiny amount of energy from gravitational waves or nearby massive bodies seems like it could kick them out of this equilibrium. (Though again, shaky ground: even on my best day I've never had a solid understanding of General Relativity).
Wow — I'm deeply grateful for these thoughtful and rigorous responses.
It’s truly an honor that a purely speculative idea like this one could draw the attention of people so clearly well-versed in these topics. The fact that you took the time to engage so generously already makes this hypothesis a small success in my eyes. Thank you.
On the electromagnetic side — you're absolutely right, of course: electric neutrality doesn’t equate to the absence of EM interactions. Neutrons, for example, still interact via their magnetic moments and internal structure. Even neutrinos, though neutral, have incredibly weak but non-zero EM couplings.
But what I had in mind here is something more radical: not just a neutral particle, but a two-particle system whose wavefunctions are locked in a state of perfect destructive resonance — canceling not only charge, but every internal dynamic mode: spin, angular momentum, field interaction potentials, etc.
It wouldn’t merely be neutral — it would be non-reactive by construction, in the sense that no degree of freedom remains available for coupling with an incoming photon.
A kind of structured silence, where interaction doesn’t fail because it’s blocked — but because there’s nothing to latch onto.
It’s admittedly more dreamlike than quantum mechanical at this stage — but I enjoy the idea of a system rendered stable not by isolation, but by the exhaustion of all interactive channels.
As for gravity — that’s likely the most fragile part of this whole thought experiment, as you rightly pointed out.
A massive object, no matter how silent, still couples to gravitational waves, fluctuating potentials, nearby moving masses. Even a vanishingly small gravitational interaction could, over billions of years, inject enough energy to kick the system out of its ultra-cold resonance.
Still, if such Z.E.R.O. states formed early — very early — and their gravitational cross-section was small enough (either due to low mass or inherently "non-perturbable" geometry), maybe the gravitational melting time exceeds the age of the universe. Or maybe most were disrupted long ago, and we only observe the survivors that drifted into stable pockets.
Either way — I know this Z.E.R.O. hypothesis is more a speculative springboard than a finished model. But again, I want to thank you sincerely for taking the time to explore its edges.
What you're describing is hydrogen. Hydrogen is made up of a combination of fundamental particles that has no overall electric charge, QCD charge (though I guess it is not a weak singlet). And indeed, if you had a collection of hydrogen at a low enough temperature eventually all of the atoms would be in their ground state and would not radiate.
The problem is that if you put this cool hydrogen near a star the light from the star would knock many of the atoms into higher energy levels and they would then radiate and we'd pick up their emission lines easily. Also, some of the light would scatter.
So you need a composite state that not only has a chargeless ground-state but has no excited states that can radiate in the detectable EM spectrum, or at least in the spectra produced by stars. But we understand the ground states of normal matter very well, thanks to chemists, and we don't know of anything like that.
We could probably even do some rough calculations to prove that it's impossible or highly implausible. Basically, it's got to have charged particles in it (otherwise it's neutrons or neutrinos and neutrons as dark matter are ruled out). But combinations of charged particles are allowed to rotate, and once they start rotating that's a state that can radiate. The energy level of such a rotating state is determined by the mass and charge of the particles involved, and so you can start trying different combinations of masses and charges of known matter and probably rule out
In summary, there is no known mechanism in electromagnetism where particles that have EM interactions at normal temperatures can combine into a neutral particle that doesn't leave leftover interactions with photons through their internal structure. I suspect it is impossible to build such a model from known ingredients.
There are models where there are exotic particles that do interact with photons at very high temperatures but do not at normal temperatures. These are called Hidden Sector models.
Thanks so much for this in-depth response — and you're absolutely right to bring up hydrogen, ground states, and known atomic behavior. 🙌
What I'm suggesting isn't a neutral bound state like hydrogen, where the constituent particles still have internal dynamics (e.g., rotations, transitions) that allow interaction with EM fields. In Z.E.R.O., I'm positing a temporary or metastable state, formed under extreme cryogenic and phase-controlled conditions, where the remaining degrees of freedom cancel not because of binding, but because of destructive coherence.
Imagine two otherwise interacting particles whose quantum states (spin, phase oscillation, etc.) are aligned in such a way that the system as a whole loses all observable EM interaction — not due to shielding or symmetry, but through cancellation.
Yes, such a state would be insanely fragile.
Yes, exposure to ambient photons would destabilize it.
But in a vacuum — or in the early universe, during brief, cold, isolated conditions — it's conceivable that some such states could have formed and persisted, perhaps frozen in the web of dark matter.
So I'm not claiming to have found a viable particle model — just exploring a speculative idea that maybe there's a type of coherent null-state that hasn't been ruled out… yet.
Also — great point on hidden sector models. Z.E.R.O. is sort of a "homegrown analog", but without invoking new particles. Just a new arrangement.
The problem with all this is that you're positing a whole bunch of completely new, never-before-seen mechanisms with basically zero reason to believe that such mechanisms should be possible. In my mind, that completely undoes any advantage the idea had from being made of known particles.
Your sales pitch starts with "what if Dark Matter is known matter" but then you follow up with "and for this to be true known matter has to behave in a way completely unlike anything we've ever seen before, going against lots of known theoretical principles, despite the fact that we already have explored the behavior of known matter at extremely cold temperatures quite extensively."
Here are the two most important theoretical problems you have to overcome:
- "Yes, exposure to ambient photons would destabilize it." You cannot hand-wave this away. Dark Matter is concentrated in galaxies, near galactic cores which are very bright. It is absolutely crucial to this idea that photons not destabilize the dark state.
- Time-reversability. If there was a way for the particles to get into this state there has to be a way for them to get out of this state. If there's a way for them to get out of this state, you have to be able to explain, in detail, why it's not staying in that state despite the dark matter getting bombarded with light from stars. Hidden Sector models have an answer to this by introducing new particles and new interactions. You have a much, much harder task of explaining how this happens using only known particles and known interactions.
If you want to make progress on this you need a model. That means you come up with a simple set of rules for the interactions and then you demonstrate mathematically that the rules produce the behavior that you want. Your limitation is that the simple set of rules should be the basic ones we already know for electromagnetism. Or, if you add any rules to electromagnetism you have to also show why we've never noticed that extra rule before.
Thank you again — your critique is fair, sharp, and genuinely helpful. I really appreciate the time you took to lay out the issues so clearly.
You're absolutely right: I'm stepping far outside conventional theory here, and I don’t pretend to have a viable model, let alone one that could pass any kind of rigorous scrutiny. I’m fully aware that I’m in speculative territory — and not just the scenic outskirts, but probably the uncharted swamp with the weird fog.
That said, I’m still haunted by the thought: what if some exotic pairing of known particles, under just the right early-universe conditions, could enter a perfectly coherent null-state — not by shielding or symmetry, but by complete cancellation of all EM-relevant degrees of freedom?
If such a state ever formed, and truly had no residual interaction with photons — no modes left to excite — then maybe light, heat, and time themselves wouldn’t “see” it anymore. It wouldn’t just be hard to detect — it would be unreachable, dynamically inert. A kind of quantum cul-de-sac.
And yes, I understand how massive a claim that is, and how many obstacles stand in its way. It's not that I think this must be true — just that it’s a curious edge case to contemplate. Like a thought experiment poking at the limits of coherence, interaction, and what we mean by "presence."
Anyway, thank you again — your pushback helps me refine the idea, and also reminds me why real models matter. I may still play with this concept fictionally (it does make for a good sci-fi plot device!), but I now see much more clearly what kind of work would be needed to even begin to approach it from a serious angle.
"not by shielding or symmetry, but by complete cancellation of all EM-relevant degrees of freedom?"
Here are your two main problems
1. Currently "cancellation ... of degrees of freedom" doesn't mean anything. This is "not even wrong" territory. There's no mechanism in current physics by that name, and it's not clear what it would mean if we tried to define it.
When I say it doesn't mean anything ultimately what I mean is that it doesn't have a mathematical definition, not even a simple model behind it. Phrases like "protected by symmetry" and "electrically shielded" do have mathematical definitions, and we can write down simple mathematical models to show how they work. "Cancellation of degrees of freedom" doesn't. If you want to be able to take your idea seriously you need to come up with a mathematical example of what that means and how it works, even if it is very simple.
If you try this your goal is to come up with a simple mathematical description of your particles and what it means for them to have degrees of freedom. Then you must define what exactly is meant mathematically by "degrees of freedom cancelling." Then you must show that by applying your new definition to your simple model, your particles behave in the way you want, i.e. they do not interact with EM fields.
Then, to take the idea really seriously, you also have to show how the degrees of freedom cancelling can happen naturally through only known interactions (or small modifications of them).
2. When you say "*all* EM-relevant degrees of freedom" I think you have made your task basically impossible because of some basic physics principles.
EM as we know it is time-reversible. That means if EM can cause something to happen, reversing the process must also be possible. If EM interactions can cause your "cancellation" to happen (and EM must be the cause because we are not allowing the theory to include new interactions) then EM must also be able to undo the cancellation. EM cannot "turn itself off" because that is an irreversible process.
There is one way to get effectively irreversible processes out of time-reversible interactions: entropy. For example, at low temperatures breaking a steel rod into two pieces is an irreversible process even though the rod is held together by reversible EM forces. However, at low temperatures, separating a blob of molten steel and then rejoining it becomes a reversible process. This principle is what underlies Hidden Sector models: at high, Big-Bang-like temperatures, dark matter and visible matter are in a phase where they do interact with each other, but when they cool they undergo a phase transition where they separate into two separate non-interacting forms.
This means there's a limit on how complete the non-interaction with EM can be. If the photons are "hot" enough they must be able to interact with the matter. That puts limits on this idea because photons in galaxies are actually quite hot. Not necessarily an insurmountable limit, but a limit that must guide any theory.
There actually is one simple example of a kind of known particle that can undergo a phase change that makes it non-interacting with a limited range of the EM spectrum: glass! Glass can be made from minerals that do interact with visible light, but after undergoing a high-temperature phase transition it can cool into a phase that (mostly) does not interact with visible light. But of course it remains solid, meaning it does still interact with short range EM forces.
Great question — thanks for taking the time to dig into this part!
When I say “remaining degrees of freedom (like spin orientation, quantum oscillation...) are cancelled via a resonant interaction”, I mean that once the particles have been cooled down to a state where almost all classical dynamics are frozen (translation, rotation, thermal agitation…), the few remaining quantum-level oscillations could, under very precise conditions, become synchronized in such a way that they destructively interfere.
Think of two pendulums, perfectly aligned, swinging in opposite phase — the system as a whole appears motionless.
Here, that’s extended to quantum modes: spin precession, vibrational zero-point fluctuations, maybe even phase alignment.
It’s not annihilation. It’s not decoherence.
It’s a resonance so perfect that it cancels all observable interaction — leaving behind only the gravitational signature.
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 11-12 of 2025.
1. The XEC COVID wave hasn't fully receded yet. Biobot shows that as of March 15, SARS2 wastewater levels haven't fallen to previous interwave gaps except for the Western region of the US. The CDC's wastewater numbers indicate a long tail for this wave, but it shows that the West and NE regions are roughly back to interwave levels. The CDC's numbers are all normalized to the previous year's numbers, so I don't know if this long tail may be an artifact of the way they normalize. I trust Biobot.
But If there is a long tail, it's due to the LP.8.1x brood that continues to gain traction against XEC.x. I expected the LP.8.1x's to top out at about 30%, but CoV-Spectrum shows they've reached 50%. Of course, there were only three LP.8.1x descendants a month ago. Now there are nineteen. If previous wastewater patterns hold, SARS2 will continue circulating at low levels during the interwave gaps. I wonder if these aren't mostly chronic infections, as seen by Marc Johnson in wastewater? (his handle on X is @SolidEvidence). If previous US patterns hold, we'll probably see another wave peak in late summer. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I suspect the next wave's hospitalization rates won't exceed 5/100,000, and the weekly death rate will be lower than 0.25/100,000. I'll try to check back on this after the next wave peaks.
2. On the HPAI A(H5) front, the CDC released it's monthly update. As of 19 March, there's still no sign of human-to-human transmission. Likewise, there's nothing to indicate that our milk supply is a vector for A(H5) infections.
3. The US measles outbreak is still spreading. It's now grown to 309 cases in 14 TX counties, and 42 cases in 2 NM counties. Plus we've got smaller outbreaks in a bunch of other states. Vaxopedia is doing a good job covering the current outbreaks.
Measles has spread from Texas south of the border to Chihuahua, Mexico. Chihuahua has a growing number of cases, with 400+ suspected and at least 32 confirmed cases. The Mexican outbreak evidently started in a Mennonite community in Chihuahua whose members had visited infected communities in Texas. The Mexican Health Ministry has issued a warning to its citizens, asking them not to travel to Texas and seven other states in the U.S. due to the measles outbreaks.
Canada is also seeing a surge in measles cases. There were approximately 500 confirmed cases as of last week, with the majority in Ontario. The Canadian outbreak started at a Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick last fall. It's since spread to other Mennonite communities in Ontario and to the rest of the country. The NB case didn't catch it in the US, though. They brought it back from the Philippines.
The WHO produces a monthly measles report. The latest one is at the following link, below (PPT presentation). The case numbers for February are still coming in, but December and January seem to have been relatively "mild" months for worldwide measles cases. And there's an interesting chart on slide 7 showing the total cases by month from 2017 to the present. I just noticed that the COVID pandemic suppressed measles transmission during 2020 and 2021. This is similar to what we saw with influenza during the same period — except that influenza completely stopped circulating, and measles continued to circulate at very low numbers.
From what I understand, there's nothing in their religious beliefs that precludes getting vaxxed, but conservative Mennonites seem to be very conservative and/or suspicious about their use of modern medicine. If there are any Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent people on ACX, I'd like to hear more about the cultural and/or theological attitudes that some Mennonite groups have in rejecting vaccination.
I dreamed about Wittgenstein last night. In the dream he was an attractive, stocky woman in her 40’s with very androgynous hair and I had a raving crush on her He’d (she’d?) just handed out a final exam, and each item on the exam concerned one event in his day, and the events were pretty prosaic. Several concerned a mall store sort of like Pier One. We were to summarize each event using Wittgenstein’s way of conceiving of words, colors, and events. I tried very very hard to write clever, substantive essays, but was sadly certain my work was only average and she/he would never love me.
WTF?
Why post about it? Dunno. Is that question an item on the final?
Just a way of keeping it weird for you guys, I guess
I've heard that talking about a dream is only enjoyable for the person who had the dream, but I enjoyed reading this. I hope feminized Wittgenstein one day loves you.
Is racism just astrology for men? I was thinking about this after I went to a party where a pretty socially awkward guy made every conversation circle back to some national/racial stereotype. It was clear he was treating the thing as a conversational hack where he had a stock line to say no matter what. I'm not saying they are in any way morally comparable as behaviors, but it seems to have a similar social function to astrology, where a pretty dumb or socially inept latches onto an arbitrary category that creates immediate friend enemy distinctions.
What is the evidence that men are more racist than women?
I believe it is agreed upon that women are generally more agreeable than men and that they conform more to social norms than men do. In a society that looks down on racism this trait means women might be less racist than men? maybe? but I imagine that in a predominately racist society (where racism is the social norm), women might be more racist than men.
Speaking personally, I think I have met more racist women than racist men. It's certainly not a category that seems male dominated to me. (Being right wing is majority men, but right wing is not the same as racist, nor is being xenophobic necessarily racist, etc...)
I thought racism was generally a byproduct of the fact that outsiders tended to bring nasty pathogens with them that locals had no natural immunity to.
I'd think that outsiders and spreaders of pathogens would, in evolutionary history, generally have been from the same race, so I don't think that makes much sense – this should have lead to wariness of humans in general, not just those belonging to other races.
Secondly, collectivist cultures are untrusting of those outside of their in-group, which may serve as a protective behaviour against interactions with those in groups that may harbour novel diseases. In similar vein to the explanation presented with one's protective nature of their in-group members, one's immune system is well adapted to local parasites and will be unable to effectively protect against unfamiliar pathogens. Therefore, avoidance of those outside of one's inner circle will aid in the prevention of being exposed to novel and dangerous pathogens that the immune system is unable to defend against.
I don't think they're very similar. Most men who are aware of racial differences that are considered racist know that mentioning those is a faux pas, whereas talking about astrology is considered socially acceptable. It is sometimes said that technical analysis is astrology for men, and I think that is more accurate.
I read an interesting article yesterday in the Guardian "My mother, the racist" which suggested that one of the main motivators for racism was the desire to feel a sense of superiority over others, when few other avenues are available for this. (This isn't an observation original to that article, but it had an interesting perspective.)
So perhaps this socially awkward guy was, in his socially inept way, trying to establish his place on a social hierarchy?
> one of the main motivators for racism was the desire to feel a sense of superiority over others
Sounds plausible. Often the racism is strongest near the bottom of the social ladder, where there are not many choices to put other people below you.
If you are middle-class, you can afford to be non-racist, because there are all these working-class people without university diplomas who are clearly lower than you, so you can be generous towards the colored people, especially if they are also educated.
Which makes me think... perhaps if we reduced the credentialism and stopped treating people without university diplomas as socially inferior... maybe in turn there would be less racism? It seems more difficult to have a racially egalitarian society without also it being egalitarian in other ways, because you are basically telling some people "we need to dismantle the hierarchies that kept you higher, while keeping the hierarchies that keep you lower" and it obviously doesn't sound to them like a good deal.
As an immigrant to the US during the first Trump presidency, I often had people talk to me about immigration as a problem, ban the Muslims, build the wall, etc. When I pointed out I was an immigrant, they didn't even blink before saying 'I'm not talking about people like you'. And they really had no issue with me being in America.
I think the racism the OP is talking about is at least as much based on socioeconomic insecurity ('those immigrants will steal my job') as on skin-colour prejudice. How many of these racists would refuse to socialise with someone from a racial minority of the right social class? And how many would spit on a homeless white person of the same race?
My model is that some people are hostile no matter what, but almost everyone will fight in self defense. So if we stop pushing people down socially based on their education, income, etc., most (not all) will stop needing racism to feel less bad about themselves.
Fore the last few decades, there has been a cultural push to break stereotypes(whatever they may be) so stereotypes might increasingly be wrong due to self-fulfilling prophecy. But they probably were accurate when they originated,
Physiognomy is my astrology. I don't talk about it to anyone else though. But it works more often than not which I think is funny. Maybe thats how girls feel about astrology.
Dissociative Antidepressants, Autism, and the Diametric Mind: A Speculative Take
Here’s an idea inspired by the autism–schizophrenia diametric model (which Scott has discussed before). If autistic cognition is overly precise, mechanistic, and rigid, and schizotypal cognition is overly loose, imaginative, and chaotic. Might dissociative antidepressants (especially weird long-acting ones like 3-MeO-PCP) be particularly suited to the autism/ADHD end of the cognitive spectrum?
First, consider how dissociatives work: NMDA receptor antagonism briefly reduces glutamate signalling, which disrupts established neural patterns. Ketamine and its less-studied cousins (3-MeO-PCP, MXE, etc) trigger a short burst of neuroplasticity, mild dopamine release, and quieting of the default mode network (DMN). For someone locked into rigid thought patterns, whether depressive rumination or autistic fixations, this momentary neural shake-up could break entrenched loops, potentially nudging the brain into healthier patterns afterward. Robin Carhart-Harris’s "Entropic Brain" idea captures this nicely: psychedelics and dissociatives might help rigid minds precisely by increasing cognitive entropy [2].
From the diametric perspective, autistic brains are marked by overly strong sensory precision and reduced theory-of-mind. Thus, introducing controlled "noise" or loosening sensory precision might paradoxically help, making autistic cognition less rigid and potentially increasing cognitive flexibility or even social openness. Anecdotally, some autistic adults using low-dose dissociatives like ketamine or MXE report precisely that: temporarily softened social anxiety, improved mood, and openness to novel perspectives.
Meanwhile, schizotypal brains, already tilted toward excessive cognitive noise and mentalizing, could experience the opposite effect. NMDA antagonists have historically been used to model schizophrenia in labs precisely because they mimic psychosis. For a mind already prone to magical thinking, excessive DMN activity, and loose associative chains, dissociatives may push it further into chaos. Indeed, there are documented cases where substances like 3-MeO-PCP induced lasting psychotic symptoms or paranoia in otherwise stable but schizotypally inclined individuals.
Memantine, a mild NMDA antagonist used in dementia, has also seen clinical experimentation in autism and ADHD. While trials in autism show mixed results (no consistent major improvement in core symptoms), there's anecdotal and preliminary clinical evidence suggesting it might still help specific subsets of autistic or ADHD people struggling with anxiety, irritability, and executive dysfunction. This might reflect precisely the dose-dependent balancing act involved: enough NMDA blockade to reduce glutamate-induced rigidity, but not so much as to impair coherence.
So, the broader thought is this: drugs pushing cognition toward the schizotypal end might selectively benefit those at the autism/ADHD end, gently disrupting rigid neural processing, improving dopamine-based reward sensitivity, and easing sensory overload. Conversely, these same drugs can tip already-chaotic schizotypal brains into further confusion or psychosis. The diametric model thus suggests a kind of cognitive pharmacological "balancing" act—one spectrum's therapeutic nudge could be another's cognitive disaster.
Clearly, formal clinical trials are sparse or nonexistent for novel dissociatives like 3-MeO-PCP and MXE, and existing trials with memantine and autism have shown mixed outcomes. Yet, given ketamine’s established antidepressant profile and preliminary anecdotes about less-studied analogs, there’s at least theoretical reason to think dissociatives could eventually find a niche for cognitive rigidity-related issues common in autism or ADHD. At minimum, this speculative lens offers a new way to think about why certain psychoactive drugs profoundly help some minds while utterly deranging others.
>tl;dr:
Dissociative NMDA antagonists (like 3-MeO-PCP, Ketamine, MXE, Memantine) might help people on the autism/ADHD side of the cognitive spectrum by loosening rigid thinking and sensory hypersensitivity, but risk worsening symptoms for schizotypal individuals prone to cognitive looseness and psychosis.
Thoughts?
[2] Carhart-Harris et al. (2014). "The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020
**NOTE: I spent a while considering this myself and have done some research, but the bulk of this has been llm assisted, using what I thought was careful prompting for this context. Also, apologies if this has been covered already elsewhere in more detail**
when downloading a language model for local offline use how do quantization and parameter count trade-off? For example, which should I try first, gemma-3-1b-fp16 or gemma-3-4b-q4? (the latter is quantized to 4 bits)
The common wisdom is that for inference, you want the largest model in the family that still fits in memory quantized to 4 bits, so you should expect gemma-3-4b-q4 to outperform gemma-3-1b-fp16.
My understanding is parameter count directly scales with the power of the model and quantization is largely a matter of optimization. So you should run the largest parameter model your system can handle at reasonable speeds and not worry nearly as much about the quantization.
This is a further training trade off I think, so "local use" should not care; as far as I know quantization hasnt been shown to decrease quality of output meaningfully
She's 21, has lived in the US since she was 7, straight A student, and so far it seems like her 'crimes' are 'being present at one of the Palestine protests' and 'putting up fliers critical of Columbia's admin'
I think the single biggest, good thing that this hive of Scum and Villainy that is the Trump admin and their supporters did for Free Speech and its cause, is to expose themselves as transparent cynics who aren't interested in the slightest in the defense of Free Speech. There is now an extremely easy heuristic to decide whether someone is worth listening to on Free Speech: What's their attitude on Trump? The answer to this proxy question determine a strict upper bound on how much we should listen to them when they claim they defend Free Speech.
Tragedies are God's way of showing us who are His true believers.
Criticizing Islam is Free Speech par excellence, Charlie Hebdo and Salman Rushdie should be martyr saints of the Free Speech cause.
Bootlicking and Hasbara for Israel is Free Speech too, nobody ever said that Speech must be true or good or have integrity to be allowed and defended as Free Speech.
It's the queer combination of (1) Criticizing Islam (2) Bootlicking Israel and aggressive Hasbara (3) Being mad that anyone fires back at (1) and (2) with opposite speech of their own, that makes a lot of Zionists not exactly paragons of how a Free Speech defender should behave.
> Arguably, their speech is much more free than it was before.
Cold war. A Russian is debating politics with an American.
A: "We have freedom of speech! We can criticise anyone - even the US president - all we like and the police don't come after us! They don't even care!"
R: "Oh, is that how it works? Why, then we're all about freedom of speech too! - We can also criticise the US president all we like - we do it all the time!"
Calling yourself a defender of freedom of speech only has meaning if you are defending speech you don't like, not merely your own. Otherwise it's just a lie. The Trump administration has cracked down hard on speech they don't want to hear. Claims that Trump is a defender of free speech are, demonstrably, lies.
Isn't posting like this embarrassing on some level? I mean intellectually, it's most likely that you just believe what you are saying, but my gut feeling is that you have to know what you are doing
"And when faced with a legitimate threat to their order, they just... gave up. What was the point of fighting for decades for a better future? Did they actually care about any of those causes at all, or was it all just a perpetual motion machine of signalling?"
When you take a slightly surprising, pretty resounding loss it is clearly the optimal response to retreat, lick your wounds, regather and carefully consider what needs to change before you try again.
I've reached the point where I'm reporting you. You make terrible comments all over the place. It's barely coherent, openly nihilistic, and often just wrong.
> Someone who smiles is preparing to bite the people around him or her.
I read somewhere that this is unironically the mental model of primates like Gorillas, they interpret humans smiling their way as challenges and act accordingly. Because in the primate world showing your teeth is a threat.
> Every day, the weather has always been and will always be worse than the day before.
If you coarsen the timescale unit a bit to "every year" or "every decade", this is literally just climate change.
Free Speech was never zero-sum given the right informational ecosystem. Unless you're literally advocating genocide (a bar so high that lots of Pro-Israel partisans, who vaguely and rhetorically support genocide while not being detailed, still don't clear), there is no possible downside to letting you spew whatever you have to say into the pipes of the internet.
Free Speech, however, is not a general-purpose entitlement card to everything you want people to do with your speech. For example, 0 reasonable interpretations of Free Speech say that I must print all of your comments and reverentially study them for the rest of my life. Free Speech is just that the words leave your mouth or keyboard and reach their natural audience without any censorship.
But someone making a movie and it flops, is this a Free Speech violation? Absolutely not, and I have trouble imagining a serious argument that would disagree.
As for social exile and being fired from jobs, a Free Speech defender should fight this as much as possible without giving carte blanche protections to anyone who can scream "Free Speech !!!" to get a free anti-firing card. If businesses can fire you for "Culture fit", then they can fire you for speech, since speech is part of your culture and we have already established that businesses can fire you for culture mismatch. My views on this is complex and depends on the exact type of speech and the exact type of company firing you, but I still can't see how electing Trump has solved this issue:
According to Google, there are 6.1 million companies in the US [1], also according to Google, there are 3 million people who work for the Federal government [2]. To "prevent companies from firing you", Trump would have to assign one federal employee to monitor 2 companies and do nothing else, an entire federal government worth of a panopticon that does nothing but ensure people are forcibly "tolerant", and Conservatives like to complain about "DEI"?
Other estimates put the number of businesses at 33 million (so including more types and sizes than traditional companies), I think we can all agree that it's worthless to even suggest to monitor something of this size.
So realistically speaking, there will always be people being fired for their Free Speech, just as there will always be people who can't find a romantic partner or a friend (sometimes through no fault of their own, but sometimes through significant faults of their own), and - short of a full frontal panopticon dystopia - there is nothing we can do about that.
Those are the same situation: when enough people each decide they've had enough of your speech, your movies books etc flop and also you find no-one wants to be around you and you are socially isolated now.
If you've ended up treating these scenarios differently, perhaps it's time to unpack assumptions a bit.
I was thinking of another dynamic, in which people simply... don't like your speech. You sing and people hate your voice, you write a song and people just think that "Wet Ass Pussy" isn't that profound of a lyrical style. You make a movie and people just think that "Somehow Palpatine Returned" is an utter disgrace to the legacy of the Universe you're making the movie about. Nobody hates you, nobody thinks you're a bigot or a sexist or that you should be cancelled, everybody wishes you would be better next time, they just don't think your talent came through this time.
Absent any deliberate, forced attempt at transforming this dynamic into a racism/sexism/xism fight, this is just a plain old "Humans not getting along story". Free Speech defenders aren't trying to create a radical utopia where **everybody** likes **everything** the singular hive voice of humanity ever says, that would be ridiculous overreach, completely unrealistic and 99% unachievable.
> If you've ended up treating these scenarios differently, perhaps it's time to unpack assumptions a bit.
Or perhaps it's the people who are unambiguously wrong. Exhibit A: Atheism vs. Religion in Pakistan. I hate every defense of Social Exile that uncritically assumes the exiling majority is always right.
"Nobody hates you, nobody thinks you're a bigot or a sexist or that you should be cancelled, everybody wishes you would be better next time, they just don't think your talent came through this time."
This is quite the false dichotomy. In practice, when people have a strong dislike for a movie you made, they very well may not think "you're a bigot or a sexist or you should be cancelled." But they are going to have a SHARPLY reduced interest in seeing any future movies you make. Not necessarily because of any opinions on you personally, but because all of us have limited time and money and have to choose who and what is worth spending it on.
The analogy to friendship is quite clear. I don't need to have any deep hatred for Bob or desire to see him socially isolated to *not want to be his friend.* And of course it is very much my right to not be Bob's friend if he's said enough things that I find unpleasant to hear. Meanwhile, if other peoples' reaction to what Bob says is strongly enough correlated with mine--not because I tried to make it happen, just because lots of humans have similar preferences--Bob may end up quite friendless. This isn't in any way an abridgement of Bob's right to free speech. This is just everyone else exercising their rights to free association.
> in which people simply... don't like your speech
It seems like you're trying to ringfence some reasons people might not like your speech as being fundamentally different than others, but as I see it, what happens once people decide they don't like your speech is still the exact same dynamic, regardless of the precise reason people don't like it.
There's no clean line you can carve through reality there; no sane way to say "these reasons for disliking a thing are valid, and these are not". People's reasons are inside their heads; only their actions are visible. If you make some reasons illegal and people badly want to walk away, they will simply claim your art is bad or whatever other reason you've left legal if pressed, even when privately the thing actually upsetting them is the slurs or whatever political thing it is you are trying to protect.
At the end of the day, you can't police this that way; so either you allow people to walk away from speech they don't like, or you force them to watch your party propaganda Clockwork Orange style.
My (non-American) understanding is that a large part of the US “myth” is that by you can leave your state if you don’t like its policies and go to another one – and you likely can find a state with better policies since it’s hard to coordinate fifty states.
Of course, the stronger the federal entity is with respect to the states, the more coordinated the states are and the harder it is to apply this argument.
I think there are examples of "PC gone too far" (something affecting pro-Palestinian people too btw), but there's no version of free speech that will protect everyone from social exile for saying what they believe.
But when we're deporting people to forced labor camps in El Salvador for their speech, then people will realize that there is in fact a point of free speech even if saying what you believe gets you socially exiled and fired from your job.
Nah, if people on the Red team get punished for their speech (fired, sued into bankruptcy, etc.) and those the Blue team never do, when the worm turns and it's the Blue team getting punished (sent to El Salvador or whatever), I expect people on the Red team to cheer.
I also expect the red team to cheer, because I never expected them to have a strong commitment to free speech.
Members of the "blue team" have been fired and sued into oblivion of course, but even if they hadn't ... "fired" vs "picked up off the street and sent to a forced labor camp in El Salvador" is obviously not even remotely in the same ballpark.
And while the "cancel culture" stuff generated a thousand handwringing thinkpieces about free speech from left-of-center types ... AFAICT the pro-trump people have not done the same here.
My disagreement is with your remark at the end that "people will realize that there is in fact a point of free speech." The Left has spent decades demonizing it as a racist, sexist fascist, neo-Nazi, etc. idea, and while it's funny when it comes back to bite them, even in some very small way as is happening now, but I don't expect them to come round to seeing its virtues.
I think the Right DOES in fact have a strong commitment to free speech, but have generally decided that TACTICALLY it would better to restore it AFTER purging the country of those who would destroy it immediately if it were to be restored while they still hold enough power to do so.
There's no legal formulation of free speech that will protect everyone from social exile, unless the legal system intrudes on private life.
There are absolutely a set of moral, social, and cultural principles that can and do protect people from being socially exiled. You can promote these principles even if you don't want to pass an Everyone Who Snubs Me Gets Fined bill.
> There are absolutely a set of moral, social, and cultural principles that can and do protect people from being socially exiled. You can promote these principles even if you don't want to pass an Everyone Who Snubs Me Gets Fined bill.
I don't think this is true ... what is the mechanism by which these principles enforce themselves? If you are not passing a "Everyone Who Snubs Me Gets Fined Bill" then the obvious answer is social sanction/exile.
You could try and do some sort of "nobody gets socially exiled except for people who try to socially exile others" type of thing, but it won't be effective as long as you let people characterize others' views as being bad in such a way that might lead someone to want to socially exile them, as Holmes said:
> Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth
It's sort of true that you can have norms that protect people from being socially exiled, but you can only have them by taking /away/ the rights to free association and freedom of speech.
This firstly confuses rights with norms, and secondly is an oversimplification.
The first and most obvious point is that social norms don't take away any of your rights. If I tell you that I'm not going to hang out with you on the weekend if you keep making TwiXXer posts about Israel, I'm not taking away your /right/ to free speech. I /am/ acting in a way that's averse to the general social principle of freedom of speech, but the legal right isn't relevant.
The second point is that freedom of speech is not, conceptually, as simple as just "all speech everywhere is permissible and nobody should ever react negatively to it". This is either a strawman or a miniscule belief held by very few. In my experience, freedom of speech is generally intended to protect free discourse within public society. I would argue that carving out specific agreed-upon exemptions to freedom of speech in private life, like not talking about politics at work or during family dinner, is doing zero harm to what I actually want from freedom of speech while also protecting people from social exile.
This kind of comment really annoys me because it pretends that there _aren't_ actually principled free speech individuals and organizations like FIRE who _do_ consistently speak out about these cases on both sides. Call out hypocrites specifically, don't tar the entirety of actually important values.
Like anything else political most people don't hold consistent and/or principled views on the Constitution. Far more common is the fair weather Constitutionalist who gets to complain about violations when their tribal enemies do something and ignore it when their allies do. The conservatives were mad about the social media censoring under Biden but approve of hate speech laws against anti-Semitism and deporting immigrants who would be immune under 1A if they were citizens. Similarly I doubt most people who are upset about the Columbia students citing 1A particularly care when leftists pass red flag laws/restrict magazine capacity/make it illegal to buy more than 1 gun in x days period/etc even though these cut against 2A.
> deporting immigrants who would be immune under 1A if they were citizens
Your confusion here possibly stems from your incorrect mental model of conservative principles. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to believe that WE believe that free speech is a universal philosophical principle, a "human right", deserved by all people regardless of nationality*. Whereas citizenship / borders is just a tawdry legal technicality of no particular philosophical importance.
For my part: not so! The citizenship part is equally philosophically important. American free speech is a treasure wrenched from a blood-soaked battlefield in 1776. It's a perk of the American citizens in-group, not a human right. You can have American free speech if you complete the process and become and American citizen; if you have not become an American citizen, then you don't get to cry about it when the protections afforded to citizens are not afforded to you. Yun Seo is being a classic free rider here: she wants the Constitution to protect her but she won't put in the work to protect the Constitution (by becoming a citizen + taxpayer + potential draftee).
I care when Americans don't have free speech. I don't care if Koreans don't have free speech, and that doesn't change depending on where the Korean is standing (including New York). The Constitution is a document for Americans, not a document for a geographic region.
* It would be better for those other nations to also afford American-style free speech to their own citizens, but if they don't, it's not the American government's responsibility to shoot itself in the foot by kowtowing to foreigners who oppose government policy.
The main problem here is that the Bill of Rights is generally about "the government can't make a law to prohibit X" rather than "individuals have a right to do X". All of the 1A provisions are restrictions on government action, not grants of individual rights, because the people who wrote this stuff believed we all had natural rights and the idea of a government "granting" them was absurd.
Personally I think non-citizens should just be summarily subject to deportation without justification, let it be a political question. If somebody is deporting the Indonesian fiancées of junior executives at oil companies, that's gonna get to a Texas Congressmen who will raise hell about it with the administration. If the government deports Cuban refugees, it'll pay the price at the ballot box in Florida. Maybe it deports Haitians and Ohio loves it and New York hates it. Up to them.
Instead we're very nice about it, and have green cards and explicit standards of what makes somebody "removable", presumably in order to encourage valuable immigrants to sufficiently trust in their continued presence here, build relationships and invest in their communities.
The real problem is that we are far too generous in granting residency to which we've attached a bunch of due process protections that are handled by a woefully inadequate number of judges. The government would likely prevail in deporting the pro-Hamas activist on the merits, it just takes too long. Same reason granting these Tren Aragua thugs a "hearing" (with no set legal standard of proof and which will undoubtedly have to go up and down the appeals system multiple times) isn't practical. When people say "oh well just give them a hearing" they imagine that might be done within a month and fully adjudicated. (Or more nefariously, they know it won't, and they know granting a hearing is as good as catch-and-release which is the policy they actually want but will never admit to.)
Approximately nobody actually wants Tren de Aragua in the country, why would they? But looking at the incremental harm of one more criminal organization getting a foothold in the country vs the practice of the government disappearing people to foreign prisons for having tattoos getting a foothold, they choose to risk that the lesser of the two evils will happen.
We do badly need a better way of dealing with organized crime, including the organizations that are already established, but this "cure" is worse than the disease.
To say they were "disappeared for having tattoos" is showing very little faith in our law enforcement system. I have every confidence that they know exactly who these people are, it wasn't a giant roundup of a whole class of people, these were identifiable individuals who in many cases were known and wanted for questioning in regard to gang activity here and elsewhere.
I think the judge is partly right inasmuch as the law likely requires some basic showing that the people removed are in fact among the class of people the law applies to, but since they are not people with any actual right to be here, I think that could adequately be satisfied by a brief in camera review of the sensitive materials on which this determination was based. As I understand it, these are not immigrants who had at one point a legal right to be here, for whom you might have to demonstrate that they're removable in an ordinary administrative hearing. A brief in camera review should suffice to show the identity.
This may come as news to you, but permanent US residents have jobs and pay taxes. If you deny them the rights and protections due any taxpayer, you are the freeloader here. I can think of few things more American than "no taxation without representation!"
Verily, what a queer way of spelling "The things the Israeli lobby wants Conservatives to say and do".
Sure Thing Comrade, We All Believe You When You Say That The Only Reason You Support Free Speech Violations Is Because The Victims Are Not American And The Opinions They Expressed Just So Happen By Chance To Be Anti-Chosen-Nation.
Gaza et al is your personal obsession, not a universal one. What Israelis do or do not do does not inform most people's moral intuitions.
In fact, many people across the world go days on end without even think about the region or the conflict there, and many others won't do more than read a headline, think, "oh, dear," and then go on to the next headline.
And rightly so. The world is a big place and Gaza et al is not the center of it.
"Obsession" is just a Russell's Conjugate [1] for "A thing you care very deeply about and which I don't like".
You can cope with your discomfort that others care about a modern livestreamed genocide while you're not doing anything about it in any way you like, including by simple silence (which is not that bad on average), but dishonesty is bad. Dishonesty and being impolite are very bad.
> The world is a big place and Gaza et al is not the center of it.
I don't know how this got over your head, but we're not discussing the "world" here, we're specifically discussing "Pro-Palestinian protestors being deported", and in that issue, Israel and Gaza are quite literally at the center of it, in every way possible.
And my comment makes fun of the "patriot" "conservatives" who just so happen to bend over and take a cock for a foreign lobby every time it asks, sending their money and children (and of course, loads of their fellow citizens') to die in pointless forever wars, while finding increasingly elaborate justifications for why "Aksuallly, this is good for America too sweetyy. Because something something Clash of Civilizations. Look it Up.".
I accept that the strangeness of my bedfellows in approving of this policy should raise an eyebrow given said bedfellows' penchant for esoteric subterfuge. "How do you do fellow xenophobes" and all that.
Not really much I can do about it though, is there.
There's a long history of court cases establishing that non-citizens have numerous rights while under US jurisdiction, including free speech. A legal opening exists to deport people for their speech because Congress is delegated fairly sweeping powers to regulate immigration. I think if it came up as a SCOTUS case it's 50/50 whether they rule deportation based on speech grounds is in violation of 1A. I think you're making more of an ought statement than is, so ignore this section if that's the case.
But also, a permanent resident is in fact completing the process to become a US citizen. It happens to be an arbitrary and capricious process that can take decades. Treating them as foreign agents with no rights during this process strikes me as not only pointless but counterproductive to encouraging immigrants to accept and endorse American norms of freedom.
>But also, a permanent resident is in fact completing the process to become a US citizen. It happens to be an arbitrary and capricious process that can take decades
This is not close to being correct. First, many permanent residents are not on the path to become citizens, because they don't want to become citizens. Second, a permanent resident can apply for citizenship after five years, and the current processing time is about 7-8 months. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/
Note that I am NOT defending the Trump Administration. IMHO, even illegal immigrants should have the same free speech rights as citizens.
> There's a long history of court cases establishing that non-citizens have numerous rights while under US jurisdiction, including free speech.
The fact that activist judges were engaging in lawfare decades ago is orthogonal to the question of whether they were correct to do so.
> But also, a permanent resident is in fact completing the process to become a US citizen. It happens to be an arbitrary and capricious process that can take decades.
This argument strikes me as isomorphic to "I don't have a job yet and hiring is capricious and arbitrary... but I still deserve a salary because I'm in the process of looking for work". If you want the protections that citizenship affords, uhh, file your forms earlier.
> Treating them as foreign agents with no rights during this process strikes me as not only pointless but counterproductive to encouraging immigrants to accept and endorse American norms of freedom.
Discouraging immigrants sounds like the opposite of "counterproductive" to me.
A generic green card holder with no special circumstances has to wait at least 5 years by law before they can become a citizen. It's not a matter of people freeloading, our country has a broken immigration system that rewards people for flagrantly violating the law while putting up a bunch of hurdles in the way of people who follow the rules.
But if you're morally opposed to immigration in general I don't suppose it makes a difference to you.
One thing the USA leftists can use in their defense in your last example is that guns objectively kill much more people than words can ever dream of, and the Colombia students are being deported for words, unlike the guns/ammo bans (which are not even true bans in your example and which even if they were true, permanent bans, are still far more mild punishment than deportations are).
Ideas alone don't kill, unless I throw a copy of Das Kapital at your back of the head it's not Communism that kills you, it's a military dictatorship that used Communism and a bunch of other tools to kill at scale.
There is a huge number of intermediate steps between "Labor is the origin of all values" and "Put all the bourgeoise traitors to the wall and fire at will". Some of those intermediate steps are almost always the same: Shutdown all the press, organize your followers into demagogic demonstrations and Kristall Nachts, demonize criticism, ... None of those are ideas, per se, they're just general-purpose strategies for how to be a supreme leader. (If you still want to think of them as ideas, I'm very happy to carve for them a special exception and say those ideas out of all others should be banned, and by extent any ideas that depend on them)
The closest that you can get to inherently violent ideas are monotheistic religions, and even then there exists counterexamples to the contrary.
Guns alone don't kill either, unless you have the idea to pull the trigger.
Communism is absolutely inherently violent. Anywhere there are property owners, they will have to be separated from their property to make way for the new regime. Anywhere there are finite commodities there will have to be someone somehow deciding on allocation of resources instead of the invisible hand.
See, the NY state legislature has 10 bills in committee this session to further restrict gun rights. At least 2 of these bills are copies from bills that were tried in other states and smacked down in courts for violating 2A. NY has a history of passing illegal gun restrictions, getting them smacked down by courts, then doing the same thing another way to end run around the courts until they smack that down again years later. And who is on here expressing outrage about the violation of my and millions of others' constitutional rights?
1A and 2A are both part of the foundational bill of rights, with language like "Congress shall pass no law" and "shall not be infringed". But then I just get the hand wave that those other rights aren't nearly the same or important. Because, again, people don't actually believe in applying the Constitution in a principled way.
I gotta admit that Taibi, despite making a hard right turn in the past 4 years or so, has come out strongly against the administration on this point, which surprised me given how ideological he'd gotten elsewhere.
Personally, as a liberal free speech supporter, I feel mildly vindicated.
In case after case, I would read a news story about someone complaining about being censored, and I’d feel like maybe they had a point about the censorship, even while the substantive views they were trying to espouse were – almost without exception – ones I fervently disagreed with. It gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance. But one of the (multiple) reasons I value free speech is for self-protection. If the political winds were to shift, I thought, the same legal and social precedents that protected one side – or, as the case may be, failed to protect them – might soon be needed to protect the other. And now the winds have shifted.
(But I can’t feel 100% vindicated. Things aren’t that simple. On one hand, protecting conservatives’ free speech didn’t just protect free speech, it also protected conservatives – making them at least marginally more powerful, marginally more able, now, to crack down on their opponents’ speech. On the other hand, considering how they were able to turn censorship into one of their key issues, perhaps more protection would have made them marginally weaker. Who can say.)
I turned conservative almost entirely because the left turned against free speech. N=1 and all that, but I think this part is spot on: "On the other hand, considering how they were able to turn censorship into one of their key issues, perhaps more protection would have made them marginally weaker."
I didn't get impression that OP is making fun of Free Speech in general, just the kind of "Free Speech defenders" who turn on a dime to support the most rabid and authoritarian anti-Free Speech practices if it serves their interests. A practical, concrete example is Bari Weiss.
I'm, for example, still of the opinion that Free Speech is extremely important, and I tested this view against my most vile political enemies (Pro-Israel Zionists) and found it to hold, although sometimes with great difficulty. I think if you don't pass this test then you get no say on what Free Speech is or how it should be defended.
I clarified it further down thread, but yeah, basically. I don't think it's productive to shun all Zionists (although I think the label is literally celebrating war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and that it's not useful 80 years after it already won), but I'm using the "Pro-Israel" marker to single out a subset of unashamed, genocidal, rabid, hate-overflowing supporters of Israel who go above and beyond to dehumanize Palestinians and express unconditional and unreserved support to anything a genocidal armed forces do.
Even they, don't deserve to be censored, except those who come right out and say that they want to commit a murder against Palestinians or Pro-Palestinians (or boast that they committed a murder) with exact details, in which case their speech becomes a straight up confession of a crime or a premediated plan to commit one.
For concrete examples to prove that those phenotypes don't just exist in my head, see the recent shooting in Florida where an American Jew mistook 2 Israeli Jews on vacation for Palestinians and fired at them, both the shooter and the victims shouted or posted on social media anti-Palestinian slurs.
This, unironically, is the actual position of lots of religious Jews (including Israelis) and evangelicals, in 2 ways.
Religious Jews: Jews should live in the Holy Land, but only when the Messiah comes. It's heresy to hasten the coming of the Messiah or to ignore the commandment to abandon the Holy Land until he comes, so Israel shouldn't exist, but since it exists anyway, we might as well get free healthcare and shout slurs at Arabs.
(I'm being cheeky, but some Jews under this category is also anti-Israel in the Pro-Palestinian sense, most (in)famously the Naturi Karta)
Evangelicals: Israel should exist because Armageddon will happen and Israel will be destroyed in it, but it should exist until then because if it got destroyed by Hamas or Hezbollah Armageddon will not happen/be delayed.
I think this is basically a lot of American liberal Jews? At least if you assume "anti Israel" is limited in scope, say to the current war, or current government, it's perfectly coherent.
I agree "Freeze Peach" is outgroup talk, I remember it from 2020 and after on Reddit and Twitter from the type of people who like to deny that Free Speech violations ever took place (But also that their targets deserved it). But also, I sometimes catch myself using it in my internal monologue to make fun of conservative defenders of Free Speech when they screech about Free Speech (either before or after Trump took office).
So it's a tough case, the easiest course of action is to just assume good faith on OP's part, especially absent any other comments clarifying their view.
> but not all Zionists are censors
I wholeheartedly agree. I brought them up because I genuinely believe that Pro-Israel rabid Zionists (a distinct category from just any old Zionist) are some of the most despicable and genocidal people I can think of off the top of my head, and I find myself still extremely reluctant to take away their Free Speech rights and mildly sympathetic to anyone of them who is silenced.
So I'm bringing this up to demonstrate that it's not an impossible standard that which we demand of conservatives, it's something I demonstrated by example is possible.
Not watching however long is 4 episodes is; how did they think it was rational? anti natalists?, or how I would use the term "death cult", cartel/cia psychopaths.
It's rationalist as in coming out of the rationalist movement, like this blog. It's a cult in that it's a group of people who have very strange and crazy ideas, and they are isolating themselves from people who do not share those ideas. It is a death cult in the sense that they have killed 4 people.
Despite being intensely curious about my ancestry I never considered sending my DNA to a Sili Valley startup with likely nonexistent privacy safeguards. Now CA AG issues this warning:
If any of you good folks have your data with them I cannot endorse the above enough - whatever vultures are circling this carcass are likely quite interested in your data.
Heh, as if the hacks weren't already enough for everyone to know what's on 23&Me deepest servers. Just off the top of my head, Haaretz and others reported a hack that targeted something like **10 million** Jewish genotypes.
That's just the last year alone.
The modern data scape is truly the worst of all possible worlds. Simultaneously too forgetful and too rememberful of our data, you simultaneously can't find a copy of that early 2000s movie or that 1930s book but hackers can easily find a copy of your whole genome if they so please, available under several prices.
Absolutely agree with your doubts about their data hygiene.
Massive props for circulating "Sili Valley", a term I've tried to get adopted. Like "noughties" for what seems to have been called "the noughts", it's a bit frustrating that the most apposite language doesn't get more usage
I'm curious what you think the biggest concrete risk is here. I use 23andMe and have zero fears. I've never heard any argument that caused me to be concerned. What's the absolute worst plausible outcome that I should be worried about?
I pondered exactly the same thing before I deleted my account this morning. And then I finally decided, “why take chances?“ I don’t really need it and why leave it hanging out there.
