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.
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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.
In 2005, Palm Beach police began investigating Jeffrey Epstein after a parent reported he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter. The investigation uncovered allegations from dozens of underage girls, leading to a 2008 plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta.
It was called “the deal of the century:” Epstein pleaded guilty to two state charges—procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting prostitution. He got 18 months in the Palm Beach County jail, not a state prison, with work release allowing him out 12 hours a day, six days a week, to his office. He served 13 months before release to house arrest, paid restitution to victims, and registered as a sex offender. In exchange, federal charges were dropped, and a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) shielded him—and potentially his co-conspirators—from further federal prosecution in that district.
The sentence was a slap on the wrist compared to what federal statutes like 18 U.S.C. § 1591 (sex trafficking of minors) could’ve brought—up to life in prison if proven. The work-release perk was unheard of for typical sex offenders, and the NPA effectively paused deeper investigation into his network at the time. Victims weren’t properly consulted, a violation later confirmed by a 2021 federal court ruling that the deal breached the Crime Victims’ Rights Act—though that didn’t undo it. In 2017, during vetting for his role as Trump’s Labor Secretary, Acosta reportedly told Trump transition officials he’d been instructed to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence” and it was “above his pay grade.”
Epstein had extensive relationships with elite individuals (Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Leslie Wexner, Bill Gates, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, to name a few.) A 2003 Vanity Fair profile noted his knack for collecting “valuable people,” hinting at kompromat—though hard evidence (tapes, photos) remains elusive beyond speculation and his own boasts, like claiming to Virginia Giuffre he had “dirt” on powerful men. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, was a media mogul with documented Mossad ties before his 1991 death—confirmed by Israeli officials at his funeral and books like Gordon Thomas’s Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy. Some speculate Epstein inherited a similar role, possibly with Mossad or the CIA, using his wealth and properties (like Little Saint James) to gather compromising material on elites for blackmail—an operation too valuable to dismantle.
In 2016, Julian Assange/WikiLeaks published a trove of emails from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, after they were obtained through a cyberattack widely attributed to Russian hackers. People on Reddit and 4Chan noticed that some emails were strangely worded, for example -
“Hi John, The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus? They can send it if you want. I know you’re busy, so feel free not to respond if it’s not yours or you don’t want it.”
“Still in torture chamber. Another question: do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?”
Several emails mentioned Podesta’s connections to James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. “James Alefantis” sounds remarkably like “j'aime les enfants,” French for “I love children.” Two doors down from Comet Ping Pong Pizza was a place called Besta Pizza (no longer in business). Before the PizzaGate narrative blew up, Besta Pizza's logo – a stylised pizza slice, looking like a spiral-shaped triangle – looked remarkably similar to a symbol commonly used by paedophiles to identify themselves to one another.
A June 2015 email from performance artist Marina Abramovic invited Podesta's brother, Tony, to a “spirit cooking” dinner – a performance art piece involving pig's blood and symbolic recipes. Diners, including Hollywood megastars such as Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani, ate food off plates that looked like mutilated human corpses. Abramovic herself posed next to writing in pig's blood reading “mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk drink on earthquake nights” and “with a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand eat the pain.” Tony Podesta was apparently into this stuff, as well as extremely disturbing artwork featuring children, which you can see for yourself here – but be warned, don't click this link unless you have a strong stomach.
This was the setting in which “Q” appeared. On October 28, 2017, an anonymous 4chan user first posted on /pol/, alleging that they had high level security clearance and that Democrats, Hollywood stars and billionaire bankers were all part of an elite Satanic paedophilic cabal. Epstein and Podesta were both involved, as was the CIA, who (together with Mossad) used compromising information gathered by Epstein on high-value individuals to control them with blackmail. Q alleged that then-President Donald Trump (he of “drain the swamp” and “I have lots of money... no one can bribe me”) was secretly working to bring down this cabal, which is why shortly after his ride down the golden escalator in 2015, the mainstream media (controlled by a handful of elite billionaires) turned him from all-American real estate billionaire into Hitler-loving, rapist wannabe dictator.
Q's claims were incredulous, but over the subsequent years he was able to build a substantial following, despite being repeatedly banned from various online forums (his posts have since been completely scrubbed from the Internet.) In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again on federal sex-trafficking charges involving minors in Florida and New York. While awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, he was found dead by hanging in his cell on August 10, 2019. This was officially ruled a suicide. However, there were numerous irregularities – the autopsy revealed Epstein had multiple fractures in his neck, including the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden, hired by Epstein’s brother Mark, argued in a 2019 60 Minutes interview that these injuries—three fractures—were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with homicidal strangulation. Two cameras outside Epstein’s cell corridor were inoperative that night. The two officers assigned to Epstein's unit both fell asleep and did not conduct required 30-minute checks, leaving Epstein unchecked for about three hours before being found at 6:30 a.m., a major breach of protocol for a high-profile inmate. Some find these irregularities too coincidental for a man with “kompromat” on powerful people.
Not to worry: Q assured his followers they could “trust the plan” and that “nothing can stop what is coming.” Trump would be re-elected, he declared, and his followers decided that JFK Jr would reveal that his death in a plane crash circa 1999 was faked, and join the Trump campaign, as part of a great revealing. After Trump's loss in 2020, Q disappeared entirely, although interestingly his prediction about Trump subsequently winning re-election (and a Kennedy joining with him) was later proven right.
On July 13, 2024, then-Presidental candidate Donald Trump narrowly avoided assassination by a last-second turning of his head which he attributed to the grace of God. Significant Secret Service failures occurred on that day and later investigation into them was hobbled by radio communications being fragmented and/or deleted. The would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Brooks, was and remains largely an unknown quantity, with no published manifesto and minimal social media presence, and his body was cremated 10 days after the event. Interestingly out of 100+ Trump rallies, CNN chose the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania as the only one to livestream.
On September 16, 2024, Sean “Diddy” Combs was arrested on charges of sexual abuse and exploitation of women over more than a decade, dating back to at least 2008. There has been alleged underage presence at his infamous White Parties or “Freak Offs” and allegations that he raped Justin Bieber when the latter was 14 years old. Rumors are flying around other Hollywood celebrity involvement (Jay-Z/Beyonce, Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, John Legend/Chrissy Teigen) but so far no charges have been laid against these individuals.
Following Trump's re-election, his followers have demanded full transparency and release of the Epstein files. His FBI director Kash Patel and his Attorney General Pam Bondi have both expressed a desire to move forward with this, but so far, there has been no new material information made public.
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.
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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/)
But even E. coli is compartmentalized and proteins/molecules are targeted to different membranes and compartments. Just as one example, the outer leaflet of the outer membrane is almost entirely lipopolysaccharide, while the inner leaflet is almost entirely phospholipids. So it's certainly not the case that any molecule within the cytoplasm will interact with the lipopolysaccharide on the cell surface once per second, or ever.
I'm not against the idea that stochastic processes are important biologically, but I can't look at even the fundamental process of transcription/translation and see something that is *defined* by stochasticity.
"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."
Could you expand on this and how you determined it? Given the number of molecules inside a single cell it strikes me as very unlikely that one molecule could bump into all the others within a second.
At a very crude level - the first few Google results suggest on the order 10^6 proteins per cell for E. Coli, while the collision frequency for molecules is usually on the order of 10^9 /s. So in 1 s, each protein experiences ~1000x more collisions than there are proteins in the cell. That doesn't prove it, since proteins could hit eachother multiple times, but it does make it plausible.
There's a probable exception here for molecules forming the cell membrane. The inner membrane molecules might collide with every molecule in the interior, but probably not with other inner membrane molecules other than their immediate neighbors. And the outer membrane molecules probably rarely encounter interior molecules, etc.
Well, I was about to start a similar calculation but I'm glad I was beaten to the punch. It's important to remember here that 1) cells are really small, 2) molecules move really fast (relative to their size), and 3) molecules have varying affinities for each other so the ones that are supposed to interact can immediately stick to each other. Eukaryotic cells are about three orders of magnitude larger than bacteria but, as mentioned below, they also have complex transport and tagging systems that make the correct interactions more likely.
Hmmm. Respectfully, there are active transport mechanisms within Eukaryotic cells. Thanks, @NancyLebovitz, for sending me down an Internet rabbit hole. It's always an educational experience when that happens. Anyway, according to the literature, there are several transport mechanisms within cells (at least within eukaryotic cells). The most important two are...