Oh, and of course if whatever flavor of nazis takes seriously the idea of targeting whatever ethnic group they declare to be the untermensch, now they won’t need to ask for papers or measure skulls.
Ok, at what odds would you be willing to bet that within 20 years someone will start ethnically cleansing the US population based on data collected by 23andMe?
I'm pretty certain that states are going to do exactly that kind of thing in the future, but I doubt the US is going to take the lead here, to state it mildly.
I don’t have any data solid enough to produce odds. This is a classic case of low-probability high-impact scenario I can easily avoid by withholding my DNA from random startups.
My thoughts run toward the insurance companies as well, and I’m not confident in this being illegal to be a great protection.
But the more worrying thing is fraud - the kind of social phishing that uses your connections to build confidence. This was explicitly mentioned at a cybersecurity training.
And then there’s just a general sense that once my DNA info is out there I can’t take it back, and I don’t know what use someone can come up with.
Your DNA is already semi-public data. You leave it everywhere you go through skin flakes, hair, saliva, etc. But no one bothers collecting it unless you're being investigated for a serious crime, because it's not worth anything.
You can bet that if there were a way to make a couple hundred bucks from fraud using someone's DNA, scammers would start collecting it from restaurants, pubs, gyms, or other public places.
I appreciate your warning and I'm not arguing against it in any way.
I have wondered about the implications of the scattering of my DNA everywhere. But a significant effort directed at me personally would be needed to harm me using it. By providing it to a centralized database with my name/address/etc. attached I'd make it 100X easier.
In general, it's just like self-defense training: if a professional assassin targets me none of my amateur training will make any difference. If a drunk bozo... you get the picture.
WRT to fraud, the way it's especially dangerous in 23&Me situation is that there's a lot of context attached to that DNA data, context that doesn't exist in a random collection of samples from a pub.
I was thinking more along the lines that, in a hypothetical world where you could do something like get a fraudulent bank loan using someone's name and DNA, scammers would chat people up and then surreptitiously swap their drinking glass or take a loose hair.
Of course in our world, banks don't use DNA to identify you. It would be a bad idea because it's not secret information, and because two people can have the same DNA.
I agree that if your info + DNA is only worth about $0.10, then it's not worth it for scammers to target you individually, but a database of millions of people is worth using.
The most obvious use I can think of for that dataset would be genetic research, identifying genetic risk factors for diseases, etc.
Yeah it's not the banks I'm worried about. The context that 23&Me provides is related to genealogy, therefore relations, therefore a fertile ground for scammers to figure out how to exploit familiarity, "hey it's your cousin Jenny, haven't talked since that vacay trip, how's Mike doing?" type of ice-breaking that is very valuable for cybercriminals. I'm not making it up, this was a topic in security training recently.
This is why I'm anonymous here, and not only that, this screen name is only used here, with a throwaway email for registration, and my FB is not under my real name, etc. etc... Makes it just a bit harder for someone to build a profile, less interconnected context.
Your data could be sold to insurance companies, possibly raising your rates. If you've had a genetic test, life insurance companies can sometimes use the results as part of calculating your rates.
I'm not super familiar with preexisting condition rules, but I can imagine that some types of coverage could become much more expensive if you are at risk of something specific.
A) At least according to 23andme, I don't have any bad genes. Nothing serious anyway. B) I'm confident that companies are more afraid of the public and legal backlash that would come from doing this than they're enticed by the potential upside. There's just no way that it would work out well for them. If it's not already illegal (and I would guess that it is) then it would rapidly be made illegal.
Can non-Californians also take advantage of this? They save 23AndMe is California-based but I'm not sure if that will work for my family members who live in New England.
I don't know; FWIW B Civil has done this per the comment... I share the concern that there's no way to know if they delete the data as requested and the lack of enforcement mechanism to compel them to.
Content warning: minor spoilers for a trifle of a television show.
If you would ruin an expensive suit to save a drowning child, I beg you to spend a small amount of electricity to help save a vessel in distress.
Doctor Odyssey is not necessarily a good show. This may be why, although it hasn't been cancelled yet, its ratings are in the danger zone. However, it's the opposite of prestige television. It's a delivery mechanism for watching good looking people in a perfect environment. Sure, it's a drama and there's an endless stream of unlikely medical emergencies to keep the hypercompetent Doctor Odyssey busy. But hurricanes subside after a few waves. Side characters learn minor lessons. Then it's always back to Captain Don Johnson's regularly scheduled heaven.
The show's motto is best summed in the gay week episode by a drag queen being treated for burns after a wig fire incident: aesthetics are important. Doctor Odyssey is clear eyed about the costs - characters hurt themselves with disordered eating, a pair of travel influencers eat low calorie slop while photographing the Odyssey's perfect meals, the crew has to maintain obsessive standards and endure the Captain's micromanaging to build this bubble - but doesn't pretend it isn't true.
It's refreshing and interesting to see something with such a different baseline ethos than most of the spaces / media I, and I'd wager many ACX readers, normally inhabit / consume. Doctor Odyssey's doctor is a wildly overqualified Yale graduate who decides to live for joy after nearly dying of Covid. The casting isn't pretending to not care about diversity. As with the view on aesthetics it's not an uncomplicated view. Gay week also features the medical team ensuring they have plenty of PrEP, Doxy PEP, and penicillin. Wellness week is about the superiority of medicine over woo. Etc.
Put it on, convert that electricity into ratings, rescue the Odyssey. You don't even really need to watch, the best part is that the show gets better the less attention you pay.
Hmm - so they've combined the genres of "medical/hospital drama TV show" with "soap opera episodes set on a cruise liner" in a sort of updated "The Love Boat"? What they plainly missed out on, and what will revitalise the new season, is to throw a *third* popular TV genre into the mix - chef/restaurant drama!
They need a new character, who is a surgeon-turned-chef or chef-turned-surgeon to come aboard who operates (heh!) in a dual capacity: are they going to be in the operating theatre or the galley aboard tonight? Whipping up a four-star Michelin banquet by night, whipping out inflamed appendices and gallbladders by day!
You could even do a comedy-serious message about organ donation episode about the shenanigans when the donated organ on ice for a passenger gets mixed up with the offal delivery on ice for the restaurant's themed 'nose to tail eating' specialty night. Did the human liver end up on the chopping board fed to the captain's table? Ooh-err, missus!
Clearly I am not thinking big (or trite) enough! What else do we need in the mix? Well, there's the old reliable standby cop show, but maybe we need to change it up a little - we need lots of ridiculously attractive people to nearly have sex before a medical emergency intervenes (if I'm going by the Wikipedia synopses of the episodes).
So a former big city lawyer - District Attorney, maybe? Or Public Defender? I suppose it depends on whether "heroic prosecutor of the bad guys a la Kamala Harris (at least according to her campaign)" or "heroic defender of the downtrodden against Da Man" is more popular this week - who is also a former swimsuit model but now has burned out in her high-profile, high-stress career comes on board as, uh, Director of Entertainment? I dunno, all we need is plenty of opportunities for her to be shown in bikinis and skimpy sports wear and glam fashion so whatever fits the bill there.
She helps the doctors, nurses, crew, captain and passengers with their fitness routines *and* legal woes! All the while engaging in a will-they-won't-they possible romance with any one or several of the hot medics, sailors and/or passengers!
"Her" could also be a "him", let's not be restricted by gender roles. Or for the maximum win, trans woman hot lady lawyer-cum-swimsuit model for the modern audience?
> "Her" could also be a "him", let's not be restricted by gender roles. Or for the maximum win, trans woman hot lady lawyer-cum-swimsuit model for the modern audience?
It's an interesting question whether Doctor Odyssey will have an explicitly trans character by the end of the first season. I lean towards yes.
Its moral universe may be somewhat different than you imagine, though. It has no issues showing characters - even white, male, cis, privileged characters - express satisfaction, a strong desire for, or regret for not having a conventional marriage. It acknowledges that some marriages are bad and it may not be a universal ideal; it's treated as another in the menu of perfectly valid life choices. Will this dash of more traditional thinking inhibit them from having a trans focus? We'll all have to watch to find out.
> Well, there's the old reliable standby cop show...
The episode preceding the mid-season break features a police officer - a cross-over character from another network show. Doctor Odyssey has to assist with the investigation and arrest in the usual police procedural way.
> She helps the doctors, nurses, crew, captain and passengers with their fitness routines *and* legal woes!
There's been glimpses of the importance of fitness onboard but there hasn't been a spotlight on a fitness crewmember yet. I expect something rhyming with your description will be in the second half of the season. You need to get an agent.
Well darn it, I'll have to dig deeper or be more shallow, whichever works. So the show already has the chef and cop angles covered, what's left?
Some sort of Korean TV-show inspired "death lottery" would seem too dark for the show, but there might be a milder version of it where a particular cruise is themed around games/events and the passengers compete to finish in the top-rank?
Worth noting that, since it's an ABC show, in order for the ratings to count, you either need to be contacted by Nielsen or watch it on their streaming service, just turning it on TV won't count.
That's the kind of nuts and bolts problem solving that Captain Odyssey likes. The show is legitimately very positive. Whether the positive world it imagines is possible doesn't matter just like it doesn't matter whether orcas can disable a cruise ship. It's about the people. There's some Love Boat in there but it's basically Star Trek:TNG as a sexualized soap opera.
I just want to add something from my personal experiences.
I have a few close friends who are Trump voters. Small data set but they are not the least bit racist (based on how they talk about the world, how they treat me), and they are not stupid. They're very sweet and kind.
They dismiss things they don't like about Trump, even fund them funny, perhaps in the way Dem voters dismiss things they don't like about Biden.
They also think Trump's faults are comparable to Biden's.
Looking at this objectively, both sides dismiss their guy's faults as trivial and see the opponent's faults as serious.
I'm not taking a position on the correctness of one side or the other, but just pointing this out.
I mean, they're not *all* like that, but seeing someone step forward on here and saying "I'm a high-IQ Trump voter and not cartoonishly racist" and then immediately acting cartoonishly racist all over the thread, I can see how this idea can persist.
Saying spending all your conversation opportunities at a party hammering on racial stereotypes is not racist and then doubling down that "most stereotypes are true or they wouldn't be stereotypes"; using IQ and SAT scores as a hammer to devalue black and Hispanic people while not paying equivalent respect to Asian people. (Believing people's worth is determined by their IQ is IMO vile but it's at least intellectually consistent and not racist per se; when you vary your standards from one comparison to another so one group you chose comes out as having the most moral worth, then you are racially prejudiced; when that group is the one with local or global hegemony and your arguments are their partisans' common talking points then you are racist.)
Do you think it's possible that whoever was behaving this way, may have seen some people who fit one of those ethnic phenotypes and also exhibited at least one of those stereotypes?
Objectively, both sides (of any issues) assign small weights to the contradictions and internal inconsistencies in their worldview, and huge weights to the contradictions and inconsistencies of the outgroup. An article I read about this that stuck in my mind is Signals and Correctives [1], which proposes that everyone has a "second-order term" which they use to account for contradictions in their pet worldview without really doing anything about them.
(e.g. a feminist may use the Corrective of "Sometimes Women accuse Men falsely of rape" to account for the objective fact of Women falsely accusing Men of rape, then proceeds to do exactly nothing about it or pay the smallest lip service to it, still supporting and believing every woman who accuses a man of rape, because it's just a Corrective and not the main Signal.)
But also objectively, it's an empirical fact that Trump is the first US president to credibly and repeatedly threaten several traditionally-US-allies countries of invasion and annexation. He is the first to blatantly use the White House for advertisements of a product of one of his entourage. He is the first to launch a product (Trump coin) while in office and use his office for advertisements of said product. Forget whether the product is shitty or scammy (it is both), the very fact of the president advertising a product has - the limit of my knowledge - never happened before. (It happened twice with Trump, Trump coin and a perfume which he used a photo of him next to Biden's wife to advertise with the caption "A fragrance your enemies can't resist". That's not counting his advertisements of used scraps of his suit, which happened in his campaign [but also continued to his presidency? I don't know].)
It's true that Trump followers aren't doing anything exactly groundbreaking or revolutionary, they're in a cult. It has been a meme since forever among atheists and other skeptics that Religions and Cults turn the nicest people on Earth to some of the most villainous and rabid advocates of truly horrible practices that they would have never touched with a 10-meter pole if not for the ancient holy texts and the promise of the afterlife.
I guess Trump voters are a counterexample to the claim that you must have a holy text or a promise of an afterlife to do that to people.
>He is the first to blatantly use the White House for advertisements of a product of one of his entourage.
I think this was actually fine. We generally accept it when political leaders encourage people *not* to buy a product (boycotts). Encouraging them *to* buy one is looked down on because you can do it to benefit yourself personally without a political reason, but if you do have a political reason, then it seems it should be similarly acceptable. And defending your ally from a boycott by the enemy side definitely counts - you didnt even get to pick what youre advertising, very low risk of motivated reasoning.
Do dem voters dismiss the things they don't like about biden? I think they mostly soured on him after the debate vs trump in which it became obvious he was too old to go on as president.
Many did not. The polls were clear on this point long before that debate. The debate just made it too stark for continuation of the wishcasting/handwaving by some Dem loyalists and most party officials.
My elder siblings say the whole episode reminded them of how Nixon's GOP support played out during Watergate.
A lot of the fault for this goes to the right wingers who were crying wolf on this issue long before it was true never mind obvious, causing people with little bandwidth to evaluate the claim at the wrong time.
Are there any other issues on which we can get you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes just to defy us? I'm fairly itching to use this new superpower.
Considering you clearly bought it every single time, I'm not going further down the rabbit hole with you, but for the third parties, this started before the first Biden campaign and yet the administration's influence on legislation during most of his term clearly showed his fingerprints showing that he was still functioning.
"administration's influence on legislation during most of his term clearly showed his fingerprints"
What specifically showed his "fingerprints" in such a way that proved that he was the one responsible? As opposed to someone else in his administration?
I think it's more accurate to say Dems dismiss things they don't like about the party (like explicit anti-white racism, the abandonment of merit, and censorship). The GOP is in the midst of a reinvention so the energy of the party rests largely in Trump; the Democratic platform is more mature so the nexus lies in the ideology.
[and I know you mean firm/settled/etc as distinct from other definitions of the word "mature"]
(1) Trumpists' collective tantrum is now every bit as self-reinforcing and brainless as was the progressives' tantrum a few years ago, and arguably has now taken over the GOP more thoroughly than the wokists had taken over the Democratic Party even during the depths of 2020-21. There were still plenty of Democrats, including some powerful/prominent ones, who in 2021 were refusing to list their preferred pronouns and whatnot. The GOP though is just entirely gone now, literally putting people in high offices having no qualification _other_ than tribal loyalty. There were no Biden administration appointments, nor any candidates pushed by that party's most-woke wing, as egregiously unqualified as Hegseth, Gabbard, etc. And even a lifelong cynic about Congress, e.g. me, can be freshly appalled by the likes of MTG and Tuberville being elected and re-elected.
(2) Meanwhile lifelong liberal/progressives (using the word "liberal" in its modern-US sense) are today in a state of confusion and disarray at the ideological level. Having lived and worked deep in the heart of "blue" America for decades I've not previously seen anything like it. We're still mostly at the "don't let it show to the Others" stage. My neighbors and coworkers and close family members if they think a given room includes anyone not (as I am) born-and-raised "blue", are still mostly keeping up appearances. Not entirely actually....but anyway in private right now, whoa. It's actually kind of disorienting, as I've heard multiple people say including my own spouse.
Whether that leads to anything other than sulking/anomie/descent into aggressive MAGA-style madness/whatever, is still very much not clear. I'm not particularly optimistic myself at least not until my own cohort (Boomers) has mostly passed from the scene. But I guess maybe we'll find out at some point.
First off, IDK what race you are or where you live, but the fact that people treat you well or don't act racist around you does not mean they aren't. You could be "one of the good ones," so culturally assimilated or so rare a demographic where you live that you don't trigger their racial anxiety.
People look at me like I'm paranoid when I say stuff like this in CA, but I'm from a part of the US where casual racism is quite common, and I can tell you, its never "on" all the time. It comes out when people think everyone else is in on the joke. A fun test: try saying something you think is pushing the boundary of acceptability and see if they get uncomfortable or if they just nod like what you said is an obvious fact everyone already knows and accepts.
That being said, obviously not all Trump supporters are racists, or at least not racist in the clean "I hate non-white people" way, or else he wouldn't have such a sizable minority support. But Trump himself is racist, in an easy to digest, old-school way, well documented way. And so if that isn't a barrier to supporting him, it doesn't make you racist necessarily, but it does mean you are the type of person who either doesn't think racism is real, or doesn't think its harmful. Its true a lot of people seem to think racism is not a material factor in society anymore, including on this blog, and I agree they all seem to be relatively nice. But when you act like racism isn't real, and give power to a real racist, it can lead to some phenomenally bad policy that you will be unable to explain or resist.
As to whether they are stupid, well, I think the average Trump supporter is pretty dumb, and I don't just mean uneducated, I mean if you found the majority of people who can't read at a middle-school level and asked them who they supported, many more of them supported Trump than Biden. But your friends could be an exception. You know, one of the smart ones.
Kamateur : You're comparing America to a (non existent) perfect world.
I really don't know if they're actually secretly racist. How does one ever know that? I'm simply saying that in my SMALL data set of personal friends who happen to be Trump voters, I don't sense racism.
Tosseick : You're making a lot of assumptions there.
I'm simply challenging the idea that Trump voters are all racist. That's an over simplification and prevents you from u see standing them.
Actually I'm comparing people in the part of the world I was raised in to the part of the world I live in now. Were sure, people are probably still racist, but the legacy of racism doesn't affect things like the complete geographic layout of the town down to the present moment.
I feel like I understand Trump voters just fine. I grew up around them, I know plenty of them. A lot of them used to be my friends and I watched as their minds slowly rotted under the weight of increasingly deranged conspiracy theories and hatred of anything liberal or woke. I'm saying *you* are the one who doesn't really understand them, because I'm guessing you've known them a relatively short amount of time and in a very controlled environment that does not reflect the majority of Trump voters.
I don't think it's possible to know and understand "Trump voters", when it's (nearly) half the US voters.
I have friends who went in on his pitch, and it didn't ruin our friendship. Some of these friends are MIT- or Caltech-trained engineers, so their politics isn't evidence that they're dumber than I am
No, I'm sure they know a lot about differential equations. But I wonder how many of them have any grounding in history, or political philosophy, or any meaningful understanding of how the civil service in this country works.
You mean the civil service that got deliberately broken for racist reasons in the 1970's when the meritocratic civil service exam was eliminated to make way for unqualified people of preferred ethnic background?
>No, a lot of people in America are pretty racist by the standards of a lot of other humans in the real world
I strongly dispute this. I've been multiple places outside the US, and in each one the level of casual racism[1] exhibited *as normal* far surpassed the *worst* incidents I witnessed while living in the South of the US for over a decade.
In the South, I saw some racist people. The *worst* anti-black guy I knew personally, a homeboy from Floribama got along fine with *individual* black people, but had some unsavory opinions about blacks *as a people*. And he kept those pretty much to himself, because they were strongly disfavored by everyone around him.
Coming back to the US after having been in Eastern Europe was a breath of fresh air on racial matters.
[1] For example, the Latvian-ethnic people asking us, religious missionaries *of their own faith*, "why are you sharing the gospel with those animals?" (meaning the Russian-ethnic Latvians) "Animals don't need the gospel." And they were 100% serious in considering the Russian-ethnics *animals who did not have souls that could be redeemed*. As in literal non-sapient beasts. And the Russians were known to walk into stores where people were speaking Latvian and tell them to "speak like people" (aka speak Russian). And both made jokes about Jews that would curl Hitler's toes. Russians and Estonians hated each other with a burning passion, mostly for wrongs done *centuries* ago (as well as more recent insults).
Moving to more skin-color issues--All of those people outright *feared* black people. As in asking "how do you live with all those black people around you?" (meaning in America) and actively avoiding the only black people I knew about there, the 6'+ basketball players (some from the US and some from various African countries). And that was 100% normalized and not shameful at all.
> I've been multiple places outside the US, and in each one the level of casual racism[1] exhibited as normal far surpassed the worst incidents I witnessed while living in the South of the US for over a decade.
Yep, strong second on this. I've been doing business overseas for more than a decade, inclusive of most of East Asia, SE Asia, and Russia. Literally every single one of those countries / regions are FAR more overtly racist than any state in America, including southern ones.
The name suggests Indian, and conservatives love Indians (sometimes literally, eg Vance) probably because Indian immigrants tend to have pretty compatible traditional values - family oriented, pro-business, etc. There are lots of Indians in the modern Republican party, and it would take a really flagrant racist to speak ill to an ally.
Well, Harris isn't an ally. The speaker just forgot that her epithet had some collateral damage built in. Luckily Jindal, Ramaswamy, Haley, Patel, etc don't seem to mind a little casual racial denigration.
Well if you go on Twitter and mention visas, plenty of Republicans are willing to say horrible things about Indians. Or just look at how they talk about JD Vance's wife. But you are correct, the Republican leadership gets to pretend like they are of an entirely different mindset.
I wish I could point out a wild generalization I see made about Trump voters, without being told I'm a Trump ally (or a Biden ally, or driven by any ideology).
Here's the thing. A lot of reflexively progressive people like me spent the entirety of 2016-2020 trying to figure out what it was that we had not understood about Trump voters, how we completely lost touch with them, how we had let ourselves get so deluded by echo chambers. I did a lot of deep soul-searching, I reconnected with a lot of people, I really dove into the deep end of the pool in my quest to be able to better communicate with them the next election around. And it did. not. matter. Because most of them are in a cult, and cult members do not want to hear you criticize their leader, no matter how empathic or reasoned or polite.
So next time *you* make a generalization about what people think of Trump supporters, maybe ask yourself what their experiences are.
While I realize you've bowed out, if you want to get further on this, the thing to do might be to report exactly what you did in order to connect with Trump voters, including what you said, which voters you contacted, and so on.
Personally, I'm not surprised to hear you encountered cult-like behavior, but not because Trump voters are especially cult-like; rather, because *people* are prone to cult-like behavior, and don't notice it when it's their own cult.
I've run across many accounts over the decades of people who tried to think like their opponents, and saying "they really, really tried", and still came up confirming their priors, so that's not interesting. What's interesting is when they tried to go one level deeper - think like their opponents, and also look at their own side through their opponent's frame of mind. I've almost never witnessed people report on this.
I can't generalize, as I know only a few. But the few I know, seem thoughtful and decent. I just thought I'd add this point out here, since the main poster was trying to understand these voters.
Many smart insightful people such as Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward etc have written book after book trying to understand this phenomenon.
The truth seems super complicated. And currently unknown. I simply wanted to eliminate racism and stupidity as factors.
The Trump cult is a cult of personality. Sad old people want to believe that one man can rise to the top and make things better. There have been, as they say, many such cases like this.
The Democratic cult isn't a cult of Biden, but it is a cult nonetheless. It is a cult of knocking on people's doors, listening to their conversations, and saying, "Was that racist? Have you been racist recently? You wouldn't want to be racist, or I'll have to report you." Knowing what it is, I'll take the cult of personality with fries on the side.
People of color isn't a power block. I'm inclined it was an invented concept to intimidate white people.
Not being white isn't actually an ethnicity, and a person doesn't have to be bigoted against their own kind to be bigoted against a category of other people who aren't white.
Repulsive to who, a tiny minority of millionaire Universalists? Rights being conferred with citizenship at birth has been a default assumption for humanity for a long, long time, all across the globe.
I don't value "citizenship" as highly as some (and i tend to prefer countries that assign citizenship by blood rather than by birth), but yea, I think it would seem completely obvious to me (and to most of our ancestors, and to most people outside the cosmopolitan circles in some western counrties today) that, yes, *of course* your political, social, civil rights etc. depend to some extent on your circumstances of birth.
I'm not a millionaire but admittedly I'm a pretty hardcore "Universalist", which sounds a lot like the "Rootless Cosmopolitan" shtick that Stalinists used to throw at Jews, typically supporters of Israel. Kinda ironic given what I typically post about, huh? Or maybe it's fitting.
Anyway, if by "Universalist", which I admit to not know what the heck you mean by, you just mean that I think all people deserve roughly the same rights (modulo their different material situations), and that I derive my moral philosophy from the Original Position [1] by John Rawls, where I try to imagine (as much as possible) that I don't know which race, creed, color or economic-social stratum am I before taking my moral positions, then hell yeah, I'm a Universalist. Universalism is the best moral philosophy.
> Rights being conferred with citizenship at birth has been a default assumption for humanity for a long, long time, all across the globe.
(1) There was no such thing as citizenship for the vast crushing majority of human existence. There was nomads and hunter-gatherers, and every land they stepped on was their country. Countries and citizenship are bullshit, literally social constructions.
(2) The fact that something was present for a long time is not moral justification for that thing. For the vast crushing majority of time both before and after humans there was no concept of "Rights" at all, everything you have - your money, your house, your wife and family - is just one tribal raid away from being taken or enslaved by a more powerful warlord. If you don't want a return to that, then you at least agree that some things that were introduced contrary to the historical trend are good and worth preserving.
(3) The Pro-Palestinian protestors are not being deported because they're not Americans, they're being deported because they're Pro-Palestinian (i.e. something that Trump disagree with) and simultaneously non-American. If you're American and you say or do anything that Trump disagree with, he can (a) Revoke your citizenship, which he can find a million excuse to (b) Make your life in America hell by any number of means. Given that Trump is extremely volatile and the list of "Things he disagrees with" is in ever-growing flux, you should be worried for your own interest about Trump persecuting Pro-Palestinians.
"There was nomads and hunter-gatherers, and every land they stepped on was their countr"
this isn't how hunter gatherer societies actually functioning. They have territories that they defend with lethal force, even if over some time frames they move around.
And even if they didn't, they have strong concepts of belonging, and of ingroup vs. outgroup, based around kinship, ancestry and language.
Exactly. In fact the ancient hunter gatherers were far less universalist than even the most blood and soil nationalist is since the latter extends his in-group to millions of people he doesn’t know and could never meet. The hunter gatherers would quite happily kill the other guys across the plain.
Universalism isn’t in fact anti-nationalist, it’s rather a form of imperialism, the universalist imagines a world without borders but only as an extension of his world view, which is more or less an idealised version of the country and time he is living in. If he’s an American liberal he imagines a world full of American liberals, and the actual messy reality of countries having different world views is opaque to him, partly because he’s at the centre of the hegemon.
> the "Rootless Cosmopolitan" shtick that Stalinists used to throw at Jews, typically supporters of Israel.
That sounds like a contradiction, but maybe that’s what you mean.
That there was no citizenship pre modern nationalism is largely because people were subjects. They were certainly aware of their ethnic groups and national identities, and places like Britain had English, Scottish and Welsh identities long before the modern idea of the state.
I'm not too caught up on the percise intricacies of Stalinist wrong think in the 1940s and the 1950s, but my impression is that they usually:
(A) Hated Soviet Jews, because Soviet Jews were disproportionately intellectuals/journalists and thus the kind of people most likely to disagree that we need 50 Stalins or maybe even 1 Stalin
(B) Initially loved Israeli Jews, because they thought the early political scene (full of Socialism mixed with blood & soil nationalism and glorification of labor, especially the agricultural type) would be representative of the future and foreign policy of the newly formed state. They were in for a rude surprise in the 1950s and the 1960s, but they were the first to recognize the new state de-facto in 1948, and the vast majority of the proto-IDF's weapons are East-European WW2 remains.
(C) Especially hated when Soviet Jews wanted to immigrate to Israel, or any other place outside of the Iron Curtain for that matter
(D) Used "Rootless Cosmopolitan" as a generic catch-all insult against all Soviet Jews, whether those Soviet Jews were Western-attracted or Israel-attracted, and indeed whether they wanted to get out of the Soviet Union at all or didn't and just criticized the party. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" being an extension of Hitler-era and pre-Hitler-era stereotypes against Jews as Roma-like tribal immigrants that exist within societies while never assimilating.
I don't know whether pro-Israel Soviet Jews were simultaneously Cosmopolitan in the same way, say, American Jews are today. Judging by American Jews today, I guess some of them were, and I guess they had the same interesting set of contradictions to reconcile as their American brethrens today have. I know for a fact that some early socialists in Israel itself were Cosmopolitan in the sense that they thought Israel should have peace and open borders with the Arab states, and thought of Arabs as allies in a shared struggle against colonial powers.
Universalists could refer to both followers of John Rawls and followers of the Universal Unitarian church.
1. Hunter gatherer rules work for hunter gatherers. Tribes of hunter gatherers were small, 20 to 60 people perhaps. Little more can be supported by nomadic foraging. Everything we have now, all the food and technology developed from agriculture also rests on 'bullshit social constructions'. Trying to re-apply hunter gatherer rules to agricultural societies is a recipe for garbage.
2. Not everything historical is good, or bad. Not everything that is a bullshit social construction is good, or bad.
3. Trump has very limited means to make your life hell if you are a citizen. I would prefer that he applies such measures to all green carders and immigrants rather than the pro Palestine people, but that's the world we live in.
> Trump has very limited means to make your life hell if you are a citizen
Are you sure about that? He can't threaten your business (the one you own or the one you're employed by) until it fires you? He can't continuously delay and withdraw funds from services and institutions you depend on?
Sound like one hell a risky bet. Let's see how it work out.
Yet for the next few centuries the American state somehow operated under the assumption of a line drawn between American citizens and non-citizens, based on birthright and then legal options for assimilation.
Most of the Bill of Rights contains no language saying it only applies to citizens. Anyone who reads that into it, Supreme Court justices included, is betraying the founding principles of the United States.
Wherever there was a state in charge of enclaves, it would generally set the rules or general guidelines for caste or religious based rights - all of which would still usually be based on birthright.
I have made the same observation. It is extremely important to keep this truth in mind. The thing that caused and perpetrates the present hostile
divisions among groups is a sort of chunking process whereby somebody who differs in belief about one hot issue is seen as differing in a bunch of other things, such as views about many other hot issues, plus also intelligence, common sense, kindness, reasoning ability, morals, etc
I have much less skin in the game than many others. But one difference that I do see is expertise. I think Biden and his administration understood the things much better on a technical level. This is nothing new, this was already a huge difference between the first Trump administration. Apart from their different political goals, this does seem a strong difference between Biden and Trump. This is also a difference to other right-wing governments. My outsider impression is that Milei has a lot more expertise than Trump.
It's not a given that a government with little expertise is bad for the country. Germany had somewhat of a baby version of Trump around 2000. The Schroder/Fischer government was determined to make lots of reforms, and they did. And some of them turned out to be very good for the country (reform of unemployment insurance "Hartz IV", not joining the Iraq war). But the majority of reforms was so ridiculously bad that they are *still* a laughing stocks today (a totally failed attempt to reform pensions "Riester-Rente", endorsing and pushing the "CumEx" tax fraud, spending hundreds of billions(!!) for a negligible installment of renewables). It's probably the government that had the longest-lasting impact in Germany in the last 40 years, and I am still split whether the overall impact was more positive or more negative.
Govt wants a neural network that measures tumor sizes, and has money. I want lots of GPUS, and have an algorithm that turns gpus into said neural network. NVIDIA has lots of GPUS, and wants money.
University facilitates trade, skims some off the top, everyone wins. This is like pre-econ-101
Because they get a LOT of money from the government, and they have a lot of expenses. Even Harvard's endowment is not large enough to fund all its operating expenses. (Their annual operating budget is currently 6.5b/yr, and that's not including capital expenditures).
I can't help but wonder to what extent their expenses are driven by those large endowments.
I've heard multiple accounts of universities that suddenly noticed how many Vice Presidents of This or That were on their payroll, that weren't there in the mid-20th century, when student loans weren't as guaranteed. Observers noticed a specific type of price spiral. It wasn't always immediately clear that all these positions were useless, but there was strong suspicion that at least 20% could have been cut with few ill effects. (Some office helping 1% of the student body; another making student life 1% better; etc.)
Harvard is older then fdrs era of the government and there was at least some rent seeking credentalism (doctors at minium) that universities had; they are part of the state co-evolved with the current system; the ww2 mil spending "science" went to universitys to rent seek over, when a industery gets controlled its via mandating a degree from a university.
I would go so far as to say schools were the mechanism the half-anarchist early america became a total state. While if trump coup of fdrs system is susscessful a break down in relations should be expected; anything before that point wouldve been silly, why should the brain seek to not share blood with the arms?
The actual strings attached are reasonable and universities didn't have a problem with them.
Now there is a bunch of new stuff the Trump administration selectively makes up based on who their political enemies are.
What may happen if federal grants become totally up to the day-to-day whims of the president, is universities move to the European model where the balance is much more in favor of "hard money" (guaranteed funding from university budgets) compared to grants.
Universities with big endowments are already prestigious and capable of attracting the best researchers. Those researchers measure career advancement in grants, for the most part. They're motivated to get them anyway. Why would the university turn down what is essentially free money?
In fact the overhead rate is often above 50%, meaning that the university spends half the money on the project and the other half on general running costs. Most universities in the US are more heavily dependent on the federal government than they like to let on.
No, Coriolis is (correctly) saying that a 50% overhead/indirect cost rate would mean that 1/3 of the total cost is overhead. Take the direct costs* and multiply by the IDC rate to get the (additional) indirect costs.
*Less than that, actually, because some stuff like tuition and major equipment is not subject to indirect costs.
Endowments + government funding is a lot more money than endowments alone.
Also, endowments often come with strings attached for what the money can be spent on, whereas government funding is often directly for research they think will be beneficial to society.
Whether or not universities like the strings attached, a huge portion of the university-industrial-complex requires government funding, and having that cut off would be a major loss. I think they have the reasonable complaint that the administration is now withholding contracts and grants, primarily dedicated to science development and the betterment of society, because it disagrees with the politics of the university as a whole, rather than the merits of their research programs themselves.
Thanks for the feedback. If this thing freeze-dries well enough for me to ship it around the country, benefit of participating might be not dying of a heart attack
I think we've all heard, with increasingly loud levels of alarm in recent years, that China out-manufactures the US and so would have a big advantage in a future conflict. That the US defense industry relies on a number of specialized components that are mostly manufactured in China these days. This is the conventional wisdom these days. So:
Could the US just start stockpiling goods that it would need in a conflict? And/or, direct defense companies to start doing so. All of the little nitty-gritty components of the modern industrial war economy- actuators, ball bearings, drone components, and so on. I understand that some things like rare earth minerals are now restricted, but actuators & drone components are freely available on the market in bulk, no? On the Chinese side a couple of people on X have noted that China is buying quite a bit more iron ore from Australia than their economy needs right now. Presumably, they are stockpiling for a conflict as well, as China is almost totally reliant on Australia for iron. And both countries have their own oil depots (China's is so big it has its own Wiki page!)
The US can't stockpile enough to win like a decade-long war. But a couple years worth? Maybe enough that US industry could then possibly take over manufacturing if the war went longer? Or, is the US government just not organized enough to carry out this kind of long-term planning?
If technological change is fast enough then your stockpiles may be rendered useless (or at least greatly devalued) every few years. This was supposedly a big reason why the German Air Force in WW2 was at such a disadvantage relative to the UK and US: ironically because the latter rearmed a few years later than the former, they had much better radar technology, which was advancing significantly even in the span of a few years.
So the ability to deploy your manufacturing infrastructure to produce the most up to date technology matters a great deal.
I have zero domain expertise here, but a couple thoughts:
1) I'm pretty sure the military plans for things like this. They audit the supply chain and think through what would happen in an actual war. I'm sure they're prepared to face an absolute trade embargo without it crippling our ability to fight.
2) Countries that trade with each other historically don't go to war. The more our economies are enmeshed, the higher the cost of war to both sides. Encouraging trade is an excellent way to disincentivize war.
RE: 2) Countries that trade with each other historically don't go to war.
This is something that sounds like it should be true, but isn't. Just before WWII, Germany's biggest trade partner was France. Just before WWI thr Ottoman Empire's biggest trade partners were Great Britain and France. Just before invading Ukraine, Russia's biggest conglomerate trade partner was the EU (China the biggest single entity) and the virtually complete loss of EU trade due to sanctions was an obvious outcome.
The point is, nations go to war (proxy or direct) with their primary trade partners all of the time, historically speaking. There are motivations beyond the purely economic that drive international relations.
Huh. Does this hold up under careful analysis? I was repeating what I thought I heard from a real academic once but maybe it's one of those conventional wisdom things that's just wrong. Like I have in my head that there's an actual negative correlation historically around this. Thanks for pointing it out.
1) The West has wasted ~20 years by preparing mostly for counter-insurgency rather than peer conflict. That includes manufacturing autarky.
2) That is what Germany has tried with Russia. It was several decades of "change through trade", the official slogan of multiple different governments. The Ukraine war has shown how well that turned out to work.
In an actual war with the United States China's manufacturing abilities will be weakened considerably. China relies on global trade to keep their manufacturing sector humming. In any actual war with the US maritime trade will be cut off significantly (I would say entirely, but some smugglers always get through). China currently imports 3 times as much oil as it produces, three times as much iron ore as it produces, 3 times as much copper as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They import 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and 161,000 tons of grain *daily*.
Some people say "Hey, they'll just import it by rail from Russia." They don't have the throughput. There are currently only two major rail lines from Russia to China. To put that in perspective, China recently invested in building two additional rail lines to Mongolia, in order to import more coal from them and less from Australia. Those two rail lines increased their coal imports from Mongolia by about 80,000 tons per day. So, to be generous, we can figure that a rail line can handle 50,000 tons per day. That means in order to maintain iron ore imports at their current rate they would need to build 60 new rail lines to Russia.
Meanwhile, in a war scenario the US will still have access to global markets and can ship in whatever raw materials or manufactured goods they need: which would certainly help in a sudden need to expand our ability to manufacture weapons of war.
Those are all interesting numbers, but did you account for the fact that this includes demands of the civilian sector as well? If China switches to a war economy, military demands would be prioritized. If the undisrupted stockpiles/import capacity is sufficient to feed the military industry for the duration of the war, it just becomes a question of whether or not China has enough money to pay the increasing prices.
The concern of the day is that China has significantly more manufacturing capacity and will “out manufacture” the US in a war. My main point is that if there is a war Chinas manufacturing capacity will be substantially reduced: we can’t look at its current manufacturing capacity and assume that it’s the same as its wartime capacity. So yes, China will still have manufacturing capacity in the case of war. What it won’t have is its current enormous capacity, which is the thing that is scaring a lot of people.
The peacetime capacity is not very relevant - nobody cares how many iPhones China can crank out while there's a major war on. What China does have is enough military industrial capacity to arm all branches of the PLA with modern hardware. With the exception of the naval production, which is obviously on the coast, these factories are also very difficult to reach with conventional weapons because China is large and these factories are deep inside the country. So if you can neither destroy nor starve these factories, then yes, China is a serious competitor even during wartime.
>The peacetime capacity is not very relevant - nobody cares how many iPhones China can crank out while there's a major war on.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who care. I keep seeing people post charts showing China has more manufacturing capacity than the US: and then using those charts to spread the idea that China will defeat the US if we go to war. Not just randos either, Noahpinion has been beating this drum for a while (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now). It's simply not true. In the case of an actual war with the US an enormous amount of China's current industrial capacity will become useless. Their GDP will crash: cutting off their maritime oil imports alone will drop their GDP by over $800 billion.
In short, I agree that China will be able to continue to make rockets, bullets, and boats (though they'll have a lot more trouble fueling them), but I doubt it would be significantly more than the US can produce: especially since the US will still have access to global markets.
As I understand it, the manufacturing bottlenecks aren't for subcomponents that could be sourced elsewhere, but for the final step - making the actual missiles or tanks or warships. Stockpiling raw materials isn't much good unless you fix that.
First of all, this isn't really in the interest of the actors at the high levels of the US government. People like Elon might bandy about with patriotic language, but I don't think they really at any level are interested in doing something like restricting the sale and trade of US goods for any reason. I think their wholesale dismantling of the fundamental structures of the US state is pretty indicative of this.
In tandem with this is the point you already made, the US government doesn't have the capacity for this any more, they aren't organized enough, or have a clear enough view of the future. This is in part because they are gutting their institutions, like I mentioned earlier.
Over the last few months I've had a lot of conversations with MAGA supporters, and I've been struggling to understand the reasons why smart people that I know, who I think of as fairly conscientious, ended up voting for Trump. I wrote a long post about it and would love thoughts.
The thesis is that in the mid to late 2010s many people threw out their previous epistemologies -- a reliance on news media and academia and the expert class -- in favor of a much more noisy confirmation-bias-validating set of inputs with worse epistemological habits. Some people, myself included, started following folks like Scott. But others started following folks with less commitment to truth seeking. That latter group forms the core of MAGA. Their epistemology, which started as "distrust academia because they have left wing bias" has morphed into a new kind of epistemology where Trump's word is correct and everything else is suspect.
The tough thing about epistemological problems is that it is quite tough to realize when you have one. Sorta like having a bug in your bug reporting form. But folks on the outside of MAGA world, including otherwise right-wing intellectuals, are looking in and increasingly pointing to a complete lack of interest in truth seeking from Musk/Trump/their most ardent supporters.
I think you have to distinguish between people’s motivations. I know a lot of people who voted for Trump, and most of them didn’t have anything more complicated in mind than “His first term went pretty well for me and mine, let’s do that again.”
yea, fair. I think I'm writing about a particular class of people who fall into the venn diagram center of smart, politically aware, and voted for Trump. Of the people I know, the ones who voted Trump are also smart and politically aware, just because there are so few of them. I don't spend a lot of time with the modal Trump voter
I'm not MAGA but I'm a conservative who (marginally) approves of Trump. The TLDR is: sometimes you need a fascist to defeat entrenched communists. (And look, this isn't intended to be persuasive, so it isn't an invitation for cross-examination. I have a model of the world that's informed by an intuition that pattern-matches and extrapolates. I can't *prove* that I'm right and I'm sure you can dismiss it with a "every middle age white male thinks the country is going to hell." But this IS how I think and I'm confident that I'm representative of a certain class of high-IQ conservative. So take it for what it's worth.)
The events of 2020 made clear to me that I am no longer living in a free society. The oppression narratives championed by the progressive left are little more than 21st century bolshevism: an elite political class advocating on behalf of an oppressed proletariat and using cultlike absolutist utopian language to do so. Which was cute when it was just bra-burnings and "only for tie-breaking" affirmative action. But in 2020 I saw BLM riot in this country over an incoherent and easily-contradicted rationale that every significant institution in this country supported mindlessly. There was not reasonable dialogue. Dissent was met with harsh oppression. People's careers were ruined. Then the DEI moral panic, and the installation of DEI apparatchiks throughout the economy. Those are nothing but political officers. Virtually every elite, public-discourse moderating institution in this country has been captured by progressive dogma and they are completely authoritarian in their defense of that dogma. Progressives have historically been agitators for freedom of expression, at least until they're in charge and then it's all "hate"-speech censorship and political statements for university employees. It's the re-casting of our national myth as one of oppression rather than excellence. It's the elimination of merit over notions of equity ("All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."). In short, it is evil. What's worse, it's winning.
Progressives have made a decades-long march through our institutions, typically on the back of moral appeals to fairness, and now that they're entrenched they are abusing institutional neutrality to oppress dissenting viewpoints and consolidate power. Since dissenting viewpoints are held by the vast majority of the country, that means we're in a situation where normal, established institutional processes can no longer be expected to act in the interests of the majority. Taken to a sufficient extreme, that's a justifiable recipe for violent revolt.
The violence in this case is institutional violence and our champion is Trump. Now I don't personally like Trump: he's a buffoon and doesn't understand the system well enough to make the kind of changes he's envisioning. I'm a William F Buckley conservative. I have elitist sympathies and I'm very rule-of-law and respect institutions. But 2020 revealed to me that those institutions are already rotten and any rule of law that I'm interested in (freedom, equality, merit) is already a memory. I would rather have our institutions destroyed than in the hands of modern Bolsheviks. I don't exaggerate when I say that if there had been a front line in 2020 then I would have *eagerly* grabbed a gun to fight against progressive insanity. Progressivism is a cancer on our institutions and Trump is the chemo. I'm willing to tolerate a lot of negative side-effects to kill the cancer.
To you this is probably a histrionic analogy by a zealot wingnut. But I promise you that it's not an analogy to me. If you want to understand MAGA then you should take this view seriously.
I can confirm this is a position shared by many high-IQ conservatives I know and respect.
I don't share this position - I personally think the cure of Trump is likely to be worse than the disease - but I understand why some people hold it, and I respect how they got there.
Just out of sheer curiosity- did you vote or participate in the 2024 Republican primary? You had the option of voting for other, non-leftist, non-Trump options. Did you do so? Or let's say you didn't vote then, or didn't have the opportunity to vote. Would Nikki Haley or DeSantis or (whoever else was running, too lazy to look it up) have sufficiently opposed leftism in your view?
No I don't vote in primaries. I would have loved DeSantis or Rubio. Haley seems stupid but I don't really know much about her. Hell, I would've sprinted to vote for Hillary if the Dems had decided to be reasonable - that's who I voted for in 2016, though it turned my stomach a little. In my view they're making a huge mistake by doubling down on woke and making Kamala/AOC the center of the party. If either party ran someone even reasonably moderate and non-insane they would win in a landslide. Believe me, I have no love for Trump, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And Kamala is just retarded.
as they say, read your opponent's newspapers to feel better about yourself
I appreciate this as an honest response, and it's similar to what many of my other smart-trumpvoting-friends have said. I think this is why I care so much about epistemology and why my article is all about how people are getting their information.
I don't expect to convince you at the object level of concern, but I feel compelled to respond either way: 'wokeness' became uncool in like 2020-2021, and I feel like all of the people being mad about woke now are like several years behind the curve. Take it from someone who was at Columbia in the mid 2010s.
The march-through-institutions, the belief that "Virtually every elite, public-discourse moderating institution in this country has been captured by progressive dogma and they are completely authoritarian in their defense of that dogma" -- this imo just didn't happen. It's extremely hard to take this seriously when there's been a conservative SCOTUS majority for 50+ years.
Even COVID response! Yes, California and New York were very harsh in the cities. But upstate New York was a totally different story, and in places like Florida it was like COVID didn't even exist. I spent a bunch of time in Ocala during COVID around May 2020, and there wasn't a mask in sight!
There were a few places that were definitely very left leaning -- mostly universities (Oberlin, e.g.), but even there there were many that just didn't give a shit (UChicago, e.g.). And there was definitely a left leaning bent to news media, especially huffpost, msnbc, cnn. And maybe the two of those together made it _feel_ like wokeness was everywhere. But it wasn't. The Biden admin passed tax cuts and busted union strikes!
If you are willing to take me at all seriously in the way that I'm taking you seriously, I'd ask that you look deeply at what your sources of information are and evaluate whether they are accurate. Read sources that you disagree with and see what actual progressives think about everything that's happened in the last few years
How have conservatives held a majority on SCOTUS for 50 years? At best, they gained a conservative-leaning majority in 1991 when Thomas replaced Marshall.
Like I said, that wasn't intended to be persuasive and I don't expect us to come to a common understanding here. We're clearly too far apart. A quick reply to your points though:
>'wokeness' became uncool in like 2020-2021,
You mean like how DEI depts are now 'inclusivity' depts? A rose by any other name. I'm sorry but this is unpersuasive; I view it as a clear hedonic treadmill. Try being a prospective academic and having good-faith HBD sentiments in your social media history, see what happens to your tenure prospects. That is unacceptable ideological censorship and I am willing to destroy the institution in order to fight it.
>there's been a conservative SCOTUS majority for 50+ years.
And that's moved the culture how, exactly? Affirmative Action was made illegal several years ago (in the 90's in California). Has affirmative action stopped? Good laws don't make good people. Without reasonable people in positions of power the law is a paper tiger. We no longer have reasonable people in enough positions of power.
Look at violent crime stats. Look at policy. And then look at the rhetoric. Look at our cultural attitudes towards merit, excellence, and achievement. Look at how truth-oriented we are vs how ideology-oriented we are. That stuff really matters.
>Read sources that you disagree with and see what actual progressives think about everything that's happened in the last few years
I do almost nothing but, and I see the same patterns everywhere: an allergy to contradictory data, a hostility to opposing viewpoints, and a simple lack of humanity towards people they disagree with ("racist! oppressor! check your privilege" etc). It's cultish dogma. I can't tell you how many accounts Reddit has banned simply because I made vigorous, good-faith, evidence-supported but anti-woke arguments. I would give you the same advice. I'm much older than you. I have the benefit of having observed the cultural trends for 40+ years. I would suggest that you should be a little more cynical in how you extrapolate current trends.
>Really? Biden abused the clear purpose of the asylum system to let in 6 million poor, low iq immigrants. And progressives burned our cities in 2020 because they're too stupid to understand that 27 < 51. Nothing Trump has done can match that.
I can understand why Reddit banned you, and it need have had nothing to do with the underlying statements of fact you were arguing for.
(EDIT: and turning around and complaining about lack of humanity toward people ...)
Under the theory that one should show humanity toward people one disagrees with. "Too stupid to understand 27 < 51" isn't less degrading than "racist! oppressor! check your privilege!"
People losing their jobs for wrongthink is important and bad, but nobody went to work camps under the progressive "Bolsheviks". I don't have any confidence that Trump will uphold even this low, low standard.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I am genuinely unclear why you think Trump and the rest of the conservative establishment would send people to work camps. Point to literally any mainstream conservative who seriously espoused this idea and I'll retract. Otherwise this sort of statement really hurts your credibility.
The entire reason I think this is that the "conservative establishment" has been a non-actor for the past 9 years. Instead of sticking up for their own principles at what should have been red lines, they uniformly kowtowed to the cult of personality that is Trump. So this is entirely up to what Trump, with his dictator friends and his annotated copy of Mein Kampf and his opinion that domestic enemies are worse than China, wants on any particular day.
Distinction without a difference in my view. Whether it's camps or unemployment, if I live in a society where I can't reasonably express my viewpoint then I'm grabbing a gun. Or, in this case, an off-the-hook norm-violating politician. In my view he is going after the greatest political evil that I have seen in my middle-aged life. If you don't think it's evil that's understandable: cancer survives by mimicking the host.
I understand the dangers that Trump represents. In my view progressivism is a present and ongoing danger so I side with potential-badness over active-badness.
> Respectfully, Trump is far more extreme than anything progressives are doing.
Respectfully, this is not even remotely close to true. I was a fan of Bill Clinton and campaign promise Obama. I still hold the same positions today, but the dnc has veered so far to the extreme left i am considered a conservative now.
Go read Bill Clinton's 1995 state of the union address talking about illegal immigration. Go read Obama's 2014 US Digital Service EO talking about government efficiency. If you didn't know better you would assume these are just Trump talking about securing the border and DOGE (which, irony of ironies, is simply that service created by Obama with the acronym repurposed).
Trump is just recycling Democrat policies from a decade or two ago, and he's steered the GOP to the center. There is an extremist party in the US, but it's team blue, not team red.
>Respectfully, Trump is far more extreme than anything progressives are doing.
Really? Biden abused the clear purpose of the asylum system to let in 6 million poor, low iq, uneducated, unacculturated immigrants. And progressives burned our cities in 2020 because they're too stupid to understand that 27 < 51. Nothing Trump has done can match that.
Look, I don't want to get into a full-blown political fight here but I'll just say that your perspective is not that of the majority of the country.
> Some people, myself included, started following folks like Scott. But others started following folks with less commitment to truth seeking. That latter group forms the core of MAGA.
*waves* if I can read scott and be far right what happened?
I don't know! I don't know how you could read Scott and look at the kinds of things that Trump and Musk push and not be concerned!
Like, you tell me -- aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking? By the willingness to push outright fabrications? Here's a list of conspiracy theories pushed by Trump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories_promoted_by_Donald_Trump even if you disagree with some of these, its not a short list.
My best guess is that it's possible we just follow Scott for different reasons.
I think that his pushback against far left progressive takes in the 2010s was downstream of his overall epistemological health, his willingness to read a lot and be critiqued and take those critiques seriously. I respected the epistemic humility and thought it made him more likely to be right.
Maybe you read Scott because you liked the pushback against far left progressive takes, independent of their correctness? like you could be one of the pro-trump accounts that shared Scotts "Youre still crying wolf"(https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf) around as affirmation that you are right?
> Like, you tell me -- aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking? By the willingness to push outright fabrications?
Yes, deeply. But I look at the world today, and it's not Trump and his cohort busy stuffing their fingers in their ears and shrieking, it's the proggo left and their politicos. Why are you so opposed to DOGE? Do you not care what billions upon trillions of your tax dollars are spent on? Do you not care why dozens of ostensibly "N"GOs that apparently answer to congress or various exec depts are suddenly forced to close shop or have massive layoffs once their government funding is turned off? Why do you oppose a proper investigation into the origins of COVID, or the actual efficacy of lockdowns, school closures, and masking?
Everything you are accusing the right of being just looks like projection to me, so I guess I agree with your fundamental concerns, but have very different conclusions about who to be concerned about.
Also, that Wikipedia link is some of the worst propaganda I have ever seen and really not up to the standards of this site. Some of the things it calls conspiracies are objectively true (Hunter Biden Ukraine thing, Obama administration sending money to ISIS stand out as whoppers), virtually all of the rest are subjective, and the few remaining are excercises in linguistics. Pointing out the length of the list merely indicates that left-leaning wiki editors have a lot of time on their hands. L
I think you're just coming at the world with a very different epistemology than I do. If I had to guess, your primary sources of information are Fox, maybe twitter?
To answer your questions truthfully:
- I don't think there is that much federal government waste, studies that I trust (that you may not!) have repeatedly been unable to find any. My tax dollars are spent on social security and defense and I'm fine with that
- DOGE would be a joke if it wasn't so tragic. The sources that I trust tell me that DOGE is incompetent, is causing more chaos than good. I do not trust Musk because I have repeatedly seen him do dishonest untrustworthy things and I know people who know him personally who have bad things to say. He has way too many conflicts of interest to be a good actor.
- The sources I trust tell me that PEPFAR is a good thing, USAID is a good thing, and that even if they were bad they make up such a small fraction of spending that I just cannot bring myself to care.
- And there are many studies on COVID policy and its efficacy, and I think that the US economy had one of the best recoveries in the entire world, again based on the sources that I trust
This is ALL epistemology. We probably agree on basic values like "we should do what is in the best interests of the US" but we profoundly disagree on factual information like "how much Ukraine spending comes back to American companies" or "how much is DOGE actually saving"
The best thing I can do is try and argue that I think your epistemology and your sources are really corrupt. Trump constantly lies. Musk constantly lies. Not in the "if you squint they might be right" sense, but in the "immigrants are eating pets" and "democrats control the weather" and "measles is good actually" sense. They throw out totally fake numbers with abandon all the time.
I can't prove to you that every single thing they have ever said is wrong. But Gell Mann amnesia is really strong here -- I am distrustful of everything they say because I have caught them lying so many times.
> If I had to guess, your primary sources of information are Fox, maybe twitter
Lol no. I probably read the same articles you do, just with a skeptical attitude always open to the likely possibility the author is trying to mislead.
Like most American progressives, you have no idea of who your political opposition actually is. To be clear- that MAGA hat wearing, fox News watching, Alex Jones spouting angry boomer is a chunk of Trump's voter base, but they will basically always vote gop and there's little you can do to change that. But that's not me, or my friends, or work and school cohorts, most of whom quietly voted for Trump despite outwardly coding as someone who would probably be a reliable dem. We are the ones who swung and cost you the election. Indeed, as I have said elsewhere in the thread I am a Bill Clinton dem, which makes me a Trump republican today because the DNC has veered wildly to the left in what I and my fellow travelers view as an extremely dangerous direction.
> a bunch of conclusions about politics from sources you trust
Again, we are probably reading the same articles, I just don't trust them. Integrity has little value in modern journalist and none at all in the mainstream media. It used to be difficult to tell the leanings of a journalist, but ever since "both sides" became a dirty word there is never any doubt as to which side of the aisle your average NYT or MSNBC writer sits, and NPR has become a farce of itself. There are a few independent media outlets that may retain some ounce of integrity (such as this very blog) but as always, caveat emptor.
> your sources are really corrupt. Trump constantly lies. Musk constantly lies
I am in total agreement! Though, I think that first point won't make you happy. And as to the second- Musk lies either about trivial shit i don't care about (best Diablo player, when FSD will be available on Tesla) or lies like Trump: in directionally correct ways that draw attention to a real problem. Were immigrants eating dogs in Ohio? No, almost certainly not. But did the Biden admin did park 20 thousand Haitians in a small Midwest town who's pop hits 50k on a good day and a) deny this was happening then b) admit it was happening and that it was a good thing to revitalize the town and would not compromise community resources in any way, or change the nature of the community? Yes they did, and then all good proggos called you a racist if you dared point out the bullshit.
Its ironic thst you nring up Gell-Man Amnesia, becauwe you are exhibiting it right here- all politicos lie, all of the time, about very nearly everything. You seem to think that I and my fellow travelers are unaware of the lies from the MAGA crowd- we are not. We are just far more concerned with the rancid, stinking, greviously unjust falsehoods that have run rampant in the DNC for a while now, and we're sick of it. So as the Good Book says, "remove the log from your eye first".
IDK what to tell you. If you're reading the same articles that I am, but don't trust them because you think the experts are biased against you, you're in a state of epistemic doubt/helplessness. But you're clearly getting your information from somewhere -- people don't just shut down their world model updating systems when they distrust people, they find new sources.
I think you should go read the original article I posted if you haven't already, because it might apply to you very directly, and I'd love your thoughts. You're basically the exact demographic I am writing about, and one that I would have been a part of if not for my disgust of trump and his obvious attempts at overthrowing democratic institutions
I have separate thoughts on whether or not you're making the right values call (i think taking trump over the dems because youre mad about progressive woke shit is just a bad trade) but its downstream of the epistemology thing
>aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking?
Weren't you concerned when BLM rioted in our cities on the premise that a cohort that commits 50+% of violent crime are involved in 27% of officer-involved homicides? And everyone went along with it? Didn't that concern you at all?
Weren't you concerned when many elite universities dropped their SAT requirements because it disadvantages groups who are well-known to have lower IQs?
Aren't you concerned that UPenn is censuring Amy Wax for publicly stating the reality of her experience with racial minorities and they refuse to release the data that they claim supports them?
“Here’s the problem. [Indians] are taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites and yet, on some level, their country is a sh*thole.”
“[Asians] realised that we’ve outgunned and outclassed them in every way… They feel anger. They feel envy. They feel shame. It creates ingratitude of the most monstrous kind”.
“[Ashkenazi Jews] are diluting their brand like crazy because they're intermarrying"
"As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration"
"I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'...Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans"
"I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half"
"Embracing cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites"
The only statement that you could even come close to trying to verify in this list is the one about graduation percentiles, which is trivially wrong -- and, since Penn's grading is blinded, deeply disturbing about why she is making these claims.
Going to just ask you openly: do you believe that white people are better than non-white people?
I think your epistemology has fundamentally failed you if it is framing Wax as anything but a white supremacist. And its possible that you too are a white supremacist, in which case I think you were probably correct that Trump is advancing your interests. I think you should be more vocal, if that is why you voted for Trump, so that other people understand what it is you and your party stand for.
Ok so there's two separate things going on here so if you don't mind I'm going to respond twice to this comment. You zeroed on in Wax and I'll defer most of that to a second thread. But for this comment I'd like to continue with the point my previous comment made about the truth-seeking norms implied by progressive behavior. So, disregarding the rest for now, Wax was censured specifically for this comment:
>"I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half"
That's a statement which is 100% empirical. Whether she's right or wrong it's factual claim that she's entitled to make. Seeing as it's based on her direct first-person experience I think she's qualified to make it. Penn a) censured her and b) refused to release the data which would reveal the truth. I do not think that responding to a factual claim with censure rather than readily-available data is not in the spirit of truth-seeking. Do you think it is?
Wax made the claim! It's her obligation to provide the data! Which she doesn't have, because again, Penn blinds the information from their professors! You have your evidentiary standards totally backwards, you can't just go around making claims and then say "well the other person didnt provide data to show it isn't true", the burden of proof is on the accuser. And even so, the dean has come out and openly said that of course, OF COURSE, black students have graduated in the top half and quarter of the class. Why is that not sufficient evidence? It's not like Wax has provided any further!
But let's say, for a moment, that you have reason to believe this is true based purely on the word of a self avowed white supremacist. Joining the Penn Law Review requires you to be in the top half of the class at minimum, the implication that students of color who are on the Law Review are also in the bottom half of the class is insane. Which is also why Wax herself can't even begin to defend the claim in interviews! https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/professor-declares-black-students-rarely-graduate-in-the-top-half-of-law-school-class/
And of course Penn isn't going to release this data. Are you serious? You want a university to release GPA information about its students, categorized by race? Besides opening Penn up to massive legal liability, this is the OPPOSITE of a 'race blind, merit first' policy! No other university or organization releases this kind of information of any kind, anywhere!
By the way, I purposely left out the worst of it because they are hearsay, but since we are taking things on face just because someone said them:
"The former law school dean alleged that Wax hadn’t just made controversial public statements. Ruger said she told a Black student that “she had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” and she also said in class that “gay couples are not fit to raise children” and that “Mexican men are more likely to assault women.”"
"Ruger also alleged, among other things, that Wax told a Black faculty member that it’s “rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators.” He also cited some of Wax’s public statements, including that she allegedly said, “Given the realities of different rates of crime, different average IQs, people have to accept without apology that Blacks are not going to be evenly distributed through all occupations.”"
So, again, what are you even defending here? Be really precise. Are you defending a world where any time anyone makes a claim, regardless of how ridiculous it is, the defendant has to provide data to the contrary? Cause if so, I'd ask you the famous question, "Why, Mr. Wanda, are you beating your wife?"
This is such a deeply unserious take that I really had trouble not filling this response with expletives.
If the police violence giving rise to that 27% was more accurately targeted on the *particular* people in that "cohort" giving rise to the 50+% there would be a lot less complaining and unrest.
If some elite universities want to drop SAT requirements because they value some measure of diversity more than they value uniformly high whatever-mix-of-IQ-and-academic-skill-the-SAT-measures among the student body, that's their right and the market will decide if they were right or wrong to do it.
And as for Amy Wax, she still has her job 7 years after getting "cancelled" and with a petition signed by 76,000 people to have her fired, while doubling down repeatedly the whole time, sounds like academic freedom is working pretty well? And it's not nearly just the remarks about black students' grades that got her censured.
I'd respond to this but, as our previous thread demonstrated, you stop responding when you're cornered.
My point isn't to litigate the object-level truth of these points (though of course I'm happy to do so with a good-faith opponent), but rather to interrogate OP's attitude towards the "truth-seeking" implied by the recent liberal institutional treatment of them.
Oh come on, you implied negitive things about all other epistemology's, fight me; surely you can throw some insult. I hate the science; imply Im a simpleton it will be fun. <3
You say "truth seeking" as if "the science" was automagiclly true; I completely disagree, want the ww2 era of the science to end in entirely.
> aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking? By the willingness to push outright fabrications? Here's a list of conspiracy theories pushed by Trump:
I believe a few after a lazy skim; Im worried what happens if we dont rip up the rot at its roots. I feel we are in a dark age already, the lack of risk in nonaction/democrates is a downside.
> even if you disagree with some of these, its not a short list.
Thats a cold comfort, Gell-Mann Amnesia should *also* apply to any field of science and government official position. Given 1 example of gross conduct, you should start unraveling into "epistemic anarchy".
> Maybe you read Scott because you liked the pushback against far left progressive takes, independent of their correctness? like you could be one of the pro-trump accounts that shared Scotts "Youre still crying wolf"
Nah, I need to keep track of the tolerable parts of the left, I really loved unsung.
---
> Their epistemology, which started as "distrust academia because they have left wing bias" has morphed into a new kind of epistemology where Trump's word is correct and everything else is suspect.
Id happily boo trump if he talks about the success of warp speed. Your putting the cart before the horse here. Anti-scientism predated trump and trump merely uses it.
Objectively, people who got vaccinated had significantly lower mortality rates during the heights of the pandemic than people who didn't. If people are willing to support things because Trump supports them (and that has been the case with many policies), he should have done as much as he could to save the lives of his supporters.
Look, its possible that you really just hate the concept of science and truthseeking. I really dont know what you mean by 'the ww2 era of science', and since it's been nearly 100 years since ww2, I suspect you also don't really know what that means. But either way, maybe we just have a fundamental values difference.
If you voted for Trump because you hate science and think that all science of the last 10 decades was bad, can you actually say it a bit louder? I think it proves my point
> I really dont know what you mean by 'the ww2 era of science', and since it's been nearly 100 years since ww2, I suspect you also don't really know what that means.
In the enlightenment there were french letter writing societies several of the maths things where Europeans writing letters to Frenchman who talked about math puzzles who would then forward thoughts around, and then British aristocratic who gambled about physics tests with the royal society. "Peer review" and grant chasing starting after the manhatten project i.e. ww2. These are different eras even if you could debate the mechinisms and break points
> If you voted for Trump because you hate science and think that all science of the last 10 decades was bad, can you actually say it a bit louder? I think it proves my point
The word scientism was coined in the 70's I think; again "cart before the horse", trump is using it and helping the thought but it isnt trump himself.
I'm sorry, you are expressing an aesthetic preference for a nostalgic time you didn't live through, based entirely on how its presented and recorded, without any real understanding of the actual material results on the quality or quantity of discoveries and improvements. There are a lot of critiques that you can make of the peer review system. "We should go back to French enlightenment salons" is not one of them.
I voted for Trump because I thought left wing identity politics had morphed into a rather toxic and corrupt sort of racialized spoils system. It had little to do with Trump and his truthiness or lack thereof. I would have voted for an ex Taliban fighter if he'd promised to restore colorblind meritocracy.
This is more of a joke than a serious point, but I think it probably satisfies everybody's preconceptions one way or another to think that a typical Trump voter *would trust* an ex-Taliban soldier who made the right promises.
Well, thank you for being honest. I think a lot of people are like you, they supported Trump because they hated the other side, and totally ignored what Trump himself said he would do because they assumed that stuff would never happen. I consider that to be incredibly morally irresponsible, but at least its honest.
I'd actually love to understand this a bit more -- what makes you confident that Trump is restoring colorblind meritocracy? Or is it enough to 'promise' that he's doing that but not actually do so?
The president can only affect what he can affect; he didn't get much done in his first time and I didn't have high expectations for that to be different this time around, and kinda still don't. I view the act as casting a protest vote more than anything, despite the fact that he won. The fact that he won fairly handily I think indicated that there was a lot of preference falsification going on out there with regard to DEI rhetoric, so that was a nice bonus, and I think led to a bit of a vibe shift that has left DEI proponents justly demoralized:
Forgetting about the dems for a moment, would it meaningfully change your mind if it became clear that the Trump admin is instituting some other kind of biased spoils system instead of a meritocracy?
I don't want to get too deep into arguing object-level stuff, I want to keep this thread mostly focused on higher level conversation about epistemology and the way different people look at truth seeking, so i'll leave off here. Thanks for the honest responses.
My personal opinion though is that the Trump admin is setting up an explicit political spoils system that is reminiscent of the early days of hte country -- reward those who are most loyal to Trump, over those who actually have merit. This is reflected in, for e.g., the appointment of Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth on the one hand, and the DOJ lawsuits against people who disagree with him on the other.
For my entire life on the internet the left has been saying "people who vote for the right are voting against their own interests and will only make their own lives worse".
Well here we are in 2025 and leftist governence is widely considered to have failed (see Ezra in the NYT or Noah Smith) and people are net migrating from left to right states. Oops.
It seems fairly clear that the gap in outcomes between right and left governance will only widen as Europe is nearly guaranteed to continue falling behind the US in GDP due to the absence of a tech sector. People love to claim GDP is not correlated to quality of life but I assure you that you that when US citizens are earning 4x as much as Europeans the difference will be too large to ignore.
Your post doesn't seem to add any new perspective to the topic, people have been calling Trump supporters idiots for a decade now. I don't believe anything Trump says but I also don't think voting for the right makes someone an idiot. As noted earlier, emperical evidence seems to indicate the reverse. (Or at the minimum voting contrary to the broader zeitgiest is more likely to keep your governance honest.)
To be fair I think the issue is more about entrenched/unaccountable processes and the expansion government funded non-profits who do nothing but sue everyone for everything.
I don't want higher GDP, I want an actually higher quality of life. It's a garbage metric.
I should note that the world is larger than the US and Europe, both of which have spent my whole lifetime moving, often in tandem, to a crueler and less equal society; I very much hope my country does not follow their lead.
Objectively speaking, what has Trump did that the "Leftist Biden" didn't, in the interests of the people?
Prices? Soaring. Stock Market? In the toilets. Foreign wars? still ongoing and at least Israel's are bankrolled for the foreseeable next century.
The only thing I can agree is immigration, and even then it's (1) A few hundred people that Trump admin flailed at random and made high-publicity examples from (2) Did so while breaking several tens of established laws, precedents, etc..., and drawing the ire of several wings of the Judiciary (3) Potentially making deportation a political tool to expel wrong thinkers, which will harm republications themselves if/when the executive branch switches parties again and a Dem is willing to get their hands dirty for payback.
The states with the highest per capita GDP are New York, Massachusetts, Washington, and California. The states with the lowest per capita GDP are Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Alabama.
“Leftist government is widely considered to have failed” doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that a lot of people believe what they see on Fox News and other right wing media. The only objective measure of success you give is GDP, a metric on which the blue states outperform the red states.
You would need to compare the states by disposable income to adjust for net incomes vs cost of living. California seems great on paper by GDP but if renting/owning a house cost 5x as much that needs to be taken into account. I found this map on reddit which comes from Forbes. There doesn't seem to be a lot of correlation between R/D governance as far as I see.
California should probably make it easier to build housing, but if people are willing to pay 5x housing costs in order to live in California rather than somewhere else, that suggests that California is doing something right.
But if you go by the revealed preference of where people are choosing to live, NY and CA are the biggest losers while TX and FL are the biggest winners. And by a large margin; NY is -1.2% population and CA -0.2% while TX is +7% and FL +8.2% over the last 5 years.
Wait, I'm not sure this is actually fair. The reason people live in NY and CA is because that is where the jobs are! Historically, most people did not live in an area because they were really in love with the governance policy, or whatever, but because they had to feed their families!
With COVID induced remote-work, the jobs calculus changes, and now people can live wherever. But, again, I don't think people are actually moving because of policy preferences, they're moving almost entirely because they can keep their high paying job working remote and be anywhere in the world, so they might as well be somewhere pretty and cheap. It's moving-to-thailand-with-a-tech-job on a domestic level. Why would you live in Coopertino when you can live like a king in the mountains in Colorado? Of course TX and FL get net migration -- they are both extremely low cost of living while also still having major (liberal) cities as hubs, and FL also benefits from having beautiful beaches and weather. I assure you that the migration was not happening to the panhandle or to O'Donnell, TX.
The jobs thing also makes me think it's extremely tenuous that we should be evaluating anything based on individual migratory patterns. Clearly the thing that is propelling the US forward is its various value-generating companies, from the incredible banking and finance hubs in NYC to the massive tech innovators in SF. If we want to look at 'good' or 'bad' governance, reflected in which states are actually producing the most VALUE for the US as a nation, it is obviously and without a doubt NY and Cali.
So I don't think any part of this analysis is actually reasonable.
You can't just go by the revealed preference of the 1.2% of the population that left NY and ignore the 98.8% that stayed or were replaced. And rent in NYC going up probably explains the NY numbers anyway.
I'm not saying that right wing intellectuals voting for Trump are idiots, but I do think they are voting against their self interest. Which, fine, maybe I'm adding to the chorus of other people who say the same thing. But as someone who is much more center than progressive left, it's hard to imagine, say, a principled libertarian or a lets-just-build stem engineer looking at everything that's happening and being like "yep this is good".
The connection to actual truthfulness right now is basically nonexistent on the right -- the entire admin is making policy choices based entirely on lies. I don't mean "things that seem like lies only if you look at it in a certain light", I mean outright fabrications. I think there are some people who are willing to bite the bullet on that, taking the position that the exaltation of stupidity and the destruction of civil norms is all worthwhile to see left wing institutions burn. But that feels much more like staring into the abyss, and yes I do think that's a mistake. Mao sent all the intellectuals to the gulag, regardless of political persuasion
Everyone who votes is voting against their self-interest. The time and effort it takes to vote simply isn't worth the tiny chance of the small difference it makes to you. The only reason to vote is if you care more about the country as a whole, and are willing to make that personal sacrifice.
Some of us vote not in our own self-interest but in the interest of the future of our nation. I'm on Social Security now and I would vote without hesitation for a politician who credibly committed to ending it. (And no, I don't propose sending my monthly stipend back to the government, which will have negligible effect on the country's long-term solvency. It's all or nothing.)
If you think that smart people are voting against their own self-interest, maybe the mistake is you're projecting the things you value onto someone else, then ending up confused when they don't act how you would.
If you think that war between the United States and Russia could be the most catastrophic thing to ever happen, and the US funding the war in Ukraine increase the likelihood of that war, voting for the option opposing that aid is in your self-interest, however the aide is allocated.
If you think that debt-to-GDP is unsustainable, and we will face severe economic hardship in the future if interest payments are not brought under control, then voting for the politician that seems to care about it more is in your self interest.
If you thought that the democratic candidate (along with her party) had been deliberately lying about the condition of the President for the past year, then voting against that party (on the principle that we shouldn't try to hide the intellectual decline of the president) is in your self interest.
The thinking could go on and on with varying degrees of importance. By saying that intelligent people who voted for Trump are acting against their own self interest, you're basically forcing people to defend their vote and position, and further entrench themselves into that support.
One of the things I discuss in the article is how we have way more factual debates compared to values debates. 20 years ago, my perception was that there were more disagreements about values (what is 'the good') compared to facts ('is the price of eggs $5 or $10')
The opinions that you are describing are downstream of the epistemologies that people have about the world, not the values that they were raised with.
For example, 'believing debt-to-GDP is unsustainable' is a _factual_ disagreement, not a _values_ disagreement. People believe that because they are downstream of sources of information that indicate, under certain conditions, the debt-to-GDP ratio will result in severe economic hardship. There are other people with different models that say, 'hey, this isnt actually an issue'. Deciding who you trust is fundamentally a question of epistemology, and is separate from what you value.
If debt-to-GDP ratio is your most important issue, it's really important to make sure you are getting good information about that from good sources! Sources that value accurately describing the real world, that care about truth seeking! But much of the MAGA right's source material is disconnected from that reality. DOGE claims to have saved hundreds of billions (!!!) of dollars already. That's just straight up a lie. Like, not 'kinda true if you squint', its just a lie.
If you are a smart conscientious person, you presumably want to be reading or interacting with sources that give you a better grasp of the world, and the right is the party of "Democrats control the weather" and "Theyre eating the pets". It should make you suspicious of all of the other things that are claimed too, about immigration or debt or Ukraine or whatever else.
Has DOGE *actually* claimed to have saved "trillions", or is this an exaggeration? As far as I've ever seen, it seems like they have never claimed to have saved anywhere near this much already, which if they haven't, makes you the "straight up" lier. This should make anyone reading this suspicious of all the other things you've claimed too. Not trying to be too provocative with that statement, but trying to demonstrate that this is clearly not a simple case of having incorrect information.
I know DOGE savings have been minimal compared to the overall deficit, and they have overstated their savings multiple times, and the goals set are unreasonable, but honestly that doesn't matter nearly as much as simply having the goal that "We should eliminate government waste and reduce spending wherever we can" which is what a lot of people agree with.
You're right, edited from trillions to hundreds of billions, though there are many cases of Elon claiming things like "I will save a trillion per year" or "based on current trajectory we have already saved trillion per year".
> I know DOGE savings have been minimal compared to the overall deficit, and they have overstated their savings multiple times, and the goals set are unreasonable, but honestly that doesn't matter nearly as much as simply having the goal that "We should eliminate government waste and reduce spending wherever we can" which is what a lot of people agree with.
To restate a bit of what you said here, "I know these people are lying about {a, b, c}, but eliminating government waste makes it worthwhile". My question to you is: where does your belief that the government is spending wastefully come from? Is it from the same people who are lying to you about {a, b, c}? If tomorrow, DOGE came out and said "problem solved, we cut enough and now were good" would you even believe that they did the job?
The problem with evaluating epistemology is that it requires pulling yourself outside of the box, and that is a really hard thing to do. The best that we can hope for is to construct epistemologies with 'good habits' (peer review, scientific method, hypothesis testing, openness to criticism) and reject those with 'bad habits'. I don't think Trump/Musk are pushing for good truth-seeking habits
I will note that if one wanted to vote for the candidate who appeared to care more about the deficit, they would have voted for Harris - she didn't care much, but she also wasnt aiming to actively baloon the deficit with tax cuts, as Trump is. So that was definitely not a reason to vote Trump unless one was misinformed about his explicitly stated goals.
If you believe that high taxes are restricting economic growth and making American less attractive to foreign talent, a reduction in government spending along with a reduction in taxes could lead to a stable budget.
If you see the root cause of the problem as government overspending, rather than insufficient taxes funding that spending, then even if Kamala was advocating for a plan that would lead to a smaller deficit than Trump (In principle eliminating the deficit is very simple. Just keep increasing the taxes to meet spending), she would still be the wrong choice.
The deficit itself is a simple problem. The more complex problem is how we can have stable government spending into the predictable future, how much we should be spending, and how much we should be taxing to fund that spending. People who vote Republican generally feel that spending too much is the problem, so voting for the party that often advocates for increased spending will probably not solve that problem, even if they promise to raise taxes as well.
"If you believe that high taxes are restricting economic growth and making American less attractive to foreign talent, a reduction in government spending along with a reduction in taxes could lead to a stable budget. "
They could, but they won't. Obviously, OBVIOUSLY they won't. We're so far past plausibly claiming they will that it's pretty flabbergasting to even still see it floated by intelligent people.
Go ahead and eyeball a graph of debt-to-gdp over time covering the past few decades. Which years have regions of positive slope vs negative slope? Are ANY of the downward slopes during periods with Republican presidents? One of those, let us remember, was THIS SAME PRESIDENT. I cannot honestly imagine the level of rationalization it would take to believe that *this administration* is going to reduce the debt-to-gdp ratio.
And talking about the problems with higher taxes is a big goalpost shift. Two comments ago it was
"If you think that debt-to-GDP is unsustainable, and we will face severe economic hardship in the future if interest payments are not brought under control, then voting for the politician that seems to care about it more is in your self interest. "
Which is it? Is the ratio unsustainable, or not? Is it absolutely critical to cut deficits? Or is of secondary importance to lowering tax rates for top earners?
I would venture to guess that this is EXACTLY the kind of thing theahura was talking about when referring to "smart people voting against there own interests." Or perhaps they're merely being dishonest about what they consider their interests to be. Regardless, the level of doublethink that appears to go on any time the national debt is brought up is astonishing. Again, the evidence is EXTREMELY lopsided about which actions are and aren't likely to bring deficits under control, and yet somehow they're simultaneously the most important thing in the world and instantly forgotten the moment the prospect of lowering taxes a bit more is on the table.
Maybe pausing here and asking yourself "Why is it that I think that this is a 'simple problem' when there's been bazillion gazillion man-hours spent on this here very problem, by clearly smart people, without a resolution in sight" would be quite useful?
A fair point, but hypothetically the tax cuts could be offset by reducing government spending. It's still addressing the problem as opposed to not caring much.
Hypothetically, they could, but we aren't talking about hypotheticals ,we are talking about the Trump plan to cut spending by two trillion, but taxes by five trillion. Obviously that will increase the deficit (though there are many dishonest people pushing, in the absence of all evidence, to claim this could somehow be revenue neutral)
Sure, and if you read what I wrote in the actual article I mentioned that there is an edge to the MAGA crowd that is primarily motivated by the desire to hurt other people who they don't like, whether that's immigrants or trans people or whatever. I think those people are getting exactly what they voted for, and are very excited about it. Like, if you're an actual racist, you're probably pretty happy with what Trump is doing. I just don't think that's the flex you think it is.
I believe the nature of not just MAGA supporters but their equally ardent opposers on the left is entirely bound up in epistemology. Gradually, continuously, at this point, perceptively, the body politic has been separated into herds. It is a function of media aggregation and the algorithm. Ultimately, a function of sponsorship money. Trump isn’t making the mistake Biden made. He is feeding his constituents the red meat. Biden failed his most progressive voters and his popularity suffered throughout. Trump understands the new epistemology (an end in itself), Biden did not.
> There's another edge to the MAGA crowd. These are people who are primarily driven by the desire to hurt their enemies, regardless of the cost to themselves. They are vicious, throwing the political equivalent of a nation wide tantrum, all id and emotion without any long term thinking. These people are not making a mistake — they know exactly what they are doing, and are here for it.
From the article, I think we're broadly in agreement but still I don't think this is the flex you think it is
I brought it up recently, and was told Musk said on Truth Social that he paid employees for testimonials. Unfortunately, Truth Social is hard to search, and I didn't want to do the job of tracking down an ill-defined quote. Has anyone seen something like that?
Were the ex-employee employed by Musk at the time they said those things?
Just as a general thing, I'm driven crazy by the idea that people who have done bad things must have been completely bad in all parts of their life, and people who are respected must have been good in all parts of their lives. I think it's very likely Musk has deteriorated.
In software, I can confidently say that at least one of the following is true (1) Musk doesn't have a single clue what he is talking about, at nearly every level and in every area of software he talked about (2) He is starting to hit early dementia and used to know things but now don't.
From his earlier quotes in the early 2000s, I'm inclined to think that it's (1). The guy really doesn't know shit, he is Star Trek techno-babbling. The terms are really from software and they will impress anyone with extremely limited understanding of software, but any complete sentence doesn't make sense.
I strongly agree with you, and people struggle with the idea that the same individual can be good and bad, in different scenarios, and change radically even in adulthood. The letters between Musk and Altman when setting up OpenAI are truly mind opening; written by someone with a similar mind but a totally different chemistry than the current Musk. He's still wildly ambitious, but cerebral, measured, willing to change his mind, detail oriented.
Here’s a puzzle my friends and I ruminated about during our college years: It’s raining hard. If you walk in the rain for 3 mins, do you get wetter if you walk slowly than if you walk
fast? Or the reverse? Does it not matter? Answer not in terms of life experience, but by explaining why you get more or fewer drops on your vertical and horizontal surfaces depending on walk rate.
So since this thread is getting old, seems like this puzzle should get wrapped up. So I think people should feel free to discuss it, not in code. I neglected to mention that when my college friends and I ruminated about this rain problem we never arrived at a consensus.
After posting this puzzle I ruminated about the rain and here my answer:
Horizontal surfaces (head top, shoulders, etc.): The amount of water per time unit you get on your horizontal surfaces is the same whether you are standing still, walking slow, or walking fast. You are just moving from one (imaginary) column of vertical rain to the next, and we’re assuming they all have the same density of drops.
Vertical surface: Assuming the rain is falling straight down, the amount of water your vertical surfaces get goes up with your speed. Actually, if you stood still you would get hit by no drops at all on any of your surfaces that are perfectly vertical. But vertical surfaces would get more hits the faster you walked. Movement transforms the vertical paths of drops into paths slanting towards you if you are moving horizontally. The faster you move the stronger the slant.
Diagonal surfaces: The top of any bulges on the vertical surfaces, such as nose, breasts or Kim Kardashian’s butt would get a number of water hits that’s in between that for vertical and horizontal surfaces, and proportional to the size of each’s horizontal and vertical components. The bottom of any bulges would have its horizontal component shielded by the overhang above. Its vertical component would get the same increase in drop hits as a purely vertical bit of the same height.
Since we all have at least some vertical components to our body, we would all get wetter the faster we walk. Body shape changes how much wetter an increase in speed would get us. The more spherical we are, the less an increase in speed will increase how many water drops we get per unit of time.
What did you guys conclude? (I have lost the link or whatever is needed for decoding coded replies)
I agree. Pauls answer works for constant distant. The problem was constant time.
Two additional points though
1. When you walk faster, your stride lengthens, exposing more horizontal surface. This makes you get wetter. Given how much more my pants get wet than the front of my shirt, i think this effect matters more.
2 well wind changes things of course. Walking with the wind makes you less wet.
rot13.com does fine. (It even has a setting you can tweak to decode the rot7. Although, note it has to be undone with rot19.)
I didn't get the same result as you. I didn't discuss horizontal vs. vertical surfaces, but I think my answer is the same even if I do. For one thing, your horizontal surface doesn't get the same amount of wet regardless of speed.
Are you walking a fixed three minutes, regardless of the speed? Or are you walking a specific distance, that will take three minutes if you walk slow or less if you walk fast?
The comparison is between 3 mins of fast walking and 3 of slow. So it is the time that is fixed. Distance would be greater in the fast walking condition.
H. fvby ovypgvuahs zbymhjlz l.n. aol avw vm fvby olhk nla dla hz h mbujapvu vm aol aptl fvb zwluk bukly aol yhpu
I. fvby clyapjhs zbymhjlz l.n. fvby mhjl nla dla hz h mbujapvu vm aol kpzahujl aoha fvb jvcly (iljhbzl fvb ihzpjhssf tvcl puav aol yhpukyvwz)
Olujl :
- pm fvb ohcl 3 tpu av zwluk pu aol yhpu, fvb zovbsk uva tvcl ha hss (dvu'a johunl ovd tbjo mhssz vu ovypgvuahs zbymhjlz, iba fvby mhjl dvu'a nla dla ha hss)
In 2017 Scott reviewed the Hungry brain. I read his review and immediately solved my weight problems. I used the Boring diet from around 2017-2020 and returned to it in 2024. Still works amazing. I have no idea why im the only person who still finds the original rationalsit pitch of "huge piles of expected value lying around everywhere".
The TLDR of “The Hungry Brain” is that your body tries to maintain a healthy weight by releasing hormones that make you feel hungry or full. Your body is quite good at estimating the calories you eat. But even very small discrepancies add up over time; one hundred extra calories a day is about ten pounds of weight gained in a year! A modern diet messes up the process. Eating a rich, varied, processed diet makes you hungrier! To become lean, without fighting hunger, you simplify your diet until your bodies natural process once again functions well enough for your goals. This is highly unlikely to require eating solely tasteless nutrient paste. Stop simplifying once you are thin enough. What factors are involved?
Variety - By far the most important factor in my opinion. People have lost weight eating only McDonald burgers or even Twinkies. The more monotonous your diet the less hungry you will be. This trades off against nutritional goals. Luckily humans don’t need that much variety. Tribes have been healthy getting most of their calories from a single nut. The Inuit do well on a diet absurdly concentrated in Seal. And low calorie fruits and vegetables can be consumed freely. So you actively want to eat a variety of those! This principle also implies the more variety of tasty fruits and vegetables the more you will eat.
Taste - The more bland your diet the less you will eat. In my opinion its possible to eat solely tasty food. But you absolutely must avoid sweeting anything substantially caloric. Real sugar is of course dangerous. But I would be careful about adding zero calorie sweeteners to something like a “diy meal square” or protein pancake. Make sure you can afford it. Conversely I am much less worried about adding sweeteners, even real sugar, to coffee or protein shakes which are very low calorie.
Complex - Complex food makes you hungrier. In my opinion the mix of carbs AND fat makes the food much more fattening. For example I eat my Taco/Chili meat without any pasta/tortilla/bread. Processed “junk food” is the epitome of this.
Glad that worked for you. I agree on avoiding very "exciting" and processed foods. For me I've lost about 40 pounds over last few years by cutting back on sugars and carbs. Replacing sugar with fake sugar has helped. But your point resonates with me in that after I eat a bowl of yogurt or a can of tuna I dont crave more. After a bowl of pasta or a slice of pizza I want another one, or maybe more. Avoiding that kind of thing makes it a lot easier to lose weight sadly.
for me i observed the opposite. In my early 20s I didn't care very much about food and I went with the most available option every day (usually kebab or schnitzel). At around 140kg I started to turn around and among other things increased the variety of my diet, e.g. I started eating salads, and cheese, and more kinds of vegetables and eventually dropped to about 105kg. Then started a new job and simplified again (kebab and pasta this time) and went up to 125kg. Then I updated my diet again, and went down to 117 right now.
I tend to simply my diet when I am stressed, and I diversify my diet, when I have time to do so. So the effect of "stress eating" probably outweights any positive effects from "simple eating".
On the other hand I noticed, that I loose more weight, when I remove high-calorie foods like pasta, meat, sugar and nuts from my diet. This may be a point for "simple eating", but I think it has more to do with calorie-density.
I did Slime mold time mold’s potato only diet and lost about 10 pounds. Partial evidence in favor. So I tried a mono diet of unflavored Huel as a control. I lasted about one week. Did not lose any weight and actually came in about 2 lbs heavier. This was certainly the blandest diet imaginable; however, I guess it was also complex by your definition.
All Potato is about as extreme as it gets. But the theory certainly suggests it would lead to very rapid weight loss! Happy to hear it worked.
Its not shocking that huel didn't work. I tried 100% meal squares and it didnt work either. Both foods are really processed. I dont think the theory predicts those strategies would clearly fail, but this isn't an anomaly either.
Thanks for the reminder of boredom with food as a feature. Your comment inspires me to resume my routine of salad in the morning and frozen veggies in the evening with an eight to ten hour time feeding window. I stopped it when I went on vacation a few months ago. My main mental block to resuming is that it's extremely boring to maintain, almost painfully so. But you've reminded me that the boring is the feature. If I can resume it for two weeks, I'm pretty sure I can reestablish it as habit. Thank you and I look forward to eating boring again!
I like frozen fruits (like strawberries or cherries) as a replacement for snacks in the evening. They are lowish in calories (compared other snacks) and you automatically eat them slow, since they are frozen.
I have not considered frozen veggies though. What kind of veggies do you use? Do you freeze them yourself, or do you get them pre-frozen at the supermarket?
I recently found out that quick is used by car people to mean fast acceleration, though there's some ambiguity about that.
Quick vs. acceleration: Orwell recommended anglo-saxon if you want to be clear, and quick is from proto-German.
Acceleration is from Latin.
Quick is a concept from ordinary experience. Acceleration combines speeding up, slowing down, and changing direction, which I don't think people combine unless they've learned some physics.
Quick: Middle English quik, from Old English cwic "living, alive, animate, characterized by the presence of life" (now archaic), and figuratively, of mental qualities, "rapid, ready," from Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz (source also of Old Saxon and Old Frisian quik, Old Norse kvikr "living, alive," Dutch kwik "lively, bright, sprightly," Old High German quec "lively," German keck "bold"), from PIE root *gwei- "to live." Sense of "lively, active, swift, speedy, hasty," developed by c. 1300, on notion of "full of life."
Quick meaning living still exists in English, though it's rare. There's "the quick and the dead", and the quick of a nail, as is biting nails down to the quick. I think there was a bit in _The Secret Garden_ about a plant showing small signs of life as "quick". There's also "cut to the quick" and quicksilver.
Acceleration: "act or condition of going faster," 1530s, from Latin accelerationem (nominative acceleratio) "a hastening," noun of action from past-participle stem of accelerare "to hasten, quicken," from ad "to" (see ad-) + celerare "hasten," from celer "swift," which is perhaps from PIE *keli- "speeding" (see celerity).
I dont think this would be formal for people but quick better mean a large effect in the highest impulse; the order of "continuity" is sub conscious but its there you can feel it: position, velocity, impluse, jerk 0th vs 3rd order "derivatives", you calculation the nth by adding n+1th to it every tick; the more level of calculation the smoother it feels. Lerps of colors, smoothness of 3d shapes, extra whatever.
Quick should means the fastest acting effect in n=infinity even if theres something more stable speed elsewhere.
It might be simpler than that. "Quick", applied to people and animals, is used more to talk about agility and rapid response time while "fast" is used more to talk about raw velocity.
Translated to cars, quick used in a similar sense could be expected to mean rapid acceleration, plus maybe stuff like steering and braking.
Or even simpler, unless you're driving on a salt flat test course or something, the practical limits on speed (besides law enforcement) are ability to control the car while maneuvering and the ability to get back up to speed after periods when you need to slow down.
Going back to roots, the original meaning of "quick" was "alive", so I'd believe a path from there to "lively" and thence to "responsive" and "good acceleration"
I'll chime in as a car person. I'd use quick synonymously with fast in describing a car, although I'd say it's less intense. A Miata is "pretty quick" but a Mclaren is "fast". Both of those terms are primarily referring to acceleration, which in car lingo refers exclusively to speeding up, you'd call deceleration "braking" and speed through corners "handling".
It makes sense. Unless you're driving on the autobahn or have an exceptionally slow car or just have no respect for the law and safety of other drivers, top speed isn't going to matter. The difference between a fast car and a slow car is how fast they accelerate.
That's very interesting; I've always just used quick as a synonym for fast (but used when you want to empathise the short period of time involved rather than speed), but never for acceleration
In many team-sport contexts -- such as in my case ice hockey -- "quick" is used to mean "accelerates really well" "can go from standing still to top speed in a blink", etc.
Then "fast" is used to mean "generates the highest sustained speed over some distance". I.e. "once that guy is moving we'll never catch him."
(Each of those is obviously a highly-relevant attribute for success in hockey, soccer, football, basketball, etc.)
Can anyone answer this tax form question? I am filing an amended return for 2021. Filled
out the main form, 8995 I believe is the number, and am now redoing the actual 2021 forms. No problem til I get to the end of form 1040, where you enter amt paid via estimated payments (I’m self-employed), and amt still
owed. What do I put there? Do I amend it too, sort of pretending I’m filling out the form for the first time? But when I filled out form the first time the numbers showed me owing a chunk of money, and I sent in the money when I filed the form. Now the amended form would show me owing less money, but still a chunk. So if I fill it out that way it’s wrong, because in fact I paid everything I thought I owed back when I first filed for 2021. In fact I overpaid by several thousand, which is why I’m filing this amended tax form.
So question is, in short, how do I fill out the amount paid/amount owed on amended 1040?
You fill it out as if you were filling it out the first time. You will come up with a smaller amount owed.
Then, you file an extra form (1040-X) on top of that. On 1040-x you'll list the old & new values of everything that changed, and that will give you a final net change.
Say if you originally owed $5000. Your new 1040 will show that you "owe" $4000. On your 1040-X you will compare those two and wind up with a $1000 refund.
This is an essay about how much about the difficulties of finding anything out is learned in the lab, and how little of it is recorded.
A little gets recorded in discussions (on Facebook? on Twitter?) under something like "the real truth about science", anonymously, about how much of what's done in science isn't the result of thoughtful experimental design. Rather, it's the result of using what's cheap and available.
It's amazing that science works at all, but a fair amount of it does.
There's a classic video called "The Inner Life of he Cell". It's a lovely portrayal of various mechanisms in the cell looking complex but orderly and purposeful. It was made for students at Harvard. The kinesin trucking* along a path hauling something large is especially memorable.
Later, it was picked up by creationists to say that there must be God's intent behind the creation of something so wonderful.
There's an something important left out of the video to make it comprehensible. Cellular processes aren't like that. There's no convenient empty space. It's all statistical. Molecules are constantly bumping into each other, and any life-supporting process is very low probability. Under a percent, I think, but let me know.
There's a style of housekeeping called junebugging. It can be useful if you're paralyzed by not having a plan. You just start making changes in a vague general direction of improvement, and you can get improvement. Less efficiently than having a good plan, but it's still better than doing nothing.
So, you don't always need to know what you're doing.
*Should have been truckin'. And I thought it was Mr. Natural.
> There's no convenient empty space. It's all statistical. Molecules are constantly bumping into each other, and any life-supporting process is very low probability. Under a percent, I think, but let me know.
Could you explicate a little further on this thought? That doesn't sound right to me. Seems like there is some sort of organized system within a cell moving stuff around, and it's not all a stochastic process.
As an example, take my favorite virus, SARS-CoV-2. It moves fast once it infects a cell, and the timing doesn't seem to be the result of a stochastic process of random motion. For instance, the entry of fluorescently labeled SARS2 virions have been tracked in real-time, and they show that viral fusion and RNA release occur within 10-20 minutes after receptor binding. The viral RNA is able to get to the ribosomes in about 30 minutes, and the RNA translation begins within an hour. The first translation produces viral replicase proteins (non-structural proteins, NSPs) that form the replication-transcription complex (RTC). The RTC completes its hijacking of the ribosomal machinery in 1 to 3 hours and starts constructing new virions in the ER-Golgi. A few more hours pass and the infected cell starts churning out new virions, which begin to be released by the host cell within 6 to 10 hours. If this underlying mechanism where stochastic, I don't think we'd see this fairly precise time sequence.
It really is that crowded and stochastic. The thing that should help your intuition is that diffusion on the molecular scale is also fast. My favorite example for teaching this is that a single molecule in a cell the size of E. coli, will randomly bump into *every* single other enzyme/molecule in the cell once per second.
The bionumbers book is a great resource for thinking about the cellular scale quantitatively (https://book.bionumbers.org/) and mesoscale explorer has some really useful visualizations of actually cellular packing (check out their examples, including SARS, on the examples tab on the left at https://molstar.org/me/viewer/)
Does anyone have good sources on what trump is doing around housing?
(preemptively saying, if trump collaspes the housing market by 80% that be a good thing, but I bet he aims for 10%)
As far as I can tell, his main policy is massive tariffs on everything, including the materials needed to construct housing. But if he does succeed in causing a second Great Recession, then perhaps house prices would go down since noone could afford to buy one anymore.
At minimum *cough* boomer finance, is convinced he's doing something; but I trust dave ramsay as far as I can throw the social security deficit using his boot straps.
I see either boomer news or "pop" real estate on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA48YFFxn-c
My red flags are aquittely triggered on these "experts"; but something is happening and this is probably among the more important things for what actually happens to the future.
> tariffs
America has trees, sand and stones it may effect cities near boarders but then your in a city and your paying for a cardboard box on million dollar a foot land.
I asked Gemini 2.5 to write a story about a child learning how to tie shoelaces. Here's the first paragraph:
The universe contracted to the size of a cheap plastic aglet. Bartholomew, who yesterday was a nebula named Kevin, wept glycerine tears that tasted suspiciously of motor oil and lost mittens. Before him lay The Problem: twin lengths of braided despair, mockingly limp upon the scuffed topography of his left shoe, a vessel formerly owned by a pirate captain who exclusively raided birthday parties.
Is this any good? I'll include the whole story in a daughter comment to make it individually collapsible.
With the caveat that I knew it was AI before reading, but my reaction was: "This is horrible"
It's so aggressively overwritten and drenched in metaphor, I can barely follow what it is saying.
Yeah I'm coming around to that view myself. That said there's two ways to evaluate this sort of thing. The first way is to ask if this is approaching the quality of a talented human author? Answer, no. And were done. The second way is to ask if this shows improvement from previous Gemini models. Not necessarily better across the board but does it show more promise in some sense? Can it do metaphor? Is it creative? That sort of thing. In this case I think the answer to that is yes.
The custom system instructions I gave it told it to be chaotic and disorienting. Without those instructions its writing is much easier to follow, but pretty boring. Better system instructions could probably improve the writing a bit or at least get it to write in a style that is less aversive.
lol well no surprise, of course it’s going to read absolutely terribly if you gave it those instructions.
Bartholomew's Shoelace Struggle
The universe contracted to the size of a cheap plastic aglet. Bartholomew, who yesterday was a nebula named Kevin, wept glycerine tears that tasted suspiciously of motor oil and lost mittens. Before him lay The Problem: twin lengths of braided despair, mockingly limp upon the scuffed topography of his left shoe, a vessel formerly owned by a pirate captain who exclusively raided birthday parties.
"Loop," instructed a voice like shattering glass, possibly his mother, possibly a rogue signal from Betelgeuse. Bartholomew’s fingers, small, clumsy starfish stolen from a beach that never existed, attempted compliance. The lace bucked, writhed, hissed forgotten radio jingles. It formed not a loop, but a Moebius strip of existential dread. Failure #4,782.