1. The cytoskeletal proteins within a cell act as a framework for the cell, but they also directionally move proteins along their filaments (microtubules) using dynein and kinesin as "motor" proteins. In the kinesin entry below, it shows the kinesin protein "walking" its payload along a microtubule.
2. Then we've got vesicular transport through the external membrane of the cell, but vesicular transport is also involved in carrying proteins from the ER-Golgi Transport. Vesicles bud off from the ER exit sites and carry proteins to the Golgi along the microtubule filaments mentioned above. These "sacks" of proteins are moved between the EF and Golgi apparatus along the microtubule filaments by powered along by Dynein and Kinesin.
Are people socialist or libertarian about certain domains for mostly ideological reasons or empirical reasons?
I'm mostly interested in the domains of, say prison construction/administration, or water supply and sewage sanitation and maintenance, or 911 emergency response services, or firefighting, or nursing homes for the not very wealthy.
Do you have strong views about whether these should be public or private, and did you mostly come to your views by some kind of first-principles reasoning (economic, philosophical) that such things would be more effectively/efficiently/justly administered through the public/private space, or did you experience or read comparative studies that things done one way turned out very well and things done the other way turned out poorly, and come to your views by such experience/studies?
As a test case, I wonder how empirically revisable your commitments are. if you're a libertarian and there was some town that had some kind of public nursing home facility that was doing pretty well, paid by local taxes, would that be fine, or would we have to privatize it because its just better if it were owned and managed for profit?
Or if you're a socialist, and there was a town where all the water is owned by and bought from a for-profit company, but it was working fine for that town, would we have to make it public because that's just better?
I think I'm mostly libertarian, based on the sense that I appear to agree with most of the positions of other people who call themselves libertarian, but not all of them. I also notice that I am contingently (mostly) libertarian, as opposed to necessarily so; if I encountered a situation where libertarian methods would appear to lead to worse outcomes than some other methods, I would prefer the latter (although I admittedly would check carefully - my heuristics have led me back to libertarianism more often than to some alternative, and the alternatives mostly involve a specific domain or two).
One of the more bedrock assumptions I make is that human beings - so far, the entities I've decided to care most about - possess incentives which make them more likely to behave in certain ways than in others. These incentives are informed in part by base instincts (same as animals, and arguably plants), and in part by reasoning from sensory data.
So far, I've benefited from reading David Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_, as well as his blog, and now, his Substack. (Friedman has also commented here before, and hosts SSC meetups.) TMoF argues for anarcho-capitalism, a radical way to organize economics (by Friedman's own characterization), but more importantly, it does so from the same assumption I use - that humans possess incentives and act on them. (It's also not a tribal polemic. Friedman himself has made arguments against libertarianism, while also identifying as one.) TMoF provides shortcuts to many arguments from incentives, which is useful even if you don't come away convinced to be ancap yourself.
I believe a great many currently public institutions could be privatized and lead to a net benefit - people would be generally better off. If I believed they wouldn't be, I wouldn't support privatizing the institution in question. If I believed they would be better, but only slightly, I would say so, and also point out the low margin and the need to consider how long the benefit would take to pay for the transition.
For example, firefighting might benefit from privatization in much the same way any privatization would: it aligns the incentives of people who want fires to be put out if they start, and of people who want to trade the service of putting out such fires for other things they want. People who want fires put out also want to pay as little for that service as they can get away with; people who want to provide that service want to charge as much as they can manage, and keep its own costs low. A public fire fighter, then, might lobby for a greater share of taxes, while buying the bare minimum of equipment and training necessary to persuade the people who allocate tax revenue will believe he is doing his job. The most efficient way to do this is not to put out all fires everywhere, but rather to put out fires in the most affluent places (particularly the homes and workplaces of the people most likely to complain to the people in charge of tax allocation, as well as nearby natural areas), and if necessary, also have ready explanations for why this or that fire was impossible to put out. Meanwhile, it also incentivizes public firefighters to justify high pay by citing the cost of quality equipment and amenities, but not to try reduce the cost of the service - especially if it's cheaper to just claim that some fires are too difficult to put out quickly. Given that a public firefighter typically has a monopoly on the service, there is no danger of a rival service proving him wrong.
OTOH, putting out fires also incurs noticeable risk, and is sometimes unavoidable - a firefighter who's never seen doing anything, except perhaps justifying why the latest fire was too difficult for him to fight, is very likely to be defunded. At the same time, it's a heroic task; a firefighter looks good when doing it. This is good news for taxpayers, as it selects for people who can competently put out at least some of the fires that start, and who like looking heroic by risking their lives. This means that even a public firefighter will do his job at least some of the time, and possibly even in less affluent areas. Putting out fires also makes people feel good about themselves (provided they didn't start them), so the occupation also selects for people who genuinely want to protect against property damage and lost lives.
For these reasons, it seems to me that privatizing firefighting would be good, to the extent that it motivates people to put out fires more efficiently. At the same time, the gains might be small, given the incentives already present to fight at least some of them. Whether this balance ultimately favors privatization may depend on local factors, such as whether someone lives in a wetland with little flammable material, or a richer neighborhood adjacent to an area known for wildfires.
I feel like the reasoning above should predict we would have more buildings burning down in the slums than is actually the case and that this should cause you to reexamine your assumptions.
Admittedly, one thing I meant to cover above was the capability of fires to spread; it suggests people have an incentive to fight fires in not only their own neighborhoods, but in adjacent ones. But this applies to both private and public frameworks. It also incentivizes people to put up firebreaks or live and work in more isolated areas if that would be cheaper than paying for some share of firefighting in adjacent areas (which in turn depends on how likely fires are to start in those areas). It also incentivizes people to build structures out of less flammable materials, again, when more affordable than prevention and fighting.
All of this suggests that, indeed, less affluent neighborhoods would be expected to see more damage from fire (measured in area, not wealth lost), and in fact, I believe this is the case. The precise difference in area is not clear, and I expect it to not be grossly disproportionate, and also to be dominated by other factors in many cases.
> Are people socialist or libertarian about certain domains for mostly ideological reasons or empirical reasons?
I am moderately leaning towards how I think my in-group thinks. I am in it for empirical reasons, but I can say with some certainty, that my out-group is heavily skewed by ideological reasons.
> As a test case ...
yes. In theory I would update my priors every time new evidence is presented. In practice I will find some reason why "that" specific example is not relevant for the issue at large.
One big issue I haven't seen mentioned explicitly is systemic robustness. When something is government-provided, the government becomes a single point of failure for it; the more things are provided by the same government, the more easily everything can go to shit simultaneously (applicability to current events is left as an exercise for the reader).
This should also lead to the conclusion that it's fine for a city state to be pretty totalitarian, whereas a large empire with scores or hundreds of millions of inhabitants should be more liberal/decentralized.
I always take everything back to first principles and moral intuitions, its probably a side effect of having my earliest higher education centered around Plato. The world is extremely complicated, and for any given system there are a thousand trade-offs and unintended consequences. Since my priors are all heavily grounded in a lot of debate about values and consistency, real world examples either for or against any particular point tend not to move the needle as much, although if evidence is overwhelming, I will of course go back to the drawing board.
I consider myself libertarian-leaning. It's a combination of both, depending on the subject at hand. For example, my opinions on UBI are purely ideological, since I'm not aware of anyone actually testing something like that. My opinions on the government vs private sector doing things in general is based on both, but the empirical parts are admittedly hearsay. I haven't actually seen studies on exactly how much the government spends, but I always here it's a lot, and it makes sense that it would be.
Also, I'd like to add that it's only ideological in the sense of theories about how the economy and such works, and not deontology where I think only a certain kind of government is ethical.
> if you're a libertarian and there was some town that had some kind of public nursing home facility that was doing pretty well, paid by local taxes, would that be fine, or would we have to privatize it because its just better if it were owned and managed for profit?
If it's cost-effective, then I'd want it to keep existing, but it would be better if there was a system where if someone set up a private nursing home that's better and costs the same, people could just go there and have the government pay them instead.