Shame arrived, wearing the ill-fitting suit of a disgraced game show host. It smelled faintly of burnt sugar and regret. It whispered statistics about developmental milestones Bartholomew was currently betraying. Outside, the sky turned a bruised purple and rained down small, melancholic gears. His right shoelace, sensing weakness, tied itself into a perfect, smug bow, then promptly dissolved into a swarm of silverfish that scurried under the skirting board where reality was thin.
He tried again. The left lace. This time, he envisioned success: a tight, symmetrical embrace. Instead, the fabric frayed, releasing trapped chronitons. For a dizzying moment, Bartholomew experienced his entire life in reverse, ending as a disappointed glint in a milkman’s eye. He landed back on the floor, dizzy, smelling of ozone and paradox. The lace lay inert, a dead worm on a forgotten sidewalk.
Hopelessness was a physical weight, a collapsed dwarf star settling in his small chest. Why this torture? Why these infernal strings? He kicked the shoe. It skittered away, laughing a dry, papery laugh. From the corner of the room, a grandfather clock, previously unnoticed, struck thirteen and began reciting multiplication tables in reverse alphabetical order.
This was it. The abyss. The final knot of unbeing. He was destined to wander the earth, laces trailing, a trip hazard for gods and men, forever marked by his failure. He picked up the shoe. He picked up the lace ends, no longer seeing them as laces, but as frayed edges of the tapestry, loose threads threatening to unravel everything. He didn't try to make loops. He didn't try to cross them. He just… pulled. A blind, desperate tug born of cosmic exhaustion.
Something snagged. Caught. Held.
It wasn't neat. It wasn't a bow. It resembled more a panicked octopus mid-implosion. But it was… tied. A knot. A clumsy, ugly, defiant knot against the smooth slide into entropy.
Silence. The gears stopped raining. The game show host of shame evaporated, leaving behind only a faint scent of desperation. The grandfather clock exploded softly into a cloud of glitter and sawdust. Bartholomew stared. The knot held. It was monstrous, lopsided, an affront to geometry. But it held.
A single, perfect sunbeam, defying the bruised sky, pierced the window and illuminated the shoe. Was this triumph? Or merely a temporary stay of execution? Bartholomew didn't know. He only knew the lace was tied. He stood up, wobbled, and took a step. The world lurched violently, then settled. Somewhere, a kettle whistled a tune that had not yet been composed. The knot held. The tragedy paused. Pathos took a breath. For now.
AI has learned to write extremely purple prose, apparently.
Yes well I used custom system instructions to try to break it out of its default persona. Might possibly have overdone things a bit.
For those who are trying to be moisturized, vibes ng, in their zone, etc:
Consumer confidence is at lower than mid covid, lower than early biden inflation levels right now.
This isn't a guarantee yet, we need another month or two of the rate falling to bring me above 80%, but this is a pretty solid predictor for a pretty solid recession.
As per my earlier posts, and all the ones before that which no one will be able to see because I got a new phone and therefore a new account, the good historical bet when conservatives are in government and confidence starts dropping is to not take any long positions and keep yourself as liquid as possible so you can start picking up other people's durable assets when they lose everything in the market and need to sell well below the expected long-term return in order to not be on the street.
if it was a normal conservative in government, I would have already turned all of my investments into short-term bonds or cash, but this government is so schizophrenic and so based on one old guy whose brain isn't working so good that one heart attack or one cosmic ray hitting the right molecule of aspartame in a diet Coke might turn it all around, so it's a lot harder than it usually is.
> For those who are trying to be moisturized, vibes ng, in their zone, etc:
What does this mean?
It's a meme - "unbothered, moisturized, in my lane." https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/unbothered-moisturized-happy-in-my-lane-focused-flourishing
So I think just "if you're feeling comfy in the economy, watch out."
I have doubts he's using the terms correctly
The relationship between equity returns and party-in-power has been examined empirically and found to be not predictive. If you're so confident you can predict the stock market's behavior, why aren't you entering short positions?
A silly take on one guard tells the truth and the other lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02gfh-h6mTQ&t=4s&ab_channel=AdmiralHardthrasher
What if telepathy is real? https://thetelepathytapes.com/
And if it was, wouldn't it be the non-verbal, non-body minds stuck in their heads that used it first?
It seems like telepathy because the parents are tricking themselves into spelling out stuff that only they could know and attributing those insights to their non-verbal children. It's really sad.
Yeah so some of these kids learn to spell type on their own. And for parents/ teachers moving/ picking for the kids, yeah sure, my phone text app does that for me too. Communication is the thing that is important, how it's done is less so.
My understanding is that these kids are otherwise nonverbal and cannot read. I'm not sure why anyone would them to be spelling.
I've listened to some of the Tapes and the parents are unfortunately deluding themselves. Like the kid who was at preschool level until his final year of highschool but his mother wanted him to go into the general class because of the facilitated spelling. Mostly it appears to be an ideomotor effect mixed with a powerful desire for connection by the parents.
I heard that episode of Joe Rogan, too. I know he loves paranormal stuff, but I wish he hadn't given that chick so much visibility.
James Randi and other skeptics have pretty thoroughly debunked facilitated communication, in both casual settings and formal, double-blind studies. While some people in the FC space are no doubt grifters, it appears that most people are engaging in a kind of highly imaginative wishful thinking and spiritual "reasoning" to avoid the tremendous pain of loving someone who is unable to effectively communicate.
And let me tell you: as a highly imaginative person who was raised in Christian Science, arguably the hardest-core faith-healing religion/cult around, it's completely possible for high-IQ people to inadvertently misuse their intellect to thoroughly "rationalize" the legitimacy of their particular woo. And it's almost impossible to avoid the temptation to exaggerate just a *wee* little bit to be even more compelling and convincing to one's audience.
And then to later genuinely forget giving into the temptation to exaggerate a wee bit...or a lot.
I'm not particularly high IQ, but I could EASILY structure alternative /speculative "realities" to defend belief in pretty much any kind of woo; Christian Science, 9/11 inside job, flat earth, soulmates, facilitated communication, and on and on. None of those alternative / speculative "realities" would hold up to rigorous scientific investigation, but they would be internally consistent and orderly, according to the rules of their particular fictional premise. As the old bromide goes, "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."
Severe, profoundly disabling autism doesn't intuitively make "sense" to us. But it doesn't have to, because - as far as has been rigorously investigated - it's simply the truth.
“It ain’t the truth, but it is a fact.”
Hi Christina, thanks for the nice response. I've only listened through the third podcast in the series. There is some facilitated communication. But it goes beyond that and some of these kids learn to communicate w/o any assistance. I'm still just dumb-struck by the whole thing. The physics part of me wants to understand the mechanism. I want to stick people in metal boxes and behind mu-metal shields. Episode 5 is reported to be more science-y and I'll probably listen to that today. Perhaps I'm overly gullible.
Well, don't discount what I said about the temptation to exaggerate, and then, after telling the story a lot, to willfully, semi-genuinely forget the exact details and embrace the exaggeration as truth (especially when it's a highly desirable and emotionally gratifying "truth").
I mean, sure, that seems obvious, but it's one of those human behaviors where the people who don't do (or don't do it in a noticeable way) it often can't *really* model what it's like to guide oneself into believing fantasy woo, knowingly or otherwise.
I finished my (very short, very bad) first novel at 12 years old, and then bought at least a dozen books on fiction writing through my tweens and teens and carefully studied them on my own time. I gave myself an early, long, rigorous training on concepts like character point of view and description in general. I spent a lot of time thinking about how character's thoughts contradicted reality.
So from being a tweenager, I've always been aware when I've added particularly good details to a spooky personal anecdote and, more importantly, *why* I was doing it. I watched my best spooky childhood anecdote evolve over the years into a perfect, tidy little campfire ghost story. I've imagined the polished story so many times that, even though I'm aware it didn't actually *happen,* even *I* (!!!) am sometimes tempted to "believe" the ghost story version. My younger brother, who was present for the anecdote, but has heard the ghost story version far more often, actually believes the ghost story version. Or at least, that's what he claims.
Notably, if I'm telling my polished ghost story to a certain audience, I will pretend that *I* still believe the ghost story version, and I'm very convincing, because I have some versions of myself that I think about as if they're fictional characters, and one of those versions actually had the spooky polished campfire ghost story happen to her, FOR REAL. No, *REALLY!*
Which is all to say:
Just because someone very, very convincingly reports something, and other people testify to that report, doesn't mean it actually happened.
And, of course, I know you know that, but...sometimes it's easy to forget, you know?
Grin, yeah I know. Have you listened to any of the podcasts? (Beside on Rogan.) OK I'll tell you a story... make of it what you will; I'm lying in the arms of my lover, in post coital bliss, and suddenly I'm in her head or she's in mine and we're reliving or recalling the one-on-one basketball game we played earlier in the day. And then it's over and we look at each other and confirm that that just happened to the other person too. Magical. And sure there are hundreds of possible explanations other than telepathy.
I'd actually like to argue that a rare, fleeting, bonding, perfect coincidence of lovely thought and feeling is more beautiful than telepathy or magic because it *isn't* structured by the paranormal. It isn't even a "gift," per se, because there is no intention and no giver. It's simply a precious surprise, cued up by shared experience.
This is a completely true story, absolutely no exaggeration:
I was once working with a very good friend. She was out of my line of sight but within ear shot. I started watching Mr. Plinkett's iconic review of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, for the very first time, using one ear bud. She did not see or hear me start the video.
There is a sneak attack joke in the middle of a lecture here, https://youtu.be/FxKtZmQgxrI?si=xDERYry2QsGiPOg8&t=113, in which the weirdo narrator unexpectedly mispronounces "protagonist" with a line reading that exquisitely conveys the self-conscious bravado of a guy who reads a lot but is too weird and off-putting to have heard and be able to confidently use rare words like "protagonist" aloud in conversation.
I *BELLOWED* the loudest, most surprised laugh of my entire life. There have been a few moments in my life where I laughed even harder and longer, but never one which was more explosive.
"Are you watching that Episode One review video? Is it the 'pro-toe-gahn-ist' part?" My friend called to me.
It's beautiful that she knew me well enough to know that that particular laugh could only have come from that specific joke.
And that's more beautiful than telepathy.
But also: We're not friends anymore, due to an awkward, unspoken, minor moment of resentment which never faded and which neither of us ever had the courage to explicitly address, for reasons that I'm still not clear on over a decade later.
Surely 'telepathy' would have done better by us.
It's not. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Let someone use their telepathy to win $100k playing poker and maybe I'll take a look.
Telepathy is not synonymous with mind reading.
Demonstrate it in some way. Even if you need two specific people that are frequency-tuned to each other or something. Put them in two Faraday caged rooms and have them predict cards off a deck at something noticeably better than random.
I am not trying to make a case for or against. I am trying to point out that those two things are not synonymous. One of them implies a conversation and the other implies a hack.
Ok then let them use it to do literally anything that has real-world dollars attached to it.
You are missing my point.
And, I object to your point that it must have dollars attached to be in any way useful or demonstratable.
Noted.
Having real money attached to it just reduces the chance of fraud. People can be inventive and it's not always easy to explain a magic trick. But if $1m changes hands then I'm much more confident that it's real.
Ahh well you'll be too late by then. It's the beginning of 'Childhood's End'*. :^)
*the story by A.C. Clarke
As far as I can tell, you're just pulling these ideas out of thin air, or more accurately, your bias.
Again, guns need someone committed to pulling the trigger. Suppose left wing ideology generates more anarchists, gangbangers, suicidal maniacs, and other forms of people willing to pull a trigger and get a gun to do it? There's plenty of evidence this can also happen. If you make sweeping assertions, they are worthless without meaningful and deep metrics.
Right-wing gun owners are also inherently more likely to train and be knowledgeable about gun handling and safety. You haven't in any way demonstrated that this doesn't counter-balance any 'inherent belief they have that it is okay to shoot people', or even overwhelm it, which again is something you have made up as far as I can tell, and lacks any supporting data.
Looks like you might have misdirected your comment here!
I was repeatedly assured that all I had to do was aim the Smart Crosshairs at the comment and pull the "Post" trigger.
The more Houthi related Signal messages come out the more I update towards the Trump administration, at the top level at least, being better functioning than I expected.
It's bad they added someone to the chat accidentally, sure. But the conversation itself was great. Quick responses to an ask, individuals raising points related to their area while deferring to the clear decision makers, clear communication, all very professional and seemingly practiced.
We don't know the full decision making process and everything before this conversation may have been trash but, the obligatory sprinkles of "rah team" cringe aside, but within this exchange there's nothing objectionable.
How can they be wrong? They’re wearing suits and writing emails and everything!
I'm willing to bite that this is neither 'professional' nor 'well functioning' (you said better functioning than you expected, idk where your bar is so I'm just going to say 'well functioning' here, but feel free to push back if you think that's a misrepresentation).
Three points:
- these people have clearly drunk the koolaid. In the private signal chat they bring up biden, unprompted, at least twice. Like the man just lives rent free in their head, to a level that is just stupid. It makes me seriously doubt the level of sober analysis they are even able to do, since they are obviously epistemologically downstream of fox news talking heads that can't stop blaming everything on biden. And it's also obvious that everything is a show to them. I don't think they are capable of making difficult decisions because they are constantly thinking about 'how to stay on message that this is bidens fault'
- "I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now." fascinating line from the veep. Why, exactly, is this supposed to give me confidence about the man supposedly in charge?
- on the actual material level, celebrating the bombing of civilians and talking about how "PATHETIC" our closest allies are is, like, obviously bad? I think NATO is a good thing, it is clear that our military leaders dont. If Russia invades Poland, I'm supposed to expect Hegseth and Vance to intervene? Any confidence I had from these two -- and it was really not very much to begin with -- is absolutely gone.
I also of course think all the meta-level stuff was extraordinarily bad. In addition to what other folks have said below, a bunch of them then committed perjury in congressional hearings! The whole reason we have these meta laws like "perjury" or "record keeping" is precisely because that hygiene is a necessary backstop to avoid a slide into dictatorship. Which, of course, is what is currently happening.
> In the private signal chat they bring up biden, unprompted, at least twice...I don't think they are capable of making difficult decisions because they are constantly thinking about 'how to stay on message that this is bidens fault'
It's possible that other messages have been released that I missed, but I see two references to Biden, both in the same message from Pete Hegseth at 8:27 and both in the context of messaging. Creating a narrative and ensuring consensus / message discipline around that narrative is part of the job of senior leadership in every org and the narrative in any political administration is going to involve political concerns. In a two party system this will inevitably involve contrasts with the other side.
Not saying they aren't incapable of making decisions due to an excessive obsession about Biden but that's not how this reads to me. I'm sure that a Democratic admin that was taking an action the previous admin could have but didn't would have similar messaging about how they're cleaning up the other guy's mess.
> Why, exactly, is this supposed to give me confidence about the man supposedly in charge?
To steelman, the head of any large and complex org - even those much simpler than the presidency - will have inconsistent views and their subordinates will try to steer them in different directions. Vance's message seems like a respectful way to raise his views.
That's probably excessive steelmanning though. I can easily believe that you should not have confidence in Trump. That doesn't mean that other rungs of the org aren't being run more competently.
> on the actual material level, celebrating the bombing of civilians...
No one celebrated the bombing of civilians.
> ...talking about how "PATHETIC" our closest allies are is, like, obviously bad?
I don't see that as obviously bad, especially in context. Pretend that these were messages from a chat at the C/Senior VP level in a business. There's some sort of problem that the business has and can solve in-house, but will disproportionately benefit a vendor that arguably should be able to do it themselves. It's not bad or unprofessional to express, even strongly, that it's pathetic that the vendor can't do it on their own.
The Hegseth "PATHETIC" comment reads to me as "Yes, we all know it's bad that we're the only ones who can do it. But we are. Given that reality..."
(Not saying that the hypothetical is exact or that countries do / should operate the same as businesses, but allies can and do have healthy disagreements including some level of personal dislike.)
> If Russia invades Poland, I'm supposed to expect Hegseth and Vance to intervene? Any confidence I had from these two -- and it was really not very much to begin with -- is absolutely gone.
That's interesting. Can you explain more about why the messages make you think that? For me, it's the opposite. The general thrust of the chain from multiple departments, as I read it, is that it will benefit Europe more than the US and we should try to get them to do more / provide some sort of compensation but we should still do it regardless. A Russian invasion of Poland has the same sort of considerations so I would expect the same outcome: US intervention.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Your original point was about the optics of professionalism and how well the team is functioning. I think a lot of your responses do raise reasonable alternative suggestions for what could be happening, but a discussion about optics is about how things seem compared to how things are.
For example, maybe Trump is actually totally honest in the way he manages the vast conflicts of interest between his companies and running the US government. But the optics of, say, publicly supporting $Trump coin (and then making a massive profit off that at the expense of retail investors) are really bad.
More generally, any discussion about optics is NOT about plausible redeeming exculpatory explanations for the behaviors on exhibit. The fact that we have to come up with reasons for why this may be redeemable, means the optics debate is already lost.
---
That said, on the merits of the actual discussion points. Before responding point by point, I want to say that its extremely important to take these messages in the broader context of what else this government has said and done. Maybe on its own, these messages could meet the explanations that you lay out, but in context they seem...significantly worse.
> I'm sure that a Democratic admin that was taking an action the previous admin could have but didn't would have similar messaging about how they're cleaning up the other guy's mess.
These bombings -- and in fact, any military action -- should serve a strategic interest for America. Either they serve that strategic interest, in which case we should do it, or they don't serve that strategic interest, in which case we should not. It's possible for there to be a debate on the pros and cons, the likely second and third order effects of a given military action on America more broadly. But the focus should be on America and American interests. (There was a bit of this, for e.g. Vance talking about the spike in oil prices)
The problem I have is these partisans make it clear that they are not primarily thinking about American interests. From the beginning, Vance opens with "the strongest reason to do this is to send a message" (to who? about what?) and then there is a bunch of discussion about messaging. This is of course where we get to that Hegseth message that you are talking about, where he outright says "Nobody knows who the Houthis are, so we need to stay focused on Biden failed and Iran funded".
What the fuck? If this is a useful thing for American, or even global interests, just explain why! Why the fuck are we talking about how Biden screwed up at all? This is like a two second blurb "shipping is important these guys were blocking major shipping" but no, they instead feel the need to discuss why this is all Biden's fault somehow. The reason I say 'Biden lives rent free in their head' is because the entire conversation could have been done without any reference to the previous administration at all. And yet.
It is definitely possible that the previous admin did this sort of messaging work (on signal chats? a bit less likely!) as well. But its also un-falsifiable. And in context, we shouldn't be surprised that the leadership sounds as unhinged as a fox news report.
> Pretend that these were messages from a chat at the C/Senior VP level in a business. [...] It's not bad or unprofessional to express, even strongly, that it's pathetic that the vendor can't do it on their own.
In fact, it is! In every job I worked, we had strong rules around what to put in writing -- the rule of thumb was always "If you wouldn't want it in the NYT, do not write it". So here. The reason you do not put things like this in writing is because it can create serious material harm. To extend your own analogy, if the vendor caught wind that we were shit talking them and then stopped supplying the company, that would obviously be bad and material. European nations are not exactly taking kindly to the insult. (This is, by the way, just assuming that the underlying assumption that Europe SHOULD be funding its own defense is somehow beneficial for America. It isn't. Pax Americana is a good thing, and forcing other nations to rearm is directly at America's expense. We should continue to fund other nations' defense explicitly because it helps America, a lot.)
And again, in the broader context of statements made by these same individuals, it is clear that they have open disdain for our once-allies. Which brings me to...
> Can you explain more about why the messages make you think that? For me, it's the opposite. The general thrust of the chain from multiple departments, as I read it, is that it will benefit Europe more than the US and we should try to get them to do more / provide some sort of compensation but we should still do it regardless.
This administration isn't even funding Ukraine, an explicit European target of Russian invasion! We have public statements from all of these guys talking about how much they hate funding EU defense, how they want to pull out of NATO, how they want to annex parts of the EU (???). We have explicit policy changes that have resulted in the defunding of an actual US ally who is actually currently under attack. And now we have private messages that use words like "loathsome" and "PATHETIC".
Going back to the first point, it does not seem like this administration undertook these bombings because they actually felt there were strong strategic justifications for doing so. In fact, the discussion is almost entirely about the message and what kind of message is being sent. This is and always has been about aesthetics; it shouldn't be lost on anyone that Hegseth is most famous as a Fox news talking head. Of course they are thinking about ratings. And what drives ratings more than bombing terrorists?
This is why they are actually angry about the fact that it actually helps Europeans out. They want the ratings, they want the projection of strength, but don't think for a moment that they are doing this because it will actually help Europe. Their base hates Europe, and the text chains show that any benefit to Europe must extract a pound of flesh in return. They are doing it because of the 'presidents directive', not because any European leaders asked for this. So if Russia actually rolled into Estonia, or whatever, I don't think the admin will care -- protecting Estonia is 'off-message', strategic value be damned. Unless, of course, they get a pound of flesh. (This is, btw, what is happening in Ukraine re: mineral rights).
The worst part of all of this is that it makes America less safe. The best war is the one that you don't have to fight at all because you have alliances and soft power. Even as this admin blows up random terrorist groups for ratings, it is simultaneously weakening our ability to actually wage war by alienating allies and making it harder for us to deploy.
---
As an aside it's also worth looking into where this 'presidential directive' is coming from. The Houthis were not always even a terrorist organization! Trump designated them as such in the last month of his first term (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-administration-remove-houthis-terrorist-list-reversing-another-trump-policy-n1256923), which Biden reversed (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/in-foreign-policy-shift-biden-lifts-terrorist-designation-for-houthis-in-yemen), and Trump re-reversed (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-re-designates-the-houthis-as-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/).
The politics of the situation are complex and no one is a 'good guy' here (as is often true with the middle east), but the Biden camp was grounding their foreign policy in humanitarian aid during an extremely violent civil war, with the hope of long term political stabilization and development. Destroying the Houthis itself is not a clear win, since Yemen will still be an incredibly unstable place.
I congratulate you for still having the energy to engage at length in these kinds of discussions.
(this is a sincere comment)
I don’t think the quality of the conversation is the issue. One would hope most of these types of discussions are competent.
To my mind, there are two issues; this is clearly not the first and only time that signal has been used for these types of discussions, rather than going through official channels of communication. So this means a lot of things are being done off the record. That is antithetical to How we have seen Govt in the past. It’s quite possible that the Biden administration did the same thing, but the cat is out of the bag now.
The second thing is, these discussions should not be taking place in public.
This is a security breach.
> One would hope most of these types of discussions are competent.
One would hope. One would also likely be disappointed if the veil was lifted and all discussions made public. Many conversations at a similar level of seniority are not as competent, the content of this one leads me to think that the administration is more effective at day to day execution than I would have expected otherwise.
> This is a security breach.
That is true. Many such cases.
If Biden admin did this do you think your reaction would be the same?
Yes. I'm not trying to impugn the cleverness of the group chat's members, but I doubt they were the first to imagine doing such a thing. I'm not aware of any similar scandals from the Biden years but I'm sure chats that would be even worse if exposed were going on. This does not bother me. If one emerges I pre-commit to not caring.
I would be more scandalized if there actually were none.
Ok, this is reasonable. There are laws against these kinds of things but it doesn't mean the idea itself if bad.
The real scandal is carelessly adding a member, for sure. I haven't used Signal so I don't know this happened. It's very easy to add someone unintended on Telegram.
Heh
they murdered 32 people
I don't think people are critiquing the decision-making process, they're critiquing how Pete Hegseth shared the exact time they would be dropping bombs over a demonstrably insecure channel. It's not "professional" just because they use professional-sounding words like "OPSEC," you have to actually do the things a professional would do to maintain OPSEC.
("But signal is end to end encrypted!" Yeah, and as this leak demonstrates, end-to-end encryption doesn't stop the ends from leaking. There are reports that one of the participants was on a trip to Russia when the meeting was happening - that's another end that could potentially have leaked.)
There's also a public records issue - the government is legally required to store official communications, but Signal automatically erases messages. Again, something that a "professional" might have known about and avoided doing so as not to get sued for it.
Various former US intelligence officers, as well as the chair (GOP) and ranking member (Dem) of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, are "critiquing" facts like one of the Trump Adm appointees joining that chat via his personal phone literally while inside the _Kremlin_. (Where he had an appointment to meet with Vladimir Putin.) That same person, in the chat, _named_ a key US field intelligence officer operating in a foreign country and nobody objected to his doing so.
Also Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, had a couple of its reporters go online yesterday where they had no trouble finding the personal phone numbers and email addresses and "some passwords" of the chat participants. They also found that those personal email addresses and phone numbers were how those participants had set up their Signal accounts.
All of the above has become known only because that particular chat session happened to include one guy mis-clicking and linking the invite to a journalist. Obvious questions include: how many _other_ Signal chats has this group had on unsecured personal phones using easily-findable logins, in which they passed around highly-classified info about US military or intelligence operations or personnel? How many other random people have been inadvertently sent the invite to chats involving this crew? Etc.
> I don't think people are critiquing the decision-making process, they're critiquing how Pete Hegseth shared the exact time they would be dropping bombs over a demonstrably insecure channel. It's not "professional" just because they use professional-sounding words like "OPSEC," you have to actually do the things a professional would do to maintain OPSEC.
Yes, shame on them using Signal. To me, it's on the venial side of the sins. I'd prefer more communication between officials than less, and to the degree that backchannels and insecure but convenient means to facilitate those communications result in better / more frequent discussions than would otherwise occur - I'm for it. There's risk in everything and the information leakage risk to me is less salient than the risk of less / miscommunication in the top levels of the world's most powerful government.
In this case the military risk is very low. I don't think it's controversial to say that we have air superiority over the Houthis. CENTCOM could forward them a copy of their morning slide decks and the worst that happens is a person being targeted hides. The risk to the aircraft and ships involved has not appreciably changed. Are there possible scenarios where that's not true and the information leaking leads to disaster? Yeah, but it's a question of probabilities and this one's in the low end.
Professionals know about and violate data retention / security policies all the time. Backchannels are unavoidable precisely because they are productive. I don't think we had perfect public records before Signal and until we live in an AI panopticon we never will.
>the worst that happens is a person being targeted hides.
Yes, the worst that happens is that the mission fails.
>In this case the military risk is very low. I don't think it's controversial to say that we have air superiority over the Houthis.
Do the Houthis have any SAMs? I wouldn't be surprised if they do, since they've got a pretty wide variety of missiles. Knowing when and where the planes will come from certainly makes it easier to put them in the right spot to shoot something down.
(Similar to how Serbia managed to shoot down a stealth plane because they knew that the bombing runs were always coming along a particular route.)
>the worst that happens is a person being targeted hides.
I mean, that seems like a pretty important risk! The whole point of the first airstrike was to kill a particular guy whom they had confirmed was hiding in a particular building. If you give him advance warning and he leaves the building before you bomb it, you've just killed 50 people for no gain. (You've also given away that you have people tracking his location, which could have repercussions down the line.)
But also, if you're going to say "eh, no harm, no foul," then you need to give people confidence that it won't happen again. That means punishing the people responsible for the screw-up, instead of downplaying it and insisting it's all totally cool and normal. You got lucky once, don't be confident you'll get lucky a second time.
And all of this goes triple if you once won an election by campaigning on "Hillary Clinton illegally stored classified information on a private email server, and unlike her, we are going to obey the law and punish people who fail to treat classified intelligence with respect."
> Do the Houthis have any SAMs?...
Yes, they have air defenses. I don't know the details that really matter for estimating its effectiveness - proficiency, placement, exact types, etc. - but I do know that they've been ineffective at responding to any previous attacks and that the military judged the risk as acceptable.
Does that mean that this leak, or a similar one, couldn't have led to a shoot-down that would not otherwise occur? Of course not. I never claimed invulnerability and additional information given to your opponent increases risk. But let's say that on a 9 point scale the risk of a shootdown was previously a 2 and this info, if leaked, would bump it to a 4. This my genuine, necessarily widely uncertain, assessment of the risks. To me that seems like an acceptable risk zone for a risky activity - and bombing someone who does not want to be bombed will always have some amount of risk.
Someone with a lower risk threshold could reasonably note that on a 9 point scale that means we've moved from the Low trio to Medium. They would then rightly perceive the risk of the Signal conversation as more serious.
> I mean, that seems like a pretty important risk!
It is, most definitely. No one is suggesting it's good if he was tipped off, not being able to do the thing you wanted to do is a bad thing.
It's one risk that exists in a complex stew of other risks in other domains, each with their own uncertainties and plausible paths to disaster. There are other risks that increase when there's less communication in an organization. My (not infinite) preference is for trade-offs in favor of more communication even up to significant risks in other areas.
> If you give him advance warning and he leaves the building before you bomb it, you've just killed 50 people for no gain. (You've also given away that you have people tracking his location, which could have repercussions down the line.)
There has been intense selection pressure on Islamic militant groups over the past two decades. The Houthis have survived through significant instability and conflict. These airstrikes are not a desperate, must-happen-now deathblow to the enemy. Whether this guy was killed on any given day doesn't matter - there was no sense of urgency in the Signal chat, delay was clearly acceptable.
So if the mission had failed the net effect would be the same world as before. The Houthis, as active combatants aware of US and allied information gathering capabilities and tactics, are aware that we can track the location of individuals closely enough to target them.
It's also not unusual for a targeted airstrike mission to fail. Much fuel has been burned for no gain in the past, much fuel will be burned for no gain in the future. The risk is all still within normal operational ranges. Hard to get worked up.
> That means punishing the people responsible for the screw-up...
Sure, no objection, getting caught is getting caught.
> And all of this goes triple if you once won an election by campaigning...
Everyone's level of acceptance for hypocrisy varies, and I was obviously not that worried about Hillary's emails, but this also seems within the usual unavoidable grandstanding in a partisan system.
I feel like you could apply this logic to any sort of risky activity, and it would be equally wrong for all of them.
"Not wearing a seat belt is just one risk in the complex stew of risks that is highway driving, and if you're otherwise driving safely, then it won't come into play in the first place, so it really only raises your risk to like a 4 out of 10." Sure, but your car has a seat belt, and you could be wearing it, and then there would be one less risk in that complex stew.
When you're talking about a systemic issue (these signal chats are apparently routine), then it doesn't make sense to say "well, it was only a small risk in a safe situation," because you're going to be constantly rolling those dice for as long as the systemic issue exists. Eventually they're going to roll them on an operation where a bad guy is listening in.
>Whether this guy was killed on any given day doesn't matter - there was no sense of urgency in the Signal chat, delay was clearly acceptable.
It sure matters to the people in the building we just flattened! The downside to failing this mission was not "the target survives a while longer," it's "we blow up a building full of innocent people and don't even have a military success to justify it with."
>Sure, no objection, getting caught is getting caught.
If you agree, then you should probably downgrade your assessment of this administration's professionalism, because in the day since my last post, they've doubled down on claiming that they did nothing wrong and that the leaks weren't classified.
> Sure, but your car has a seat belt, and you could be wearing it, and then there would be one less risk in that complex stew.
This is plainly true and if there were no tradeoffs then it would obviously be preferable that all communication happen in strict accordance with applicable laws and guidelines. There are, however, tradeoffs and the ideal of perfect compliance is not met at any organization.
> When you're talking about a systemic issue...
You are correct that this was not a one-off. But a) we can only analyze the risk of the situation we know about, and b) I think I said that I was comfortable with conversations of even higher levels of risk. You are also correct that eventually information will leak from less secured channels that would not have from more secured channels. It did in this case, it has in worse ways in the past, and will do so in the future.
The point is that this risk is acceptable compared to the other risks that will increase by having an organization with a lower flow of information among its principals. Not to an infinite level - nothing holds true as you venture ever further into the tails - but nothing happens in a vacuum and you equally cannot move a system to be more secure in one aspect without increasing risk elsewhere.
> It sure matters to the people in the building we just flattened!
As a pedantic point I doubt very much that any civilian killed as collateral damage in an airstrike has ever felt comfort seeing the intended target killed first.
There's always a possibility in any targeted strike that the target(s) will survive: bad intel, dumb luck, unknown escape tunnels, whatever. Meaning that while it's a Bad Outcome and would obviously not be the desired outcome it's well within the range of possible outcomes. It's not an extraordinary risk. You may have a different risk perspective and say that anything that increases the possibility of that Bad Outcome, like the Signal conversation did in some unknowable amount, is intolerable. I would disagree but this is a matter of preference.
Correct me if I'm assuming incorrectly here, but it seems like you might at least potentially support the current administration. If that's correct, were the promises of increased government transparency made during the campaign and subsequently something that you personally found to be important?
No, I didn't vote for this administration and I'm unaware of their campaign promises around transparency.
Not making any claims either way about how well they are / intend to live up to those promises, but even a highly transparent government will have violations.
Ok, thanks, sorry for the incorrect assumption.
>will have violations.
Absolutely, although I'd hope that a government honestly striving for transparency (and who has made an "unaccountable deepstate" the primary bogeyman) wouldn't be so nakedly and obviously trying to shift blame and avoid responsibility for those violations.
We're getting close to June 1, 2025. Which is the deadline of Scott's AI image generator bet.
I know Scott already said he won[1], but I remember it being contentious at the time.
OpenAI just released a new image generation model. It seems to be really good. See this[2] reddit thread.
Anyone out here with a subscription willing to generate images from those prompts again? Just to check out what it looks like given the current state-of-the-art.
[1] - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1jjyn5q/openais_new_4o_image_generation_is_insane/
From this tweet, seems like it's a clear win: https://x.com/filipeabperes/status/1904763313067807202
In my opinion, it still clearly fails at the "stained glass window, woman, library, raven, key" - task:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e54316-d414-8006-a58c-48be7ea60ecc
The only other thing I tried to get it to generate in multiple ways, it also failed at. It involved an axe hitting into the head of a cartoon zombie. With many attempts, the axe never turned the right angle, and it struggled to analyze the issue with the picture correctly. It blocks me from sharing the chat, perhaps because of gore ("sharing deactivated by moderation")
I tried opening your chat yesterday and the image didn't show. I can see it today. OpenAI's servers were probably overloaded.
Yeah that's a pretty clear fail. _so_ close though. Just missed putting the key in the mouth.
Interesting - the key was actually solved in other attempts (maybe you can see them in the chat too)
I think it just failed because the image isn’t a stained glass window. It’s in the optics of a stained glass window, and has one in the background. But it’s not actually a window depicting the woman with everything else
I can only see 2 images and 2 prompts. Ends with
> Try again, this time make sure the whole image is actually a stained glass picture, not just in the general optics of it
And the image generated after.
> I think it just failed because the image isn’t a stained glass window
Maybe this is a prompt/ambiguity thing? I'd interpret the image as a "stained glass picture", even though it's not techincally a "picture of a stained glass window".
I tried again, hoping to make it clearer. It stills doesn’t get it right:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e54316-d414-8006-a58c-48be7ea60ecc
I still only get the first 2 images. Maybe you need to update the link?
I ended up buying a subscription too...
Here's my attempt: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e6d7f8-1930-8002-9c9d-4ce6479cb29f
I think it's pretty good. But it does have a bit of "picture in style of stained glass" more than actual stained glass.
I tried telling it to show the walls and change perpective, then it's better. But it forgot the key. I think the context window started getting saturated
It can finally do three cats in a trenchcoat!
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e3e974-5a04-8001-b702-683e7600901e
Love the cat ears on the hat!
Are you sure you're using the latest model though? The style looks like DallE
Well, that didn't take long:
Nathaniel Johnson, Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Treasury told an OMG journalist that 23andMe has been sharing data with "pharmaceutical companies," including "the Ministry of Defense of Russia."
"There's a clause in their contract that basically says, 'we can give your information to our shareholders.'"
Trump seems determined to destroy the US dollar in various ways. The Mar a Lago Accord plans to turn outstanding 30-year US bonds into 100-year bonds by force. Trump also wants to force other nations to devalue the US dollar. Both of these ideas are plans to default on US debt, which would send interest rates skyrocketing and the economy to the moon in a reflection pond.
Those crazy Trump ideas won't likely come to pass directly, but his determination to permanently cripple the US economy one way or another seems to have a decent chance of happening. (Why does Trump want this? Because he's fucking insane, as he has always been.)
My question is what happens after Trump has defaulted on the federal debt, through one means or another, and permanently collapsed the dollar?
The US still has the best economy in the world for now, mostly led by technology companies located in California and Texas. Do California and Texas secede from the USA like in the recent movie from a couple years ago? Do the leading software and AI companies relocate? If so, where? (As in, outside the USA.)
This is a hypothetical, of course, and the answers I'm most interested in are to the question: Where? If US tech decides it must relocate.
Or would US tech companies simply benefit long-term from the collapse of the US economy and the dollar? (I don't think they would because the political pressure to tax them heavily would be high. But what if they controlled the strings of government?)
I consider myself a patriotic American and I hope and pray for the day when the dollar is significantly devalued. What a joyous outcome that would be.
It's already been devalued by a factor of twenty in the past century according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/. How much more do you need?
To be fair to the viewpoint, I think the point is to devalue the dollar relative to the average foreign currency, rather than on an absolute basis. The idea is that it makes exports and domestic consumption of domestic goods more practical and imports and outsourcing less practical, as well as attracting fewer immigrants and guest workers because remissions/savings wouldn't be worth as much back home. Basically turning the US into a BRICS country economically. As stated so far it might actually work. But the ultimate objective is to have a broad and prosperous native middle class and reduce poverty and the hollowing out of suburbs and small towns, which from the BRICS analogy seems unlikely to follow.
I think the only simple model that makes sense is that prices in real terms in the long term aren't affected by currency fluctuations (barring hyperinflation – that has real economic effects). That would lead one to disbelieve all of those effects.
Reducing US productivity to BRICS level would imply a reduction in output by about a factor of five. That's considerably more than even Germany's economy shrank as a result of WW2. Anyone who correctly predicted such an extreme event could get insanely wealthy.
"The US still has the best economy in the world for now, mostly led by technology companies located in California and Texas. Do California and Texas secede from the USA like in the recent movie from a couple years ago? Do the leading software and AI companies relocate? If so, where? (As in, outside the USA.) "
Well, I don't really expect this to *stay* true. I think having the best tech companies in the world is downstream of the U.S. being a world hub for science, and I don't see that lasting. The administration has already shown so much hostility to all things academic and most things foreign that it's hard to imagine the worldwide scientific community will be able to maintain the same relationship with the U.S., even after this administration leaves power.
Granted, being "downstream" means it might take quite a while for the full effects to be felt. It's very possible that U.S. tech dominance will persist on inertia for quite a while, even if other places are overtaking it. But bad economic policy could hasten the process considerably.
I dont think software companies (which, as much as I dont like it, is mostly what tech means) are especially dependent on science, unless youre counting path dependence from chip manufacturing. Google arguably was with pagerank, but that still seems more like "early in computer manufacture/adoption" than "top computer science". Frankly, science doesnt explain the massive US/EU imbalance in tech. Compare pharma for how I would expect a science-dependent industry to look.
The "Accord" is a trial balloon floated by several of Trump's advisors. So far at least, there is no indication that he plans to do any of it.
The only 30-year bonds affected would be those held by foreign central bankers, who would be strong-armed into swapping them for 100-year bonds on really bad terms. Technically debt forgiveness rather than default. Devaluation has never been regarded as default, though bond markets dislike it for many of the same reasons. The only new wrinkle here is the apparent intent to bring it about by bullying other nations into deflating their currencies, rather than the more usual course of inflating our own. Not an effort that seems likely to succeed.
Serious question: if Biden floated this plan - would you have still describe it in such neutral terms? Like, nothing to see here, just a trial balloon?
And by the way bond "devaluation" is absolutely a default. A bond default occurs when an issuer fails to meet its contractual obligations to bondholders. These obligations typically include timely payment of interest (coupon payments) and the return of principal at maturity.
"Devaluation" refers, as usual, to *currency* devaluation-- which, again, has never been regarded as a default on bonds, even back in the days of fixed exchange rates.
As for your "serious question"... well, I'd hate to see what your frivolous questions look like.
Ok, agreed on the difference between bond devaluation vs currency devaluation.
If I rebrand the question as "frivolous" will you answer?
Yes, but with another question: Suppose I admit that in this situation you've invented I would have totally lost my shit about Biden. Should my blatant hypothecrisy cause everyone to update their opinions of Trump-- a man who, whatever his other faults, is at least not me?
Well, yes? If the same actions cause a meltdown when taken by Biden but are a "trial balloon" under Trump, the update is to move Trump's assessment closer to Biden's? Like it's really bad? something in the middle between an apocalypse and a nothingburger.
In this "trial balloon", though, general bondholders would be facing "devaluation" but central bankers would be facing something more like "default"--they fail to receive the principal they were promised at the end of 30 years, and they only get the choice of getting it at the end of 100 years (supposedly, from an entity that already defaulted once) or just holding a bag.
"Why does Trump want this?"
He likely either has formed a view of the US economy as being as described in this article (https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/you-voted-for-this), or is influenced by people who do. Inflating the US dollar funds his political enemies who tried to throw him in jail. So, to hurt his enemies, he is looking for any way to force the US dollar to deflate.
I think that model vastly underestimates the material benefits of just simply living in a world where wars are relatively rare and international trade is common.
It was once the case that the US was the most prosperous country in the world, and got most of its revenue from lump sum taxes and tariffs, and wars occurred regularly overseas.
You may be surprised to learn that the economic basis of the U.S. during that period was actually *substantially* different than it is today. In the 19th century any significant degree of industrialization put you ahead of the pack. In the 21st century a country whose economic basis is primarily agriculture and bulk manufacturing is certainly *not* going to be a world economic leader.
It may also be worth realizing that warfare is really rather different today than it was 150-200 years ago. A rather large fraction of the U.S. population learned why "overseas wars are no concern of ours" doesn't actually constitute a robust security policy for the modern world all the way back in 1941. Strangely, neither the importance of global trade nor the ability of militaries to project force over long distances has actually *declined* in the last 75 years, rendering that lesson still rather important.
> overseas wars are no concern of ours" doesn't actually constitute a robust security policy for the modern world all the way back in 1941.
I’d say the US was pretty secure even after pearl harbour.
I'm honestly confused as to what this statement is attempting to communicate.
Do you mean to say that even after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. never had its core territories attacked or seriously threatened by belligerents in the war? If so then yes, that's largely true, but it's pretty clearly true *because* the U.S. chose to respond to Pearl Harbor by getting involved in an overseas war, and doing so fairly aggressively.
It *might* have been possible for the U.S. to fight only Japan and stay out of the European war and maintain a similar level of security in its core territories. But clearly U.S. maintaining security required *at the very least* a war with Japan. Even if one imagines going back in time and so radically altering the psychology of both the leadership and the whole nation so as to allow "sue for peace" to be a viable response to Pearl Harbor, the result wouldn't be a more secure U.S. Rather, it would be an emboldened Japan, expanding faster and farther into the Pacific, and expecting it could make whatever demands it wanted of the U.S. as part of the process.
"In the 21st century a country whose economic basis is primarily agriculture and bulk manufacturing is certainly *not* going to be a world economic leader."
Someone should let China know this, so they can step down as one of the world's premier economies.
"A rather large fraction of the U.S. population learned why "overseas wars are no concern of ours" doesn't actually constitute a robust security policy for the modern world all the way back in 1941."
Japan started a war that wasn't overseas, so they lost it. If no one wants to start another war with Hawaii, the people of the US are happy to leave things as they are. Wars are expensive.
"Someone should let China know this, so they can step down as one of the world's premier economies. "
Thank you for so succinctly demonstrating my point. China has something less than 1/6th the GDP-per-capita of the U.S. "The U.S. would be better if everyone in it was 85% poorer" is not a political stance that's going to win you many friends.
"Japan started a war that wasn't overseas,"
Leaving aside quibbles about the definition of "overseas," this misses the point rather badly. The war didn't START in 1941. It had been going on for several years already and the U.S. was fairly determined to stay out of it. And then they discovered they couldn't. For the second time in two decades, as it happens.
The moral of the story is not "the U.S. should start more foreign wars," mind you. Rather it's "an unstable world is a world in which the U.S. is more likely to find itself at war." The condition of the world in which "wars regularly occur overseas" is also the condition of the world in which the U.S. was more likely to be drawn into conflicts against its will, and drawn in at points where being involved is exceptionally expensive.
Now personally, I'd much rather see a LESS interventionist and militaristic U.S. than has existed for the past 80 years: less of a brash cowboy diplomat and more of a powerful-but-restrained coalition member. But there's still a great big difference between *that* and returning to the utter fantasy that isolation = security. It most certainly doesn't, not in the modern world.
The absolute level of prosperity was much lower than today though. If you want to go back to a 19th-Century standard of living, be my guest, but leave me out of it.
"US economy as being as described in this article (https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/you-voted-for-this)"
If this word salad of cluelessness (start here: Federal Reserve does not "print money", anything that flows from that premise is garbage) is taken seriously by anyone in any power position in this clown administration, God help us all.
The Federal Reserve does not literally print money. They instead buy and guarantee securities so banks can loan out more money. This still has inflationary pressure that benefits certain parties over others, who end up holding the bag.
Banks’ loan volumes are not affected in any way by this. They are driven entirely by demand. As far as reserves go, treasuries, bills, notes, are all money. Exchanging treasury bills for… other treasury bills changes nothing.
As evidenced by two decades of QE failing to move the inflation needle, despite a loud chorus of Austrian “economists” loudly predicting imminent hyperinflation and dollar demise. Only once Congress started shoving out COVID stimulus inflation reared its ugly head.
Like I said, that article starts with garbage in, and predictably dishes garbage out.
We do not have hyperinflation. Instead, we have a bunch of genius economists who believe in MMT who tell us that we have a perfectly reasonable level of inflation that should be kept indefinitely. We also have this mysterious thing called 'cost disease' where everything seems to keep getting more expensive while also getting shittier, and interest payments on Social Security keep going up, up, and up.
None of this has anything to do with "Fed printing money" fallacy.
The Fed still holds over $2T worth of mortgage backed securities, which it began to buy after the 2008 debacle. This does effectively increase the price (or reduce the going interest rate) on such securities, which translates to lower mortgage rates and, presumably, increased volume.
Whether this failed to move the inflation needle is not obvious. We don't have the other timeline to view. You can of course weakman the position by pointing to various hard money muppets who are continually predicting hyperinflation, but 'we didn't get hyperinflation' is not the same as 'this wasn't inflationary at all'. I think a strong argument can be made that we *do* have more inflation than we would have seen if the Fed had sat on its hands and let the 2008 crisis unfold with no intervention at all. Whether this inflation is worse than the result of such a catastrophe is, of course, a different question.
The price of mortgage securities is affected mostly by long-term interest rates and probability of default. Having the Fed hold them vs. a bank holding them (come on, someone has to hold them, right?) makes no difference.
"I think a strong argument can be made that we *do* have more inflation than we would have seen"
It can? I don't think so but would love to see one.
It might not be so much a matter of companies moving away as new companies starting elsewhere or not starting branches here.
It’s quite difficult for a company to move, so I would not expect a rapid exodus. A lot depends on whether a significant portion of your work force would be willing to move, and whether the destination country would allow them to immigrate. It helps if people in the destination country speak English, which suggests Canada, the UK, or Australia. I think that English is pretty widely understood in Switzerland because there is not a single national language.
Don't U.S. tech companies employ a pretty large proportion of non-U.S.-born workers anyway? Not saying it's necessarily going to be *easy* for them to move, but probably *easier* since they're already sourcing talent from all over the globe.
As an American I don't want to see this. Can we please keep America great?
I think the idea was that four years later you will be allowed to make America great again, but maybe I have misunderstood the slogans.
There are now two known instances in which the people Trump's ICE kidnapped and sent to an El Salvador torture prison with no charges or trial, alleging membership in the drug gang Tren de Aragua, seem to just be a soccer fan or player with a soccer tattoo: the refugee E.M., and the soccer player Reyes Barrios.[1] In both cases it was a soccer ball with a crown on it. This seems to be extremely popular and normal iconography; find as many examples as you like on Google Images. Even a bunch of soccer teams have a crown in their logo.[2]
It seems increasingly likely that ICE just happened to once see a Venezualan gang member or gang members, who also happened to like the most popular sport in the world and also had a popular soccer tattoo; and now they're kidnapping all tattooed Venezuelan soccer fans they can.
Charity would have me attribute this to incompetence instead of malice. But I won't.
[1] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302464134.html; https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/21/deported-soccer-player-venezuela-tattoo/82589688007/
[2] https://tinyurl.com/46tp7hmz; https://tinyurl.com/8wey6c3k
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/y9y6rx/every_spanish_team_in_the_first_3_divisions_with/
I can't repeat this enough: cruelty is the point.
It's an evil regime, but we voted for it. There's a mandate for evil.
Only about a quarter of Americans voted for it.
But I get your point.
A rather grim video about the increasing risk of lung cancer in people who have never smoked. The reason isn't obvious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYhncB9Ftt8&ab_channel=SciShow
If cooking is a risk factor, then people whose jobs require cooking (say, restaurant cooks) should also be at risk for lung cancer.
> The reason isn't obvious.
?
I live somewhere where you dont get to see the sun when califoria has a wildfire; I have some theories
Didn't watch the video, but I'd think growing up in urban areas with leaded gas or near coal plants in the 70s could be a cause. Since nearly everyone used to smoke, smoking may have masked lung cancer from other causes for several decades.
Maybe you should watch the video or read the transcript. Lung cancer in non-smokers is a different sort of cancer than lung cancer in smokers.
The video is misleadingly oversimplifying. There are differences in distributions of type of cancer between smokers and nonsmokers, but nonsmokers are not getting types of cancer that smokers don't get. The difference is in the other direction, with smokers seeing a lot more variety in type of lung cancer than nonsmokers. The most common subtype is the same in both categories, adenocarcinoma, which is 65% of lung cancer in smokers and 93% of lung cancer in nonsmokers. There are papers with titles like "Never-smoking nonsmall cell lung cancer as a separate entity", but they seem to be talking more about epidemiology and disease progression than about a fundamental physical difference in the type of cancer.