Here's my version of the question: Does anyone think that their preferred system is worse to live in, but should be done for ideological reasons? That it's immoral for people to not own what they create, and this will lead to a capital dystopia but a moral victory? Or that property is theft, and Communism is the only moral form of government, even though it will lead to everyone being poor? People often give ideological arguments for why a form of government is moral that's completely separate from it being effective, but do they ever really hold to that?
I studied economics in college and that gave me the strong philosophical belief that most things are better off in the private sector, except 1) natural monopolies like utilities, 2) goods with lots of positive externalities that are hard to capture, like nursing homes where the clients can rarely pay enough for the value they provide. I then went to work for a public utility and after 10 years of seeing the evidence of public and private utilities in action, I generally stand by the philosophical opinion with the important caveat that bad people (evil or incompetent) serving a public good will be bad and good people (beneficent and competent) in a private utility will be good. So the economic incentives tend to push in one direction, but actual humans in the mix can resist that pressure.
So for me personally, the philosophy has stuck and been, at most, informed and tweaked by the data. I don't like to think I'm obstinate here, and can think of examples where I changed my mind about things due to data (health research comes to mind). So my justification is that big complicated systems like government are so heard to get good data on - experimentation not being possible really - that empiricism is deeply ineffective. For big systems philosophy is more likely to lead to truth - assuming it's properly rigorous itself. I think many people's "philosophy" falls short though - ex. libertarianism, if you really read up the key philosophers - likely believes in a lot more state intervention than people would want due to starting state inequality breaking it's assumptions.
I'm noticing some variation in the kind of private ownership and I'm not sure its only a matter of good or bad people. Private equity's acquisition of some of these, for example, don't look good on any dimension. Waste Management or Athens picking up municipal garbage disposal contracts, no problem.
I think one of the reasons is that water is too mobile for its ownership to be tracked the same way as, say, land. If I own a lake and put something in it to make more edible plants grow for the fish there, that's nominally permissible; if that thing I added interacts with the soil to make something that leaches into the drinking water of people downstream, that's nominally wrong - but not obvious. There's an argument that I ought to own the water in that lake, but it's hard to legislate what should happen if that water moves elsewhere of its own accord. Any law that prevents harm on consistent and strict principle would prevent any of us from doing anything, since we're all in each other's event cones.
A similar argument exists for air.
I think government manages to provide water because everyone largely understands how hard it is to track ownership, and also is largely satisfied with the scheme their government ultimately came up with. But I notice this is likely only possible because most people do not know exactly how their government is making water decisions, or do not know of an obviously better way. If, for example, everyone was perfectly aware of exactly who uses how much water in California, there might be a movement to burn down all the almond farms.
It's an interesting distinction between a government subsidizing and/or protecting farmers, which is pretty common and possibly suboptimal, as compared to supplying food, which is relatively rare and has some possibilities for disaster.
In extreme cases (the Holodomor), if the government doesn't like you, you're likely to die. In less extreme cases (Egypt, I think) people don't have good alternatives to government-supplied food, and if the government decides to raise prices, there are food riots.
I do think it's true that central planning (which is not the same as state ownership) tends to work less well when the value of the goods being produced is more subjective (i.e. dependent on individual preference) and less objective (dependent on clear metrics).
Like, state run oil companies or copper mines tend to work fine- state run women's fashion boutiques, not so much. Water would be more in the first category. (Hungary did fine exporting wine, but they combined a fair amount of market and semi-market pricing into their model of communism).
I agree, but I wouldn't overstate the problems with governments providing food, either.
The Soviets' chronic issues with their agricultural sector (which persisted after the last actual famine in 1948, though there were no more famines) stemmed in part from poor policy decisions, partly for dumb ideological reasons and partly for short term political reasons. Most of the other Eastern European countries did a much better job with agricultural production though. It's been a while since I looked at the contemporary CIA statistics, but IIRC their estimates were that in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary the state agricultural sector was of comparable productivity to the private or cooperative plots. Hungary and Czechoslovakia in particular were quite agriculturally productive and Hungary was a major agricultural exporter.
The Soviets' problems with food production were largely because 1) food prices were too low, 2) agricultural wages were too low, and 3) investment in rural communities was too low, which are, again, dumb and destructive policy choices but I don't think are a necessary component of socialism or communism.
My theory is that having each company set up their own network to pipe water to people's homes would both be very expensive and ultimately reliant on the government to give them permission to put those pipes in the ground.
Food isn't a natural monopoly. It doesn't require digging in land you don't own. Anyone can make food.
I agree. I think governments could potentially be similarly good at providing food, if it was a single, simple kind of food paste or something - as is basically the case with water. The government doesn't have to provide apple juice so you don't die of thirst, but it would have to provide a varied and minimally appealing diet to ensure you don't starve. The second problem seems fundamentally harder the first.
Imo almost everyone thinks they're empirical, but only a minority is even remotely being fair when evaluating such experiences/studies. Sometimes, unfortunately, even with good reasons.
On the topic at hand, I certainly lean libertarian, but imo one general issue is that large and complex organizations can hide a lot of inefficiency, waste and general dysfunction, and that in absence of proper incentives and cleaning house it just accumulates forever. Especially complexity can be a toxic feedback loop unto itself.
Governmental institutions tend to be the very largest and most complex, lack incentives by default and almost never clean house, so they're often hardest hit. But plenty of large private organizations can be pretty fucked up, too. Sometimes even small ones, like some charities getting a default money stream based on a nice-sounding name and good vibes, without anyone checking whether they actually do anything.
I'm libertarian about most things but the size and makeup of a state definitely matters regarding my opinion(s) of how a given state should be run. I would happily change my mind if it was proven that the other way was better and my views are mostly based on economic reasoning.
My guess is most people are empirical on the issues that don’t have a tribal component and status/social plus empirical on tribal issues like healthcare and schools. And then some things (roads) are a function of it being way simpler to think about being public, so that’s the default
I'm more empirical about it - I think the state should run more things in places it runs well (e.g. in America I think the state should double down on brightline, maybe even help set up some competitors, since Amtrak and cahsr are such a mess; in Sweden it makes sense to have government just run all the services).
That said, there are limits - social housing is mostly worse than market rate housing even in places like Sweden with famously efficient governments, and running transit requires some direct state management even in America.
isn't social housing worse largely because it tends to attract, e.g. unemployed pr marginally employed people who can't afford market rate housing? The problem then would be with the residents, and the job market, not with the quality o the housing.
That depends on the area, but often the quality of the housing itself is fine (as wasser points out about Sweden) in places where it's more common. The issue is that it's still just a worse way to provision housing, with endless waitlists and lotteries or applications and much less control over your preferences of where you want to live (and these parts seem universal, even in places where the housing itself is nice).
Not sure what they meant by it being worse than market-rate housing. The actual housing in social housing in Sweden is pretty great, and market-rate rental housing is generally worse, since it's mostly a black market (because rent control applies to most apartments). The problem is that to get an apartment in an attractive area, you have to wait in line for decades (and you even have to wait in line for years to get one in a no-go zone in Stockholm), and once you've gotten one, you're incentivized not to move even if your needs change, since moving means forfeiting a valuable rental contract.
I definitely don't know much about Sweden! I also don't know that state-subsidized housing developments in the US are worse than comparable market rate once- that's the conventional wisdom, but the CW is very often wrong. I'm just sayng that *even if it was true*, it's quite possible that the state-subsidized apartments are worse for reasons entirely separate from them being state subsidized. Any community with high levels of unemployment is going to suck, because unemployment and underemployment are really terrible for people.
Most Swedes disagree that the government should run all the services. E.g. about 30% of high school students in Sweden attend a privately owned school, and even the party formerly known as the communist party doesn't want to abolish the voucher system (they just want to just regulate it much more).
Yeah sorry, I should have specified "public transportation services" there; like with housing, even a more competent government has areas I don't want it to fully (or sometimes even partially) manage.
Ah, sorry about the misunderstanding. But my impression is that the deregulation of railway traffic in Sweden has also largely been a success (I read somewhere that it's the most deregulated such system in the world), resulting in lower prices and higher passenger satisfaction. Currently, only the party formerly known as the communist party wants the government to take back control over all railway traffic.
So that's interesting. My main source of reading this has been about transit construction, where Alon Levy has pointed out that Scandinavian systems have been outsourcing more of the planning to consultants in recent years and as a result have lost their ability to build more cost effectively than the rest of Europe.