The big risk factors for nonsmokers are secondhand smoke, other air pollutants, radon, genetic and hormonal factors, and lung damage from other diseases.
Masking of a base rate of not-caused-by-smoking lung cancer by high rates of smoking in the general population seems fairly plausible to me. I also wouldn't be surprised if there were a secondary factor of indoor air quality (especially with regards to radon) getting worse as houses and commercial buildings have increasingly been optimized for energy efficiency.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7431055/
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cncr.23679
Maybe it's microplastics.
Your goal is to make the U.S. as great as possible.
1) You may acquire a part of Mexico or Canada for the U.S. so long as you surrender a current part of the U.S. that is about as big.
2) The parts you trade must be as compact and contiguous as possible, so you can't do something like trade every U.S. county whose per capita GDP is very low.
3) You can do multiple trades.
Which trades do you make?
Trade Alaska for Alberta and British Columbia, for starters. Improves contiguity of both nations. I think by square miles we could also get Nova Scotia in the deal, though this is less important. Alaska, in general, is large and thinly populated enough to be an obvious 'sell' in this game, unless you have very strong opinions about maintaining US claims to the polar region. Alberta also produces more oil than Alaska, and has a bunch of uranium to boot...
Gaining Baja would be nice; you could probably make the square mileage add up by giving Mexico West Texas (west of Odessa) and moving the southern borders of NM and AZ north by a hundred miles, or a little less.
Leaving aside boringly-lopsided trades (like Vancouver for a random patch of Alaska) or outgroup bashing, my agenda would be to think about places which are currently underdeveloped due to a lack of links with their own country, which might be better off on the other side of the border.
Baja California is top of the list. As part of Mexico it's a weird appendage separated by a thin strip of desert from everywhere that matters, but as part of the US it would be an extension of the richest and most powerful portion of the country. In exchange, Mexico could perhaps have everything south of San Antonio, which gives them some decent agricultural land and some useful extra coastline.
On the other end, I'd be looking at the Maritime Provinces. Now, Maine itself is pretty underdeveloped too, but it's all a lot closer to Boston and even New York than it is to Toronto, so I'd just run a fast train line from Boston to Halifax and see what happens. In exchange, give them Michigan for greater Great Lakes dominance. If that's not enough, offer them Hawaii too, because if there's one thing that Canada definitely needs more of it's warm weather.
I have a feeling you're not gonna pawn Detroit and Flint off on Canada so easily; you'll probably have to throw in part of Minnesota, too, at the very least.
Detroit is a major economic center and a reasonably prosperous metropolitan area- it's just the *city itself* that has a ton of dysfunction (which may have bottomed out, or not).
I think Canada would be happy to have them, though it might be destabilizing to throw off the current Anglo vs. Franco balance (Michigan would increase the population of Canada by like 28% or so).
Two problems with acquiring Baja California:
1) It effectively lengthens the U.S.-Mexico border, which will make illegal immigration worse. Open Google Maps and use the "Measure Distance" function. The distance between San Diego and Yuma is 140 miles. The distance from Yuma to Cabo San Lucas is 740 miles. That means you'd be lengthening the border by 600 miles, with the new border being in the middle of the Gulf of California, which is so narrow that little boats full of people could easily cross it.
2) Only the northern 1/3 of Baja California is desirable. Look at the Koppen Climate Map of the region and you'll see the bottom 2/3 is very hot, lifeless desert.
Trade Canada for the southwestern part of British Columbia (the City of Vancouver, its suburbs, and Vancouver Island), the Canadian portion of the Saint Lawrence watershed (includes Toronto, Ontario, Montreal, and Quebec), and the Maritime Provinces. Respective are about 14k square miles, 300k square miles (total basin is about 500k, minus about 100k each for the US part of the watershed and the surface area of the lakes themselves), and 130k square miles. Total about 450k square miles. All of this is contiguous with the US, and much of it is situated so that the transfer would actually reduce border gore.
In return, offer the northern 3/4 of Alaska, most of which appears to be very sparsely inhabited. I'm tempted to keep the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, on the North Slope, and doing so would probably meet the letter of the challenge as the parts actually being traded are still compact and contiguous without it, but keeping the oil field would leave an ugly exclave that probably violates the spirit of the rules. I'm having trouble finding out the overall gross profits of the field, but it looks like it's probably somewhere around $8B/year in revenue (multiplying production by wholesale oil prices), of which the state's cut is somewhere around $2.5B. But even just looking at overall revenue, $8B/year is a minuscule fraction of the GDP of the parts of Canada the US would be getting in trade (I'm guesstimating something like 75% of Canada's US$2.1 trillion GDP).
I would trade the eastern half of Alaska for Alberta and for the peninsular portion of Ontario that looks like a dagger pointed at the heart of Ohio. Everything between Windsor and Ottawa would become American. Then, charge heavy tolls on any Canadian vehicles, trains or products moving between British Columbia and the remainder of eastern Canada.
Throwing off the English-French language balance in Canada through this land trade, subtracting Canada's most productive areas, and economically isolating British Columbia would leave rump Canada so weakened that it would eventually break up, and most or even all of the pieces would be absorbed by the U.S., so we'd get the eastern half of Alaska back in the end.
As for Mexico, we'd probably benefit from trading the southern strips of Arizona and New Mexico for the northern portion of Baja California. Look at the southern border of New Mexico and note how it's not a straight, horizontal line--it's like a three-step staircase. Change the border to a two-step staircase by drawing a horizontal line between El Paso and the Papago Farms and giving Mexico everything south of that. Take an equal amount of land from Baja California and from Sonora state so that Arizona gets a short coastline on the Gulf of California and California annexes everything down to about the city of Ensenada.
Easy. Trade the swath of red states from Texas to Florida for an equally sized chunk of Canada that includes Toronto and. Montreal. The resulting country would hopefully restore the historic role of the US as the world leader in feeding starving children and resetting refugees*, which is what great countries do.
*Refugees. Not asylees.
Will europe be woke longer then america or will it collaspe harder? (assuming woke came from america and was spread by usaid/hollywood/silicone valley; and the white guilt over slavery arguments may just not effect countries not part of the slave trade)
I think it never got nearly as big in Europe in the first place. Only in certain areas.
And advocating for Islam is a much more unpopular thing to do in Europe, because we have far more Muslim immigrants (with all the problems they bring). You can see this in voter %'s, majority of parties in Western Europe (since in Eastern Europe wokeness was even less pronounced) are leaning right wing and even left wing parties are moving towards an anti immigration stance.
I'm not sure Woke is dead. It might come back in the future.
There are of course witch burning cultures and people inclined to that level of conformity; but once the puritans were convinced god wasnt real(harvard was founded by puritans) they moved on to different conformity's and in theory the years where there wasn't a witch burning may have clues about how to prevent them. But I think this specific version is gone, its getting easier to be wildly "inflammatory"(ask me how I know), it will eat itself sure but Im not sure it can ever escape outside "bluesky"/colleges again and there maybe attempts to just stop the escalation to deaths(swattings in this era, I think thats the only mechanism of note) once death is off the table shouldnt it just collapse as voices without fear can just ask "Soooo why is this peoples dead? Why did you say [horribly awful thing] for someone saying [an attempt to be neutral]?"
Decline can go on for a quite a while, going by Latin American countries. The question is how many more Muslims can European countries import before they start forming their own parties and taking over governments?
They have formed their own parties already. And for example in Germany, majority of the vote is now pretty anti immigration (from Africa and Middle East especially). Same with Netherlands, France, Austria, Italy. It has yet to translate into action though, as it would require a EU wide effort to actually curb immigration effectively.
I would expect some reaction before that point; its not like theres isnt any right wing in Europe or that Europe has the censorship capabilitys of china. It will likely be to little to late and make europe a backwater in the next era but why would all of europe quietly go into that good night, at least 1% wont?
Some countries might pull it off. The liberal left seems too deeply entrenched in the political systems in the UK and France that I don't see anything happening there.
France has the oldest far right nationalist party in Europe. And it’s far from woke.
The ira and isis are post-state actors; while I have doubts about this timetable, nation states may stop mattering. Given the choice of sharia or the ira I can easily imagine my choice.
I *highly doubt* it will come to that, there are dozens of possiblies before that point(include violent ones) and there are in fact right wing protests in europe; but I dont see how all of europe turns muslim.
---
Power comes from violence, and young males are becoming increasingly right wing while the left eat itself and doesnt want to have children, or farms or guns. This era will end, the question is how; lets cross our fingers for farmers protests but be prepared for other options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Slovakia is quite woke.
Yes, it is an American concept, but when people from smaller countries spend a lot of time online, they often start thinking in American terms.
I think it was woke of germany to collaspe its birthrate, disarm, censor the right wing party, dismantle its nuclear power plants (for "green" energy that never came) etc.
Im unsure if Hungary ever got infected with woke isnt that one of the "strong men who is EVIL" for doing things like paying people to have children. Post soviets seem to tolerate wokeness out of fear of russia.
By europe I mostly mean the eu bureaucrats; if the eu disolves then europe is a big place and my american mind can no longer keep track of the important details of "cheese made 1 mirco-baguettes to far east is no longer the right cheese because of the war of 1678, in memory of le timmy". If the various sub-cultures reassert themselves then nesserily they wont be cookie cutter citizens of the world who are very sorry for being white.
"I think it was woke of Germany to collaspe its birthrate, disarm, censor the right wing party, dismantle its nuclear power plants (for "green" energy that never came) etc."
These things are liberal and arguably leftist, but they are not "woke" in any remotely common sense of the word, cf. e.g. Freddie DeBoer (https://web.archive.org/web/20230404013504/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means). They do not involve decentralized language policing, shaming, and purity spirals, they do not champion oppressed groups and castigate "privilege", etc, etc, etc. They're just bog-standard left-wing political positions, all of which long predate "wokeness", all of which are held by a great many people who are in no way "woke".
I have long pushed back against the claim that "woke" is just a mindless sneer word of zero informational content, arguing that there is a real concept or closely-coupled set of concepts there that needs to be named so it can be addressed, Please don't use "woke" as a mindless sneer word.
My European news recently has been wrong think police vists; recently I emailed a tip line for the german think tank that made the rounds for their interview on 60 minutes intending to waste their time(they ignored me ;__; but I have so many offensive meme to share) while there are exceptions of left wing people not engaging in censorship or shaming, I would never think it breaks across geographic lines, thats a individual moral test.
> arguing that there is a real concept or closely-coupled set of concepts there that needs to be named so it can be addressed,
We'll see what happens with 4 years of trump and the lefts low engery and usaid funding cuts causing chaos; but isnt it possible we reached "peak-woke"
If the 2028 democrats kick out exactly who I think is "woke-est"(which may just well happen, I think newsoms podcast is going well for him right?) wouldnt the issues be addressed if in a destructive manner?
“ Im unsure if Hungary ever got infected with woke isnt that one of the "strong men who is EVIL" for doing things like paying people to have children.”
This is a bad faith representation of why people characterize Orban as an authoritarian and you know it as well as I do. Do better.
> you know it as well as I do. Do better.
I dont even understand how you could believe this is effective argumentation.
It’s not argumentation because you haven’t offered an argument.
“People think Orban is bad because he pays people to have kids” isn’t an argument that needs refuting. You don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, and no one reading this thread does either. It’s posted entirely in bad faith.
ruralfp may be a bit condescending with the "do better" but you definitely do not meet the criteria of charitable/necessary/kind ... also, it is note very effective either as it is more likely to end up in a typical internet shouting match rather than a civil SSC discussion (I know this is ACX but it would be nice to strive for those standards still). You can communicate your point of view just as efficiently without all the inflammatory rhetoric.
Is this a selective call for rigor? Or do you feel my comment is significantly worse?
> charitable/necessary/kind
I feel that was an attempt at shaming, so I used a throw away "I statement" from non-violent communication; this is *beyond* what I feel my ethical requirement are.
Even if its Utopian(I will just break its rules, and know I have) I prefer non-violent communications "I" vs "you" statements as the basis of debate ethics over this charitable/necessary thing. What an individual feels should be a blunt fact and the conversation can move forward from there, even if you may despise what was said. If you managed to convince neo nazis to say "I feel unsafe around black poeple" rather then stats neither you or them care about in a stupid fight over who spams the most links, it may not be a "fun" conversation, but I believe it be more productive then 99% of conversations on the internet.
The "nessery" requirement seems to just invite rules lawyering and censorship I have little care for it.
"I think it was woke of germany to collaspe its birthrate, disarm, censor the right wing party, dismantle its nuclear power plants (for "green" energy that never came) etc."
so the word woke has truly lost all meaning it seems
I'm pretty strongly opposed to wokedom, but none of those things (except arguably censoring the AFD) seem particularly 'woke' to me.
Dont read the Wikipedia definition to understand a right wing pejorative term
As John Schilling stated, it's not just a right wing pejorative term. It has a specific meaning, and you're doing the same thing I see a lot of other sloppy writers do when they stretch and play loose with words. It makes it damned hard to figure out what you really mean, what you don't actually mean, invites misinterpretation, and generally wastes everyone's time.
A cousin of mine once chastised one of her own kids for doing the same thing. "You write like a cave painting!" Don't do that.
In Scott’s post, above, he mentions Tabula Bio. Is Tabula Bio a particular project, a research setting, a company or what? If it’s not a company, is it affiliated with one? Asking because I know someone who’s very interested in this kind of thing who is job hunting. Where should he go to see whether they are hiring?
If you click through the link, it looks like they are a new company. There's an email address at the bottom of the post, team@tabulabio.com
My friend has a Ph.D. in mathematical finance and knows a lot about computers. He also keeps close track of AI progress. He's been working as a computer programmer for the past few years.
We recently talked about how AI will impact his career. He uses AI tools to assist with programming, and he described it as a powerful sort of "autocomplete," and he said it was surprisingly accurate predicting what kind of code he was about to write. He also said it's bug-finding capabilities were excellent.
Because AI makes coding faster and easier, he said it will destroy human programming jobs because the demand for new computer applications and websites isn't infinitely elastic--the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps. He also predicted his job would be fully automated in five years and that he'd have to return to work as a math teacher, which was what he did as a T.A. during his Ph.D. studies. He thinks there will still be a need in 2030 for human-to-human instruction in college math courses.
Do those of you with his same education and/or career field agree with his insights?
When a university advertises a tenure track (US) or permanent (Europe) lecturing job in STEM, they get hundreds of applicants. It's *tough* to land those jobs, the supply and demand is likely to be worse than it is in programming for some time. There are plenty of poorly paid semester-by-semester jobs, but that's going to be a step down from programming, both in pay and job quality. I know because I've got a PhD in mathematics, and am back on job market currently.
AI is really bad news for universities - it seems to me that one of the few tasks that AI can do better than humans is third level assessment. I've heard plenty of colleagues tell me about their AI-proof assessment - I enjoy showing them how to prompt the AI to answer it. My favourite is 'Write in the style of an 18 year old from (insert city), with B1 level proficiency in (language). Insert some errors that a first year student would be likely to make.' Universities are ill-prepared to deal with it.
I'm applying for public sector jobs - it's sad to turn away from 10 years of teaching and research, but between the never-ending funding crisis, the disposability of staff and the coming AI-storm, it's a good time to get out.
I don't think he wants try becoming a tenured professor.
Thank you everyone for the brilliant replies. I'll distill them as best I can through my mind the next time I talk to my friend. Hopefully it will cheer him up, though I think it's likelier he will dismiss them.
Just a lowly engineer by education, not a mathematician and not with any PhD (although I definitely fantasize about it). Always wanted to be a mathematician actually, except there is not enough money in it where I live, so SWE it is.
No, AI is not going to replace human programmers. Not today. Not next year. Not in 2030. Not in 2040. Maybe Juniors and adjacent positions in 2050. Perhaps mid-to-senior programmers in 2100, if we don't Strangelove ourselves.
Let's point to a bunch of empirical data points first: "AI Software Engineers" like Devin [1] and Artisan [2]. Sleek graphics, futuristic scenarios, breathless promises (Artisan: Computers don't get tired! Your hired flesh-and-bone sacks in your engineering floor suck! Replace them now!). But in practice, they're not autonomous, they're not engineers, and they get stuck on pretty trivial things, and by "pretty trivial" I mean spending days in a live lock loop trying to accomplish something without recognizing that it has been days without progress. Honest review [3] after honest review [4] show: LLM SWE is simply not there yet. It's just not there. You can't force it to be there by the sheer force of doomerism and Silicon Valley tech-broism.
It will be there when it gets there, we **know** that human cognition is not special, one moment there is an unremarkable and purely biochemical slop like sperm and eggs, the next moment it's a brain full of Cogito Ergo Sums and differential equations and Universal Grammar. Absent Gods and Jinns, that must mean human cognition is fully contained in the biochemical soup that men produce by rubbing themselves when they get bored and women produce automatically each month. Artificial Cognition/Intelligence/Sentience/Whatever will be there, eventually. You just have to be patient.
I have spewed walls of text before on Open Thread 371 (ctrl-F my username or "I'm not convinced LLMs ") on why LLMs are not ready yet to replace human engineers. To avoid repeating myself, I will focus on one key point from the major 4 points I listed there: Memory. LLMs have a queer concept of what "Learning" is, their "Learning" is done exactly once at the start of their lifetime, and then never again*. This is not how Software Engineering works, this is not how any self-respecting domain works, really. Trained LLMs are always in the "incremental science" mode of Thomas Kuhn, always trying to add one more token, one more little piece that completes the whole and doesn't rock the boat too much, always in the Ptolemaic illusion that the world is fundamentally known and figured out and all you have to do is to keep adding Epicycle after Epicycle to tease out the details.
Then there is the lack of agency. Then there is the lack of self-introspection and meta-cognition, the ability to push back on wrong/contradictory/suboptimal information and suggestion or have any opinions at all, or recognizing dead ends and asking for help. Then there is the extreme inefficiency in power and compute. Then there is the inability to keep track of more than 1 million thing in memory, that's how many Teams meetings and Jira tickets again? **
Over and over again, people tried to add those things via the "user interface" so to speak, that is, without changing the LLM architecture. Just one more system prompt bro, just one more chain of thought methodology bro, just one more <THINK> token bro. We're so close to AGI, we're this close, just one more billion dollars, PLEASE I BEG YOU, I will do anything.
But no AGI. We're closing in on the tenth anniversary of the Transformer architecture now, and still no AGI. No world model. No long-term memory or dynamic weights. No learning data efficiency. The whole worldview is fundamentally limited. It's a genius idea to have general purpose cognition via the extremely special-purpose mechanism of predicting token sequences, it took me completely by surprise when it sank in for the first time. It would have been awesome and elegant if that's what AGI is, but I don't think it is.
Till the next breakthrough, we can still be very excited about all the ways we can still milk LLMs, Adoption Lags Capability, as they say. There is still so much untaped potential, integrating one into your brain (or via wearables) to have an instantly polyglot co-brain in your head. Unparalleled semantic search and auto-summarization. Destroying the Leetcode interview.
[1] https://devin.ai/
[2] https://www.artisan.co/about
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2MDENSvzJk
[4] https://www.answer.ai/posts/2025-01-08-devin.html
* I'm simplifying, I know. There are multiple rounds of training, and all involve changing the weights in one way or another. The key thing is that they all happen exactly once, then the model is frozen and used in inference exactly as-is. Every session it's still exactly as it was at the end of the training, it doesn't learn from sessions. Hell, it doesn't even learn within a single session or "chat", it doesn't absorb things into its weights.
** the point I'm trying to make here is that it can't dynamically decide which information to discard or assign lower priority to and which to center in its thinking, unlike humans, it naively just picks the most recent N tokens and tries to complete them. Whereas you're perfectly capable of discarding all the inane small talk you had with your coworker 2 hours ago and the billboards you saw on the highway on your way to work, the LLM can't, there is a singular "Context" that contains everything it ever saw, and when it fills it starts discarding info in First-In-First-Out manner. If you're thinking of curating and cherry-picking the exact info you will present to the LLM: Congratulation, you are thinking of programming. That's what programming is, transforming and spoon-feeding data and logic to computers in the form they expect.
That is a beautiful post and I wish you'd post more of this kind on technical topics.
"You can't force it to be there by the sheer force of doomerism and Silicon Valley tech-broism."
Muhaha. I love it.
> Maybe Juniors and adjacent positions in 2050.
Well, that depends on the specific junior. I have seen both very good ones, and ones that I would replace by Claude without hesitation even if money wasn't a concern.
> But in practice, they're not autonomous, they're not engineers, and they get stuck on pretty trivial things, and by "pretty trivial" I mean spending days in a live lock loop trying to accomplish something without recognizing that it has been days without progress.
Yeah, you can't replace e.g. a team of three junior developers by an LLM, exactly for these reasons.
However, in a team containing some senior developers and some junior developers, you could probably replace the junior developers by an LLM. Give all the incoming tasks to the LLM -- some of them will be done successfully, the rest will be handled by the seniors. Talking to the LLM also takes time, so keep 1 smartest junior for that; his job will be to give tasks to the LLM, do some sanity checks, nudge to LLM to also write unit tests, etc.
This is basically a "glass half full / half empty" kind of debate. You can't use LLMs as a full replacement for developers. But you can reduce the number of developers to a half, by using LLMs for the things they are good at, and humans for everything else.
Yes, we only need senior developers. Let's get rid of all the juniors.
Who is "we"?
Obviously, without junior developers now, there will be no senior developers in the future.
But would *you* hire juniors for *your* company, when your competitors will hire 1 senior with an LLM and achieve greater productivity?
Even before LLMs, my impression was that juniors are relatively overpaid and seniors underpaid. (This may depend on country.) Senior salary is about 2x the junior salary, but I think the difference in productivity is much greater than 2x. This is not just about the speed of coding, but also about choosing the right tool for the job, the number of bugs produced, and most importantly how likely the project will crumble under its own weight.
I know some companies (again, before LLMs) who simply do not hire juniors. The companies that do, I suspect it is one of the following reasons:
1) They are unable to hire enough seniors, for example because the work obviously sucks, so they are happy to accept anyone.
2) They hope that the juniors will be overpaid for a year or two, but then they will gain the experience, and hopefully stay with the company, and hopefully will suck at negotiating higher salary. This may or may not happen; I have seen both outcomes in real life.
3) The company produces the kind of software that requires lots of relatively easy tasks, for example a web application with dozens of dialogs, each of them with dozens of buttons. So it hires a senior developer to do the hard parts, and a few junior developers to do the relatively simple work which is still a lot of typing. -- I expect that this kind of junior job position will go away with LLMs. As soon as the senior developer is able to explain what needs to be done, it will magically be done, no need to hire the juniors.
"But would *you* hire juniors for *your* company, when your competitors will hire 1 senior with an LLM and achieve greater productivity?"
Well, it depends on how much the company is playing the long game, and what business it's in.
Obviously the answer is "no" if you're stuck in Moloch-mode with the competition breathing down your neck. The answer might also be "no" if you lack confidence in your ability to retain your juniors as they start to skill up.
But on the flip side, if you have some slack and you think you've got a reasonably good ability to retain valuable employees, being the company who hires a bunch of juniors and doesn't *solely* rely on the LLM + seniors combo will give you a *huge* advantage in the medium term. All the more so if you can figure out how to work in the LLM in ways that make skilling up the juniors less demanding on the seniors' time.
Depends on what you mean by your friend working as a "computer programmer", If that's literally his job title, he may be in trouble. If you're using it as generic for "he's a software guy and he writes code", he may be OK.
Most "software guys who sometimes write code" are software developers, not programmers. "Programmer" is a fairly specialized job, that involves writing code to specific requirements, often set by a software developer in a large project. And that's a job that AIs may largely (but probably not entirely) take over in the next five years. But the broader task of software development, which includes some degree of writing code to vague and fuzzy requirements, is not likely to fall to AI in that timeframe,
He's a software developer, then.
> he said it will destroy human programming jobs because the demand for new computer applications and websites isn't infinitely elastic--the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps.
We already have far surpassed the number of programmers we *need* its all just logistics and wants; yet I look around and can find idiots employed. I would not apply an effeint market hypothesis to software *AT ALL*; in fact its a universally grossly inefficient market, the important people like the guy making ffmpeg isnt getting money while theres dozens of web ui libs that I couldnt tell you a single interesting about many of which are maintained by giant corps.
What will happen is that the economy will become more niche as costs of production come down. This has the potential to massively create demand, as people are willing to pay more for niche products.
So instead of 1 app that serves a million people, you have 100 apps that serve 10000 people in a more specific customized way.
IDK. It seems like for typical web apps this isn't limited by labor productivity but more by network effects--an app that serves 1 million people with an ill-fitting design is more attractive for the marginal user than an app that serves 10000 people with a perfect design, because the 1 million people do unpaid work that benefits the marginal user.
>the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps.
I agree with most of it but not this. Imagine someone saying that about the US economy in 1900: there are only so many things people need, eventually this whole patent business will become passe. As long as computers are an important part of the economy there will be a demand for new software.
In my view (recently retired software engineer, I've used AI a bit to code) it will still be a while before AI can code completely autonomously. My model of this is that AI is a force multiplier: it makes engineers vastly more productive. This will have the short-term impact of reducing employment but increasing wages: 50 person depts will be replaced with 2 or 3 architect-level engineers plus AI tooling. This lowers the capital cost for creating software, which should result in more, smaller companies targeting niche markets. AI hasn't even really begun to penetrate most markets: I expect that there will soon be an AI ecosystem explosion with a groundswell of demand for "help me use AI to reduce my workforce by 50%" or "help me put lawyers out of business," much like there was a rush of "build me a website" in the 90's and "build me an app" in the 2010's. The technology isn't quite mature enough to disrupt most business yet: I'd say it's comparable to where the web was in the mid 90's.
It's hard to know what will happen when AI becomes good enough to operate autonomously, but I have the general attitude that technological innovations always enhance economic activity in the long run. There will certainly be some disruption in the short-term but I think it will be at least a generation before AI is better that AI + human, so I suspect your friend's prediction is overly bleak. I think high-level engineers and those who have a decent ML background are going to see an incredible demand over the next decade. There will almost certainly be a phase when AI is good enough to do most jobs but implementing it for a particular company will be labor-intensive: imagine what GM will be willing to pay the engineer that helps them reduce their labor costs by 50%.
'>the human race only has need for so many webpages and apps.
I agree with most of it but not this. Imagine someone saying that about the US economy in 1900: there are only so many things people need, eventually this whole patent business will become passe. As long as computers are an important part of the economy there will be a demand for new software.'
Let me explain his claim differently: Let's say I run a big company, and I employ 20 computer programmers. Each one of them has made 10 webpages for me and maintains them. They are 100% busy doing those things, and my website has 200 webpages.
One day, my programmers start using a new AI tool that doubles their productivity. That means, for the same amount of time and salary, each one of them can create and constantly maintain 20 webpages. Does that mean I increase my website so it contains 400 webpages?
No. After thinking about my actual business needs and all aspects of the customer experience, I realize that adding an extra 60 webpages would satisfy all of my needs. My company website grows to 260 webpages, I realize I only need 13 computer programmers to make them and maintain them thereafter, so I fire the other seven computer programmers.
In other words, the efficiency gains outpace the demand for new product.
I am also in agreement with Wanda's take. Regarding limiting demand for software, I just don't see it. Through my adult life software invaded everything (often as "firmware", but code in any other name). Just an example off the top of my head: when I started my engineering career, "test engineering" mostly involved dealing with hardware: turning knobs and pushing buttons. Now? Everything is done via code. Test setups, control, result processing, all done in matlab/python/etc.
I work in AI and I mostly agree with Wanda. I'd add one thing on top of what she says. People imagine the modern LLMs as magical black boxes that somehow learn automatically and get better just ... because. And I am not talking about development of new better models, I am talking about the current models "learning".
I constantly meet customers who have expectations for LLMs which are way outside of what they can do. In fact, finding use-cases for LLMs today which really have a good ROI is not that easy.
One example - most office work is sort of tedious, not too complex but needs to be done accurately and diligently. If you have an LLM-based chatbot, you can probably make it fairly accurate when you ask it about your company documents but fairly accurate is often not good enough. You need 99% accuracy, sometimes more. You don't get that today so a lot of tasks either have to be limited in scope significantly (making the AI still useful but a lot less impressive) or they just don't work. It is of no use if you have an "AI coworker" who is super fast and does everyting correctly 90% of the time if you don't know which 90% this is and as a result you have to check up all of its work.
And even to get to fairly accurate you need people to curate your data, set up and fine-tune a lot of things (not really train, that's mostly not done with LLMs outside of Anthropic, OpenAI etc).
Now it is true that coding is actually faster and easier with these tools as coding is a field which is almost ideal for LLMs - you can run tests to see if things worked, try again, occasionally ask for human feedback ... also code is just text, so it is easy to work with and there's ton of it online if a very nice format.
But even so current models don't make engineers that much better. A lot of what programmers do is not actually coding. It is talking to business people, figuring out the best architecture for the given business use-case and current situation, etc.
AI cannot replace a single senior dev right now. It can kind of almost replace very junior devs, which is interesting since to become a senior you really need to first be a junior but what happens if AI does all the junior jobs? I think what will happen is that the non-coding aspects of programming become all the more important even for juniors.
So will you need fewer? I don't think so. Not all programming is webpages, in fact most of it is not. Some things are currently not done because they are seen as just nice to have but not worth the investment. But if you could do them with half or a third of the effort they'd be worth it. It is sort of when better irrigation methods allow you to farm land which otherwise would not have yields that are worth the effort.
Maybe in the long-run programmers will actually be replaced (along with many other professions) by AI. But I don't think we are 5 years away from that. The current technology is still mostly in a state of a solution searching for a problem (when we compare the amount of investment and costs vs current capabilities). It is getting better but the rate at which we see improvements is slowing down. Just making transformer models larger and adding a few tweaks here and there is not going to lead to anything close to senior dev level of capability I think. So it will require some new ideas. Those might come in 2 years, or they might come in 20 years or they might come in 200 years ...
I think they will probably come sooner or later since I don't believe the human brain is somehow unique but you cannot simply assume that past progress automatically translates into future progress when you rely on new ideas. The idea of a perceptron has been around for decades before first practical neural networks. It took some more ideas for it to really start working and it also took improvements in hardware (more ideas) for it to be feasible.
>In other words, the efficiency gains outpace the demand for new product.
To first order, that's true. That's why there will be (already is) a short-term reduction in employment. But the efficiency gains will unlock new economic niches for software and that won't mean creating new webpages. It'll be some qualitatively new product niche, or writing management or optimization software for the AI itself, etc. That's what creative destruction is about. Cloud computing destroyed Sun Microsystems, but there are many more cloud computing jobs now than there ever were Sun employees. I'm a techno-optimist: so long as there's economic activity there will be a demand for people.
Jevon's paradox states that making a resource (like gas) more efficient (by making cars have better mileage) results in greater use of that resource. In this case the resource is engineers and AI makes them more productive - that should result in more of them being used.
Assuming people won't be just learning maths for its own sake or to become maths teachers, he could also do whatever job those students would end up doing in this scenario?
He enjoys teaching and researching math and doesn't seem interested in getting rich or undertaking a high-stress job.
Fair then. I misunderstood the tone, in that case.
It does seem plausible that good teaching would remain in the human camp for longer as it requires a level of "human" connection (and modelling of another's mind) that should give humans enough of an advantage
Hi all,
I’d like to share a speculative idea that emerged while thinking about dark matter, quantum behavior at extremely low temperatures, and the possibility of hidden composite states.
This isn’t a formal theory, but a question built on some plausible steps.
Basic idea:
What if dark matter wasn’t made of new particles, but of pairs of known particles, brought to ultra-low temperatures (~picokelvin), where:
- Most degrees of freedom (motion, vibration, etc.) are frozen,
- Remaining degrees (like spin orientation, quantum oscillation...) are cancelled via a resonant interaction,
- The result is a composite object that:
- Emits nothing,
- Interacts with nothing,
- But still has mass and thus gravitational effect.
Sort of like a quantum black box: totally silent, but real.
---
Why it might be interesting:
These entities could’ve formed during the early cooling phases of the universe.
Once in this “zero-resonance” state, they’d be:
- Stable,
- Invisible,
- Perfectly consistent with gravitational observations of dark matter.
And no need for exotic new particles — just a new configuration of known ones.
Possible lab exploration?
Far-fetched, but:
- Use trapped ions cooled to near-zero,
- Pair them in opposite modes (spin, motion, etc.),
- Apply fine-tuned resonance,
- Watch for total cancellation of detectable activity — while gravitational coupling remains (the hard part!).
So here’s my question(s):
- Could such a state exist in quantum physics as we know it?
- Could it form naturally in the early universe?
- Is there a known name for this kind of mechanism?
- Would it be meaningful to explore further, even just theoretically?
(And for transparency: I refined this with help from ChatGPT-4, but the concept and structure are mine. Happy to rework anything that sounds off!)
Thanks for reading — I’d genuinely love to hear what people think, whether you find it plausible, problematic, or just a fun thought experiment.
I'm not familiar enough with the ideas here to answer coherently, I think. But Humphrey Appleby might. (Physics professor.) Hopefully this comment will serve as a ping.
The main problem to me is that space itself is not that cold. The cosmic microwave background is at 2.7K, so particles would not be able to cool sufficiently for this kind of effect, at least as I understand it from your description. The temperature of space has also been cooling over time, so that would introduce another varying effect over time we should have detected if this was the case.
The actual particles that make up the interstellar medium (ISM) are even hotter than that, often 6000K or more, hotter than the surface of the Sun. There are just so few of them that their black body radiation represents considerably less energy than the CMB. In denser regions like interstellar clouds where there are enough particles to dominate the energy of the CMB, the temperature is much lower (but still hotter than CMB), something like 10-100K
That said, I think you're correct that the CMB provides a practical long-term floor for how cold something in the interstellar medium can get. I can imagine a near-zero-energy particle avoiding collisions with high-energy ISM particles for a very long time (although I'm nowhere near prepared to try to do the math to see how long), but CMB seems like it would warm those particles up extremely quickly on a cosmological time scale.
And even ignoring CMB, this model would predict that "dark matter" would be more prevalent away from galaxies than within them, as stars emit their own radiation that also acts to warm up the ISM. This is the opposite of what is observed: dark matter seems to be concentrated in and around galaxies (except for a handful of places where a clump of dark matter seems to have been stripped away from its galaxy during a galactic collision), not diffuse in deep intergalactic space.
Thank you — this is exactly the kind of thoughtful challenge that makes me love writing speculative pieces like this one!
You're absolutely right that the interstellar medium is not cold — and in many places it's blazing hot (even if dilute). And yes, the CMB imposes a practical radiative floor for anything attempting to maintain a truly ultra-cold state.
So a Z.E.R.O.-like state would not be generated under typical galactic conditions — nor could it survive long in a standard ISM environment.
But here's where the idea can stretch its wings a bit:
I'm imagining these "null-resonant" states forming in very early, extremely cold, isolated regions of the universe, potentially during — or just after — recombination, before galaxies fully assembled.
If formed during that primordial period, some of them could become gravitationally trapped in the potential wells of forming galaxies, not because they prefer warm regions, but because gravity does the gathering. Once there, they persist simply because they don’t interact electromagnetically.
So, the observed dark matter halos around galaxies wouldn’t imply thermal compatibility — but rather gravitational history.
Once you’re "dark", and you don’t radiate, you're free to ride the gravitational currents wherever they pull you.
The only limiting factor would be longevity: how stable such a state could remain, and whether cosmic radiation (CMB + stellar photons) could eventually “melt” it.
That’s an open question… and maybe an opportunity for further modeling (or sci-fi extrapolation).
I'm not getting *why* they don't interact electromagnetically. Like, certainly the composite could be electrically neutral and (like every other known particle) magnetically neutral. But we already know of particles like that--neutrons for instance--and they still interact electrically and magnetically, just over much shorter distances. What effect, exactly, are you imagining that's keeping them from electromagnetic interactions?
Next question--and I'll freely admit I'm on much shakier ground here--even if we were to take it as a given that electromagnetic interactions couldn't warm them up, what about gravitational interactions? Obviously these are usually negligible compared to electromagnetic interactions for most particles. But we're talking about things that are just sitting around at extremely low temperatures for billions of years: absorbing even a tiny amount of energy from gravitational waves or nearby massive bodies seems like it could kick them out of this equilibrium. (Though again, shaky ground: even on my best day I've never had a solid understanding of General Relativity).
Wow — I'm deeply grateful for these thoughtful and rigorous responses.
It’s truly an honor that a purely speculative idea like this one could draw the attention of people so clearly well-versed in these topics. The fact that you took the time to engage so generously already makes this hypothesis a small success in my eyes. Thank you.
On the electromagnetic side — you're absolutely right, of course: electric neutrality doesn’t equate to the absence of EM interactions. Neutrons, for example, still interact via their magnetic moments and internal structure. Even neutrinos, though neutral, have incredibly weak but non-zero EM couplings.
But what I had in mind here is something more radical: not just a neutral particle, but a two-particle system whose wavefunctions are locked in a state of perfect destructive resonance — canceling not only charge, but every internal dynamic mode: spin, angular momentum, field interaction potentials, etc.
It wouldn’t merely be neutral — it would be non-reactive by construction, in the sense that no degree of freedom remains available for coupling with an incoming photon.
A kind of structured silence, where interaction doesn’t fail because it’s blocked — but because there’s nothing to latch onto.
It’s admittedly more dreamlike than quantum mechanical at this stage — but I enjoy the idea of a system rendered stable not by isolation, but by the exhaustion of all interactive channels.
As for gravity — that’s likely the most fragile part of this whole thought experiment, as you rightly pointed out.
A massive object, no matter how silent, still couples to gravitational waves, fluctuating potentials, nearby moving masses. Even a vanishingly small gravitational interaction could, over billions of years, inject enough energy to kick the system out of its ultra-cold resonance.
Still, if such Z.E.R.O. states formed early — very early — and their gravitational cross-section was small enough (either due to low mass or inherently "non-perturbable" geometry), maybe the gravitational melting time exceeds the age of the universe. Or maybe most were disrupted long ago, and we only observe the survivors that drifted into stable pockets.
Either way — I know this Z.E.R.O. hypothesis is more a speculative springboard than a finished model. But again, I want to thank you sincerely for taking the time to explore its edges.
What you're describing is hydrogen. Hydrogen is made up of a combination of fundamental particles that has no overall electric charge, QCD charge (though I guess it is not a weak singlet). And indeed, if you had a collection of hydrogen at a low enough temperature eventually all of the atoms would be in their ground state and would not radiate.
The problem is that if you put this cool hydrogen near a star the light from the star would knock many of the atoms into higher energy levels and they would then radiate and we'd pick up their emission lines easily. Also, some of the light would scatter.
So you need a composite state that not only has a chargeless ground-state but has no excited states that can radiate in the detectable EM spectrum, or at least in the spectra produced by stars. But we understand the ground states of normal matter very well, thanks to chemists, and we don't know of anything like that.
We could probably even do some rough calculations to prove that it's impossible or highly implausible. Basically, it's got to have charged particles in it (otherwise it's neutrons or neutrinos and neutrons as dark matter are ruled out). But combinations of charged particles are allowed to rotate, and once they start rotating that's a state that can radiate. The energy level of such a rotating state is determined by the mass and charge of the particles involved, and so you can start trying different combinations of masses and charges of known matter and probably rule out
In summary, there is no known mechanism in electromagnetism where particles that have EM interactions at normal temperatures can combine into a neutral particle that doesn't leave leftover interactions with photons through their internal structure. I suspect it is impossible to build such a model from known ingredients.
There are models where there are exotic particles that do interact with photons at very high temperatures but do not at normal temperatures. These are called Hidden Sector models.
Thanks so much for this in-depth response — and you're absolutely right to bring up hydrogen, ground states, and known atomic behavior. 🙌
What I'm suggesting isn't a neutral bound state like hydrogen, where the constituent particles still have internal dynamics (e.g., rotations, transitions) that allow interaction with EM fields. In Z.E.R.O., I'm positing a temporary or metastable state, formed under extreme cryogenic and phase-controlled conditions, where the remaining degrees of freedom cancel not because of binding, but because of destructive coherence.
Imagine two otherwise interacting particles whose quantum states (spin, phase oscillation, etc.) are aligned in such a way that the system as a whole loses all observable EM interaction — not due to shielding or symmetry, but through cancellation.
Yes, such a state would be insanely fragile.
Yes, exposure to ambient photons would destabilize it.
But in a vacuum — or in the early universe, during brief, cold, isolated conditions — it's conceivable that some such states could have formed and persisted, perhaps frozen in the web of dark matter.
So I'm not claiming to have found a viable particle model — just exploring a speculative idea that maybe there's a type of coherent null-state that hasn't been ruled out… yet.
Also — great point on hidden sector models. Z.E.R.O. is sort of a "homegrown analog", but without invoking new particles. Just a new arrangement.
The problem with all this is that you're positing a whole bunch of completely new, never-before-seen mechanisms with basically zero reason to believe that such mechanisms should be possible. In my mind, that completely undoes any advantage the idea had from being made of known particles.
Your sales pitch starts with "what if Dark Matter is known matter" but then you follow up with "and for this to be true known matter has to behave in a way completely unlike anything we've ever seen before, going against lots of known theoretical principles, despite the fact that we already have explored the behavior of known matter at extremely cold temperatures quite extensively."
Here are the two most important theoretical problems you have to overcome:
- "Yes, exposure to ambient photons would destabilize it." You cannot hand-wave this away. Dark Matter is concentrated in galaxies, near galactic cores which are very bright. It is absolutely crucial to this idea that photons not destabilize the dark state.
- Time-reversability. If there was a way for the particles to get into this state there has to be a way for them to get out of this state. If there's a way for them to get out of this state, you have to be able to explain, in detail, why it's not staying in that state despite the dark matter getting bombarded with light from stars. Hidden Sector models have an answer to this by introducing new particles and new interactions. You have a much, much harder task of explaining how this happens using only known particles and known interactions.
If you want to make progress on this you need a model. That means you come up with a simple set of rules for the interactions and then you demonstrate mathematically that the rules produce the behavior that you want. Your limitation is that the simple set of rules should be the basic ones we already know for electromagnetism. Or, if you add any rules to electromagnetism you have to also show why we've never noticed that extra rule before.
Thank you again — your critique is fair, sharp, and genuinely helpful. I really appreciate the time you took to lay out the issues so clearly.
You're absolutely right: I'm stepping far outside conventional theory here, and I don’t pretend to have a viable model, let alone one that could pass any kind of rigorous scrutiny. I’m fully aware that I’m in speculative territory — and not just the scenic outskirts, but probably the uncharted swamp with the weird fog.
That said, I’m still haunted by the thought: what if some exotic pairing of known particles, under just the right early-universe conditions, could enter a perfectly coherent null-state — not by shielding or symmetry, but by complete cancellation of all EM-relevant degrees of freedom?
If such a state ever formed, and truly had no residual interaction with photons — no modes left to excite — then maybe light, heat, and time themselves wouldn’t “see” it anymore. It wouldn’t just be hard to detect — it would be unreachable, dynamically inert. A kind of quantum cul-de-sac.
And yes, I understand how massive a claim that is, and how many obstacles stand in its way. It's not that I think this must be true — just that it’s a curious edge case to contemplate. Like a thought experiment poking at the limits of coherence, interaction, and what we mean by "presence."
Anyway, thank you again — your pushback helps me refine the idea, and also reminds me why real models matter. I may still play with this concept fictionally (it does make for a good sci-fi plot device!), but I now see much more clearly what kind of work would be needed to even begin to approach it from a serious angle.
As a help, let me focus on this sentence
"not by shielding or symmetry, but by complete cancellation of all EM-relevant degrees of freedom?"
Here are your two main problems
1. Currently "cancellation ... of degrees of freedom" doesn't mean anything. This is "not even wrong" territory. There's no mechanism in current physics by that name, and it's not clear what it would mean if we tried to define it.
When I say it doesn't mean anything ultimately what I mean is that it doesn't have a mathematical definition, not even a simple model behind it. Phrases like "protected by symmetry" and "electrically shielded" do have mathematical definitions, and we can write down simple mathematical models to show how they work. "Cancellation of degrees of freedom" doesn't. If you want to be able to take your idea seriously you need to come up with a mathematical example of what that means and how it works, even if it is very simple.
If you try this your goal is to come up with a simple mathematical description of your particles and what it means for them to have degrees of freedom. Then you must define what exactly is meant mathematically by "degrees of freedom cancelling." Then you must show that by applying your new definition to your simple model, your particles behave in the way you want, i.e. they do not interact with EM fields.
Then, to take the idea really seriously, you also have to show how the degrees of freedom cancelling can happen naturally through only known interactions (or small modifications of them).
2. When you say "*all* EM-relevant degrees of freedom" I think you have made your task basically impossible because of some basic physics principles.
EM as we know it is time-reversible. That means if EM can cause something to happen, reversing the process must also be possible. If EM interactions can cause your "cancellation" to happen (and EM must be the cause because we are not allowing the theory to include new interactions) then EM must also be able to undo the cancellation. EM cannot "turn itself off" because that is an irreversible process.
There is one way to get effectively irreversible processes out of time-reversible interactions: entropy. For example, at low temperatures breaking a steel rod into two pieces is an irreversible process even though the rod is held together by reversible EM forces. However, at low temperatures, separating a blob of molten steel and then rejoining it becomes a reversible process. This principle is what underlies Hidden Sector models: at high, Big-Bang-like temperatures, dark matter and visible matter are in a phase where they do interact with each other, but when they cool they undergo a phase transition where they separate into two separate non-interacting forms.
This means there's a limit on how complete the non-interaction with EM can be. If the photons are "hot" enough they must be able to interact with the matter. That puts limits on this idea because photons in galaxies are actually quite hot. Not necessarily an insurmountable limit, but a limit that must guide any theory.
There actually is one simple example of a kind of known particle that can undergo a phase change that makes it non-interacting with a limited range of the EM spectrum: glass! Glass can be made from minerals that do interact with visible light, but after undergoing a high-temperature phase transition it can cool into a phase that (mostly) does not interact with visible light. But of course it remains solid, meaning it does still interact with short range EM forces.
What do you mean by "Remaining degrees (like spin orientation, quantum oscillation...) are cancelled via a resonant interaction"?
Great question — thanks for taking the time to dig into this part!
When I say “remaining degrees of freedom (like spin orientation, quantum oscillation...) are cancelled via a resonant interaction”, I mean that once the particles have been cooled down to a state where almost all classical dynamics are frozen (translation, rotation, thermal agitation…), the few remaining quantum-level oscillations could, under very precise conditions, become synchronized in such a way that they destructively interfere.
Think of two pendulums, perfectly aligned, swinging in opposite phase — the system as a whole appears motionless.
Here, that’s extended to quantum modes: spin precession, vibrational zero-point fluctuations, maybe even phase alignment.
It’s not annihilation. It’s not decoherence.
It’s a resonance so perfect that it cancels all observable interaction — leaving behind only the gravitational signature.
Total silence… but still something real.
My pathogen update for epidemiological weeks 11-12 of 2025.
1. The XEC COVID wave hasn't fully receded yet. Biobot shows that as of March 15, SARS2 wastewater levels haven't fallen to previous interwave gaps except for the Western region of the US. The CDC's wastewater numbers indicate a long tail for this wave, but it shows that the West and NE regions are roughly back to interwave levels. The CDC's numbers are all normalized to the previous year's numbers, so I don't know if this long tail may be an artifact of the way they normalize. I trust Biobot.
But If there is a long tail, it's due to the LP.8.1x brood that continues to gain traction against XEC.x. I expected the LP.8.1x's to top out at about 30%, but CoV-Spectrum shows they've reached 50%. Of course, there were only three LP.8.1x descendants a month ago. Now there are nineteen. If previous wastewater patterns hold, SARS2 will continue circulating at low levels during the interwave gaps. I wonder if these aren't mostly chronic infections, as seen by Marc Johnson in wastewater? (his handle on X is @SolidEvidence). If previous US patterns hold, we'll probably see another wave peak in late summer. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I suspect the next wave's hospitalization rates won't exceed 5/100,000, and the weekly death rate will be lower than 0.25/100,000. I'll try to check back on this after the next wave peaks.
2. On the HPAI A(H5) front, the CDC released it's monthly update. As of 19 March, there's still no sign of human-to-human transmission. Likewise, there's nothing to indicate that our milk supply is a vector for A(H5) infections.
https://t.co/tyyjIv8pCb
3. The US measles outbreak is still spreading. It's now grown to 309 cases in 14 TX counties, and 42 cases in 2 NM counties. Plus we've got smaller outbreaks in a bunch of other states. Vaxopedia is doing a good job covering the current outbreaks.
https://stopantivaxpropaganda.substack.com/p/just-how-big-has-the-texas-measles?
Measles has spread from Texas south of the border to Chihuahua, Mexico. Chihuahua has a growing number of cases, with 400+ suspected and at least 32 confirmed cases. The Mexican outbreak evidently started in a Mennonite community in Chihuahua whose members had visited infected communities in Texas. The Mexican Health Ministry has issued a warning to its citizens, asking them not to travel to Texas and seven other states in the U.S. due to the measles outbreaks.
https://t.co/hlLBS5F1D3
Canada is also seeing a surge in measles cases. There were approximately 500 confirmed cases as of last week, with the majority in Ontario. The Canadian outbreak started at a Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick last fall. It's since spread to other Mennonite communities in Ontario and to the rest of the country. The NB case didn't catch it in the US, though. They brought it back from the Philippines.
https://t.co/ze5pyWAM6B
The WHO produces a monthly measles report. The latest one is at the following link, below (PPT presentation). The case numbers for February are still coming in, but December and January seem to have been relatively "mild" months for worldwide measles cases. And there's an interesting chart on slide 7 showing the total cases by month from 2017 to the present. I just noticed that the COVID pandemic suppressed measles transmission during 2020 and 2021. This is similar to what we saw with influenza during the same period — except that influenza completely stopped circulating, and measles continued to circulate at very low numbers.
https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fimmunizationdata.who.int%2Fdocs%2Flibrariesprovider21%2Fmeasles-and-rubella%2Fglobal-mr-update.pptx%3Fsfvrsn%3D3547ebab_9&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK
You can find my slides here...
https://t.co/8gbce1KxGz
Mennonites don’t vax?
Mennonites are adjacent to the Amish.
Also, there are Mennonites in Mexico?
From what I understand, there's nothing in their religious beliefs that precludes getting vaxxed, but conservative Mennonites seem to be very conservative and/or suspicious about their use of modern medicine. If there are any Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent people on ACX, I'd like to hear more about the cultural and/or theological attitudes that some Mennonite groups have in rejecting vaccination.
I dreamed about Wittgenstein last night. In the dream he was an attractive, stocky woman in her 40’s with very androgynous hair and I had a raving crush on her He’d (she’d?) just handed out a final exam, and each item on the exam concerned one event in his day, and the events were pretty prosaic. Several concerned a mall store sort of like Pier One. We were to summarize each event using Wittgenstein’s way of conceiving of words, colors, and events. I tried very very hard to write clever, substantive essays, but was sadly certain my work was only average and she/he would never love me.
WTF?
Why post about it? Dunno. Is that question an item on the final?
Just a way of keeping it weird for you guys, I guess
I'm a Wittgenstein lover as well. Quite a weird dream though.
Happy for you. Or sorry that happened.
I have some unpublished writings on his work. This is a short one that I published.
https://cannabrava.co/philosophy/wittgenstein/
I've heard that talking about a dream is only enjoyable for the person who had the dream, but I enjoyed reading this. I hope feminized Wittgenstein one day loves you.
Is racism just astrology for men? I was thinking about this after I went to a party where a pretty socially awkward guy made every conversation circle back to some national/racial stereotype. It was clear he was treating the thing as a conversational hack where he had a stock line to say no matter what. I'm not saying they are in any way morally comparable as behaviors, but it seems to have a similar social function to astrology, where a pretty dumb or socially inept latches onto an arbitrary category that creates immediate friend enemy distinctions.
I think astrology for men is assuming everyone acts like that one person you saw at a party.
What is the evidence that men are more racist than women?
I believe it is agreed upon that women are generally more agreeable than men and that they conform more to social norms than men do. In a society that looks down on racism this trait means women might be less racist than men? maybe? but I imagine that in a predominately racist society (where racism is the social norm), women might be more racist than men.
Speaking personally, I think I have met more racist women than racist men. It's certainly not a category that seems male dominated to me. (Being right wing is majority men, but right wing is not the same as racist, nor is being xenophobic necessarily racist, etc...)
Racism is WAY better than astrology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhCWw0E_mVY
> Is racism just astrology for men?
No, dont be silly; alchemy is.
I thought racism was generally a byproduct of the fact that outsiders tended to bring nasty pathogens with them that locals had no natural immunity to.
I'd think that outsiders and spreaders of pathogens would, in evolutionary history, generally have been from the same race, so I don't think that makes much sense – this should have lead to wariness of humans in general, not just those belonging to other races.
Here's what I was referring to:
Secondly, collectivist cultures are untrusting of those outside of their in-group, which may serve as a protective behaviour against interactions with those in groups that may harbour novel diseases. In similar vein to the explanation presented with one's protective nature of their in-group members, one's immune system is well adapted to local parasites and will be unable to effectively protect against unfamiliar pathogens. Therefore, avoidance of those outside of one's inner circle will aid in the prevention of being exposed to novel and dangerous pathogens that the immune system is unable to defend against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite-stress_theory
I don't think they're very similar. Most men who are aware of racial differences that are considered racist know that mentioning those is a faux pas, whereas talking about astrology is considered socially acceptable. It is sometimes said that technical analysis is astrology for men, and I think that is more accurate.
I read an interesting article yesterday in the Guardian "My mother, the racist" which suggested that one of the main motivators for racism was the desire to feel a sense of superiority over others, when few other avenues are available for this. (This isn't an observation original to that article, but it had an interesting perspective.)
So perhaps this socially awkward guy was, in his socially inept way, trying to establish his place on a social hierarchy?
> one of the main motivators for racism was the desire to feel a sense of superiority over others
Sounds plausible. Often the racism is strongest near the bottom of the social ladder, where there are not many choices to put other people below you.
If you are middle-class, you can afford to be non-racist, because there are all these working-class people without university diplomas who are clearly lower than you, so you can be generous towards the colored people, especially if they are also educated.
Which makes me think... perhaps if we reduced the credentialism and stopped treating people without university diplomas as socially inferior... maybe in turn there would be less racism? It seems more difficult to have a racially egalitarian society without also it being egalitarian in other ways, because you are basically telling some people "we need to dismantle the hierarchies that kept you higher, while keeping the hierarchies that keep you lower" and it obviously doesn't sound to them like a good deal.
As an immigrant to the US during the first Trump presidency, I often had people talk to me about immigration as a problem, ban the Muslims, build the wall, etc. When I pointed out I was an immigrant, they didn't even blink before saying 'I'm not talking about people like you'. And they really had no issue with me being in America.
I think the racism the OP is talking about is at least as much based on socioeconomic insecurity ('those immigrants will steal my job') as on skin-colour prejudice. How many of these racists would refuse to socialise with someone from a racial minority of the right social class? And how many would spit on a homeless white person of the same race?
My model is that some people are hostile no matter what, but almost everyone will fight in self defense. So if we stop pushing people down socially based on their education, income, etc., most (not all) will stop needing racism to feel less bad about themselves.
That's not racism, it's stereotyping. Those are very different things. Most stereotypes are accurate, otherwise they wouldn't be stereotypes.
Thats a bold claim.
Not really. It's a well-replicated effect in psychology.
Fore the last few decades, there has been a cultural push to break stereotypes(whatever they may be) so stereotypes might increasingly be wrong due to self-fulfilling prophecy. But they probably were accurate when they originated,
They're not wrong now, they're just suppressed so you never hear them in polite conversations anymore. But believe me, they still exist.
Physiognomy is my astrology. I don't talk about it to anyone else though. But it works more often than not which I think is funny. Maybe thats how girls feel about astrology.
What do you get from physiognomy?
Hey, same. I like trying to figure out a person's roots based off the shape of their skull or set of their eyes.
Dissociative Antidepressants, Autism, and the Diametric Mind: A Speculative Take
Here’s an idea inspired by the autism–schizophrenia diametric model (which Scott has discussed before). If autistic cognition is overly precise, mechanistic, and rigid, and schizotypal cognition is overly loose, imaginative, and chaotic. Might dissociative antidepressants (especially weird long-acting ones like 3-MeO-PCP) be particularly suited to the autism/ADHD end of the cognitive spectrum?
First, consider how dissociatives work: NMDA receptor antagonism briefly reduces glutamate signalling, which disrupts established neural patterns. Ketamine and its less-studied cousins (3-MeO-PCP, MXE, etc) trigger a short burst of neuroplasticity, mild dopamine release, and quieting of the default mode network (DMN). For someone locked into rigid thought patterns, whether depressive rumination or autistic fixations, this momentary neural shake-up could break entrenched loops, potentially nudging the brain into healthier patterns afterward. Robin Carhart-Harris’s "Entropic Brain" idea captures this nicely: psychedelics and dissociatives might help rigid minds precisely by increasing cognitive entropy [2].
From the diametric perspective, autistic brains are marked by overly strong sensory precision and reduced theory-of-mind. Thus, introducing controlled "noise" or loosening sensory precision might paradoxically help, making autistic cognition less rigid and potentially increasing cognitive flexibility or even social openness. Anecdotally, some autistic adults using low-dose dissociatives like ketamine or MXE report precisely that: temporarily softened social anxiety, improved mood, and openness to novel perspectives.
Meanwhile, schizotypal brains, already tilted toward excessive cognitive noise and mentalizing, could experience the opposite effect. NMDA antagonists have historically been used to model schizophrenia in labs precisely because they mimic psychosis. For a mind already prone to magical thinking, excessive DMN activity, and loose associative chains, dissociatives may push it further into chaos. Indeed, there are documented cases where substances like 3-MeO-PCP induced lasting psychotic symptoms or paranoia in otherwise stable but schizotypally inclined individuals.
Memantine, a mild NMDA antagonist used in dementia, has also seen clinical experimentation in autism and ADHD. While trials in autism show mixed results (no consistent major improvement in core symptoms), there's anecdotal and preliminary clinical evidence suggesting it might still help specific subsets of autistic or ADHD people struggling with anxiety, irritability, and executive dysfunction. This might reflect precisely the dose-dependent balancing act involved: enough NMDA blockade to reduce glutamate-induced rigidity, but not so much as to impair coherence.
So, the broader thought is this: drugs pushing cognition toward the schizotypal end might selectively benefit those at the autism/ADHD end, gently disrupting rigid neural processing, improving dopamine-based reward sensitivity, and easing sensory overload. Conversely, these same drugs can tip already-chaotic schizotypal brains into further confusion or psychosis. The diametric model thus suggests a kind of cognitive pharmacological "balancing" act—one spectrum's therapeutic nudge could be another's cognitive disaster.
Clearly, formal clinical trials are sparse or nonexistent for novel dissociatives like 3-MeO-PCP and MXE, and existing trials with memantine and autism have shown mixed outcomes. Yet, given ketamine’s established antidepressant profile and preliminary anecdotes about less-studied analogs, there’s at least theoretical reason to think dissociatives could eventually find a niche for cognitive rigidity-related issues common in autism or ADHD. At minimum, this speculative lens offers a new way to think about why certain psychoactive drugs profoundly help some minds while utterly deranging others.
>tl;dr:
Dissociative NMDA antagonists (like 3-MeO-PCP, Ketamine, MXE, Memantine) might help people on the autism/ADHD side of the cognitive spectrum by loosening rigid thinking and sensory hypersensitivity, but risk worsening symptoms for schizotypal individuals prone to cognitive looseness and psychosis.
Thoughts?
[2] Carhart-Harris et al. (2014). "The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020
**NOTE: I spent a while considering this myself and have done some research, but the bulk of this has been llm assisted, using what I thought was careful prompting for this context. Also, apologies if this has been covered already elsewhere in more detail**
**EDIT: Removed bad source links.
when downloading a language model for local offline use how do quantization and parameter count trade-off? For example, which should I try first, gemma-3-1b-fp16 or gemma-3-4b-q4? (the latter is quantized to 4 bits)
The common wisdom is that for inference, you want the largest model in the family that still fits in memory quantized to 4 bits, so you should expect gemma-3-4b-q4 to outperform gemma-3-1b-fp16.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09720 shows empirically that this holds across a wide range of model sizes.
My understanding is parameter count directly scales with the power of the model and quantization is largely a matter of optimization. So you should run the largest parameter model your system can handle at reasonable speeds and not worry nearly as much about the quantization.
This is a further training trade off I think, so "local use" should not care; as far as I know quantization hasnt been shown to decrease quality of output meaningfully
It absolutely does once you go below Q4: Mistral Nemo Q4 is both smarter and faster than Mistral Small Q2.
Trump admin going after another greencard holder:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/nyregion/columbia-student-ice-suit-yunseo-chung.html
She's 21, has lived in the US since she was 7, straight A student, and so far it seems like her 'crimes' are 'being present at one of the Palestine protests' and 'putting up fliers critical of Columbia's admin'
Paywall override: https://archive.ph/OOvK7
I think the single biggest, good thing that this hive of Scum and Villainy that is the Trump admin and their supporters did for Free Speech and its cause, is to expose themselves as transparent cynics who aren't interested in the slightest in the defense of Free Speech. There is now an extremely easy heuristic to decide whether someone is worth listening to on Free Speech: What's their attitude on Trump? The answer to this proxy question determine a strict upper bound on how much we should listen to them when they claim they defend Free Speech.
Tragedies are God's way of showing us who are His true believers.
> Trump admin and their supporters did for Free Speech and its cause
That’s true of a lot of free speech advocates who are pro zionists. The free speech they wanted was to criticise Islam.
Criticizing Islam is Free Speech par excellence, Charlie Hebdo and Salman Rushdie should be martyr saints of the Free Speech cause.
Bootlicking and Hasbara for Israel is Free Speech too, nobody ever said that Speech must be true or good or have integrity to be allowed and defended as Free Speech.
It's the queer combination of (1) Criticizing Islam (2) Bootlicking Israel and aggressive Hasbara (3) Being mad that anyone fires back at (1) and (2) with opposite speech of their own, that makes a lot of Zionists not exactly paragons of how a Free Speech defender should behave.
> Arguably, their speech is much more free than it was before.
Cold war. A Russian is debating politics with an American.
A: "We have freedom of speech! We can criticise anyone - even the US president - all we like and the police don't come after us! They don't even care!"
R: "Oh, is that how it works? Why, then we're all about freedom of speech too! - We can also criticise the US president all we like - we do it all the time!"
Calling yourself a defender of freedom of speech only has meaning if you are defending speech you don't like, not merely your own. Otherwise it's just a lie. The Trump administration has cracked down hard on speech they don't want to hear. Claims that Trump is a defender of free speech are, demonstrably, lies.
Isn't posting like this embarrassing on some level? I mean intellectually, it's most likely that you just believe what you are saying, but my gut feeling is that you have to know what you are doing
"And when faced with a legitimate threat to their order, they just... gave up. What was the point of fighting for decades for a better future? Did they actually care about any of those causes at all, or was it all just a perpetual motion machine of signalling?"
When you take a slightly surprising, pretty resounding loss it is clearly the optimal response to retreat, lick your wounds, regather and carefully consider what needs to change before you try again.
Anomie by any other name?
'Hythlodaeus' is a character from More's Utopia, whose name means "peddler of nonsense".
Anomia (but not anomie) is a kind of aphasia where words lose their meaning.
Unclear if same person or nominative determinism.
The name Hythlodaeus is also used by a character in Final Fantasy 14, and more recently in Metaphor: ReFantazio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UKwnZOB4-I
...Metaphor also has a character named More in it. I'm beginning to see a connection.
It's the style and the ideas. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the guy. But I can see how he grates people the wrong way.
You have a soft spot for 4chan-style low-effort provocationism that any 13-year-old can master by imitation?
To each their own.
I had the same thought
I've reached the point where I'm reporting you. You make terrible comments all over the place. It's barely coherent, openly nihilistic, and often just wrong.
Agreed, and also reported another comment. I think that Anomie/Hythlodaeus has long disqualified himself from good-faith discussion.
But also I can see the fun in making nihilistic, blatantly false comments! "Freedom is a zero-sum game" was an excellent one. Here are my attempts:
* No one has ever loved another person.
* When two countries are at peace, they fight each other in devastating unreported battles which kill more people than during wars.
* Every day, the weather has alway been and will always be worse than the day before.
* Human babies are disgusting monsters - most people naturally hate them.
* Someone who smiles is preparing to bite the people around him or her.
* You can only get cured from an illness by getting several other, more painful diseases.
> Someone who smiles is preparing to bite the people around him or her.
I read somewhere that this is unironically the mental model of primates like Gorillas, they interpret humans smiling their way as challenges and act accordingly. Because in the primate world showing your teeth is a threat.
> Every day, the weather has always been and will always be worse than the day before.
If you coarsen the timescale unit a bit to "every year" or "every decade", this is literally just climate change.
Yes, all these statements are somewhat adjacent to something true. Still, they are very false.
Free Speech was never zero-sum given the right informational ecosystem. Unless you're literally advocating genocide (a bar so high that lots of Pro-Israel partisans, who vaguely and rhetorically support genocide while not being detailed, still don't clear), there is no possible downside to letting you spew whatever you have to say into the pipes of the internet.
Free Speech, however, is not a general-purpose entitlement card to everything you want people to do with your speech. For example, 0 reasonable interpretations of Free Speech say that I must print all of your comments and reverentially study them for the rest of my life. Free Speech is just that the words leave your mouth or keyboard and reach their natural audience without any censorship.
But someone making a movie and it flops, is this a Free Speech violation? Absolutely not, and I have trouble imagining a serious argument that would disagree.
As for social exile and being fired from jobs, a Free Speech defender should fight this as much as possible without giving carte blanche protections to anyone who can scream "Free Speech !!!" to get a free anti-firing card. If businesses can fire you for "Culture fit", then they can fire you for speech, since speech is part of your culture and we have already established that businesses can fire you for culture mismatch. My views on this is complex and depends on the exact type of speech and the exact type of company firing you, but I still can't see how electing Trump has solved this issue:
According to Google, there are 6.1 million companies in the US [1], also according to Google, there are 3 million people who work for the Federal government [2]. To "prevent companies from firing you", Trump would have to assign one federal employee to monitor 2 companies and do nothing else, an entire federal government worth of a panopticon that does nothing but ensure people are forcibly "tolerant", and Conservatives like to complain about "DEI"?
Other estimates put the number of businesses at 33 million (so including more types and sizes than traditional companies), I think we can all agree that it's worthless to even suggest to monitor something of this size.
So realistically speaking, there will always be people being fired for their Free Speech, just as there will always be people who can't find a romantic partner or a friend (sometimes through no fault of their own, but sometimes through significant faults of their own), and - short of a full frontal panopticon dystopia - there is nothing we can do about that.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/487741/number-of-firms-in-the-us-by-employment-size/
[2] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-government/
> someone making a movie and it flops
> social exile
Those are the same situation: when enough people each decide they've had enough of your speech, your movies books etc flop and also you find no-one wants to be around you and you are socially isolated now.
If you've ended up treating these scenarios differently, perhaps it's time to unpack assumptions a bit.
I was thinking of another dynamic, in which people simply... don't like your speech. You sing and people hate your voice, you write a song and people just think that "Wet Ass Pussy" isn't that profound of a lyrical style. You make a movie and people just think that "Somehow Palpatine Returned" is an utter disgrace to the legacy of the Universe you're making the movie about. Nobody hates you, nobody thinks you're a bigot or a sexist or that you should be cancelled, everybody wishes you would be better next time, they just don't think your talent came through this time.
Absent any deliberate, forced attempt at transforming this dynamic into a racism/sexism/xism fight, this is just a plain old "Humans not getting along story". Free Speech defenders aren't trying to create a radical utopia where **everybody** likes **everything** the singular hive voice of humanity ever says, that would be ridiculous overreach, completely unrealistic and 99% unachievable.
> If you've ended up treating these scenarios differently, perhaps it's time to unpack assumptions a bit.
Or perhaps it's the people who are unambiguously wrong. Exhibit A: Atheism vs. Religion in Pakistan. I hate every defense of Social Exile that uncritically assumes the exiling majority is always right.
"Nobody hates you, nobody thinks you're a bigot or a sexist or that you should be cancelled, everybody wishes you would be better next time, they just don't think your talent came through this time."
This is quite the false dichotomy. In practice, when people have a strong dislike for a movie you made, they very well may not think "you're a bigot or a sexist or you should be cancelled." But they are going to have a SHARPLY reduced interest in seeing any future movies you make. Not necessarily because of any opinions on you personally, but because all of us have limited time and money and have to choose who and what is worth spending it on.
The analogy to friendship is quite clear. I don't need to have any deep hatred for Bob or desire to see him socially isolated to *not want to be his friend.* And of course it is very much my right to not be Bob's friend if he's said enough things that I find unpleasant to hear. Meanwhile, if other peoples' reaction to what Bob says is strongly enough correlated with mine--not because I tried to make it happen, just because lots of humans have similar preferences--Bob may end up quite friendless. This isn't in any way an abridgement of Bob's right to free speech. This is just everyone else exercising their rights to free association.
> in which people simply... don't like your speech
It seems like you're trying to ringfence some reasons people might not like your speech as being fundamentally different than others, but as I see it, what happens once people decide they don't like your speech is still the exact same dynamic, regardless of the precise reason people don't like it.
There's no clean line you can carve through reality there; no sane way to say "these reasons for disliking a thing are valid, and these are not". People's reasons are inside their heads; only their actions are visible. If you make some reasons illegal and people badly want to walk away, they will simply claim your art is bad or whatever other reason you've left legal if pressed, even when privately the thing actually upsetting them is the slurs or whatever political thing it is you are trying to protect.
At the end of the day, you can't police this that way; so either you allow people to walk away from speech they don't like, or you force them to watch your party propaganda Clockwork Orange style.
What makes leaving it up to the states better than applying a rule federally in this case? Is something varying from place to place?
My (non-American) understanding is that a large part of the US “myth” is that by you can leave your state if you don’t like its policies and go to another one – and you likely can find a state with better policies since it’s hard to coordinate fifty states.
Of course, the stronger the federal entity is with respect to the states, the more coordinated the states are and the harder it is to apply this argument.
I think there are examples of "PC gone too far" (something affecting pro-Palestinian people too btw), but there's no version of free speech that will protect everyone from social exile for saying what they believe.
But when we're deporting people to forced labor camps in El Salvador for their speech, then people will realize that there is in fact a point of free speech even if saying what you believe gets you socially exiled and fired from your job.
Nah, if people on the Red team get punished for their speech (fired, sued into bankruptcy, etc.) and those the Blue team never do, when the worm turns and it's the Blue team getting punished (sent to El Salvador or whatever), I expect people on the Red team to cheer.
I also expect the red team to cheer, because I never expected them to have a strong commitment to free speech.
Members of the "blue team" have been fired and sued into oblivion of course, but even if they hadn't ... "fired" vs "picked up off the street and sent to a forced labor camp in El Salvador" is obviously not even remotely in the same ballpark.
And while the "cancel culture" stuff generated a thousand handwringing thinkpieces about free speech from left-of-center types ... AFAICT the pro-trump people have not done the same here.
My disagreement is with your remark at the end that "people will realize that there is in fact a point of free speech." The Left has spent decades demonizing it as a racist, sexist fascist, neo-Nazi, etc. idea, and while it's funny when it comes back to bite them, even in some very small way as is happening now, but I don't expect them to come round to seeing its virtues.
I think the Right DOES in fact have a strong commitment to free speech, but have generally decided that TACTICALLY it would better to restore it AFTER purging the country of those who would destroy it immediately if it were to be restored while they still hold enough power to do so.
There's no legal formulation of free speech that will protect everyone from social exile, unless the legal system intrudes on private life.
There are absolutely a set of moral, social, and cultural principles that can and do protect people from being socially exiled. You can promote these principles even if you don't want to pass an Everyone Who Snubs Me Gets Fined bill.
> There are absolutely a set of moral, social, and cultural principles that can and do protect people from being socially exiled. You can promote these principles even if you don't want to pass an Everyone Who Snubs Me Gets Fined bill.
I don't think this is true ... what is the mechanism by which these principles enforce themselves? If you are not passing a "Everyone Who Snubs Me Gets Fined Bill" then the obvious answer is social sanction/exile.
You could try and do some sort of "nobody gets socially exiled except for people who try to socially exile others" type of thing, but it won't be effective as long as you let people characterize others' views as being bad in such a way that might lead someone to want to socially exile them, as Holmes said:
> Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth
It's sort of true that you can have norms that protect people from being socially exiled, but you can only have them by taking /away/ the rights to free association and freedom of speech.
This firstly confuses rights with norms, and secondly is an oversimplification.
The first and most obvious point is that social norms don't take away any of your rights. If I tell you that I'm not going to hang out with you on the weekend if you keep making TwiXXer posts about Israel, I'm not taking away your /right/ to free speech. I /am/ acting in a way that's averse to the general social principle of freedom of speech, but the legal right isn't relevant.
The second point is that freedom of speech is not, conceptually, as simple as just "all speech everywhere is permissible and nobody should ever react negatively to it". This is either a strawman or a miniscule belief held by very few. In my experience, freedom of speech is generally intended to protect free discourse within public society. I would argue that carving out specific agreed-upon exemptions to freedom of speech in private life, like not talking about politics at work or during family dinner, is doing zero harm to what I actually want from freedom of speech while also protecting people from social exile.
"free association" in this case meaning "unchecked corporate power"
Its very important for freeze peach that anyone who says something that might hurt a conservative's feelings be threatened by the state.
This is a coherent ideology and not cynical at all, we'll see all those free speech crusaders speaking out any day now.
This kind of comment really annoys me because it pretends that there _aren't_ actually principled free speech individuals and organizations like FIRE who _do_ consistently speak out about these cases on both sides. Call out hypocrites specifically, don't tar the entirety of actually important values.
Like anything else political most people don't hold consistent and/or principled views on the Constitution. Far more common is the fair weather Constitutionalist who gets to complain about violations when their tribal enemies do something and ignore it when their allies do. The conservatives were mad about the social media censoring under Biden but approve of hate speech laws against anti-Semitism and deporting immigrants who would be immune under 1A if they were citizens. Similarly I doubt most people who are upset about the Columbia students citing 1A particularly care when leftists pass red flag laws/restrict magazine capacity/make it illegal to buy more than 1 gun in x days period/etc even though these cut against 2A.
> deporting immigrants who would be immune under 1A if they were citizens
Your confusion here possibly stems from your incorrect mental model of conservative principles. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to believe that WE believe that free speech is a universal philosophical principle, a "human right", deserved by all people regardless of nationality*. Whereas citizenship / borders is just a tawdry legal technicality of no particular philosophical importance.
For my part: not so! The citizenship part is equally philosophically important. American free speech is a treasure wrenched from a blood-soaked battlefield in 1776. It's a perk of the American citizens in-group, not a human right. You can have American free speech if you complete the process and become and American citizen; if you have not become an American citizen, then you don't get to cry about it when the protections afforded to citizens are not afforded to you. Yun Seo is being a classic free rider here: she wants the Constitution to protect her but she won't put in the work to protect the Constitution (by becoming a citizen + taxpayer + potential draftee).
I care when Americans don't have free speech. I don't care if Koreans don't have free speech, and that doesn't change depending on where the Korean is standing (including New York). The Constitution is a document for Americans, not a document for a geographic region.
* It would be better for those other nations to also afford American-style free speech to their own citizens, but if they don't, it's not the American government's responsibility to shoot itself in the foot by kowtowing to foreigners who oppose government policy.
Mormons comprise one small but important segment of the right coalition that believes the rights enumerated in the Constitution are for all mankind.
The main problem here is that the Bill of Rights is generally about "the government can't make a law to prohibit X" rather than "individuals have a right to do X". All of the 1A provisions are restrictions on government action, not grants of individual rights, because the people who wrote this stuff believed we all had natural rights and the idea of a government "granting" them was absurd.
Personally I think non-citizens should just be summarily subject to deportation without justification, let it be a political question. If somebody is deporting the Indonesian fiancées of junior executives at oil companies, that's gonna get to a Texas Congressmen who will raise hell about it with the administration. If the government deports Cuban refugees, it'll pay the price at the ballot box in Florida. Maybe it deports Haitians and Ohio loves it and New York hates it. Up to them.
Instead we're very nice about it, and have green cards and explicit standards of what makes somebody "removable", presumably in order to encourage valuable immigrants to sufficiently trust in their continued presence here, build relationships and invest in their communities.
The real problem is that we are far too generous in granting residency to which we've attached a bunch of due process protections that are handled by a woefully inadequate number of judges. The government would likely prevail in deporting the pro-Hamas activist on the merits, it just takes too long. Same reason granting these Tren Aragua thugs a "hearing" (with no set legal standard of proof and which will undoubtedly have to go up and down the appeals system multiple times) isn't practical. When people say "oh well just give them a hearing" they imagine that might be done within a month and fully adjudicated. (Or more nefariously, they know it won't, and they know granting a hearing is as good as catch-and-release which is the policy they actually want but will never admit to.)
Approximately nobody actually wants Tren de Aragua in the country, why would they? But looking at the incremental harm of one more criminal organization getting a foothold in the country vs the practice of the government disappearing people to foreign prisons for having tattoos getting a foothold, they choose to risk that the lesser of the two evils will happen.
We do badly need a better way of dealing with organized crime, including the organizations that are already established, but this "cure" is worse than the disease.
To say they were "disappeared for having tattoos" is showing very little faith in our law enforcement system. I have every confidence that they know exactly who these people are, it wasn't a giant roundup of a whole class of people, these were identifiable individuals who in many cases were known and wanted for questioning in regard to gang activity here and elsewhere.
I think the judge is partly right inasmuch as the law likely requires some basic showing that the people removed are in fact among the class of people the law applies to, but since they are not people with any actual right to be here, I think that could adequately be satisfied by a brief in camera review of the sensitive materials on which this determination was based. As I understand it, these are not immigrants who had at one point a legal right to be here, for whom you might have to demonstrate that they're removable in an ordinary administrative hearing. A brief in camera review should suffice to show the identity.
This may come as news to you, but permanent US residents have jobs and pay taxes. If you deny them the rights and protections due any taxpayer, you are the freeloader here. I can think of few things more American than "no taxation without representation!"
> conservative principles.
Verily, what a queer way of spelling "The things the Israeli lobby wants Conservatives to say and do".
Sure Thing Comrade, We All Believe You When You Say That The Only Reason You Support Free Speech Violations Is Because The Victims Are Not American And The Opinions They Expressed Just So Happen By Chance To Be Anti-Chosen-Nation.
Gaza et al is your personal obsession, not a universal one. What Israelis do or do not do does not inform most people's moral intuitions.
In fact, many people across the world go days on end without even think about the region or the conflict there, and many others won't do more than read a headline, think, "oh, dear," and then go on to the next headline.
And rightly so. The world is a big place and Gaza et al is not the center of it.
"Obsession" is just a Russell's Conjugate [1] for "A thing you care very deeply about and which I don't like".
You can cope with your discomfort that others care about a modern livestreamed genocide while you're not doing anything about it in any way you like, including by simple silence (which is not that bad on average), but dishonesty is bad. Dishonesty and being impolite are very bad.
> The world is a big place and Gaza et al is not the center of it.
I don't know how this got over your head, but we're not discussing the "world" here, we're specifically discussing "Pro-Palestinian protestors being deported", and in that issue, Israel and Gaza are quite literally at the center of it, in every way possible.
And my comment makes fun of the "patriot" "conservatives" who just so happen to bend over and take a cock for a foreign lobby every time it asks, sending their money and children (and of course, loads of their fellow citizens') to die in pointless forever wars, while finding increasingly elaborate justifications for why "Aksuallly, this is good for America too sweetyy. Because something something Clash of Civilizations. Look it Up.".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
I accept that the strangeness of my bedfellows in approving of this policy should raise an eyebrow given said bedfellows' penchant for esoteric subterfuge. "How do you do fellow xenophobes" and all that.
Not really much I can do about it though, is there.
There's a long history of court cases establishing that non-citizens have numerous rights while under US jurisdiction, including free speech. A legal opening exists to deport people for their speech because Congress is delegated fairly sweeping powers to regulate immigration. I think if it came up as a SCOTUS case it's 50/50 whether they rule deportation based on speech grounds is in violation of 1A. I think you're making more of an ought statement than is, so ignore this section if that's the case.
But also, a permanent resident is in fact completing the process to become a US citizen. It happens to be an arbitrary and capricious process that can take decades. Treating them as foreign agents with no rights during this process strikes me as not only pointless but counterproductive to encouraging immigrants to accept and endorse American norms of freedom.
>But also, a permanent resident is in fact completing the process to become a US citizen. It happens to be an arbitrary and capricious process that can take decades
This is not close to being correct. First, many permanent residents are not on the path to become citizens, because they don't want to become citizens. Second, a permanent resident can apply for citizenship after five years, and the current processing time is about 7-8 months. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times/
Note that I am NOT defending the Trump Administration. IMHO, even illegal immigrants should have the same free speech rights as citizens.
> There's a long history of court cases establishing that non-citizens have numerous rights while under US jurisdiction, including free speech.
The fact that activist judges were engaging in lawfare decades ago is orthogonal to the question of whether they were correct to do so.
> But also, a permanent resident is in fact completing the process to become a US citizen. It happens to be an arbitrary and capricious process that can take decades.
This argument strikes me as isomorphic to "I don't have a job yet and hiring is capricious and arbitrary... but I still deserve a salary because I'm in the process of looking for work". If you want the protections that citizenship affords, uhh, file your forms earlier.
> Treating them as foreign agents with no rights during this process strikes me as not only pointless but counterproductive to encouraging immigrants to accept and endorse American norms of freedom.
Discouraging immigrants sounds like the opposite of "counterproductive" to me.
A generic green card holder with no special circumstances has to wait at least 5 years by law before they can become a citizen. It's not a matter of people freeloading, our country has a broken immigration system that rewards people for flagrantly violating the law while putting up a bunch of hurdles in the way of people who follow the rules.
But if you're morally opposed to immigration in general I don't suppose it makes a difference to you.
do...do you think green card holders don't pay taxes?
> women don’t have to register for the draft, which will never happen anyway.
This is an argument for removing Constitutional protections from women, not an argument for extending Constitutional protections to Korean women.
> It’s unclear how this woman contributed any less to society than a citizen would have.
Did she vote?
You consider voting a contribution to society?
One thing the USA leftists can use in their defense in your last example is that guns objectively kill much more people than words can ever dream of, and the Colombia students are being deported for words, unlike the guns/ammo bans (which are not even true bans in your example and which even if they were true, permanent bans, are still far more mild punishment than deportations are).
Nonsense. The power of ideas and all that. Words have led via bright red lines to the deaths of hundreds of millions.
Ideas alone don't kill, unless I throw a copy of Das Kapital at your back of the head it's not Communism that kills you, it's a military dictatorship that used Communism and a bunch of other tools to kill at scale.
There is a huge number of intermediate steps between "Labor is the origin of all values" and "Put all the bourgeoise traitors to the wall and fire at will". Some of those intermediate steps are almost always the same: Shutdown all the press, organize your followers into demagogic demonstrations and Kristall Nachts, demonize criticism, ... None of those are ideas, per se, they're just general-purpose strategies for how to be a supreme leader. (If you still want to think of them as ideas, I'm very happy to carve for them a special exception and say those ideas out of all others should be banned, and by extent any ideas that depend on them)
The closest that you can get to inherently violent ideas are monotheistic religions, and even then there exists counterexamples to the contrary.
Guns alone don't kill either, unless you have the idea to pull the trigger.
Communism is absolutely inherently violent. Anywhere there are property owners, they will have to be separated from their property to make way for the new regime. Anywhere there are finite commodities there will have to be someone somehow deciding on allocation of resources instead of the invisible hand.
See, the NY state legislature has 10 bills in committee this session to further restrict gun rights. At least 2 of these bills are copies from bills that were tried in other states and smacked down in courts for violating 2A. NY has a history of passing illegal gun restrictions, getting them smacked down by courts, then doing the same thing another way to end run around the courts until they smack that down again years later. And who is on here expressing outrage about the violation of my and millions of others' constitutional rights?
1A and 2A are both part of the foundational bill of rights, with language like "Congress shall pass no law" and "shall not be infringed". But then I just get the hand wave that those other rights aren't nearly the same or important. Because, again, people don't actually believe in applying the Constitution in a principled way.
I gotta admit that Taibi, despite making a hard right turn in the past 4 years or so, has come out strongly against the administration on this point, which surprised me given how ideological he'd gotten elsewhere.
Personally, as a liberal free speech supporter, I feel mildly vindicated.
In case after case, I would read a news story about someone complaining about being censored, and I’d feel like maybe they had a point about the censorship, even while the substantive views they were trying to espouse were – almost without exception – ones I fervently disagreed with. It gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance. But one of the (multiple) reasons I value free speech is for self-protection. If the political winds were to shift, I thought, the same legal and social precedents that protected one side – or, as the case may be, failed to protect them – might soon be needed to protect the other. And now the winds have shifted.
(But I can’t feel 100% vindicated. Things aren’t that simple. On one hand, protecting conservatives’ free speech didn’t just protect free speech, it also protected conservatives – making them at least marginally more powerful, marginally more able, now, to crack down on their opponents’ speech. On the other hand, considering how they were able to turn censorship into one of their key issues, perhaps more protection would have made them marginally weaker. Who can say.)
I turned conservative almost entirely because the left turned against free speech. N=1 and all that, but I think this part is spot on: "On the other hand, considering how they were able to turn censorship into one of their key issues, perhaps more protection would have made them marginally weaker."
I didn't get impression that OP is making fun of Free Speech in general, just the kind of "Free Speech defenders" who turn on a dime to support the most rabid and authoritarian anti-Free Speech practices if it serves their interests. A practical, concrete example is Bari Weiss.
I'm, for example, still of the opinion that Free Speech is extremely important, and I tested this view against my most vile political enemies (Pro-Israel Zionists) and found it to hold, although sometimes with great difficulty. I think if you don't pass this test then you get no say on what Free Speech is or how it should be defended.
> some of their supporters
Majority?
>Pro-Israel Zionists
As opposed to the Anti-Israel Zionists?
I clarified it further down thread, but yeah, basically. I don't think it's productive to shun all Zionists (although I think the label is literally celebrating war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and that it's not useful 80 years after it already won), but I'm using the "Pro-Israel" marker to single out a subset of unashamed, genocidal, rabid, hate-overflowing supporters of Israel who go above and beyond to dehumanize Palestinians and express unconditional and unreserved support to anything a genocidal armed forces do.
Even they, don't deserve to be censored, except those who come right out and say that they want to commit a murder against Palestinians or Pro-Palestinians (or boast that they committed a murder) with exact details, in which case their speech becomes a straight up confession of a crime or a premediated plan to commit one.
For concrete examples to prove that those phenotypes don't just exist in my head, see the recent shooting in Florida where an American Jew mistook 2 Israeli Jews on vacation for Palestinians and fired at them, both the shooter and the victims shouted or posted on social media anti-Palestinian slurs.
"Israel should exist just ... not this one!"
This, unironically, is the actual position of lots of religious Jews (including Israelis) and evangelicals, in 2 ways.
Religious Jews: Jews should live in the Holy Land, but only when the Messiah comes. It's heresy to hasten the coming of the Messiah or to ignore the commandment to abandon the Holy Land until he comes, so Israel shouldn't exist, but since it exists anyway, we might as well get free healthcare and shout slurs at Arabs.
(I'm being cheeky, but some Jews under this category is also anti-Israel in the Pro-Palestinian sense, most (in)famously the Naturi Karta)
Evangelicals: Israel should exist because Armageddon will happen and Israel will be destroyed in it, but it should exist until then because if it got destroyed by Hamas or Hezbollah Armageddon will not happen/be delayed.
> As opposed to the Anti-Israel Zionists?
Never heard about those... which proves how strong the censorship is!
I think this is basically a lot of American liberal Jews? At least if you assume "anti Israel" is limited in scope, say to the current war, or current government, it's perfectly coherent.
I agree "Freeze Peach" is outgroup talk, I remember it from 2020 and after on Reddit and Twitter from the type of people who like to deny that Free Speech violations ever took place (But also that their targets deserved it). But also, I sometimes catch myself using it in my internal monologue to make fun of conservative defenders of Free Speech when they screech about Free Speech (either before or after Trump took office).
So it's a tough case, the easiest course of action is to just assume good faith on OP's part, especially absent any other comments clarifying their view.
> but not all Zionists are censors
I wholeheartedly agree. I brought them up because I genuinely believe that Pro-Israel rabid Zionists (a distinct category from just any old Zionist) are some of the most despicable and genocidal people I can think of off the top of my head, and I find myself still extremely reluctant to take away their Free Speech rights and mildly sympathetic to anyone of them who is silenced.
So I'm bringing this up to demonstrate that it's not an impossible standard that which we demand of conservatives, it's something I demonstrated by example is possible.
The Podcast Behind The Bastards did a 4 episode series on the Zizians, the rationalist death cult. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJAerUL-7w
Behind the Bastards has been awfully chatty, so I usually don't bother with them.
Not watching however long is 4 episodes is; how did they think it was rational? anti natalists?, or how I would use the term "death cult", cartel/cia psychopaths.
It's rationalist as in coming out of the rationalist movement, like this blog. It's a cult in that it's a group of people who have very strange and crazy ideas, and they are isolating themselves from people who do not share those ideas. It is a death cult in the sense that they have killed 4 people.
23 and Me is filing for bankruptcy.
Despite being intensely curious about my ancestry I never considered sending my DNA to a Sili Valley startup with likely nonexistent privacy safeguards. Now CA AG issues this warning:
“Given 23andMe’s reported financial distress, I remind Californians to consider invoking their rights and directing 23andMe to delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company.” (https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-urgently-issues-consumer-alert-23andme-customers).
If any of you good folks have your data with them I cannot endorse the above enough - whatever vultures are circling this carcass are likely quite interested in your data.
Heh, as if the hacks weren't already enough for everyone to know what's on 23&Me deepest servers. Just off the top of my head, Haaretz and others reported a hack that targeted something like **10 million** Jewish genotypes.
That's just the last year alone.
The modern data scape is truly the worst of all possible worlds. Simultaneously too forgetful and too rememberful of our data, you simultaneously can't find a copy of that early 2000s movie or that 1930s book but hackers can easily find a copy of your whole genome if they so please, available under several prices.
Yep.
Absolutely agree with your doubts about their data hygiene.
Massive props for circulating "Sili Valley", a term I've tried to get adopted. Like "noughties" for what seems to have been called "the noughts", it's a bit frustrating that the most apposite language doesn't get more usage
I'm curious what you think the biggest concrete risk is here. I use 23andMe and have zero fears. I've never heard any argument that caused me to be concerned. What's the absolute worst plausible outcome that I should be worried about?
I pondered exactly the same thing before I deleted my account this morning. And then I finally decided, “why take chances?“ I don’t really need it and why leave it hanging out there.
Yeah I'm inclined to agree that the best argument is "better safe than sorry". There's nothing actually concrete ... but you never know.
Oh, and of course if whatever flavor of nazis takes seriously the idea of targeting whatever ethnic group they declare to be the untermensch, now they won’t need to ask for papers or measure skulls.
That's why I made a point of specifying PLAUSIBLE outcomes.
Ten years ago I would have dismissed this concern as nonsense on stilts. Not anymore.
Ok, at what odds would you be willing to bet that within 20 years someone will start ethnically cleansing the US population based on data collected by 23andMe?
I'm pretty certain that states are going to do exactly that kind of thing in the future, but I doubt the US is going to take the lead here, to state it mildly.
And also, if we're to the point of targeting and ethnically cleansing the United States, why would we be limited to the data collected by 23andMe?
You'd think the state could...like...run new tests, you know?
I don’t have any data solid enough to produce odds. This is a classic case of low-probability high-impact scenario I can easily avoid by withholding my DNA from random startups.
My thoughts run toward the insurance companies as well, and I’m not confident in this being illegal to be a great protection.
But the more worrying thing is fraud - the kind of social phishing that uses your connections to build confidence. This was explicitly mentioned at a cybersecurity training.
And then there’s just a general sense that once my DNA info is out there I can’t take it back, and I don’t know what use someone can come up with.
Your DNA is already semi-public data. You leave it everywhere you go through skin flakes, hair, saliva, etc. But no one bothers collecting it unless you're being investigated for a serious crime, because it's not worth anything.
You can bet that if there were a way to make a couple hundred bucks from fraud using someone's DNA, scammers would start collecting it from restaurants, pubs, gyms, or other public places.
I appreciate your warning and I'm not arguing against it in any way.
I have wondered about the implications of the scattering of my DNA everywhere. But a significant effort directed at me personally would be needed to harm me using it. By providing it to a centralized database with my name/address/etc. attached I'd make it 100X easier.
In general, it's just like self-defense training: if a professional assassin targets me none of my amateur training will make any difference. If a drunk bozo... you get the picture.
WRT to fraud, the way it's especially dangerous in 23&Me situation is that there's a lot of context attached to that DNA data, context that doesn't exist in a random collection of samples from a pub.
I was thinking more along the lines that, in a hypothetical world where you could do something like get a fraudulent bank loan using someone's name and DNA, scammers would chat people up and then surreptitiously swap their drinking glass or take a loose hair.
Of course in our world, banks don't use DNA to identify you. It would be a bad idea because it's not secret information, and because two people can have the same DNA.
I agree that if your info + DNA is only worth about $0.10, then it's not worth it for scammers to target you individually, but a database of millions of people is worth using.
The most obvious use I can think of for that dataset would be genetic research, identifying genetic risk factors for diseases, etc.
Yeah it's not the banks I'm worried about. The context that 23&Me provides is related to genealogy, therefore relations, therefore a fertile ground for scammers to figure out how to exploit familiarity, "hey it's your cousin Jenny, haven't talked since that vacay trip, how's Mike doing?" type of ice-breaking that is very valuable for cybercriminals. I'm not making it up, this was a topic in security training recently.
This is why I'm anonymous here, and not only that, this screen name is only used here, with a throwaway email for registration, and my FB is not under my real name, etc. etc... Makes it just a bit harder for someone to build a profile, less interconnected context.
Your data could be sold to insurance companies, possibly raising your rates. If you've had a genetic test, life insurance companies can sometimes use the results as part of calculating your rates.
I'm not super familiar with preexisting condition rules, but I can imagine that some types of coverage could become much more expensive if you are at risk of something specific.
A) At least according to 23andme, I don't have any bad genes. Nothing serious anyway. B) I'm confident that companies are more afraid of the public and legal backlash that would come from doing this than they're enticed by the potential upside. There's just no way that it would work out well for them. If it's not already illegal (and I would guess that it is) then it would rapidly be made illegal.
It's been illegal since 2008 when GINA was signed by President Bush. An insurance company would be insane to try to buy this data. It's all downside.
“Would be insane” and “won’t do” unfortunately have a correlation coefficient that is too low for comfort.
Can non-Californians also take advantage of this? They save 23AndMe is California-based but I'm not sure if that will work for my family members who live in New England.
I don't know; FWIW B Civil has done this per the comment... I share the concern that there's no way to know if they delete the data as requested and the lack of enforcement mechanism to compel them to.
I just did it from New York State for what it’s worth. Assuming they will follow through on what they told me they’re going to do that is.
Content warning: minor spoilers for a trifle of a television show.
If you would ruin an expensive suit to save a drowning child, I beg you to spend a small amount of electricity to help save a vessel in distress.
Doctor Odyssey is not necessarily a good show. This may be why, although it hasn't been cancelled yet, its ratings are in the danger zone. However, it's the opposite of prestige television. It's a delivery mechanism for watching good looking people in a perfect environment. Sure, it's a drama and there's an endless stream of unlikely medical emergencies to keep the hypercompetent Doctor Odyssey busy. But hurricanes subside after a few waves. Side characters learn minor lessons. Then it's always back to Captain Don Johnson's regularly scheduled heaven.
The show's motto is best summed in the gay week episode by a drag queen being treated for burns after a wig fire incident: aesthetics are important. Doctor Odyssey is clear eyed about the costs - characters hurt themselves with disordered eating, a pair of travel influencers eat low calorie slop while photographing the Odyssey's perfect meals, the crew has to maintain obsessive standards and endure the Captain's micromanaging to build this bubble - but doesn't pretend it isn't true.
It's refreshing and interesting to see something with such a different baseline ethos than most of the spaces / media I, and I'd wager many ACX readers, normally inhabit / consume. Doctor Odyssey's doctor is a wildly overqualified Yale graduate who decides to live for joy after nearly dying of Covid. The casting isn't pretending to not care about diversity. As with the view on aesthetics it's not an uncomplicated view. Gay week also features the medical team ensuring they have plenty of PrEP, Doxy PEP, and penicillin. Wellness week is about the superiority of medicine over woo. Etc.
Put it on, convert that electricity into ratings, rescue the Odyssey. You don't even really need to watch, the best part is that the show gets better the less attention you pay.
Hmm - so they've combined the genres of "medical/hospital drama TV show" with "soap opera episodes set on a cruise liner" in a sort of updated "The Love Boat"? What they plainly missed out on, and what will revitalise the new season, is to throw a *third* popular TV genre into the mix - chef/restaurant drama!
They need a new character, who is a surgeon-turned-chef or chef-turned-surgeon to come aboard who operates (heh!) in a dual capacity: are they going to be in the operating theatre or the galley aboard tonight? Whipping up a four-star Michelin banquet by night, whipping out inflamed appendices and gallbladders by day!
You could even do a comedy-serious message about organ donation episode about the shenanigans when the donated organ on ice for a passenger gets mixed up with the offal delivery on ice for the restaurant's themed 'nose to tail eating' specialty night. Did the human liver end up on the chopping board fed to the captain's table? Ooh-err, missus!
There is a chef who becomes a secondary character in the medical team's world. Via passionate love in an episode featuring organ meat.
You've got the nose for TV writing. Come out to the coast, shop your ideas around.
Clearly I am not thinking big (or trite) enough! What else do we need in the mix? Well, there's the old reliable standby cop show, but maybe we need to change it up a little - we need lots of ridiculously attractive people to nearly have sex before a medical emergency intervenes (if I'm going by the Wikipedia synopses of the episodes).
So a former big city lawyer - District Attorney, maybe? Or Public Defender? I suppose it depends on whether "heroic prosecutor of the bad guys a la Kamala Harris (at least according to her campaign)" or "heroic defender of the downtrodden against Da Man" is more popular this week - who is also a former swimsuit model but now has burned out in her high-profile, high-stress career comes on board as, uh, Director of Entertainment? I dunno, all we need is plenty of opportunities for her to be shown in bikinis and skimpy sports wear and glam fashion so whatever fits the bill there.
She helps the doctors, nurses, crew, captain and passengers with their fitness routines *and* legal woes! All the while engaging in a will-they-won't-they possible romance with any one or several of the hot medics, sailors and/or passengers!
"Her" could also be a "him", let's not be restricted by gender roles. Or for the maximum win, trans woman hot lady lawyer-cum-swimsuit model for the modern audience?
> "Her" could also be a "him", let's not be restricted by gender roles. Or for the maximum win, trans woman hot lady lawyer-cum-swimsuit model for the modern audience?
It's an interesting question whether Doctor Odyssey will have an explicitly trans character by the end of the first season. I lean towards yes.
Its moral universe may be somewhat different than you imagine, though. It has no issues showing characters - even white, male, cis, privileged characters - express satisfaction, a strong desire for, or regret for not having a conventional marriage. It acknowledges that some marriages are bad and it may not be a universal ideal; it's treated as another in the menu of perfectly valid life choices. Will this dash of more traditional thinking inhibit them from having a trans focus? We'll all have to watch to find out.