But also on regulations - worth noting there's a difference between deregulation and privatization (and they can often go together). Deregulation is about how many rules there are to make things harder (and can apply to the government itself), privatization is whether the agency running the trains is the government itself or a private company (sometimes, like in Singapore, it's an odd mix).
I read some article saying we should consider it deregulation rather than privatization because the government didn't get rid of its train company – it just started allowing other companies to bid for using the tracks. One thing about deregulation, though, is that it also requires some skill on the part of government, as was demonstrated by the failure that was the British deregulation/privatization of railway traffic, which happened around the same time as the Swedish one.
I don't know much about the construction/maintenance side, but I think I'd rather look at it from a "firms vs markets" perspective (which a lot of dispassionate analysis has gone into) than a "governments vs markets" perspective (which I think people generally find hard to think dispassionately about), because the tradeoffs seem identical to me as when a firm decides whether to do something in-house or to outsource it.
I wrote a substack piece a few days ago about how the US military did biological weapons testing (specifically dumping Cadmium on St. Louis and Minneapolis) during the 1950s, and maybe this had some long term heath consequences. Unfortunately finding health incidence data going back that far is hard, even when the Rochester Epidemiological Project exists. Does anyone have any advice navigating the IRB system to find such data?
Here are some sources and avenues to explore for historical data on population health (deaths, births, diagnoses, causes of death, disability diagnoses) in St. Louis, MO, and Minneapolis, MN, from 1940 to 1980:
St. Louis, MO
Missouri Vital Statistics Reports
The Missouri Department of Social Services provides historical statistics, including births, deaths, and population data, in archived reports like the Missouri Vital Statistics 1980. These reports may include data from earlier decades as well.
Access here
Missouri Census Data Center (MCDC)
The University of Missouri offers historical data on population changes, including births, deaths, and migration for St. Louis.
MCDC Historical Data
City of St. Louis Health Reports
The City of St. Louis provides access to local health assessments and statistical reports. While recent data is emphasized, historical trends may also be available.
Health Reports and Data - St. Louis
Federal Reserve Data (FRED)
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains historical population data for the city, which includes information derived from Census data and other demographic trends.
Resident Population Data
Minneapolis, MN
Minnesota Center for Health Statistics (MCHS)
MCHS provides access to vital statistics, including births, deaths, leading causes of death, and disability data at the state and county levels.
Minnesota Health Statistics
Annual Summary of Minnesota Health Statistics
This publication includes data on fertility rates, causes of death, and mortality trends from 1940 to 1980. It may also have county-level insights for Minneapolis.
Annual Summaries
University of Minnesota Libraries – Health Data Sources
The University of Minnesota offers access to interactive vital statistics queries, including historical birth and death data for the state and counties.
Health Statistics and Data Sources
FamilySearch – Minnesota Census Data
FamilySearch contains population schedules from the 1940 census, which can provide supplementary information on births, deaths, and disabilities in Minneapolis.
Minnesota Census Data
Recommendations
To access detailed data:
Check state public health departments for archived health reports.
Use the National Archives for vital statistics from the Census Bureau.
Explore university libraries for digitized historical reports and records.
Another interesting historical tidbit is that Lawrence Livermore labs accidentally distributed treated sewer sludge that was contaminated with plutonium to the surrounding community In the 1960s and 1970s. The public was allowed to use the sewer sludge as a soil amendment for their yards. After several decades of study, state and federal authorities were not able to find any health impacts.
This is maybe pedantic, but wouldn't that be chemical weapons testing? My understanding was that biological weapons meant specifically living organisms such as viruses, bacteria, or maybe fungi.
-edit- ok, after reading a bit, I see why you chose that. They were interested in how biological weapons would work (apparently anthrax) and chose a non-biological agent to simulate it. From a pedantic perspective I would still maybe phrase it differently since they weren't testing actual biological weapons. They were doing research that was relevant to and inspired by biological weapons, but not actually testing them. I dunno, admittedly a grey area.
I'll take off my pedantic hat now. Interesting (and horrifying!) bit of history either way.
Scott had a long piece a few months back to the effect that Covid didn’t come from the lab. But that theory seems more popular than ever (apparently just about every intelligence agency on earth believes it). Did something change? Did new evidence emerge?
Yeah I find this confusing too. Not an expert but I found the rootclaim debate very convincing. Is that wrong? Take the argument that the genetic sequence of the furin cleavage site was a) unlike any human-engineered version ever on record and b) likely the result of a frame-shift mutation. Am I wrong in thinking that this is a semi slam-dunk? What's the strongest lab-leak response to this?
It was noticed very early in the pandemic by Anand et al. that ENaC is cleaved by furin very similarly to how SARS2's spike gene is cleaved. See figure 1 here.
The paper linked before shows the professional confluence between UNC researchers. It's likely that Baric knew about the ENaC work when the FCS insertion was proposed in the DEFUSE grant. This idea was studied extensively by his colleagues.
Thanks. Ok, so the first paper establishes that it was understood that nonstandard sequences were compatible with furin, though not the exact sequence found in Covid. It still feels like a bit of a leap to go from that to someone inserting a novel cleavage site. And hey, maybe that was the point of the experiment. It still feels more parsimonious to me to think that a researcher interested in gain-of-function would use something already known to cause gain-of-function, but I hear you that this makes it at least seem plausible.
What about the frame-shift mutation? That feels like the fingerprint of random mutation, not human design.
No, no new information emerged. I'm not sure why intelligence agencies should be the go-to source for this sort of assessment. I doubt if the CIA and DIA have virologists and biochemists on staff — maybe — but most virologists, biochemists, and epidemiologists say the genomic evidence points to its zoonotic origin — plus the epidemic spread outward from the Huanan market (which is ten miles away and across the river from the WIV). Yes, it's a coincidence that WIV is in the same city where the outbreak happened, but Wuhan happens to also be the center of the wild animal trade in China.
As for intelligence agency assessments, US Intel agencies have a long history of bad assessments. They failed to predict the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, they made the mistaken assessment that Iraq had WMDs (2003), and they predicted that Ukraine would be conquered by Russia within a couple of weeks.
"I doubt if the CIA and DIA have virologists and biochemists on staff"
The Department of Energy, one of the intelligence agencies favoring Lab Leak, actually does have virologists and biochemists on staff(*). The CIA and DIA almost certainly have virologists and biochemists on retainer as consultants, to help assess intelligence reports in that area, and they probably have the ability to read the email of Chinese virologists and biochemists who are better positioned to understand the origins of COVID than anyone in the United States but may not be entirely candid in their public statements about same.
Dismissing the assessments of the intelligence community out of hand, is simply foolish.
* Because "Department of Energy" mostly means "Department of Making Sure our H-Bombs go Boom on Demand, plus some other stuff to greenwash that unpleasantness", and the set of National Laboratories that do nuclear-weapons work also got tasked with some of the biological and chemical weapons stuff as well.
Granted, the assessment that I linked below doesn't mention the case cluster around the Huanan Market. An epidemiologist would've pointed that out immediately. This fact was known publicly by late January 2020 and confirmed by subsequent investigative follow-ups by April 2020. That's why I didn't think they were consulting with scientists. OTOH, they mentioned that they didn't put any credence on the idea the virus was engineered, which suggests that someone was looking at the evidence presented by the genome.
From the CBS News report of on the change in the CIA's position...
"The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory, according to an assessment released Saturday that points the finger at China even while acknowledging that the spy agency has "low confidence" in its own conclusion."
And Reuters echoed that puzzling wording.
WTF does that mean? Does "originated from a lab" mean it was human-engineered? Was it a sample of a wild virus that escaped? Was it released on purpose? Was it released by accident? And how can they say "most likely" when they have "low confidence" in their conclusions?
But the CIA still hasn't released the text of its January 2025 assessment regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. These news stories seem to have come from a press conference, and our moronic press corps either didn't know what questions to ask or the CIA refused to answer them in a clear way.
Also did they consult with the virology community before they made that statement?
BTW, the assessment is still classified. Why? Are they protecting HUMINT sources? If so, do they have low confidence in the reliability of those sources?
The assessment seems to still be classified, and yes, that's probably to protect sources. But not necessarily HUMINT sources; e.g. pretty much everything that comes from SIGINT and IMINT satellites stays classified to protect the capabilities of those assets.