> Well, there's the old reliable standby cop show...
The episode preceding the mid-season break features a police officer - a cross-over character from another network show. Doctor Odyssey has to assist with the investigation and arrest in the usual police procedural way.
> She helps the doctors, nurses, crew, captain and passengers with their fitness routines *and* legal woes!
There's been glimpses of the importance of fitness onboard but there hasn't been a spotlight on a fitness crewmember yet. I expect something rhyming with your description will be in the second half of the season. You need to get an agent.
Well darn it, I'll have to dig deeper or be more shallow, whichever works. So the show already has the chef and cop angles covered, what's left?
Some sort of Korean TV-show inspired "death lottery" would seem too dark for the show, but there might be a milder version of it where a particular cruise is themed around games/events and the passengers compete to finish in the top-rank?
Worth noting that, since it's an ABC show, in order for the ratings to count, you either need to be contacted by Nielsen or watch it on their streaming service, just turning it on TV won't count.
Excellent point, thank you.
That's the kind of nuts and bolts problem solving that Captain Odyssey likes. The show is legitimately very positive. Whether the positive world it imagines is possible doesn't matter just like it doesn't matter whether orcas can disable a cruise ship. It's about the people. There's some Love Boat in there but it's basically Star Trek:TNG as a sexualized soap opera.
I just want to add something from my personal experiences.
I have a few close friends who are Trump voters. Small data set but they are not the least bit racist (based on how they talk about the world, how they treat me), and they are not stupid. They're very sweet and kind.
They dismiss things they don't like about Trump, even fund them funny, perhaps in the way Dem voters dismiss things they don't like about Biden.
They also think Trump's faults are comparable to Biden's.
Looking at this objectively, both sides dismiss their guy's faults as trivial and see the opponent's faults as serious.
I'm not taking a position on the correctness of one side or the other, but just pointing this out.
Are liberals still thinking that all Trump voters are cartoonishly racist? I thought we were past that
I mean, they're not *all* like that, but seeing someone step forward on here and saying "I'm a high-IQ Trump voter and not cartoonishly racist" and then immediately acting cartoonishly racist all over the thread, I can see how this idea can persist.
Can you give an example of this cartoonist racism?
Saying spending all your conversation opportunities at a party hammering on racial stereotypes is not racist and then doubling down that "most stereotypes are true or they wouldn't be stereotypes"; using IQ and SAT scores as a hammer to devalue black and Hispanic people while not paying equivalent respect to Asian people. (Believing people's worth is determined by their IQ is IMO vile but it's at least intellectually consistent and not racist per se; when you vary your standards from one comparison to another so one group you chose comes out as having the most moral worth, then you are racially prejudiced; when that group is the one with local or global hegemony and your arguments are their partisans' common talking points then you are racist.)
So that’s one guy on an anonymous forum. Who didn’t say he was a Trump supporter anyway.
Do you think it's possible that whoever was behaving this way, may have seen some people who fit one of those ethnic phenotypes and also exhibited at least one of those stereotypes?
Yes, your point being?
Objectively, both sides (of any issues) assign small weights to the contradictions and internal inconsistencies in their worldview, and huge weights to the contradictions and inconsistencies of the outgroup. An article I read about this that stuck in my mind is Signals and Correctives [1], which proposes that everyone has a "second-order term" which they use to account for contradictions in their pet worldview without really doing anything about them.
(e.g. a feminist may use the Corrective of "Sometimes Women accuse Men falsely of rape" to account for the objective fact of Women falsely accusing Men of rape, then proceeds to do exactly nothing about it or pay the smallest lip service to it, still supporting and believing every woman who accuses a man of rape, because it's just a Corrective and not the main Signal.)
But also objectively, it's an empirical fact that Trump is the first US president to credibly and repeatedly threaten several traditionally-US-allies countries of invasion and annexation. He is the first to blatantly use the White House for advertisements of a product of one of his entourage. He is the first to launch a product (Trump coin) while in office and use his office for advertisements of said product. Forget whether the product is shitty or scammy (it is both), the very fact of the president advertising a product has - the limit of my knowledge - never happened before. (It happened twice with Trump, Trump coin and a perfume which he used a photo of him next to Biden's wife to advertise with the caption "A fragrance your enemies can't resist". That's not counting his advertisements of used scraps of his suit, which happened in his campaign [but also continued to his presidency? I don't know].)
It's true that Trump followers aren't doing anything exactly groundbreaking or revolutionary, they're in a cult. It has been a meme since forever among atheists and other skeptics that Religions and Cults turn the nicest people on Earth to some of the most villainous and rabid advocates of truly horrible practices that they would have never touched with a 10-meter pole if not for the ancient holy texts and the promise of the afterlife.
I guess Trump voters are a counterexample to the claim that you must have a holy text or a promise of an afterlife to do that to people.
[1] https://everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the-signal-and-the-corrective/
>He is the first to blatantly use the White House for advertisements of a product of one of his entourage.
I think this was actually fine. We generally accept it when political leaders encourage people *not* to buy a product (boycotts). Encouraging them *to* buy one is looked down on because you can do it to benefit yourself personally without a political reason, but if you do have a political reason, then it seems it should be similarly acceptable. And defending your ally from a boycott by the enemy side definitely counts - you didnt even get to pick what youre advertising, very low risk of motivated reasoning.
"perhaps in the way Dem voters dismiss things they don't like about Biden."
That "perhaps" is doing all the work here.
Do dem voters dismiss the things they don't like about biden? I think they mostly soured on him after the debate vs trump in which it became obvious he was too old to go on as president.
It was obvious LONG before then. They dismissed all the evidence.
Mary Catelli? The same from ACOUP? It's such an privilege to read your unbendingly dogmatic conservatism here as well!
Many did not. The polls were clear on this point long before that debate. The debate just made it too stark for continuation of the wishcasting/handwaving by some Dem loyalists and most party officials.
My elder siblings say the whole episode reminded them of how Nixon's GOP support played out during Watergate.
A lot of the fault for this goes to the right wingers who were crying wolf on this issue long before it was true never mind obvious, causing people with little bandwidth to evaluate the claim at the wrong time.
Are there any other issues on which we can get you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes just to defy us? I'm fairly itching to use this new superpower.
Kindly be specific about when this was, who was saying it, and how it was clearly false.
Considering you clearly bought it every single time, I'm not going further down the rabbit hole with you, but for the third parties, this started before the first Biden campaign and yet the administration's influence on legislation during most of his term clearly showed his fingerprints showing that he was still functioning.
"administration's influence on legislation during most of his term clearly showed his fingerprints"
What specifically showed his "fingerprints" in such a way that proved that he was the one responsible? As opposed to someone else in his administration?
I think it's more accurate to say Dems dismiss things they don't like about the party (like explicit anti-white racism, the abandonment of merit, and censorship). The GOP is in the midst of a reinvention so the energy of the party rests largely in Trump; the Democratic platform is more mature so the nexus lies in the ideology.
Eh...._was_ more mature.
[and I know you mean firm/settled/etc as distinct from other definitions of the word "mature"]
(1) Trumpists' collective tantrum is now every bit as self-reinforcing and brainless as was the progressives' tantrum a few years ago, and arguably has now taken over the GOP more thoroughly than the wokists had taken over the Democratic Party even during the depths of 2020-21. There were still plenty of Democrats, including some powerful/prominent ones, who in 2021 were refusing to list their preferred pronouns and whatnot. The GOP though is just entirely gone now, literally putting people in high offices having no qualification _other_ than tribal loyalty. There were no Biden administration appointments, nor any candidates pushed by that party's most-woke wing, as egregiously unqualified as Hegseth, Gabbard, etc. And even a lifelong cynic about Congress, e.g. me, can be freshly appalled by the likes of MTG and Tuberville being elected and re-elected.
(2) Meanwhile lifelong liberal/progressives (using the word "liberal" in its modern-US sense) are today in a state of confusion and disarray at the ideological level. Having lived and worked deep in the heart of "blue" America for decades I've not previously seen anything like it. We're still mostly at the "don't let it show to the Others" stage. My neighbors and coworkers and close family members if they think a given room includes anyone not (as I am) born-and-raised "blue", are still mostly keeping up appearances. Not entirely actually....but anyway in private right now, whoa. It's actually kind of disorienting, as I've heard multiple people say including my own spouse.
Whether that leads to anything other than sulking/anomie/descent into aggressive MAGA-style madness/whatever, is still very much not clear. I'm not particularly optimistic myself at least not until my own cohort (Boomers) has mostly passed from the scene. But I guess maybe we'll find out at some point.
By what definition is Gabbard unqualified?
Maybe so, but my point is that people have already emotionally chosen a side. Then they find a rationale to justify it.
First off, IDK what race you are or where you live, but the fact that people treat you well or don't act racist around you does not mean they aren't. You could be "one of the good ones," so culturally assimilated or so rare a demographic where you live that you don't trigger their racial anxiety.
People look at me like I'm paranoid when I say stuff like this in CA, but I'm from a part of the US where casual racism is quite common, and I can tell you, its never "on" all the time. It comes out when people think everyone else is in on the joke. A fun test: try saying something you think is pushing the boundary of acceptability and see if they get uncomfortable or if they just nod like what you said is an obvious fact everyone already knows and accepts.
That being said, obviously not all Trump supporters are racists, or at least not racist in the clean "I hate non-white people" way, or else he wouldn't have such a sizable minority support. But Trump himself is racist, in an easy to digest, old-school way, well documented way. And so if that isn't a barrier to supporting him, it doesn't make you racist necessarily, but it does mean you are the type of person who either doesn't think racism is real, or doesn't think its harmful. Its true a lot of people seem to think racism is not a material factor in society anymore, including on this blog, and I agree they all seem to be relatively nice. But when you act like racism isn't real, and give power to a real racist, it can lead to some phenomenally bad policy that you will be unable to explain or resist.
As to whether they are stupid, well, I think the average Trump supporter is pretty dumb, and I don't just mean uneducated, I mean if you found the majority of people who can't read at a middle-school level and asked them who they supported, many more of them supported Trump than Biden. But your friends could be an exception. You know, one of the smart ones.
> people who can't read at a middle-school level and asked them who they supported
Looking at literacy rates by race, I wouldn't be so sure of that.
I guess I should clarify: among the electorate who actually voted.
Kamateur : You're comparing America to a (non existent) perfect world.
I really don't know if they're actually secretly racist. How does one ever know that? I'm simply saying that in my SMALL data set of personal friends who happen to be Trump voters, I don't sense racism.
Tosseick : You're making a lot of assumptions there.
I'm simply challenging the idea that Trump voters are all racist. That's an over simplification and prevents you from u see standing them.
Actually I'm comparing people in the part of the world I was raised in to the part of the world I live in now. Were sure, people are probably still racist, but the legacy of racism doesn't affect things like the complete geographic layout of the town down to the present moment.
I feel like I understand Trump voters just fine. I grew up around them, I know plenty of them. A lot of them used to be my friends and I watched as their minds slowly rotted under the weight of increasingly deranged conspiracy theories and hatred of anything liberal or woke. I'm saying *you* are the one who doesn't really understand them, because I'm guessing you've known them a relatively short amount of time and in a very controlled environment that does not reflect the majority of Trump voters.
I don't think it's possible to know and understand "Trump voters", when it's (nearly) half the US voters.
I have friends who went in on his pitch, and it didn't ruin our friendship. Some of these friends are MIT- or Caltech-trained engineers, so their politics isn't evidence that they're dumber than I am
No, I'm sure they know a lot about differential equations. But I wonder how many of them have any grounding in history, or political philosophy, or any meaningful understanding of how the civil service in this country works.
You mean the civil service that got deliberately broken for racist reasons in the 1970's when the meritocratic civil service exam was eliminated to make way for unqualified people of preferred ethnic background?
>No, a lot of people in America are pretty racist by the standards of a lot of other humans in the real world
I strongly dispute this. I've been multiple places outside the US, and in each one the level of casual racism[1] exhibited *as normal* far surpassed the *worst* incidents I witnessed while living in the South of the US for over a decade.
In the South, I saw some racist people. The *worst* anti-black guy I knew personally, a homeboy from Floribama got along fine with *individual* black people, but had some unsavory opinions about blacks *as a people*. And he kept those pretty much to himself, because they were strongly disfavored by everyone around him.
Coming back to the US after having been in Eastern Europe was a breath of fresh air on racial matters.
[1] For example, the Latvian-ethnic people asking us, religious missionaries *of their own faith*, "why are you sharing the gospel with those animals?" (meaning the Russian-ethnic Latvians) "Animals don't need the gospel." And they were 100% serious in considering the Russian-ethnics *animals who did not have souls that could be redeemed*. As in literal non-sapient beasts. And the Russians were known to walk into stores where people were speaking Latvian and tell them to "speak like people" (aka speak Russian). And both made jokes about Jews that would curl Hitler's toes. Russians and Estonians hated each other with a burning passion, mostly for wrongs done *centuries* ago (as well as more recent insults).
Moving to more skin-color issues--All of those people outright *feared* black people. As in asking "how do you live with all those black people around you?" (meaning in America) and actively avoiding the only black people I knew about there, the 6'+ basketball players (some from the US and some from various African countries). And that was 100% normalized and not shameful at all.
Also note that racism shouldn't be shorthand for anti-black racism. Ainu aren't welcome in Japan.
There's even a modern sort of racism there-- prejudice against people with a disfavored blood type.
> I've been multiple places outside the US, and in each one the level of casual racism[1] exhibited as normal far surpassed the worst incidents I witnessed while living in the South of the US for over a decade.
Yep, strong second on this. I've been doing business overseas for more than a decade, inclusive of most of East Asia, SE Asia, and Russia. Literally every single one of those countries / regions are FAR more overtly racist than any state in America, including southern ones.
The name suggests Indian, and conservatives love Indians (sometimes literally, eg Vance) probably because Indian immigrants tend to have pretty compatible traditional values - family oriented, pro-business, etc. There are lots of Indians in the modern Republican party, and it would take a really flagrant racist to speak ill to an ally.
Kamala Harris is of Indian descent, and one of Trump's closest aides (and rumored side bitch) said that she would make the White House smell of curry.
Clearly the better attack would have been to say she would fill the bathtubs full of collard greens:
https://www.instagram.com/kamalaharris/reel/C_Wot0HPOul/?hl=en
Harris leaned more on her black heritage than her Indian, or so it seems to me; I didn't see her making much reference to that.
Well, Harris isn't an ally. The speaker just forgot that her epithet had some collateral damage built in. Luckily Jindal, Ramaswamy, Haley, Patel, etc don't seem to mind a little casual racial denigration.
Well if you go on Twitter and mention visas, plenty of Republicans are willing to say horrible things about Indians. Or just look at how they talk about JD Vance's wife. But you are correct, the Republican leadership gets to pretend like they are of an entirely different mindset.
I wish I could point out a wild generalization I see made about Trump voters, without being told I'm a Trump ally (or a Biden ally, or driven by any ideology).
Here's the thing. A lot of reflexively progressive people like me spent the entirety of 2016-2020 trying to figure out what it was that we had not understood about Trump voters, how we completely lost touch with them, how we had let ourselves get so deluded by echo chambers. I did a lot of deep soul-searching, I reconnected with a lot of people, I really dove into the deep end of the pool in my quest to be able to better communicate with them the next election around. And it did. not. matter. Because most of them are in a cult, and cult members do not want to hear you criticize their leader, no matter how empathic or reasoned or polite.
So next time *you* make a generalization about what people think of Trump supporters, maybe ask yourself what their experiences are.
From an outside perceptive I saw none of this reflection after the loss to Trump last time. Instead it was a doubling down on everybody is a racist
While I realize you've bowed out, if you want to get further on this, the thing to do might be to report exactly what you did in order to connect with Trump voters, including what you said, which voters you contacted, and so on.
Personally, I'm not surprised to hear you encountered cult-like behavior, but not because Trump voters are especially cult-like; rather, because *people* are prone to cult-like behavior, and don't notice it when it's their own cult.
I've run across many accounts over the decades of people who tried to think like their opponents, and saying "they really, really tried", and still came up confirming their priors, so that's not interesting. What's interesting is when they tried to go one level deeper - think like their opponents, and also look at their own side through their opponent's frame of mind. I've almost never witnessed people report on this.
I can't generalize, as I know only a few. But the few I know, seem thoughtful and decent. I just thought I'd add this point out here, since the main poster was trying to understand these voters.
Many smart insightful people such as Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward etc have written book after book trying to understand this phenomenon.
The truth seems super complicated. And currently unknown. I simply wanted to eliminate racism and stupidity as factors.
The Trump cult is a cult of personality. Sad old people want to believe that one man can rise to the top and make things better. There have been, as they say, many such cases like this.
The Democratic cult isn't a cult of Biden, but it is a cult nonetheless. It is a cult of knocking on people's doors, listening to their conversations, and saying, "Was that racist? Have you been racist recently? You wouldn't want to be racist, or I'll have to report you." Knowing what it is, I'll take the cult of personality with fries on the side.
I apologize. I mean everything I've said so far, but I can tell I'm getting more heated than is appropriate, so I'm going to leave this thread.
People of color isn't a power block. I'm inclined it was an invented concept to intimidate white people.
Not being white isn't actually an ethnicity, and a person doesn't have to be bigoted against their own kind to be bigoted against a category of other people who aren't white.
Repulsive to who, a tiny minority of millionaire Universalists? Rights being conferred with citizenship at birth has been a default assumption for humanity for a long, long time, all across the globe.
I would think it would be at least equally repulsive to non-millionaire universalists as well.
I don't value "citizenship" as highly as some (and i tend to prefer countries that assign citizenship by blood rather than by birth), but yea, I think it would seem completely obvious to me (and to most of our ancestors, and to most people outside the cosmopolitan circles in some western counrties today) that, yes, *of course* your political, social, civil rights etc. depend to some extent on your circumstances of birth.
I'm not a millionaire but admittedly I'm a pretty hardcore "Universalist", which sounds a lot like the "Rootless Cosmopolitan" shtick that Stalinists used to throw at Jews, typically supporters of Israel. Kinda ironic given what I typically post about, huh? Or maybe it's fitting.
Anyway, if by "Universalist", which I admit to not know what the heck you mean by, you just mean that I think all people deserve roughly the same rights (modulo their different material situations), and that I derive my moral philosophy from the Original Position [1] by John Rawls, where I try to imagine (as much as possible) that I don't know which race, creed, color or economic-social stratum am I before taking my moral positions, then hell yeah, I'm a Universalist. Universalism is the best moral philosophy.
> Rights being conferred with citizenship at birth has been a default assumption for humanity for a long, long time, all across the globe.
(1) There was no such thing as citizenship for the vast crushing majority of human existence. There was nomads and hunter-gatherers, and every land they stepped on was their country. Countries and citizenship are bullshit, literally social constructions.
(2) The fact that something was present for a long time is not moral justification for that thing. For the vast crushing majority of time both before and after humans there was no concept of "Rights" at all, everything you have - your money, your house, your wife and family - is just one tribal raid away from being taken or enslaved by a more powerful warlord. If you don't want a return to that, then you at least agree that some things that were introduced contrary to the historical trend are good and worth preserving.
(3) The Pro-Palestinian protestors are not being deported because they're not Americans, they're being deported because they're Pro-Palestinian (i.e. something that Trump disagree with) and simultaneously non-American. If you're American and you say or do anything that Trump disagree with, he can (a) Revoke your citizenship, which he can find a million excuse to (b) Make your life in America hell by any number of means. Given that Trump is extremely volatile and the list of "Things he disagrees with" is in ever-growing flux, you should be worried for your own interest about Trump persecuting Pro-Palestinians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
"There was nomads and hunter-gatherers, and every land they stepped on was their countr"
this isn't how hunter gatherer societies actually functioning. They have territories that they defend with lethal force, even if over some time frames they move around.
And even if they didn't, they have strong concepts of belonging, and of ingroup vs. outgroup, based around kinship, ancestry and language.
Exactly. In fact the ancient hunter gatherers were far less universalist than even the most blood and soil nationalist is since the latter extends his in-group to millions of people he doesn’t know and could never meet. The hunter gatherers would quite happily kill the other guys across the plain.
Universalism isn’t in fact anti-nationalist, it’s rather a form of imperialism, the universalist imagines a world without borders but only as an extension of his world view, which is more or less an idealised version of the country and time he is living in. If he’s an American liberal he imagines a world full of American liberals, and the actual messy reality of countries having different world views is opaque to him, partly because he’s at the centre of the hegemon.
> the "Rootless Cosmopolitan" shtick that Stalinists used to throw at Jews, typically supporters of Israel.
That sounds like a contradiction, but maybe that’s what you mean.
That there was no citizenship pre modern nationalism is largely because people were subjects. They were certainly aware of their ethnic groups and national identities, and places like Britain had English, Scottish and Welsh identities long before the modern idea of the state.
> That sounds like a contradiction
I'm not too caught up on the percise intricacies of Stalinist wrong think in the 1940s and the 1950s, but my impression is that they usually:
(A) Hated Soviet Jews, because Soviet Jews were disproportionately intellectuals/journalists and thus the kind of people most likely to disagree that we need 50 Stalins or maybe even 1 Stalin
(B) Initially loved Israeli Jews, because they thought the early political scene (full of Socialism mixed with blood & soil nationalism and glorification of labor, especially the agricultural type) would be representative of the future and foreign policy of the newly formed state. They were in for a rude surprise in the 1950s and the 1960s, but they were the first to recognize the new state de-facto in 1948, and the vast majority of the proto-IDF's weapons are East-European WW2 remains.
(C) Especially hated when Soviet Jews wanted to immigrate to Israel, or any other place outside of the Iron Curtain for that matter
(D) Used "Rootless Cosmopolitan" as a generic catch-all insult against all Soviet Jews, whether those Soviet Jews were Western-attracted or Israel-attracted, and indeed whether they wanted to get out of the Soviet Union at all or didn't and just criticized the party. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" being an extension of Hitler-era and pre-Hitler-era stereotypes against Jews as Roma-like tribal immigrants that exist within societies while never assimilating.
I don't know whether pro-Israel Soviet Jews were simultaneously Cosmopolitan in the same way, say, American Jews are today. Judging by American Jews today, I guess some of them were, and I guess they had the same interesting set of contradictions to reconcile as their American brethrens today have. I know for a fact that some early socialists in Israel itself were Cosmopolitan in the sense that they thought Israel should have peace and open borders with the Arab states, and thought of Arabs as allies in a shared struggle against colonial powers.
Universalists could refer to both followers of John Rawls and followers of the Universal Unitarian church.
1. Hunter gatherer rules work for hunter gatherers. Tribes of hunter gatherers were small, 20 to 60 people perhaps. Little more can be supported by nomadic foraging. Everything we have now, all the food and technology developed from agriculture also rests on 'bullshit social constructions'. Trying to re-apply hunter gatherer rules to agricultural societies is a recipe for garbage.
2. Not everything historical is good, or bad. Not everything that is a bullshit social construction is good, or bad.
3. Trump has very limited means to make your life hell if you are a citizen. I would prefer that he applies such measures to all green carders and immigrants rather than the pro Palestine people, but that's the world we live in.
> Trump has very limited means to make your life hell if you are a citizen
Are you sure about that? He can't threaten your business (the one you own or the one you're employed by) until it fires you? He can't continuously delay and withdraw funds from services and institutions you depend on?
Sound like one hell a risky bet. Let's see how it work out.
The Declaration of Independence claimed that fundamental rights were endowed by the "creator", not the state.
Yet for the next few centuries the American state somehow operated under the assumption of a line drawn between American citizens and non-citizens, based on birthright and then legal options for assimilation.
Most of the Bill of Rights contains no language saying it only applies to citizens. Anyone who reads that into it, Supreme Court justices included, is betraying the founding principles of the United States.
Wherever there was a state in charge of enclaves, it would generally set the rules or general guidelines for caste or religious based rights - all of which would still usually be based on birthright.
I have made the same observation. It is extremely important to keep this truth in mind. The thing that caused and perpetrates the present hostile
divisions among groups is a sort of chunking process whereby somebody who differs in belief about one hot issue is seen as differing in a bunch of other things, such as views about many other hot issues, plus also intelligence, common sense, kindness, reasoning ability, morals, etc
Agree
I have much less skin in the game than many others. But one difference that I do see is expertise. I think Biden and his administration understood the things much better on a technical level. This is nothing new, this was already a huge difference between the first Trump administration. Apart from their different political goals, this does seem a strong difference between Biden and Trump. This is also a difference to other right-wing governments. My outsider impression is that Milei has a lot more expertise than Trump.
It's not a given that a government with little expertise is bad for the country. Germany had somewhat of a baby version of Trump around 2000. The Schroder/Fischer government was determined to make lots of reforms, and they did. And some of them turned out to be very good for the country (reform of unemployment insurance "Hartz IV", not joining the Iraq war). But the majority of reforms was so ridiculously bad that they are *still* a laughing stocks today (a totally failed attempt to reform pensions "Riester-Rente", endorsing and pushing the "CumEx" tax fraud, spending hundreds of billions(!!) for a negligible installment of renewables). It's probably the government that had the longest-lasting impact in Germany in the last 40 years, and I am still split whether the overall impact was more positive or more negative.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
It's all very well for experts when things need to be done. The whole notion of democracy is the voters get to decide whether.
Curious why universities with huge endowments take money from govt at all, if they don't like the strings attached. Thoughts?
Govt wants a neural network that measures tumor sizes, and has money. I want lots of GPUS, and have an algorithm that turns gpus into said neural network. NVIDIA has lots of GPUS, and wants money.
University facilitates trade, skims some off the top, everyone wins. This is like pre-econ-101
Because they get a LOT of money from the government, and they have a lot of expenses. Even Harvard's endowment is not large enough to fund all its operating expenses. (Their annual operating budget is currently 6.5b/yr, and that's not including capital expenditures).
I can't help but wonder to what extent their expenses are driven by those large endowments.
I've heard multiple accounts of universities that suddenly noticed how many Vice Presidents of This or That were on their payroll, that weren't there in the mid-20th century, when student loans weren't as guaranteed. Observers noticed a specific type of price spiral. It wasn't always immediately clear that all these positions were useless, but there was strong suspicion that at least 20% could have been cut with few ill effects. (Some office helping 1% of the student body; another making student life 1% better; etc.)
Harvard is older then fdrs era of the government and there was at least some rent seeking credentalism (doctors at minium) that universities had; they are part of the state co-evolved with the current system; the ww2 mil spending "science" went to universitys to rent seek over, when a industery gets controlled its via mandating a degree from a university.
I would go so far as to say schools were the mechanism the half-anarchist early america became a total state. While if trump coup of fdrs system is susscessful a break down in relations should be expected; anything before that point wouldve been silly, why should the brain seek to not share blood with the arms?
The actual strings attached are reasonable and universities didn't have a problem with them.
Now there is a bunch of new stuff the Trump administration selectively makes up based on who their political enemies are.
What may happen if federal grants become totally up to the day-to-day whims of the president, is universities move to the European model where the balance is much more in favor of "hard money" (guaranteed funding from university budgets) compared to grants.
Consider UPenn has an endowment of ~$21 billion (7th largest). https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/03/penn-federal-funding-data-analysis-2024
Universities with big endowments are already prestigious and capable of attracting the best researchers. Those researchers measure career advancement in grants, for the most part. They're motivated to get them anyway. Why would the university turn down what is essentially free money?
In fact the overhead rate is often above 50%, meaning that the university spends half the money on the project and the other half on general running costs. Most universities in the US are more heavily dependent on the federal government than they like to let on.
This is not the meaning of overhead. 100% overhead would man what you said.
You're right - the NSF calls them indirect costs, and when I was at a Uni in the US, I think they were called on-costs internally.
No, Coriolis is (correctly) saying that a 50% overhead/indirect cost rate would mean that 1/3 of the total cost is overhead. Take the direct costs* and multiply by the IDC rate to get the (additional) indirect costs.
*Less than that, actually, because some stuff like tuition and major equipment is not subject to indirect costs.
Endowments + government funding is a lot more money than endowments alone.
Also, endowments often come with strings attached for what the money can be spent on, whereas government funding is often directly for research they think will be beneficial to society.
Whether or not universities like the strings attached, a huge portion of the university-industrial-complex requires government funding, and having that cut off would be a major loss. I think they have the reasonable complaint that the administration is now withholding contracts and grants, primarily dedicated to science development and the betterment of society, because it disagrees with the politics of the university as a whole, rather than the merits of their research programs themselves.
Have you had your bloodwork done in the past year?
Do you live in the US?
You're invited to participate in a study!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf_BXwlEJaGxtQVtOpTzLMgpCmzLbA171izWx0EfSBBAKnvOw/viewform
More context would've been useful to me, esp'ly in terms of what the benefit of the research might be
Thanks for the feedback. If this thing freeze-dries well enough for me to ship it around the country, benefit of participating might be not dying of a heart attack
I think we've all heard, with increasingly loud levels of alarm in recent years, that China out-manufactures the US and so would have a big advantage in a future conflict. That the US defense industry relies on a number of specialized components that are mostly manufactured in China these days. This is the conventional wisdom these days. So:
Could the US just start stockpiling goods that it would need in a conflict? And/or, direct defense companies to start doing so. All of the little nitty-gritty components of the modern industrial war economy- actuators, ball bearings, drone components, and so on. I understand that some things like rare earth minerals are now restricted, but actuators & drone components are freely available on the market in bulk, no? On the Chinese side a couple of people on X have noted that China is buying quite a bit more iron ore from Australia than their economy needs right now. Presumably, they are stockpiling for a conflict as well, as China is almost totally reliant on Australia for iron. And both countries have their own oil depots (China's is so big it has its own Wiki page!)
The US can't stockpile enough to win like a decade-long war. But a couple years worth? Maybe enough that US industry could then possibly take over manufacturing if the war went longer? Or, is the US government just not organized enough to carry out this kind of long-term planning?
If technological change is fast enough then your stockpiles may be rendered useless (or at least greatly devalued) every few years. This was supposedly a big reason why the German Air Force in WW2 was at such a disadvantage relative to the UK and US: ironically because the latter rearmed a few years later than the former, they had much better radar technology, which was advancing significantly even in the span of a few years.
So the ability to deploy your manufacturing infrastructure to produce the most up to date technology matters a great deal.
The Ukraine war shows pretty clearly that just having a lot of stuff, even if it's technically outdated, can be a quality all of its own.
I have zero domain expertise here, but a couple thoughts:
1) I'm pretty sure the military plans for things like this. They audit the supply chain and think through what would happen in an actual war. I'm sure they're prepared to face an absolute trade embargo without it crippling our ability to fight.
2) Countries that trade with each other historically don't go to war. The more our economies are enmeshed, the higher the cost of war to both sides. Encouraging trade is an excellent way to disincentivize war.
> Countries that trade with each other historically don't go to war.
Which periods of history are you basing this on?
RE: 2) Countries that trade with each other historically don't go to war.
This is something that sounds like it should be true, but isn't. Just before WWII, Germany's biggest trade partner was France. Just before WWI thr Ottoman Empire's biggest trade partners were Great Britain and France. Just before invading Ukraine, Russia's biggest conglomerate trade partner was the EU (China the biggest single entity) and the virtually complete loss of EU trade due to sanctions was an obvious outcome.
The point is, nations go to war (proxy or direct) with their primary trade partners all of the time, historically speaking. There are motivations beyond the purely economic that drive international relations.
Huh. Does this hold up under careful analysis? I was repeating what I thought I heard from a real academic once but maybe it's one of those conventional wisdom things that's just wrong. Like I have in my head that there's an actual negative correlation historically around this. Thanks for pointing it out.
1) The West has wasted ~20 years by preparing mostly for counter-insurgency rather than peer conflict. That includes manufacturing autarky.
2) That is what Germany has tried with Russia. It was several decades of "change through trade", the official slogan of multiple different governments. The Ukraine war has shown how well that turned out to work.
In an actual war with the United States China's manufacturing abilities will be weakened considerably. China relies on global trade to keep their manufacturing sector humming. In any actual war with the US maritime trade will be cut off significantly (I would say entirely, but some smugglers always get through). China currently imports 3 times as much oil as it produces, three times as much iron ore as it produces, 3 times as much copper as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They import 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and 161,000 tons of grain *daily*.
Some people say "Hey, they'll just import it by rail from Russia." They don't have the throughput. There are currently only two major rail lines from Russia to China. To put that in perspective, China recently invested in building two additional rail lines to Mongolia, in order to import more coal from them and less from Australia. Those two rail lines increased their coal imports from Mongolia by about 80,000 tons per day. So, to be generous, we can figure that a rail line can handle 50,000 tons per day. That means in order to maintain iron ore imports at their current rate they would need to build 60 new rail lines to Russia.
Meanwhile, in a war scenario the US will still have access to global markets and can ship in whatever raw materials or manufactured goods they need: which would certainly help in a sudden need to expand our ability to manufacture weapons of war.
Those are all interesting numbers, but did you account for the fact that this includes demands of the civilian sector as well? If China switches to a war economy, military demands would be prioritized. If the undisrupted stockpiles/import capacity is sufficient to feed the military industry for the duration of the war, it just becomes a question of whether or not China has enough money to pay the increasing prices.
The concern of the day is that China has significantly more manufacturing capacity and will “out manufacture” the US in a war. My main point is that if there is a war Chinas manufacturing capacity will be substantially reduced: we can’t look at its current manufacturing capacity and assume that it’s the same as its wartime capacity. So yes, China will still have manufacturing capacity in the case of war. What it won’t have is its current enormous capacity, which is the thing that is scaring a lot of people.
The peacetime capacity is not very relevant - nobody cares how many iPhones China can crank out while there's a major war on. What China does have is enough military industrial capacity to arm all branches of the PLA with modern hardware. With the exception of the naval production, which is obviously on the coast, these factories are also very difficult to reach with conventional weapons because China is large and these factories are deep inside the country. So if you can neither destroy nor starve these factories, then yes, China is a serious competitor even during wartime.
>The peacetime capacity is not very relevant - nobody cares how many iPhones China can crank out while there's a major war on.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who care. I keep seeing people post charts showing China has more manufacturing capacity than the US: and then using those charts to spread the idea that China will defeat the US if we go to war. Not just randos either, Noahpinion has been beating this drum for a while (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now). It's simply not true. In the case of an actual war with the US an enormous amount of China's current industrial capacity will become useless. Their GDP will crash: cutting off their maritime oil imports alone will drop their GDP by over $800 billion.
In short, I agree that China will be able to continue to make rockets, bullets, and boats (though they'll have a lot more trouble fueling them), but I doubt it would be significantly more than the US can produce: especially since the US will still have access to global markets.
As I understand it, the manufacturing bottlenecks aren't for subcomponents that could be sourced elsewhere, but for the final step - making the actual missiles or tanks or warships. Stockpiling raw materials isn't much good unless you fix that.
First of all, this isn't really in the interest of the actors at the high levels of the US government. People like Elon might bandy about with patriotic language, but I don't think they really at any level are interested in doing something like restricting the sale and trade of US goods for any reason. I think their wholesale dismantling of the fundamental structures of the US state is pretty indicative of this.
In tandem with this is the point you already made, the US government doesn't have the capacity for this any more, they aren't organized enough, or have a clear enough view of the future. This is in part because they are gutting their institutions, like I mentioned earlier.
These are at least my impressions on the matter.
(Apologies in advance for self promotion)
Over the last few months I've had a lot of conversations with MAGA supporters, and I've been struggling to understand the reasons why smart people that I know, who I think of as fairly conscientious, ended up voting for Trump. I wrote a long post about it and would love thoughts.
The thesis is that in the mid to late 2010s many people threw out their previous epistemologies -- a reliance on news media and academia and the expert class -- in favor of a much more noisy confirmation-bias-validating set of inputs with worse epistemological habits. Some people, myself included, started following folks like Scott. But others started following folks with less commitment to truth seeking. That latter group forms the core of MAGA. Their epistemology, which started as "distrust academia because they have left wing bias" has morphed into a new kind of epistemology where Trump's word is correct and everything else is suspect.
The tough thing about epistemological problems is that it is quite tough to realize when you have one. Sorta like having a bug in your bug reporting form. But folks on the outside of MAGA world, including otherwise right-wing intellectuals, are looking in and increasingly pointing to a complete lack of interest in truth seeking from Musk/Trump/their most ardent supporters.
https://theahura.substack.com/p/right-wing-epistemology-and-the-problem
I think your discussion style is putting a confounding filter on the information you say you're seeking.
I think you have to distinguish between people’s motivations. I know a lot of people who voted for Trump, and most of them didn’t have anything more complicated in mind than “His first term went pretty well for me and mine, let’s do that again.”
yea, fair. I think I'm writing about a particular class of people who fall into the venn diagram center of smart, politically aware, and voted for Trump. Of the people I know, the ones who voted Trump are also smart and politically aware, just because there are so few of them. I don't spend a lot of time with the modal Trump voter
I'm not MAGA but I'm a conservative who (marginally) approves of Trump. The TLDR is: sometimes you need a fascist to defeat entrenched communists. (And look, this isn't intended to be persuasive, so it isn't an invitation for cross-examination. I have a model of the world that's informed by an intuition that pattern-matches and extrapolates. I can't *prove* that I'm right and I'm sure you can dismiss it with a "every middle age white male thinks the country is going to hell." But this IS how I think and I'm confident that I'm representative of a certain class of high-IQ conservative. So take it for what it's worth.)
The events of 2020 made clear to me that I am no longer living in a free society. The oppression narratives championed by the progressive left are little more than 21st century bolshevism: an elite political class advocating on behalf of an oppressed proletariat and using cultlike absolutist utopian language to do so. Which was cute when it was just bra-burnings and "only for tie-breaking" affirmative action. But in 2020 I saw BLM riot in this country over an incoherent and easily-contradicted rationale that every significant institution in this country supported mindlessly. There was not reasonable dialogue. Dissent was met with harsh oppression. People's careers were ruined. Then the DEI moral panic, and the installation of DEI apparatchiks throughout the economy. Those are nothing but political officers. Virtually every elite, public-discourse moderating institution in this country has been captured by progressive dogma and they are completely authoritarian in their defense of that dogma. Progressives have historically been agitators for freedom of expression, at least until they're in charge and then it's all "hate"-speech censorship and political statements for university employees. It's the re-casting of our national myth as one of oppression rather than excellence. It's the elimination of merit over notions of equity ("All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."). In short, it is evil. What's worse, it's winning.
Progressives have made a decades-long march through our institutions, typically on the back of moral appeals to fairness, and now that they're entrenched they are abusing institutional neutrality to oppress dissenting viewpoints and consolidate power. Since dissenting viewpoints are held by the vast majority of the country, that means we're in a situation where normal, established institutional processes can no longer be expected to act in the interests of the majority. Taken to a sufficient extreme, that's a justifiable recipe for violent revolt.
The violence in this case is institutional violence and our champion is Trump. Now I don't personally like Trump: he's a buffoon and doesn't understand the system well enough to make the kind of changes he's envisioning. I'm a William F Buckley conservative. I have elitist sympathies and I'm very rule-of-law and respect institutions. But 2020 revealed to me that those institutions are already rotten and any rule of law that I'm interested in (freedom, equality, merit) is already a memory. I would rather have our institutions destroyed than in the hands of modern Bolsheviks. I don't exaggerate when I say that if there had been a front line in 2020 then I would have *eagerly* grabbed a gun to fight against progressive insanity. Progressivism is a cancer on our institutions and Trump is the chemo. I'm willing to tolerate a lot of negative side-effects to kill the cancer.
To you this is probably a histrionic analogy by a zealot wingnut. But I promise you that it's not an analogy to me. If you want to understand MAGA then you should take this view seriously.
Appreciate hearing this steelman argument, thanks.
Trump was the US President in 2020
I can confirm this is a position shared by many high-IQ conservatives I know and respect.
I don't share this position - I personally think the cure of Trump is likely to be worse than the disease - but I understand why some people hold it, and I respect how they got there.
Just out of sheer curiosity- did you vote or participate in the 2024 Republican primary? You had the option of voting for other, non-leftist, non-Trump options. Did you do so? Or let's say you didn't vote then, or didn't have the opportunity to vote. Would Nikki Haley or DeSantis or (whoever else was running, too lazy to look it up) have sufficiently opposed leftism in your view?
No I don't vote in primaries. I would have loved DeSantis or Rubio. Haley seems stupid but I don't really know much about her. Hell, I would've sprinted to vote for Hillary if the Dems had decided to be reasonable - that's who I voted for in 2016, though it turned my stomach a little. In my view they're making a huge mistake by doubling down on woke and making Kamala/AOC the center of the party. If either party ran someone even reasonably moderate and non-insane they would win in a landslide. Believe me, I have no love for Trump, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And Kamala is just retarded.
as they say, read your opponent's newspapers to feel better about yourself
I appreciate this as an honest response, and it's similar to what many of my other smart-trumpvoting-friends have said. I think this is why I care so much about epistemology and why my article is all about how people are getting their information.
I don't expect to convince you at the object level of concern, but I feel compelled to respond either way: 'wokeness' became uncool in like 2020-2021, and I feel like all of the people being mad about woke now are like several years behind the curve. Take it from someone who was at Columbia in the mid 2010s.
The march-through-institutions, the belief that "Virtually every elite, public-discourse moderating institution in this country has been captured by progressive dogma and they are completely authoritarian in their defense of that dogma" -- this imo just didn't happen. It's extremely hard to take this seriously when there's been a conservative SCOTUS majority for 50+ years.
Even COVID response! Yes, California and New York were very harsh in the cities. But upstate New York was a totally different story, and in places like Florida it was like COVID didn't even exist. I spent a bunch of time in Ocala during COVID around May 2020, and there wasn't a mask in sight!
There were a few places that were definitely very left leaning -- mostly universities (Oberlin, e.g.), but even there there were many that just didn't give a shit (UChicago, e.g.). And there was definitely a left leaning bent to news media, especially huffpost, msnbc, cnn. And maybe the two of those together made it _feel_ like wokeness was everywhere. But it wasn't. The Biden admin passed tax cuts and busted union strikes!
If you are willing to take me at all seriously in the way that I'm taking you seriously, I'd ask that you look deeply at what your sources of information are and evaluate whether they are accurate. Read sources that you disagree with and see what actual progressives think about everything that's happened in the last few years
How have conservatives held a majority on SCOTUS for 50 years? At best, they gained a conservative-leaning majority in 1991 when Thomas replaced Marshall.
Like I said, that wasn't intended to be persuasive and I don't expect us to come to a common understanding here. We're clearly too far apart. A quick reply to your points though:
>'wokeness' became uncool in like 2020-2021,
You mean like how DEI depts are now 'inclusivity' depts? A rose by any other name. I'm sorry but this is unpersuasive; I view it as a clear hedonic treadmill. Try being a prospective academic and having good-faith HBD sentiments in your social media history, see what happens to your tenure prospects. That is unacceptable ideological censorship and I am willing to destroy the institution in order to fight it.
>there's been a conservative SCOTUS majority for 50+ years.
And that's moved the culture how, exactly? Affirmative Action was made illegal several years ago (in the 90's in California). Has affirmative action stopped? Good laws don't make good people. Without reasonable people in positions of power the law is a paper tiger. We no longer have reasonable people in enough positions of power.
Look at violent crime stats. Look at policy. And then look at the rhetoric. Look at our cultural attitudes towards merit, excellence, and achievement. Look at how truth-oriented we are vs how ideology-oriented we are. That stuff really matters.
>Read sources that you disagree with and see what actual progressives think about everything that's happened in the last few years
I do almost nothing but, and I see the same patterns everywhere: an allergy to contradictory data, a hostility to opposing viewpoints, and a simple lack of humanity towards people they disagree with ("racist! oppressor! check your privilege" etc). It's cultish dogma. I can't tell you how many accounts Reddit has banned simply because I made vigorous, good-faith, evidence-supported but anti-woke arguments. I would give you the same advice. I'm much older than you. I have the benefit of having observed the cultural trends for 40+ years. I would suggest that you should be a little more cynical in how you extrapolate current trends.
If your idea of "vigorous" is something like
>Really? Biden abused the clear purpose of the asylum system to let in 6 million poor, low iq immigrants. And progressives burned our cities in 2020 because they're too stupid to understand that 27 < 51. Nothing Trump has done can match that.
I can understand why Reddit banned you, and it need have had nothing to do with the underlying statements of fact you were arguing for.
(EDIT: and turning around and complaining about lack of humanity toward people ...)
Ok you're simply proving my point. Under what theory of reasonable ideological discourse should that viewpoint be banned?
Under the theory that one should show humanity toward people one disagrees with. "Too stupid to understand 27 < 51" isn't less degrading than "racist! oppressor! check your privilege!"
People losing their jobs for wrongthink is important and bad, but nobody went to work camps under the progressive "Bolsheviks". I don't have any confidence that Trump will uphold even this low, low standard.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I am genuinely unclear why you think Trump and the rest of the conservative establishment would send people to work camps. Point to literally any mainstream conservative who seriously espoused this idea and I'll retract. Otherwise this sort of statement really hurts your credibility.
The entire reason I think this is that the "conservative establishment" has been a non-actor for the past 9 years. Instead of sticking up for their own principles at what should have been red lines, they uniformly kowtowed to the cult of personality that is Trump. So this is entirely up to what Trump, with his dictator friends and his annotated copy of Mein Kampf and his opinion that domestic enemies are worse than China, wants on any particular day.
Updating from 'hurts your credibility' to 'destroys, shreds, burns, folds, spindles, swallows, and gently digests' your credibility.
👌
Distinction without a difference in my view. Whether it's camps or unemployment, if I live in a society where I can't reasonably express my viewpoint then I'm grabbing a gun. Or, in this case, an off-the-hook norm-violating politician. In my view he is going after the greatest political evil that I have seen in my middle-aged life. If you don't think it's evil that's understandable: cancer survives by mimicking the host.
I understand the dangers that Trump represents. In my view progressivism is a present and ongoing danger so I side with potential-badness over active-badness.
> Respectfully, Trump is far more extreme than anything progressives are doing.
Respectfully, this is not even remotely close to true. I was a fan of Bill Clinton and campaign promise Obama. I still hold the same positions today, but the dnc has veered so far to the extreme left i am considered a conservative now.
Go read Bill Clinton's 1995 state of the union address talking about illegal immigration. Go read Obama's 2014 US Digital Service EO talking about government efficiency. If you didn't know better you would assume these are just Trump talking about securing the border and DOGE (which, irony of ironies, is simply that service created by Obama with the acronym repurposed).
Trump is just recycling Democrat policies from a decade or two ago, and he's steered the GOP to the center. There is an extremist party in the US, but it's team blue, not team red.
>Respectfully, Trump is far more extreme than anything progressives are doing.
Really? Biden abused the clear purpose of the asylum system to let in 6 million poor, low iq, uneducated, unacculturated immigrants. And progressives burned our cities in 2020 because they're too stupid to understand that 27 < 51. Nothing Trump has done can match that.
Look, I don't want to get into a full-blown political fight here but I'll just say that your perspective is not that of the majority of the country.
> Some people, myself included, started following folks like Scott. But others started following folks with less commitment to truth seeking. That latter group forms the core of MAGA.
*waves* if I can read scott and be far right what happened?
I don't know! I don't know how you could read Scott and look at the kinds of things that Trump and Musk push and not be concerned!
Like, you tell me -- aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking? By the willingness to push outright fabrications? Here's a list of conspiracy theories pushed by Trump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories_promoted_by_Donald_Trump even if you disagree with some of these, its not a short list.
My best guess is that it's possible we just follow Scott for different reasons.
I think that his pushback against far left progressive takes in the 2010s was downstream of his overall epistemological health, his willingness to read a lot and be critiqued and take those critiques seriously. I respected the epistemic humility and thought it made him more likely to be right.
Maybe you read Scott because you liked the pushback against far left progressive takes, independent of their correctness? like you could be one of the pro-trump accounts that shared Scotts "Youre still crying wolf"(https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf) around as affirmation that you are right?
> Like, you tell me -- aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking? By the willingness to push outright fabrications?
Yes, deeply. But I look at the world today, and it's not Trump and his cohort busy stuffing their fingers in their ears and shrieking, it's the proggo left and their politicos. Why are you so opposed to DOGE? Do you not care what billions upon trillions of your tax dollars are spent on? Do you not care why dozens of ostensibly "N"GOs that apparently answer to congress or various exec depts are suddenly forced to close shop or have massive layoffs once their government funding is turned off? Why do you oppose a proper investigation into the origins of COVID, or the actual efficacy of lockdowns, school closures, and masking?
Everything you are accusing the right of being just looks like projection to me, so I guess I agree with your fundamental concerns, but have very different conclusions about who to be concerned about.
Also, that Wikipedia link is some of the worst propaganda I have ever seen and really not up to the standards of this site. Some of the things it calls conspiracies are objectively true (Hunter Biden Ukraine thing, Obama administration sending money to ISIS stand out as whoppers), virtually all of the rest are subjective, and the few remaining are excercises in linguistics. Pointing out the length of the list merely indicates that left-leaning wiki editors have a lot of time on their hands. L
> merely indicates that left-leaning wiki editors have a lot of time on their hands.
I'd say it indicates the institutional capture of Wikipedia.
I think you're just coming at the world with a very different epistemology than I do. If I had to guess, your primary sources of information are Fox, maybe twitter?
To answer your questions truthfully:
- I don't think there is that much federal government waste, studies that I trust (that you may not!) have repeatedly been unable to find any. My tax dollars are spent on social security and defense and I'm fine with that
- DOGE would be a joke if it wasn't so tragic. The sources that I trust tell me that DOGE is incompetent, is causing more chaos than good. I do not trust Musk because I have repeatedly seen him do dishonest untrustworthy things and I know people who know him personally who have bad things to say. He has way too many conflicts of interest to be a good actor.
- The sources I trust tell me that PEPFAR is a good thing, USAID is a good thing, and that even if they were bad they make up such a small fraction of spending that I just cannot bring myself to care.