The "low confidence" could be in the source, or in the interpretation of what the source indicates. But note that "low confidence" still means "probably true", just not "smoking-gun proof". As a very rough guideline, when I'm translating IC-speak to Bayesian statistics, I use:
> WTF does that mean? Does "originated from a lab" mean it was human-engineered?
A scientist down-thread confidently tells me that the CIA hypothesis is that it wasn't bioweapon engineering and just accidental leaking.
> And how can they say "most likely" when they have "low confidence" in their conclusions?
There's no contradiction here. Without getting into the specific claims, just those two terms, they have several theories with different amounts of likelihood, and one of them has the most likelihood. But there are large error bars.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on covid, only someone who has looked into it occasionally. In the case of the post below, I described exactly what I did - and it's not particularly comprehensive. You can (and should) do at least that much, too.
"We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon."
I don't know how related that is to the CIA. The dni.gov homepage is "OFFICE of the DIRECTOR of NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE", and seems to be a sort of umbrella organisation - of which the CIA is only one of 18 agencies/organisations.
So I guess there's still scope for the CIA itself to be very sure it's an escaped bioweapon. But if so - that's not what they're saying publicly, because other recent news articles say things like <<A spokesperson said that a "research-related origin" of the pandemic "is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting".>>
So if they're meaning 'escaped bioweapon' then they're understating their case rather.
Do you have a date for that document? I think this is from the previous round of reports that the Biden administration had the DNI put together. I could be wrong about that, though. There's another more detailed assessment, here (below) that I think was released in 2023...
Are you sure it's not just the CIA and the Germany's foreign intelligence service?
With both having low confidence in this conclusion.
I checked the top four pages of a google search for "covid from lab intelligence agency", and those seemed to be it, apart from a couple from dni.gov - I'm not sure what that is exactly, but they report no consensus, and I'm guessing probably involves the same people as the CIA.
It's kind of frustrating that the 'positive' claims get much more press than the negative ones, which gives people generally the impression it's settled that way.
But last time I checked the consensus in scientific circles seems to be in favour of a natural origin.
It seems these decisions towards lab-leak put more weight on evidence of the possibility of gain-of-function experiments being carried out, that is, conspiracy stuff, while those against generally prioritise scientific data.
Speaking as a scientist ... you really shouldn't trust "scientific consensus" on this one. The loudest people with the strongest opinion who shape the official consensus tend to be deeply compromised. Tbh, this sadly goes for most politically relevant questions. Science functions best when it's as far as possible from current-day politics.
Also speaking as a scientist (and having read a number of the papers on the subject), you probably shouldn't trust the CIA on that either - particularly not if you're worried about organisations being politically compromised.
Shouldn't that be "speaking as a CIA agent...", if you're speaking to the credibility of the CIA?
OK, we probably don't have one of those here, at least not who's willing to admit it. But I'm both peripherally a scientist and peripherally a member of the intelligence community, and I think I have a pretty good idea where the bounds of trust are on both sides of that fence.
In this area, you should listen to both the scientists and the spooks. If they disagree, you should almost certainly not hold *any* position on the matter with high confidence.
Sure, but I hardly know anyone foolish enough to really trust a intelligence agency, so that kind of goes without saying. On the other hand, *scientific consensus* is often treated as this slam-dunk argument - how can you be against it, what are you, a crank? - that it just isn't when it comes to political topics.
Consider 2 large cosmopolitan cities of roughly 10M people, Wuhan and NYC. In Wuhan we're trying to figure out where the virus emerged, because we don't know. What's interesting about NYC is that *we do know* where the virus emerged, and it was clearly at the airports where people flew in. Do early NYC cases cluster around the airports there?
No. The earliest known hospitalizations were people who lived in Westchester, not near the airports.
"Low confidence" in a lab leak doesn't mean "we don't think it was a lab leak."
It means "we think it was a lab leak, but only like 60/40."
> gain-of-function experiments being carried out, that is, conspiracy stuff
Gain of function is normal and sometimes prudent research. It can be done completely benevolently.
"Lab leak" runs the gamut from "the Chinese virus deliberately engineered as something never before seen in nature as a bioweapon to be unleashed upon the Western world" all the way down to "they had this virus at the lab, because it was a dangerous virus discovered nearby and so they naturally were studying it, and just weren't careful enough and someone at work got sick from it."
//Gain of function is normal and sometimes prudent research. It can be done completely benevolently.//
I am fully aware, having done such experiments myself.
The conspiracies I was talking about was the Chinese system covering up things which someone in authority thinks makes China look bad - which is something everybody knows to happen.
The fact that sort of thing happened early in the outbreak has very little bearing on whether a lab-leak actually happened.
Also, the CIA position as widely reported online is that it thinks there was (probably) an accidental lab leak, and definitely not bioweapon engineering. In the context of this discussion, you might as well stick to that, everything beyond that is kind of irrelevant.
I think they still have split opinions? Enough of them believe it that lab leak proponents can easily pick the three most confident to make it sound very convincing, but a lot of them are on the fence (like the CIA)
I'm sort of confused by people's continued interest in this topic. Several things seem relatively obvious to me:
1. We are never going to know for certain (barring the possibility that it did come from the lab and the Chinese government knows and has the evidence and chooses at some point the future to release it)
2. It is certainly *possible* that it came from a lab, and if it didn't it's certainly possible that, barring large changes to the kinds of research we do, that a different disease in the future could
3. Our institutions basically lied to us about the level of certainty we should have had early on in the pandemic, and treated people who even questioned the official line as pariahs and cranks in a way that was pretty damning for their credibility and trustworthiness as well as (in my opinion) probably working to unconstitutionally undermine people's first amendment rights through "jawboning".
None of these things seem to hinge on whether or not COVID *did* actually come from a lab. And also, in my opinion, the actions we should take also don't hinge on whether or not it did. The fact that it *could* have, and that future diseases also might, seems like plenty, and both of those seem to be relatively obviously true.
I believe you're largely right that the actions we should take are the same either way. Continuing to talk about it makes it more likely that Americans will want to:
1. Maintain restrictions on GOF research
2. Think of the Chinese as liars
3. Distrust public health authorities
#1 is definitely good, #2 is sensible, and #3 is necessary to force those authorities to rebuild public trust. At some point in the future, we probably would like the PH establishment to have some trust back, because right now if we had a new pandemic I don't think they could get a critical mass of people to do ANYTHING about it. Unless I saw people turning into zombies around me, I would not be inclined to take any PH mouthpiece seriously, and would be highly suspicious of any NPIs suggested and very unlikely to comply with them. It would probably do them a world of good right now, whether they really believe it or not, to embrace the lab leak theory, apologize, admit their mistakes, and vow to do better. Covid was pretty mild compared to the types of pandemic that might still happen, and burning all their credibility on it to maximize compliance for NPIs of questionable effectiveness was a poor strategic choice. Somehow they've skated by without any real reckoning, learned no lessons from this, and are still going to be yelling about "science!" fruitlessly as nobody listens to them in 2032 when we're ravaged by some AI-created superflu.
THe media, the CDC, and more, early on, were, within the rules of Bounded Distrust [1], trying their hardest to push the idea that it absolutely didn't come out of a lab and to think it might have was both misinformation and racist. Here is just one example, a CNN article written about an interview that Fauci gave:
Again, note that, the very specific things he is saying are (as I understand the state of evidence) true:
>is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated …
We have no reason to believe that COVID was to any degree genetically engineered, so the statement is true. But he was using those true facts to discredit a related, but _very importantly different_ hypothesis: that it was a naturally occurring virus that had been studied in a lab and leaked from the lab.
That second one, there remains to this day a great deal of uncertainty about, and there was absolutely not good reasoning for official sources to be discrediting.
I think it's fair to decide (as Scott does in the Bounded Distrust article) to not call this kind of thing a lie. I'm sure that there were statements made by officials that were less careful, and would would cross the line that I don't care enough to go and dig up. But even this careful non-lie is, in my opinion, well into misleading territory, to the extent that one should decided to deeply distrust the person making the statement. But that's an opinion, and you are free to make your own judgment on it.
You bring up bounded distrust, but I think a better description of the US public health officials' behavior falls into Herbert Simon's idea of bounded rationality — especially when the key players were publicly sharing their discourse in real-time — including their admissions of ignorance, puzzlements, and speculations — on Twitter and in preprints. The media did a lousy job covering the science, though (but what do you expect from a bunch of scientifically uninformed journalists and headline writers?).
But at the risk of being tiresome, I'll post this timeline again. Here's how the lab leak conspiracy theory got started. Spoiler alert: it wasn't scientists or intelligence agencies that started the bioweapons and/or lab leak narrative.
> The whole lab leak story was originally cooked up by the rightwing commentariat and took a life of its own with little in the way of supporting evidence—scientific or documentary. And, yes, it was a xenophobic response—just like all the plagues since the Black Death have been blamed on the malevolence of others. Here's the timeline...
> On 26 Jan 2020, the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization, published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program,” which immediately gets picked up by global media. This is the earliest reference to a lab leak in the public media.
> 31 Jan 2020: Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. This got lots of media play until other scientists pointed out that these gene sequences are found in lots of non-HIV viruses. But claims continued to circulate in the conspiracy world for years afterward that HIV genes were purposely incorporated into SARS-CoV-2 as part of the Chinese Biowarfare program.
> 1 Feb 2020: Anthony Fauci sends out an email calling a meeting of senior scientists after he has a phone call with Kristian Andersen. Andersen raised some concerns that some features of the virus may indicate lab origins... ADDITIONAL NOTE: I believe it was the really unusual CGG codon pair at the Furin cleavage site that may have raised his suspicions, but I got that indirectly from other side conversations on Twitter.
> 2 Feb 2020: There's a meeting between Andersen and key players. Andersen's concerns are addressed. Lab Origin was shot down, but the Leakers are already hyper-vocal on social media... ADDITIONAL NOTE: it came out in the following weeks that the mysterious Furin cleavage site didn't show any splicing scars from CRISPR or any other signs of tampering with known techniques.
> 15 Feb 2020: Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. makes the claim on Fox News Sunday Morning program that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab.
> 17 Feb 2020: Andersen submitted a preprint of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" where he stated, "the virus is not a laboratory product". It was revised and published 17 March 2020. Andersen's public change of opinion is attacked by Leakers as a sign of a bigger cover-up. Andersen is chased off Twitter because of threats and libels made against him.
> 17 Feb 2020: Richard Ebright and others push back on Cotton's claims in the Washington Post. He wrote: "There's absolutely nothing in the genome sequence that indicates the virus was engineered. The possibility this was deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded." Later on, Ebright moved into the Leaker camp, and he has since called for a ban on all GoF research. However when I asked him why he changed his mind from his previous opinion, he blocked me on Twitter.
> 19 Feb 2020: 27 scientists publish a statement in The Lancet to "condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" They write that data overwhelmingly shows the "coronavirus originated in wildlife." Later it comes out that Peter Daszak organized this letter, and Daszak is then accused of a conflict of interest because his EcoHealth Alliance procured grants for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and put proposals before NIH and DoD to GoF experiments with wild viruses. The funded grants that were shared with WIV were only for virus sampling surveys in Horseshoe Bats. And no CoV with the SARS-CoV-2 cleavage site was ever listed in the WIV database of viruses.
> 16 April 2020: CNN reports US officials were investigating the claim the virus was released from the lab accidentally as scientists were studying infectious diseases (intelligence officials said they didn't believe the virus is man-made or developed as a bioweapon.)
> 16 April 2020: Fox News reports that anonymous sources claim "patient zero" worked at the laboratory. The lab employee was accidentally infected before spreading the disease across Wuhan. When asked about this, President Trump says: "more and more we're hearing the story". Over the next few weeks, anonymous sources repeat this claim to the WSJ and Forbes. The anonymous sources, later on, name three WIV researchers, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Zhu Yan as the patient(s) zero. But no evidence is presented that suggest they were ever infected or were hospitalized. Over a year passed, and on 19 November 2021, Michael Worobey, through genomic analysis from samples gathered from Wuhan hospitals, identified patient zero as a woman who worked in the Huanan Market. The media doesn't pay much attention.
> 21 April 2020. Trump gets more questions and says the theory "makes sense." Fauci pushes back. Tom Cotton writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, writing: "While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story."
> 1 May 2020: 1 May 2020: CNN reports that Trump said he's seen evidence of a lab leak. But that same day, the NYTimes reports that Mike Pompeo directed intelligence agencies to continue to look for lab leak evidence—which suggests that our intelligence agencies had no evidence to support a lab leak at that time.
So, yes, I think some of the players in this story were lying. But it wasn't scientists or public health officials.
"We are never going to know for certain (barring the possibility that it did come from the lab and the Chinese government knows and has the evidence and chooses at some point the future to release it." This literally happened in the Soviet Union.
And even then for purely self-interested reasons western scientists "investigated" and swore up and down the Anthrax was naturally occurring and said we must believe the Soviet scientists even though they're commies, etc.
I'm not at all ignoring that. I agree with you that, *if* they had such evidence, destroying it is most likely what they did. I was merely pointing out that we probably won't ever know for sure *unless* they kept it and it is therefore eventually released.
I personally just don't think it matters. None of my opinions or beliefs around disease risk and what society should do about it, or how I think about governments, institutions, and state power, would be greatly impacted either way.
About the only related thing that *would* cause a non-trivial change in my beliefs and opinions is if we found out that not only
A) it had a lab origin
and B) The Chinese government knew
but C) the *US Government* also knew at the time.
This last one would actually shift my opinions. I already think many institutions were lying about certainty and abusing their power for political reasons. But I think that they were operating under uncertainty and decided that pretending certainty was useful to them. To find out that that the pretended certainty was in contrast to the actual real knowledge of the opposite truth would be a big deal (for me), but I find that pretty unlikely.
I see the CIA changed their opinion to 'more likely than not', but also with 'low confidence'. I think it's still a perfectly reasonable thing to think given the evidence, but no one should have 100% confidence in their answer either way until a natural reservoir is found, which would be the only the way to get a conclusive answer.
You seem to hold 100% confidence that it was not a lab leak. Or else I'd expect you'd have noticed that there is another way to get a conclusive answer.
And what would that be? If it was a lab leak I'm sure China has scrubbed everything from everywhere that could prove it. The most that could happen is some scientist coming out and saying it was. I don't think you could call that 'conclusive' unless they had other data/info that corroborated their story.
You may be "sure" that China has scrubbed "everything", but you may be wrong about that. It is entirely plausible that e.g. some Chinese academic has secretly filed away a private copy of everything, or that the CIA has the whole thing but can't talk about it while the asset that delivered it is still in play, or that China had foreign partners in this enterprise who have their own records beyond China's ability to "scrub".
It is possible that documents conclusively proving that COVID was created in a laboratory will someday be publicly released, in exactly the way it is possible that samples from a natural reservoir predating 11/19 may someday be discovered. Or we may get neither of those things, ever, but it's strange that you would consider only one of them to be possible.
What consequences would forcible annexation of Greenland to the US have?
From Europe, I believe that the entire F-35 program would be toast in Europe, and NATO probably as well. That would just be a bridge too far, you cannot be allied to someone who acts aggressively towards you.
But it is not clear to me what the consequences in the US would be. Would a future Democratic White House give up the territory again or would they go "fuck some white men's tears, its is ours anyway"?
Trump can't fire congressmen. And it isn't clear that the United States Military will carry out an unprovoked invasion without a declaration of war, er, "congressional authorization for use of military force", even if the President does order it.
And I don't think Trump knows enough competent but spineless military officers to carry out the necessary restaffing.
It is my impression that the MAGA crowd doesn't yearn for another big war a la Iraq, but would be happy with some quickie which would result in almost 0 casualties, and Greenland unfortunately fits the bill.
What's the chance of China and Russia declaring war on the U.S. due to the annexation?
What would C&R accomplish by that?
1.- If Denmark doesn't react with force against the annexation, then NATO doesn't fracture/disappear. If C&R declare war, then every NATO country has to chose between: a) not helping the U.S. against C&R, thus probably bringing an end to NATO; b) helping the U.S. to keep C&R forces away from European invaded territory (Greenland). This includes NATO members Canada, Denmark and every neighbor of Denmark. Probable outcome is the break-up of NATO.