- And there are many studies on COVID policy and its efficacy, and I think that the US economy had one of the best recoveries in the entire world, again based on the sources that I trust
This is ALL epistemology. We probably agree on basic values like "we should do what is in the best interests of the US" but we profoundly disagree on factual information like "how much Ukraine spending comes back to American companies" or "how much is DOGE actually saving"
The best thing I can do is try and argue that I think your epistemology and your sources are really corrupt. Trump constantly lies. Musk constantly lies. Not in the "if you squint they might be right" sense, but in the "immigrants are eating pets" and "democrats control the weather" and "measles is good actually" sense. They throw out totally fake numbers with abandon all the time.
I can't prove to you that every single thing they have ever said is wrong. But Gell Mann amnesia is really strong here -- I am distrustful of everything they say because I have caught them lying so many times.
> If I had to guess, your primary sources of information are Fox, maybe twitter
Lol no. I probably read the same articles you do, just with a skeptical attitude always open to the likely possibility the author is trying to mislead.
Like most American progressives, you have no idea of who your political opposition actually is. To be clear- that MAGA hat wearing, fox News watching, Alex Jones spouting angry boomer is a chunk of Trump's voter base, but they will basically always vote gop and there's little you can do to change that. But that's not me, or my friends, or work and school cohorts, most of whom quietly voted for Trump despite outwardly coding as someone who would probably be a reliable dem. We are the ones who swung and cost you the election. Indeed, as I have said elsewhere in the thread I am a Bill Clinton dem, which makes me a Trump republican today because the DNC has veered wildly to the left in what I and my fellow travelers view as an extremely dangerous direction.
> a bunch of conclusions about politics from sources you trust
Again, we are probably reading the same articles, I just don't trust them. Integrity has little value in modern journalist and none at all in the mainstream media. It used to be difficult to tell the leanings of a journalist, but ever since "both sides" became a dirty word there is never any doubt as to which side of the aisle your average NYT or MSNBC writer sits, and NPR has become a farce of itself. There are a few independent media outlets that may retain some ounce of integrity (such as this very blog) but as always, caveat emptor.
> your sources are really corrupt. Trump constantly lies. Musk constantly lies
I am in total agreement! Though, I think that first point won't make you happy. And as to the second- Musk lies either about trivial shit i don't care about (best Diablo player, when FSD will be available on Tesla) or lies like Trump: in directionally correct ways that draw attention to a real problem. Were immigrants eating dogs in Ohio? No, almost certainly not. But did the Biden admin did park 20 thousand Haitians in a small Midwest town who's pop hits 50k on a good day and a) deny this was happening then b) admit it was happening and that it was a good thing to revitalize the town and would not compromise community resources in any way, or change the nature of the community? Yes they did, and then all good proggos called you a racist if you dared point out the bullshit.
Its ironic thst you nring up Gell-Man Amnesia, becauwe you are exhibiting it right here- all politicos lie, all of the time, about very nearly everything. You seem to think that I and my fellow travelers are unaware of the lies from the MAGA crowd- we are not. We are just far more concerned with the rancid, stinking, greviously unjust falsehoods that have run rampant in the DNC for a while now, and we're sick of it. So as the Good Book says, "remove the log from your eye first".
IDK what to tell you. If you're reading the same articles that I am, but don't trust them because you think the experts are biased against you, you're in a state of epistemic doubt/helplessness. But you're clearly getting your information from somewhere -- people don't just shut down their world model updating systems when they distrust people, they find new sources.
I think you should go read the original article I posted if you haven't already, because it might apply to you very directly, and I'd love your thoughts. You're basically the exact demographic I am writing about, and one that I would have been a part of if not for my disgust of trump and his obvious attempts at overthrowing democratic institutions
I have separate thoughts on whether or not you're making the right values call (i think taking trump over the dems because youre mad about progressive woke shit is just a bad trade) but its downstream of the epistemology thing
>aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking?
Weren't you concerned when BLM rioted in our cities on the premise that a cohort that commits 50+% of violent crime are involved in 27% of officer-involved homicides? And everyone went along with it? Didn't that concern you at all?
Weren't you concerned when many elite universities dropped their SAT requirements because it disadvantages groups who are well-known to have lower IQs?
Aren't you concerned that UPenn is censuring Amy Wax for publicly stating the reality of her experience with racial minorities and they refuse to release the data that they claim supports them?
Where, exactly, is the truth-seeking there?
I protested (and approved of rioting, where it occurred) on the premise that officers who murder people under color of law get away with it
it's not a race thing and I was fiercely critical of those activists who turned it into one; US cops murder white people too.
I'm just going to cite Wax's own words:
“Here’s the problem. [Indians] are taught that they are better than everybody else because they are Brahmin elites and yet, on some level, their country is a sh*thole.”
“[Asians] realised that we’ve outgunned and outclassed them in every way… They feel anger. They feel envy. They feel shame. It creates ingratitude of the most monstrous kind”.
“[Ashkenazi Jews] are diluting their brand like crazy because they're intermarrying"
"As long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration"
"I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'...Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans"
"I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half"
"Embracing cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites"
The only statement that you could even come close to trying to verify in this list is the one about graduation percentiles, which is trivially wrong -- and, since Penn's grading is blinded, deeply disturbing about why she is making these claims.
Going to just ask you openly: do you believe that white people are better than non-white people?
I think your epistemology has fundamentally failed you if it is framing Wax as anything but a white supremacist. And its possible that you too are a white supremacist, in which case I think you were probably correct that Trump is advancing your interests. I think you should be more vocal, if that is why you voted for Trump, so that other people understand what it is you and your party stand for.
Ok so there's two separate things going on here so if you don't mind I'm going to respond twice to this comment. You zeroed on in Wax and I'll defer most of that to a second thread. But for this comment I'd like to continue with the point my previous comment made about the truth-seeking norms implied by progressive behavior. So, disregarding the rest for now, Wax was censured specifically for this comment:
>"I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half"
That's a statement which is 100% empirical. Whether she's right or wrong it's factual claim that she's entitled to make. Seeing as it's based on her direct first-person experience I think she's qualified to make it. Penn a) censured her and b) refused to release the data which would reveal the truth. I do not think that responding to a factual claim with censure rather than readily-available data is not in the spirit of truth-seeking. Do you think it is?
Wax made the claim! It's her obligation to provide the data! Which she doesn't have, because again, Penn blinds the information from their professors! You have your evidentiary standards totally backwards, you can't just go around making claims and then say "well the other person didnt provide data to show it isn't true", the burden of proof is on the accuser. And even so, the dean has come out and openly said that of course, OF COURSE, black students have graduated in the top half and quarter of the class. Why is that not sufficient evidence? It's not like Wax has provided any further!
But let's say, for a moment, that you have reason to believe this is true based purely on the word of a self avowed white supremacist. Joining the Penn Law Review requires you to be in the top half of the class at minimum, the implication that students of color who are on the Law Review are also in the bottom half of the class is insane. Which is also why Wax herself can't even begin to defend the claim in interviews! https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/professor-declares-black-students-rarely-graduate-in-the-top-half-of-law-school-class/
And of course Penn isn't going to release this data. Are you serious? You want a university to release GPA information about its students, categorized by race? Besides opening Penn up to massive legal liability, this is the OPPOSITE of a 'race blind, merit first' policy! No other university or organization releases this kind of information of any kind, anywhere!
By the way, I purposely left out the worst of it because they are hearsay, but since we are taking things on face just because someone said them:
"The former law school dean alleged that Wax hadn’t just made controversial public statements. Ruger said she told a Black student that “she had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” and she also said in class that “gay couples are not fit to raise children” and that “Mexican men are more likely to assault women.”"
"Ruger also alleged, among other things, that Wax told a Black faculty member that it’s “rational to be afraid of Black men in elevators.” He also cited some of Wax’s public statements, including that she allegedly said, “Given the realities of different rates of crime, different average IQs, people have to accept without apology that Blacks are not going to be evenly distributed through all occupations.”"
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/09/24/penns-amy-wax-punished-statements-wont-lose-job
So, again, what are you even defending here? Be really precise. Are you defending a world where any time anyone makes a claim, regardless of how ridiculous it is, the defendant has to provide data to the contrary? Cause if so, I'd ask you the famous question, "Why, Mr. Wanda, are you beating your wife?"
This is such a deeply unserious take that I really had trouble not filling this response with expletives.
If the police violence giving rise to that 27% was more accurately targeted on the *particular* people in that "cohort" giving rise to the 50+% there would be a lot less complaining and unrest.
If some elite universities want to drop SAT requirements because they value some measure of diversity more than they value uniformly high whatever-mix-of-IQ-and-academic-skill-the-SAT-measures among the student body, that's their right and the market will decide if they were right or wrong to do it.
And as for Amy Wax, she still has her job 7 years after getting "cancelled" and with a petition signed by 76,000 people to have her fired, while doubling down repeatedly the whole time, sounds like academic freedom is working pretty well? And it's not nearly just the remarks about black students' grades that got her censured.
I'd respond to this but, as our previous thread demonstrated, you stop responding when you're cornered.
My point isn't to litigate the object-level truth of these points (though of course I'm happy to do so with a good-faith opponent), but rather to interrogate OP's attitude towards the "truth-seeking" implied by the recent liberal institutional treatment of them.
> I don't know!
Oh come on, you implied negitive things about all other epistemology's, fight me; surely you can throw some insult. I hate the science; imply Im a simpleton it will be fun. <3
https://monkyyyscience.substack.com/p/let-the-science-die
You say "truth seeking" as if "the science" was automagiclly true; I completely disagree, want the ww2 era of the science to end in entirely.
> aren't you at least sorta worried by the complete lack of interest in truth seeking? By the willingness to push outright fabrications? Here's a list of conspiracy theories pushed by Trump:
I believe a few after a lazy skim; Im worried what happens if we dont rip up the rot at its roots. I feel we are in a dark age already, the lack of risk in nonaction/democrates is a downside.
> even if you disagree with some of these, its not a short list.
Thats a cold comfort, Gell-Mann Amnesia should *also* apply to any field of science and government official position. Given 1 example of gross conduct, you should start unraveling into "epistemic anarchy".
> Maybe you read Scott because you liked the pushback against far left progressive takes, independent of their correctness? like you could be one of the pro-trump accounts that shared Scotts "Youre still crying wolf"
Nah, I need to keep track of the tolerable parts of the left, I really loved unsung.
---
> Their epistemology, which started as "distrust academia because they have left wing bias" has morphed into a new kind of epistemology where Trump's word is correct and everything else is suspect.
Id happily boo trump if he talks about the success of warp speed. Your putting the cart before the horse here. Anti-scientism predated trump and trump merely uses it.
Warp Speed is one of the few things Trump SHOULD brag about.
objectively no he shouldnt
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9916429/Moment-Donald-Trump-BOOED-Alabama-rally-encouraging-supporters-vaccine.html
He a/b tests crowds, he'd be "ignoring the science" to continue
Objectively, people who got vaccinated had significantly lower mortality rates during the heights of the pandemic than people who didn't. If people are willing to support things because Trump supports them (and that has been the case with many policies), he should have done as much as he could to save the lives of his supporters.
Look, its possible that you really just hate the concept of science and truthseeking. I really dont know what you mean by 'the ww2 era of science', and since it's been nearly 100 years since ww2, I suspect you also don't really know what that means. But either way, maybe we just have a fundamental values difference.
If you voted for Trump because you hate science and think that all science of the last 10 decades was bad, can you actually say it a bit louder? I think it proves my point
> I really dont know what you mean by 'the ww2 era of science', and since it's been nearly 100 years since ww2, I suspect you also don't really know what that means.
In the enlightenment there were french letter writing societies several of the maths things where Europeans writing letters to Frenchman who talked about math puzzles who would then forward thoughts around, and then British aristocratic who gambled about physics tests with the royal society. "Peer review" and grant chasing starting after the manhatten project i.e. ww2. These are different eras even if you could debate the mechinisms and break points
> If you voted for Trump because you hate science and think that all science of the last 10 decades was bad, can you actually say it a bit louder? I think it proves my point
The word scientism was coined in the 70's I think; again "cart before the horse", trump is using it and helping the thought but it isnt trump himself.
I'm sorry, you are expressing an aesthetic preference for a nostalgic time you didn't live through, based entirely on how its presented and recorded, without any real understanding of the actual material results on the quality or quantity of discoveries and improvements. There are a lot of critiques that you can make of the peer review system. "We should go back to French enlightenment salons" is not one of them.
Doing the lord's work man, don't let these other commentors bring you down.
I voted for Trump because I thought left wing identity politics had morphed into a rather toxic and corrupt sort of racialized spoils system. It had little to do with Trump and his truthiness or lack thereof. I would have voted for an ex Taliban fighter if he'd promised to restore colorblind meritocracy.
> I would have voted for an ex Taliban fighter if he'd promised to restore colorblind meritocracy.
You require him to be "ex-"?
This is more of a joke than a serious point, but I think it probably satisfies everybody's preconceptions one way or another to think that a typical Trump voter *would trust* an ex-Taliban soldier who made the right promises.
Well, thank you for being honest. I think a lot of people are like you, they supported Trump because they hated the other side, and totally ignored what Trump himself said he would do because they assumed that stuff would never happen. I consider that to be incredibly morally irresponsible, but at least its honest.
I'd actually love to understand this a bit more -- what makes you confident that Trump is restoring colorblind meritocracy? Or is it enough to 'promise' that he's doing that but not actually do so?
The president can only affect what he can affect; he didn't get much done in his first time and I didn't have high expectations for that to be different this time around, and kinda still don't. I view the act as casting a protest vote more than anything, despite the fact that he won. The fact that he won fairly handily I think indicated that there was a lot of preference falsification going on out there with regard to DEI rhetoric, so that was a nice bonus, and I think led to a bit of a vibe shift that has left DEI proponents justly demoralized:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/10/noah-smith-on-the-vibe-shift.html
Forgetting about the dems for a moment, would it meaningfully change your mind if it became clear that the Trump admin is instituting some other kind of biased spoils system instead of a meritocracy?
Of course.
I don't want to get too deep into arguing object-level stuff, I want to keep this thread mostly focused on higher level conversation about epistemology and the way different people look at truth seeking, so i'll leave off here. Thanks for the honest responses.
My personal opinion though is that the Trump admin is setting up an explicit political spoils system that is reminiscent of the early days of hte country -- reward those who are most loyal to Trump, over those who actually have merit. This is reflected in, for e.g., the appointment of Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth on the one hand, and the DOJ lawsuits against people who disagree with him on the other.
I'd vote for an ex-Taliban fighter over Trump too.
Haha, well played.
For my entire life on the internet the left has been saying "people who vote for the right are voting against their own interests and will only make their own lives worse".
Well here we are in 2025 and leftist governence is widely considered to have failed (see Ezra in the NYT or Noah Smith) and people are net migrating from left to right states. Oops.
It seems fairly clear that the gap in outcomes between right and left governance will only widen as Europe is nearly guaranteed to continue falling behind the US in GDP due to the absence of a tech sector. People love to claim GDP is not correlated to quality of life but I assure you that you that when US citizens are earning 4x as much as Europeans the difference will be too large to ignore.
Your post doesn't seem to add any new perspective to the topic, people have been calling Trump supporters idiots for a decade now. I don't believe anything Trump says but I also don't think voting for the right makes someone an idiot. As noted earlier, emperical evidence seems to indicate the reverse. (Or at the minimum voting contrary to the broader zeitgiest is more likely to keep your governance honest.)
To be fair I think the issue is more about entrenched/unaccountable processes and the expansion government funded non-profits who do nothing but sue everyone for everything.
>GDP
in other words, rent and health care bills
I don't want higher GDP, I want an actually higher quality of life. It's a garbage metric.
I should note that the world is larger than the US and Europe, both of which have spent my whole lifetime moving, often in tandem, to a crueler and less equal society; I very much hope my country does not follow their lead.
Objectively speaking, what has Trump did that the "Leftist Biden" didn't, in the interests of the people?
Prices? Soaring. Stock Market? In the toilets. Foreign wars? still ongoing and at least Israel's are bankrolled for the foreseeable next century.
The only thing I can agree is immigration, and even then it's (1) A few hundred people that Trump admin flailed at random and made high-publicity examples from (2) Did so while breaking several tens of established laws, precedents, etc..., and drawing the ire of several wings of the Judiciary (3) Potentially making deportation a political tool to expel wrong thinkers, which will harm republications themselves if/when the executive branch switches parties again and a Dem is willing to get their hands dirty for payback.
The states with the highest per capita GDP are New York, Massachusetts, Washington, and California. The states with the lowest per capita GDP are Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Alabama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP
“Leftist government is widely considered to have failed” doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that a lot of people believe what they see on Fox News and other right wing media. The only objective measure of success you give is GDP, a metric on which the blue states outperform the red states.
You would need to compare the states by disposable income to adjust for net incomes vs cost of living. California seems great on paper by GDP but if renting/owning a house cost 5x as much that needs to be taken into account. I found this map on reddit which comes from Forbes. There doesn't seem to be a lot of correlation between R/D governance as far as I see.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/175ajv6/us_states_by_total_disposable_income_and_total/
California should probably make it easier to build housing, but if people are willing to pay 5x housing costs in order to live in California rather than somewhere else, that suggests that California is doing something right.
California isn't interested in making the state livable enough for people to move there like they used to.
But if you go by the revealed preference of where people are choosing to live, NY and CA are the biggest losers while TX and FL are the biggest winners. And by a large margin; NY is -1.2% population and CA -0.2% while TX is +7% and FL +8.2% over the last 5 years.
Wait, I'm not sure this is actually fair. The reason people live in NY and CA is because that is where the jobs are! Historically, most people did not live in an area because they were really in love with the governance policy, or whatever, but because they had to feed their families!
With COVID induced remote-work, the jobs calculus changes, and now people can live wherever. But, again, I don't think people are actually moving because of policy preferences, they're moving almost entirely because they can keep their high paying job working remote and be anywhere in the world, so they might as well be somewhere pretty and cheap. It's moving-to-thailand-with-a-tech-job on a domestic level. Why would you live in Coopertino when you can live like a king in the mountains in Colorado? Of course TX and FL get net migration -- they are both extremely low cost of living while also still having major (liberal) cities as hubs, and FL also benefits from having beautiful beaches and weather. I assure you that the migration was not happening to the panhandle or to O'Donnell, TX.
The jobs thing also makes me think it's extremely tenuous that we should be evaluating anything based on individual migratory patterns. Clearly the thing that is propelling the US forward is its various value-generating companies, from the incredible banking and finance hubs in NYC to the massive tech innovators in SF. If we want to look at 'good' or 'bad' governance, reflected in which states are actually producing the most VALUE for the US as a nation, it is obviously and without a doubt NY and Cali.
So I don't think any part of this analysis is actually reasonable.
You can't just go by the revealed preference of the 1.2% of the population that left NY and ignore the 98.8% that stayed or were replaced. And rent in NYC going up probably explains the NY numbers anyway.
I'm not saying that right wing intellectuals voting for Trump are idiots, but I do think they are voting against their self interest. Which, fine, maybe I'm adding to the chorus of other people who say the same thing. But as someone who is much more center than progressive left, it's hard to imagine, say, a principled libertarian or a lets-just-build stem engineer looking at everything that's happening and being like "yep this is good".
The connection to actual truthfulness right now is basically nonexistent on the right -- the entire admin is making policy choices based entirely on lies. I don't mean "things that seem like lies only if you look at it in a certain light", I mean outright fabrications. I think there are some people who are willing to bite the bullet on that, taking the position that the exaltation of stupidity and the destruction of civil norms is all worthwhile to see left wing institutions burn. But that feels much more like staring into the abyss, and yes I do think that's a mistake. Mao sent all the intellectuals to the gulag, regardless of political persuasion
Everyone who votes is voting against their self-interest. The time and effort it takes to vote simply isn't worth the tiny chance of the small difference it makes to you. The only reason to vote is if you care more about the country as a whole, and are willing to make that personal sacrifice.
Some of us vote not in our own self-interest but in the interest of the future of our nation. I'm on Social Security now and I would vote without hesitation for a politician who credibly committed to ending it. (And no, I don't propose sending my monthly stipend back to the government, which will have negligible effect on the country's long-term solvency. It's all or nothing.)
If you think that smart people are voting against their own self-interest, maybe the mistake is you're projecting the things you value onto someone else, then ending up confused when they don't act how you would.
If you think that war between the United States and Russia could be the most catastrophic thing to ever happen, and the US funding the war in Ukraine increase the likelihood of that war, voting for the option opposing that aid is in your self-interest, however the aide is allocated.
If you think that debt-to-GDP is unsustainable, and we will face severe economic hardship in the future if interest payments are not brought under control, then voting for the politician that seems to care about it more is in your self interest.
If you thought that the democratic candidate (along with her party) had been deliberately lying about the condition of the President for the past year, then voting against that party (on the principle that we shouldn't try to hide the intellectual decline of the president) is in your self interest.
The thinking could go on and on with varying degrees of importance. By saying that intelligent people who voted for Trump are acting against their own self interest, you're basically forcing people to defend their vote and position, and further entrench themselves into that support.
One of the things I discuss in the article is how we have way more factual debates compared to values debates. 20 years ago, my perception was that there were more disagreements about values (what is 'the good') compared to facts ('is the price of eggs $5 or $10')
The opinions that you are describing are downstream of the epistemologies that people have about the world, not the values that they were raised with.
For example, 'believing debt-to-GDP is unsustainable' is a _factual_ disagreement, not a _values_ disagreement. People believe that because they are downstream of sources of information that indicate, under certain conditions, the debt-to-GDP ratio will result in severe economic hardship. There are other people with different models that say, 'hey, this isnt actually an issue'. Deciding who you trust is fundamentally a question of epistemology, and is separate from what you value.
If debt-to-GDP ratio is your most important issue, it's really important to make sure you are getting good information about that from good sources! Sources that value accurately describing the real world, that care about truth seeking! But much of the MAGA right's source material is disconnected from that reality. DOGE claims to have saved hundreds of billions (!!!) of dollars already. That's just straight up a lie. Like, not 'kinda true if you squint', its just a lie.
If you are a smart conscientious person, you presumably want to be reading or interacting with sources that give you a better grasp of the world, and the right is the party of "Democrats control the weather" and "Theyre eating the pets". It should make you suspicious of all of the other things that are claimed too, about immigration or debt or Ukraine or whatever else.
Has DOGE *actually* claimed to have saved "trillions", or is this an exaggeration? As far as I've ever seen, it seems like they have never claimed to have saved anywhere near this much already, which if they haven't, makes you the "straight up" lier. This should make anyone reading this suspicious of all the other things you've claimed too. Not trying to be too provocative with that statement, but trying to demonstrate that this is clearly not a simple case of having incorrect information.
I know DOGE savings have been minimal compared to the overall deficit, and they have overstated their savings multiple times, and the goals set are unreasonable, but honestly that doesn't matter nearly as much as simply having the goal that "We should eliminate government waste and reduce spending wherever we can" which is what a lot of people agree with.
You're right, edited from trillions to hundreds of billions, though there are many cases of Elon claiming things like "I will save a trillion per year" or "based on current trajectory we have already saved trillion per year".
> I know DOGE savings have been minimal compared to the overall deficit, and they have overstated their savings multiple times, and the goals set are unreasonable, but honestly that doesn't matter nearly as much as simply having the goal that "We should eliminate government waste and reduce spending wherever we can" which is what a lot of people agree with.
To restate a bit of what you said here, "I know these people are lying about {a, b, c}, but eliminating government waste makes it worthwhile". My question to you is: where does your belief that the government is spending wastefully come from? Is it from the same people who are lying to you about {a, b, c}? If tomorrow, DOGE came out and said "problem solved, we cut enough and now were good" would you even believe that they did the job?
The problem with evaluating epistemology is that it requires pulling yourself outside of the box, and that is a really hard thing to do. The best that we can hope for is to construct epistemologies with 'good habits' (peer review, scientific method, hypothesis testing, openness to criticism) and reject those with 'bad habits'. I don't think Trump/Musk are pushing for good truth-seeking habits
Well said. I'd like to add that there are plenty of lies on the left, and both sides are vulnerable to lies that support their value-set.
I will note that if one wanted to vote for the candidate who appeared to care more about the deficit, they would have voted for Harris - she didn't care much, but she also wasnt aiming to actively baloon the deficit with tax cuts, as Trump is. So that was definitely not a reason to vote Trump unless one was misinformed about his explicitly stated goals.
It depends on how you look at it.
If you believe that high taxes are restricting economic growth and making American less attractive to foreign talent, a reduction in government spending along with a reduction in taxes could lead to a stable budget.
If you see the root cause of the problem as government overspending, rather than insufficient taxes funding that spending, then even if Kamala was advocating for a plan that would lead to a smaller deficit than Trump (In principle eliminating the deficit is very simple. Just keep increasing the taxes to meet spending), she would still be the wrong choice.
The deficit itself is a simple problem. The more complex problem is how we can have stable government spending into the predictable future, how much we should be spending, and how much we should be taxing to fund that spending. People who vote Republican generally feel that spending too much is the problem, so voting for the party that often advocates for increased spending will probably not solve that problem, even if they promise to raise taxes as well.
"If you believe that high taxes are restricting economic growth and making American less attractive to foreign talent, a reduction in government spending along with a reduction in taxes could lead to a stable budget. "
They could, but they won't. Obviously, OBVIOUSLY they won't. We're so far past plausibly claiming they will that it's pretty flabbergasting to even still see it floated by intelligent people.
Go ahead and eyeball a graph of debt-to-gdp over time covering the past few decades. Which years have regions of positive slope vs negative slope? Are ANY of the downward slopes during periods with Republican presidents? One of those, let us remember, was THIS SAME PRESIDENT. I cannot honestly imagine the level of rationalization it would take to believe that *this administration* is going to reduce the debt-to-gdp ratio.
And talking about the problems with higher taxes is a big goalpost shift. Two comments ago it was
"If you think that debt-to-GDP is unsustainable, and we will face severe economic hardship in the future if interest payments are not brought under control, then voting for the politician that seems to care about it more is in your self interest. "
Which is it? Is the ratio unsustainable, or not? Is it absolutely critical to cut deficits? Or is of secondary importance to lowering tax rates for top earners?
I would venture to guess that this is EXACTLY the kind of thing theahura was talking about when referring to "smart people voting against there own interests." Or perhaps they're merely being dishonest about what they consider their interests to be. Regardless, the level of doublethink that appears to go on any time the national debt is brought up is astonishing. Again, the evidence is EXTREMELY lopsided about which actions are and aren't likely to bring deficits under control, and yet somehow they're simultaneously the most important thing in the world and instantly forgotten the moment the prospect of lowering taxes a bit more is on the table.
"The deficit itself is a simple problem."
Maybe pausing here and asking yourself "Why is it that I think that this is a 'simple problem' when there's been bazillion gazillion man-hours spent on this here very problem, by clearly smart people, without a resolution in sight" would be quite useful?
A fair point, but hypothetically the tax cuts could be offset by reducing government spending. It's still addressing the problem as opposed to not caring much.
Hypothetically, they could, but we aren't talking about hypotheticals ,we are talking about the Trump plan to cut spending by two trillion, but taxes by five trillion. Obviously that will increase the deficit (though there are many dishonest people pushing, in the absence of all evidence, to claim this could somehow be revenue neutral)
Sorry, what is this even a response to?
Sure, and if you read what I wrote in the actual article I mentioned that there is an edge to the MAGA crowd that is primarily motivated by the desire to hurt other people who they don't like, whether that's immigrants or trans people or whatever. I think those people are getting exactly what they voted for, and are very excited about it. Like, if you're an actual racist, you're probably pretty happy with what Trump is doing. I just don't think that's the flex you think it is.
I believe the nature of not just MAGA supporters but their equally ardent opposers on the left is entirely bound up in epistemology. Gradually, continuously, at this point, perceptively, the body politic has been separated into herds. It is a function of media aggregation and the algorithm. Ultimately, a function of sponsorship money. Trump isn’t making the mistake Biden made. He is feeding his constituents the red meat. Biden failed his most progressive voters and his popularity suffered throughout. Trump understands the new epistemology (an end in itself), Biden did not.
> There's another edge to the MAGA crowd. These are people who are primarily driven by the desire to hurt their enemies, regardless of the cost to themselves. They are vicious, throwing the political equivalent of a nation wide tantrum, all id and emotion without any long term thinking. These people are not making a mistake — they know exactly what they are doing, and are here for it.
From the article, I think we're broadly in agreement but still I don't think this is the flex you think it is
In a book review a couple of years ago, Scott had quotes from Musk's ex-employees about how technically adept Musk was.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
I brought it up recently, and was told Musk said on Truth Social that he paid employees for testimonials. Unfortunately, Truth Social is hard to search, and I didn't want to do the job of tracking down an ill-defined quote. Has anyone seen something like that?
Were the ex-employee employed by Musk at the time they said those things?
Just as a general thing, I'm driven crazy by the idea that people who have done bad things must have been completely bad in all parts of their life, and people who are respected must have been good in all parts of their lives. I think it's very likely Musk has deteriorated.
Noah Smith blocked me for agreeing with Yglesias on him being wrong about Tsarist Russia, but I still give him credit when he makes good points: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/only-fools-think-elon-is-incompetent https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1765791723525914639
In software, I can confidently say that at least one of the following is true (1) Musk doesn't have a single clue what he is talking about, at nearly every level and in every area of software he talked about (2) He is starting to hit early dementia and used to know things but now don't.
From his earlier quotes in the early 2000s, I'm inclined to think that it's (1). The guy really doesn't know shit, he is Star Trek techno-babbling. The terms are really from software and they will impress anyone with extremely limited understanding of software, but any complete sentence doesn't make sense.
I strongly agree with you, and people struggle with the idea that the same individual can be good and bad, in different scenarios, and change radically even in adulthood. The letters between Musk and Altman when setting up OpenAI are truly mind opening; written by someone with a similar mind but a totally different chemistry than the current Musk. He's still wildly ambitious, but cerebral, measured, willing to change his mind, detail oriented.
https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musk-and-openai
Here’s a puzzle my friends and I ruminated about during our college years: It’s raining hard. If you walk in the rain for 3 mins, do you get wetter if you walk slowly than if you walk
fast? Or the reverse? Does it not matter? Answer not in terms of life experience, but by explaining why you get more or fewer drops on your vertical and horizontal surfaces depending on walk rate.
Please answer using letter scrambler
So since this thread is getting old, seems like this puzzle should get wrapped up. So I think people should feel free to discuss it, not in code. I neglected to mention that when my college friends and I ruminated about this rain problem we never arrived at a consensus.
After posting this puzzle I ruminated about the rain and here my answer:
Horizontal surfaces (head top, shoulders, etc.): The amount of water per time unit you get on your horizontal surfaces is the same whether you are standing still, walking slow, or walking fast. You are just moving from one (imaginary) column of vertical rain to the next, and we’re assuming they all have the same density of drops.
Vertical surface: Assuming the rain is falling straight down, the amount of water your vertical surfaces get goes up with your speed. Actually, if you stood still you would get hit by no drops at all on any of your surfaces that are perfectly vertical. But vertical surfaces would get more hits the faster you walked. Movement transforms the vertical paths of drops into paths slanting towards you if you are moving horizontally. The faster you move the stronger the slant.
Diagonal surfaces: The top of any bulges on the vertical surfaces, such as nose, breasts or Kim Kardashian’s butt would get a number of water hits that’s in between that for vertical and horizontal surfaces, and proportional to the size of each’s horizontal and vertical components. The bottom of any bulges would have its horizontal component shielded by the overhang above. Its vertical component would get the same increase in drop hits as a purely vertical bit of the same height.
Since we all have at least some vertical components to our body, we would all get wetter the faster we walk. Body shape changes how much wetter an increase in speed would get us. The more spherical we are, the less an increase in speed will increase how many water drops we get per unit of time.
What did you guys conclude? (I have lost the link or whatever is needed for decoding coded replies)
I agree. Pauls answer works for constant distant. The problem was constant time.
Two additional points though
1. When you walk faster, your stride lengthens, exposing more horizontal surface. This makes you get wetter. Given how much more my pants get wet than the front of my shirt, i think this effect matters more.
2 well wind changes things of course. Walking with the wind makes you less wet.
rot13.com does fine. (It even has a setting you can tweak to decode the rot7. Although, note it has to be undone with rot19.)
I didn't get the same result as you. I didn't discuss horizontal vs. vertical surfaces, but I think my answer is the same even if I do. For one thing, your horizontal surface doesn't get the same amount of wet regardless of speed.
Walk at a speed of 0 and you get as much rain as can land in one place before it stops, and you don't get there.
Smartass answer:
Vs vg'f envavat uneq naq lbh'er bhg gurer sbe guerr zvahgrf, cebonoyl lbh'er trggvat nf jrg nf lbh pna trg ertneqyrff bs ubj snfg lbh jnyx.
Fvzvyneyl gb Fpvmbeunaqf:
Vzntvar gur enva vf pbzcyrgryl fgvyy, naq lbh'er sybngvat guebhtu vg ng gur fnzr eryngvir fcrrq. Vs lbh'er noyr gb eha rkprcgvbanyyl snfg - yvxr n wrgcnpx vf cebcryyvat lbh - lbhe cngu guebhtu gung envafcnpr jvyy or arneyl syng. Vs lbh jnyx nf n abezny uhzna, lbhe cngu jvyy or fgrrc, naq bpphcl n zhpu terngre ibyhzr.
Va cenpgvpr, eryngvir gb snyyvat enva, gur qvssrerapr orgjrra jnyxvat naq ehaavat vf yvxr bar irel fgrrc cngu naq bar rira fgrrcre cngu, juvpu vf nqzvggrqyl abg gung terng.
For a set distance:
Zbqry lbhefrys nf n obk naq gur enva snyyvat fgenvtug qbja. Nf lbh zbir sbejneq, lbhe sebag jvyy or jrg gur rknpg fnzr nzbhag ertneqyrff bs lbhe fcrrq. Lbh pna svther guvf bhg jvgu zngu be whfg ernyvmvat gung lbh'er fjrrcvat n obk guebhtu n ibyhzr jvgu n pregnva nzbhag bs jngre va vg, naq vg qbrfa'g znggre lbhe fcrrq sbe gung.
Lbh trg envarq ba lbhe gbc yvarne gb gur gvzr lbh fcraq va gur enva.
"Eha lbh sbby."
For a set time:
Whfg fgnaq fgvyy naq bayl lbhe gbc trgf jrg, 3 zvahgrf bs enva ab znggre jung.
The minutephysics video on the topic ends with the same sentence. Is it a coincidence or is there a connection?
"Fly you fools" is scripting The Fellowship Of The Ring.
I was quoting my memory of Why Things Are, Volume II, which answered this question in 1993, https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345377982?tag=bravesoftwa04-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1&language=en_US
Here’s the mythbuster’s episode on that: https://youtu.be/HtbJbi6Sswg
Are you walking a fixed three minutes, regardless of the speed? Or are you walking a specific distance, that will take three minutes if you walk slow or less if you walk fast?
The comparison is between 3 mins of fast walking and 3 of slow. So it is the time that is fixed. Distance would be greater in the fast walking condition.
Seems pretty straightforward then:
Rnfvrfg gb ivfhnyvmr vs jr hfr gur ersrerapr senzr jurer gur enva vf ng erfg naq lbh ner zbivat hc naq sbejneq guebhtu vg. Nf lbh zbir, lbh fjrrc bhg n ibyhzr bs enva-svyyrq nve naq trg uvg ol gur envaqebcf lbh vagrefrpg jvgu. Ubj jrg lbh trg vf n shapgvba bs ubj znal envaqebcf lbh cnff guebhtu naq pbyyrpg. Tbvat snfgre zrnaf gung N) lbhe irpgbe eryngvir gb gur enva vf zber sbejneq, engure guna hc, fb lbh'er fjrrcvat bhg n jvqre nern jvgu lbhe obql engure guna whfg gur gbc bs lbhe urnq naq fubhyqref, naq O) lbh'er tbvat zber gbgny qvfgnapr. Obgu bs gurfr vapernfr gur gbgny ibyhzr bs enva lbh'er fpbbcvat hc fb lbh trg jrggre.
I believe you will be slightly drier if you run, but the difference is modest enough that it's not really important either way
Rot7
Hzzbtpun aoha aol yhpu mhssz clyapjhssf:
H. fvby ovypgvuahs zbymhjlz l.n. aol avw vm fvby olhk nla dla hz h mbujapvu vm aol aptl fvb zwluk bukly aol yhpu
I. fvby clyapjhs zbymhjlz l.n. fvby mhjl nla dla hz h mbujapvu vm aol kpzahujl aoha fvb jvcly (iljhbzl fvb ihzpjhssf tvcl puav aol yhpukyvwz)
Olujl :
- pm fvb ohcl 3 tpu av zwluk pu aol yhpu, fvb zovbsk uva tvcl ha hss (dvu'a johunl ovd tbjo mhssz vu ovypgvuahs zbymhjlz, iba fvby mhjl dvu'a nla dla ha hss)
- pm fvb ohcl h mpelk kpzahujl av jvcly, fvb zovbsk ybu hz mhza hz wvzzpisl (dvu'a johunl ovd tbjo fvby clyapjhs zbymhjlz nla dla, iba dpss tpuptpgl ovd tbjo fvby ovypgvuahs zbymhjlz dpss nla dla)
Huljkval : P iprl h sva huk P jhu huljkvahssf jvumpyt aoha P nla dla tbjo mhzaly aohu pm P dhsr vy zahuk zapss bukly aol yhpu.
Rot7 ??? Where are you from?
I don't get it? Is rot13 for some reason more common?
Rot13 is the de facto standard. I've never seen anybody use rot7 until now.
In 2017 Scott reviewed the Hungry brain. I read his review and immediately solved my weight problems. I used the Boring diet from around 2017-2020 and returned to it in 2024. Still works amazing. I have no idea why im the only person who still finds the original rationalsit pitch of "huge piles of expected value lying around everywhere".
The TLDR of “The Hungry Brain” is that your body tries to maintain a healthy weight by releasing hormones that make you feel hungry or full. Your body is quite good at estimating the calories you eat. But even very small discrepancies add up over time; one hundred extra calories a day is about ten pounds of weight gained in a year! A modern diet messes up the process. Eating a rich, varied, processed diet makes you hungrier! To become lean, without fighting hunger, you simplify your diet until your bodies natural process once again functions well enough for your goals. This is highly unlikely to require eating solely tasteless nutrient paste. Stop simplifying once you are thin enough. What factors are involved?
Variety - By far the most important factor in my opinion. People have lost weight eating only McDonald burgers or even Twinkies. The more monotonous your diet the less hungry you will be. This trades off against nutritional goals. Luckily humans don’t need that much variety. Tribes have been healthy getting most of their calories from a single nut. The Inuit do well on a diet absurdly concentrated in Seal. And low calorie fruits and vegetables can be consumed freely. So you actively want to eat a variety of those! This principle also implies the more variety of tasty fruits and vegetables the more you will eat.
Taste - The more bland your diet the less you will eat. In my opinion its possible to eat solely tasty food. But you absolutely must avoid sweeting anything substantially caloric. Real sugar is of course dangerous. But I would be careful about adding zero calorie sweeteners to something like a “diy meal square” or protein pancake. Make sure you can afford it. Conversely I am much less worried about adding sweeteners, even real sugar, to coffee or protein shakes which are very low calorie.
Complex - Complex food makes you hungrier. In my opinion the mix of carbs AND fat makes the food much more fattening. For example I eat my Taco/Chili meat without any pasta/tortilla/bread. Processed “junk food” is the epitome of this.
A few more details and some pictures of me here: https://sapphstar.substack.com/p/delicious-boy-slop-boring-diet-effortless
(this feels quite on topic to share since I literally got the idea from Scott)
Glad that worked for you. I agree on avoiding very "exciting" and processed foods. For me I've lost about 40 pounds over last few years by cutting back on sugars and carbs. Replacing sugar with fake sugar has helped. But your point resonates with me in that after I eat a bowl of yogurt or a can of tuna I dont crave more. After a bowl of pasta or a slice of pizza I want another one, or maybe more. Avoiding that kind of thing makes it a lot easier to lose weight sadly.
for me i observed the opposite. In my early 20s I didn't care very much about food and I went with the most available option every day (usually kebab or schnitzel). At around 140kg I started to turn around and among other things increased the variety of my diet, e.g. I started eating salads, and cheese, and more kinds of vegetables and eventually dropped to about 105kg. Then started a new job and simplified again (kebab and pasta this time) and went up to 125kg. Then I updated my diet again, and went down to 117 right now.
I tend to simply my diet when I am stressed, and I diversify my diet, when I have time to do so. So the effect of "stress eating" probably outweights any positive effects from "simple eating".
On the other hand I noticed, that I loose more weight, when I remove high-calorie foods like pasta, meat, sugar and nuts from my diet. This may be a point for "simple eating", but I think it has more to do with calorie-density.
I did Slime mold time mold’s potato only diet and lost about 10 pounds. Partial evidence in favor. So I tried a mono diet of unflavored Huel as a control. I lasted about one week. Did not lose any weight and actually came in about 2 lbs heavier. This was certainly the blandest diet imaginable; however, I guess it was also complex by your definition.
All Potato is about as extreme as it gets. But the theory certainly suggests it would lead to very rapid weight loss! Happy to hear it worked.
Its not shocking that huel didn't work. I tried 100% meal squares and it didnt work either. Both foods are really processed. I dont think the theory predicts those strategies would clearly fail, but this isn't an anomaly either.
Thanks for the reminder of boredom with food as a feature. Your comment inspires me to resume my routine of salad in the morning and frozen veggies in the evening with an eight to ten hour time feeding window. I stopped it when I went on vacation a few months ago. My main mental block to resuming is that it's extremely boring to maintain, almost painfully so. But you've reminded me that the boring is the feature. If I can resume it for two weeks, I'm pretty sure I can reestablish it as habit. Thank you and I look forward to eating boring again!
> frozen veggies
That's like a cheat-code for weight-loss imo!
I like frozen fruits (like strawberries or cherries) as a replacement for snacks in the evening. They are lowish in calories (compared other snacks) and you automatically eat them slow, since they are frozen.
I have not considered frozen veggies though. What kind of veggies do you use? Do you freeze them yourself, or do you get them pre-frozen at the supermarket?
Hell yeah!
This family of strategies works shockingly well.
I recently found out that quick is used by car people to mean fast acceleration, though there's some ambiguity about that.
Quick vs. acceleration: Orwell recommended anglo-saxon if you want to be clear, and quick is from proto-German.
Acceleration is from Latin.
Quick is a concept from ordinary experience. Acceleration combines speeding up, slowing down, and changing direction, which I don't think people combine unless they've learned some physics.
Quick: Middle English quik, from Old English cwic "living, alive, animate, characterized by the presence of life" (now archaic), and figuratively, of mental qualities, "rapid, ready," from Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz (source also of Old Saxon and Old Frisian quik, Old Norse kvikr "living, alive," Dutch kwik "lively, bright, sprightly," Old High German quec "lively," German keck "bold"), from PIE root *gwei- "to live." Sense of "lively, active, swift, speedy, hasty," developed by c. 1300, on notion of "full of life."
Quick meaning living still exists in English, though it's rare. There's "the quick and the dead", and the quick of a nail, as is biting nails down to the quick. I think there was a bit in _The Secret Garden_ about a plant showing small signs of life as "quick". There's also "cut to the quick" and quicksilver.
If you want to see a discussion of quick in Swedish, https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid032Ldhtco1ACHATCqm8SRaSpsrBvfkRvpqjpJJzMzLapxEBwtm2fpx1fD5RfenzT8cl
Acceleration: "act or condition of going faster," 1530s, from Latin accelerationem (nominative acceleratio) "a hastening," noun of action from past-participle stem of accelerare "to hasten, quicken," from ad "to" (see ad-) + celerare "hasten," from celer "swift," which is perhaps from PIE *keli- "speeding" (see celerity).
I dont think this would be formal for people but quick better mean a large effect in the highest impulse; the order of "continuity" is sub conscious but its there you can feel it: position, velocity, impluse, jerk 0th vs 3rd order "derivatives", you calculation the nth by adding n+1th to it every tick; the more level of calculation the smoother it feels. Lerps of colors, smoothness of 3d shapes, extra whatever.
Quick should means the fastest acting effect in n=infinity even if theres something more stable speed elsewhere.
It might be simpler than that. "Quick", applied to people and animals, is used more to talk about agility and rapid response time while "fast" is used more to talk about raw velocity.
Translated to cars, quick used in a similar sense could be expected to mean rapid acceleration, plus maybe stuff like steering and braking.
Or even simpler, unless you're driving on a salt flat test course or something, the practical limits on speed (besides law enforcement) are ability to control the car while maneuvering and the ability to get back up to speed after periods when you need to slow down.
Going back to roots, the original meaning of "quick" was "alive", so I'd believe a path from there to "lively" and thence to "responsive" and "good acceleration"
I'll chime in as a car person. I'd use quick synonymously with fast in describing a car, although I'd say it's less intense. A Miata is "pretty quick" but a Mclaren is "fast". Both of those terms are primarily referring to acceleration, which in car lingo refers exclusively to speeding up, you'd call deceleration "braking" and speed through corners "handling".
It makes sense. Unless you're driving on the autobahn or have an exceptionally slow car or just have no respect for the law and safety of other drivers, top speed isn't going to matter. The difference between a fast car and a slow car is how fast they accelerate.
That's very interesting; I've always just used quick as a synonym for fast (but used when you want to empathise the short period of time involved rather than speed), but never for acceleration
In many team-sport contexts -- such as in my case ice hockey -- "quick" is used to mean "accelerates really well" "can go from standing still to top speed in a blink", etc.
Then "fast" is used to mean "generates the highest sustained speed over some distance". I.e. "once that guy is moving we'll never catch him."
(Each of those is obviously a highly-relevant attribute for success in hockey, soccer, football, basketball, etc.)
Can anyone answer this tax form question? I am filing an amended return for 2021. Filled
out the main form, 8995 I believe is the number, and am now redoing the actual 2021 forms. No problem til I get to the end of form 1040, where you enter amt paid via estimated payments (I’m self-employed), and amt still
owed. What do I put there? Do I amend it too, sort of pretending I’m filling out the form for the first time? But when I filled out form the first time the numbers showed me owing a chunk of money, and I sent in the money when I filed the form. Now the amended form would show me owing less money, but still a chunk. So if I fill it out that way it’s wrong, because in fact I paid everything I thought I owed back when I first filed for 2021. In fact I overpaid by several thousand, which is why I’m filing this amended tax form.
So question is, in short, how do I fill out the amount paid/amount owed on amended 1040?
You fill it out as if you were filling it out the first time. You will come up with a smaller amount owed.
Then, you file an extra form (1040-X) on top of that. On 1040-x you'll list the old & new values of everything that changed, and that will give you a final net change.
Say if you originally owed $5000. Your new 1040 will show that you "owe" $4000. On your 1040-X you will compare those two and wind up with a $1000 refund.
Thank you!
The importance of bumbling.
https://effieklimi.substack.com/p/the-unpublishables-i-my-failures
This is an essay about how much about the difficulties of finding anything out is learned in the lab, and how little of it is recorded.
A little gets recorded in discussions (on Facebook? on Twitter?) under something like "the real truth about science", anonymously, about how much of what's done in science isn't the result of thoughtful experimental design. Rather, it's the result of using what's cheap and available.
It's amazing that science works at all, but a fair amount of it does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y&ab_channel=XVIVOScientificAnimation
There's a classic video called "The Inner Life of he Cell". It's a lovely portrayal of various mechanisms in the cell looking complex but orderly and purposeful. It was made for students at Harvard. The kinesin trucking* along a path hauling something large is especially memorable.
Later, it was picked up by creationists to say that there must be God's intent behind the creation of something so wonderful.
There's an something important left out of the video to make it comprehensible. Cellular processes aren't like that. There's no convenient empty space. It's all statistical. Molecules are constantly bumping into each other, and any life-supporting process is very low probability. Under a percent, I think, but let me know.
There's a style of housekeeping called junebugging. It can be useful if you're paralyzed by not having a plan. You just start making changes in a vague general direction of improvement, and you can get improvement. Less efficiently than having a good plan, but it's still better than doing nothing.
So, you don't always need to know what you're doing.
*Should have been truckin'. And I thought it was Mr. Natural.
https://www.singulart.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Keep-on-Truckin-1-1140x681.jpg
About June-bugging: There are some insects, and possibly some animals too whose algorithm for finding sustenance is *wander around.*.
> There's no convenient empty space. It's all statistical. Molecules are constantly bumping into each other, and any life-supporting process is very low probability. Under a percent, I think, but let me know.
Could you explicate a little further on this thought? That doesn't sound right to me. Seems like there is some sort of organized system within a cell moving stuff around, and it's not all a stochastic process.
As an example, take my favorite virus, SARS-CoV-2. It moves fast once it infects a cell, and the timing doesn't seem to be the result of a stochastic process of random motion. For instance, the entry of fluorescently labeled SARS2 virions have been tracked in real-time, and they show that viral fusion and RNA release occur within 10-20 minutes after receptor binding. The viral RNA is able to get to the ribosomes in about 30 minutes, and the RNA translation begins within an hour. The first translation produces viral replicase proteins (non-structural proteins, NSPs) that form the replication-transcription complex (RTC). The RTC completes its hijacking of the ribosomal machinery in 1 to 3 hours and starts constructing new virions in the ER-Golgi. A few more hours pass and the infected cell starts churning out new virions, which begin to be released by the host cell within 6 to 10 hours. If this underlying mechanism where stochastic, I don't think we'd see this fairly precise time sequence.
It really is that crowded and stochastic. The thing that should help your intuition is that diffusion on the molecular scale is also fast. My favorite example for teaching this is that a single molecule in a cell the size of E. coli, will randomly bump into *every* single other enzyme/molecule in the cell once per second.
The bionumbers book is a great resource for thinking about the cellular scale quantitatively (https://book.bionumbers.org/) and mesoscale explorer has some really useful visualizations of actually cellular packing (check out their examples, including SARS, on the examples tab on the left at https://molstar.org/me/viewer/)