2.- Regarding Taiwan, I assume everyone is operating under the assumption that China is preparing a possible invasion, evaluating scenarios, trying to figure the best possible time, etc. If you don't know how your armed forces will perform in a real war (last time China went to war was in the 1980s), well, taking part in a real war might help to gauge how well prepared you are.
Open war, no, that's not how these things work. These are nuclear powers, those do proxy wars, and if an open war does develop (god forbid) it'll be over a flashpoint of much greater importance to both sides.
However, there will be recognition of a Greenlandic government-in-exile and targeted sanctions against specific US officials and companies. Maybe arms or volunteers to a resistance movement, if one develops.
A proxy war would be much less effective politically, I believe. A limited - only Greenlandic territory and territorial waters - war would be more effective as training and to drive a wedge between NATO members.
Taiwan is in China's sphere, as is Ukraine in Russia's. That's not to say that they own them or should, or anything concrete like that, but just that they're local and what happens there matters a lot to those countries.
Greenland could hardly matter less to China. It would be difficult to theorycraft a location that's further away both physically and in interests from anything China cares about. They wouldn't step in against the US for Greenland.
Russia has a good bit more interest, but it's still very little. And Russia wouldn't stand a chance against the US, and wouldn't want to try.
The EU might care enough, but they've got much better tools to dissuade the US from attacking, even with Trump running the show. I don't know that the EU would care if the US owned Greenland instead of Denmark, except how it went about getting it. Offering Denmark $100 billion to buy it would probably be perfectly fine by the EU.
Russia has absolutely no chance in a war, and would just be crushed in an instant. Meanwhile, China instead uses it as a pretext to annex other places they like (possibly but not necessarily up to and including Taiwan). They both fully support the idea that great powers should get to annex stuff and that international law shouldn't stop them.
While forcibly annexing Greenland would kill NATO as a transcontinental alliance, the notion that it would lead to Russia invading the Baltics is a massive reach. European NATO countries are still fairly credible as allies to each other (maybe a couple outliers like Hungary notwithstanding).
Given how poorly the war in Ukraine has gone for Russia, the prospect of fighting a war against even just the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany (which has troops stationed in the Baltic countries) is probably a losing proposition for Russia. Plus France, the UK, and Scandinavia, it’d be an obvious suicide mission for Russia.
I’m honestly surprised how many people still hold Russia in such high regard as an imminent military threat. 1940 Germany it is not. It’s taken them over 3 years to gain essentially no land in a war against a much smaller, much weaker, much poorer, not very well prepared country.
They certainly won't attack the Baltics overnight. They need to replenish their forces, and that may take up to ten years. Russian demography is atrocious.
That said, it turned out that the strongest weapon of the Russians is propaganda, they were able to sway tens of millions of people across the Western civilization to listen to them, and they now have a good foothold in the very White House. Hearing Witkoff parroting Russian talking points about Donbass verbatim was ghastly.
If the Baltics are to be conquered, the first and foremost preparation will be turning at least Germany and France neutral. Russia cannot hope to neuter the Poles, they hate Russian imperialism with passion. But Poland alone, or even in tandem with Finland, won't be in shape to defend the Baltics. And both Germany and France have a lot of people who will say "why die for Tallinn?"
God I hate reading this and nodding in total agreement. We, "The West", are weak and stupid. Our only hope really is that Russia implodes from within; anything short of that means they will walk all over us.
That's nonsense. Europe could crush Russia on their own. If the U.S. helps, it's downright trivial and everything is over in a couple of weeks. In a couple of years, Poland can defeat Russia on their own.
Russia has proven again and again just how godawful they are at fighting a war.
I like your optimism, but did you read Marian’s comment I agreed with? To the point, Europe certainly “could”, but… would it? The events of the last three years don’t leave me optimistic.
Nope, article 5 does not force anyone to enter the war, read it carefully. In practice, Europe would not wage war against the US.
I fully agree that the very idea is madness on steroids, and that the consequences would be stark, but neither France nor the UK (realistically the only two European countries capable of projecting power overseas) would defend Greenland against the US.
So according to your interpretation, what's the least thing the Europeans could do that fulfills "if such an armed attack occurs, each of them [...] will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area." ?
Yes, a shooting war is not very realistic, but I would expect, at the very least, dramatic economic and political sanctions. (I also wonder what would happen to the US military bases in Europe - could they be held hostage?)
I am not sure. Given how Europe usually works from the inside, I would expect at least a few countries to start licking Trump's boots immediately, with a vague hope to be allowed to pull off something similar against their own neighbors.
Hungary for one - they have a national trauma from the Trianon Peace Treaty and taking, say, Ruthenia from Ukraine would certainly please the local nationalists.
60 thousand people thinly spread on a vast unforgiving territory isn't a really good recipe for independence. At the very least, they would require some actual protecting military power, otherwise anyone (incl. Russia) could annex them again.
Denmark currently subsidizes Greenland to the tune of €17,000 per capita yearly. I doubt that anyone is going to be willing to take over the subsidy to independent Greenland, and without it, living standards of the Greenlanders will plummet.
The US has granted independence (again, formal independence anyway) to colonies before that are way less economically viable than Greenland (FS Micronesia, etc.) so clearly it can be done.
Greenlanders have voted pretty decisively for pro independence political parties (most of the major parties now are pro independence, the debate is fast vs. slow track to independence) so clearly they don't care about this stuff as much as you do.
"Clearly?" This is not so clear cut. SNP is strong in Scotland, but the independence movement still lost the referendum.
I would wait for an actual referendum before declaring anything to be sure and clear. Parties are a multi-faceted proxy, and voters vote for them without endorsing 100 per cent of their programs with absolute dedication.
Note that the referendum was in 2014, two years before the Brexit mess. One of the most effective messages against Scottish independence that may have just moved enough voters was "if we declare independence we lose EU membership". So they voted to stay, only to be taken out of EU anyway. It may have been very different if the referendum happened after Brexit.
I know, but even contemporary polls don't indicate a pro-independence majority.
I saw the dissolution of Czechoslovakia personally. I can tell you with confidence that if there was a referendum, it would have resulted in some sort of confederation instead. People like to play with big ideas, but once a serious discussion of all upsides and downsides begins, a lot of ordinary voters grow more conservative and don't rock the boat.
Splitting the country guarantees you high bills for all the necessary adaptations, but doesn't guarantee you better governance. Especially in the democratic world, the benefits aren't that great. It would be a different story if the seceding nation was subject to serious abuse from the dominant party (Ireland, Bangladesh, South Sudan etc.)
There are a number of advantages, though. Fishing and mining rights per capita, especially in a warmer future, would be insane. And you can do all those things that small island nations do - set up tax havens, low-inspection web hosting, and so on.
I'm sure they would make some mineral deal or something with the US if they went independent to get a sovereign wealth fund or something to pay out at least that much. Otherwise, yes, it would be very difficult for them to support themselves.
The US has given up territory in the past, and I think the next Democratic administration would be willing to give up Greenland to rekindle foreign alliances. What I think they wouldn't have the will to do is what's necessary to make it plausible to erstwhile allies that we won't have another administration that out of control again. So maybe if they think they can't recover the alliances anyway they would keep Greenland as a shitty consolation prize.
>What I think they wouldn't have the will to do is what's necessary to make it plausible to erstwhile allies that we won't have another administration that out of control again.
The *nice* and *legal* and *not rocking the boat* way to do this is to have a Constitutional convention where the South gets devolved to its own nation and the states that remain in the US adopt a parliamentary system of national government. (The parliamentary system might be enough "strong medicine" for the allies to give it another go, but making "letting go of the South" part of it is the only way to possibly get enough buy-in to have a Constitutional convention in the first place.)
It is unrealistic to expect the Greenlanders to vote themselves into the US. About 85 per cent are against it, and no campaign on X can sway such a lopsided ratio.
BTW the US last declared war in 1943. Everything since then are "kinetic military actions" etc. Even Russia still calls the war in Ukraine "special military operation". Declaration of war went out of fashion.
The EU wouldn't use nukes on the US over Greenland, so no WW3. The only person with authority to use nukes in the EU is the French president, and he made it clear that the French nuclear force only protects vital French interests.
The main question is what constitutes "vital French interests".
I understand their unwillingness to hard commitments in distant parts of Europe.
Also, presidents change, and, in a presidential system, that might mean a major pivot in policies (see also: US). If, hypothetically, Marine Le Pen wins the presidency, her concept of vital French interests may differ significantly from Macron's.
the NPR piece was suggesting that De Gaulle saw France's nuclear program as serving as a defensive umbrella for Western Europe in general, but maybe that was wrong.
Of course as I said re: China, France would also gain some international credibility and goodwill by posing as the defender of Greenlandic sovereignty- this is especially the case since both France and China are often resented for throwing their weight around and acting in a "neo imperiel" fashion.
An associated state isn't really "in the US", although it would allow Trump to boast on twitter about how he annexed Greenland, it wouldn't be the legal reality. For a start, they would be free to leave Associated State status once trump dies (I'm assuming trump is going to try to remain president for life, never mind the pesky issue banning thrid terms), and a sane administration is in power.
Yea, well, then, they'll just beef up security, and if necessary keep him secluded in Mar a Lago for four years (or eight, or 12, or however long the gods, or the devils, choose to keep his heart going) where he can issue executive orders over twitter to his heart's content.
At several times french presidents have mentioned that EU could be included in french interests. There is an ambiguity on this that is sort of maintained on purpose, but both Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande and Emmanuel Macron have at time hinted so. This said, I cannot see France using its nuclear weapon against the US over Greenland.
Greenland receives ~$650 Million in subsidies from Denmark ever year. The US could match that while only increasing the federal budget by 0.01%. They could multiple it by ten, or just double it and give every greenlander a one-time payment of $100,000 for an amount that is an effective rounding error.
The US doesn't have to do much to convince Greenland to vote for independence, since they already want that. What comes after is simply a matter of how sweet they are willing to make the deal to get 50% to vote to become an associated state, as the US can make any deal arbitrarily attractive with more money.
I wouldn't agree that everyone has a price, although more people do than a lot of people like to think. Even if they did, though, why would Greenlanders trust Donald Trump, of all people, to keep his promises?
Despite any of Trumps proclivities to outright lie, international treaties are still generally enforced. It's a long conversation as to how to make international agreements enforceable without an arbiter more powerful than both players, but it is usually a factor of pre-commitment. I.E. The US sending a billion dollars worth of aid before any independence vote, or simply an international treaty promising Greenland double the aid of Denmark should they become an associated state of America.
Trump has already used outright lies to "lawfully" avoid treaty obligations once. All he'd have to do is declare the deficit a "national security crisis" like he did with fentanyl or something and yank the aid.
Couldn't we use computer vision to improve gun accuracy? I was reading a story about NYC police firing on a suspect in a subway car recently, and hitting him but also 3 bystanders. Not meant to be critical of the police per se, and I've fired enough handguns to understand how difficult it is to be accurate.
My proposed idea would be for a scope/red dot to sit on top of a handgun or carbine. The user aims the weapon and sights a potential target. Pulling the trigger just means that the identified target is now 'locked', and the gun will release a stream of 6 or however many bullets *when it determines that the barrel is facing the now-locked in target and will result in a direct hit*. So if the user's hand moves the gun's minute of angle off of the target for a split second, the gun will simply stop firing- once their hand has moved the gun back onto the target, firing will resume. (Gun will probably need a big emergency stop button on the side for the user to hit, if needed). Basically the user is simply aiming the gun in the general direction of the target, and using computer vision and maybe lidar the gun's computer is taking care of shot selection. Doesn't solve overpenetration but should solve human aiming/fine motor control error, especially at handgun range.
Could this work? Isn't computer vision at the level now where this is realistic? Maybe not necessarily affordable I suppose
How does the AI tell the difference between an "innocent bystander" and a "potential target"? If it's possible for a bullet aimed (even poorly) at a legitimate target to hit an innocent bystander, then there must be innocent bystanders and legitimate targets standing pretty close to one another. If the gun is pointed vaguely towards both, what stops the AI from picking the innocent bystander and saying "yeah, that one, I'm obviously supposed to shoot that one and absolutely not the other guy"?
If the answer is the ineffably awesome infallibility of AI, then no, just no. This really isn't the sort of thing AIs are good at, and it is the sort of thing even moderately clever people are quite capable of bollixing them about.
I'm not sure I explained my concept properly. There's no 'AI' and there's no computer out there determining its own target. The user 'locks' 1 specific person by sighting them the scope on their face and pressing the trigger. Computer vision was advanced enough 12+ years ago to identify and stay with 1 person. If the scope doesn't continue to see the identified person in its sights, it doesn't fire
If the person can literally put the reticle on the intended target's face, then there's no need for the fancy electronics - just launch the bullet as soon as the shooter activates the "yes, this is what I want to shoot" control. Also known as the trigger. Assuming the sights are properly aligned, the bullet will go where the reticle is, which is the target.
The problem, is that people can't reliably put the reticle literally on the target in the stress and chaos of combat. Their choices often come down to "put the sights somewhere in the general vicinity of the target at hope that's good enough" or "wait until the stress and chaos are over and see if I haven't been shot myself by then".
The fancy electronics don't do anything helpful unless they can address the case where the reticle *isn't* on the target, and there are one or more innocent bystanders in the field of view as well as the target.
Imagine the targeting square in this picture is red, and the user is looking through a red dot on top of the gun. Once the square 'locks' on a person, and the user sees that square on them through the red dot sight, just pull the trigger to engage them. I think you're imagining like a laser, which of course already exists. This is 'the computer is selecting 1 face at a time, press button when face selected is your target'.
You need vastly less accuracy than actually putting a bullet into a target. I'm assuming you've shot a handgun before, it's surprisingly difficult to be accurate, especially after the 1st shot.
If anything the CV part of my idea is the easiest part. It's the 'gun calculates when it's on target' part that's much harder
Am I to assume that the computer vision system is going to put the square on the target's face if there's a face anywhere in the field of view? If so, that makes it much easier to shoot people in the face, yes.
But if there are two people in the field of view, a legitimate target and an innocent bystander, or many innocent bystanders, how does the computer vision system know which face to lock on to? Because the version where I have to scroll through a menu of target choices is probably just going to get *me* killed.
And if there aren't any innocent bystanders in the FOV, then there wasn't a risk to innocent bystanders in the first place and I'm merely wasting bullets if my aimpoint isn't on target.
So, useful in some circumstances, and I'd like to have the option, but I don't think it solves the innocent-bystander problem. Just the "how can I be John Wick" problem.
>But if there are two people in the field of view, a legitimate target and an innocent bystander, or many innocent bystanders, how does the computer vision system know which face to lock on to?
It just does 1 face at a time, and it can change by the user slightly moving the gun. Imagine the digital square from the picture, but only on 1 target at a time. Want to change targets? The user moves where the end of the gun is pointed
Does it address the six shots problem? If the police feel they need six shots to stop the target, and the target is moving in a crowd of ppl, it seems inevitable theyd hit bystanders. With this solution so long as they hit the mark with the first shot, which is probably the easiest? Then they stop the target with out hitting any bystanders.
Image segmentation is one thing AI actually does well at today. If you once pick out a person in a video feed, AI is able to track that person through successive frames. So, the operator clicks on the guy they want to shoot, and AI takes it from there.
How are you expecting this to work if there's no video feed? I took the OP to be referring to an LEO aiming an actual gun at an actual target surrounded by actual non-targets. Not some guy operating a drone (good luck getting a drone on a subway, by the way). And there's not enough time for an LEO to shoot a phone video and then call timeout and review instant replay.
OP's "Pulling the trigger just means that the identified target is now 'locked'" assumes some form of camera and image processing (or perhaps its moral equivalent using something other than visible light) built into the gun (or alternatively the heavy processing can happen in a pack the person carries, which is connected to the gun). There is no other way to stay "locked" on a target that is itself moving.
Between the electronics modern troops are kitted out with right now, and off-the-shelf hardware that consumers can buy today, this is not actually a very large assumption.
It sounds like you're saying a modern US warfighter (or cop, but ignore that for now) could go in with his firearm with mounted "smart scope", see a laser dot on the desired target, pull the "lock" trigger, and now just hold it down and the bullets fly whenever the smart scope determines that they would hit that same target.
If so, I am about 99% skeptical that any such thing exists, and 99.9999% skeptical that it exists for a price that wouldn't break the US defense budget, let alone any other nation. There's all sorts of problems to solve here, including OTTOMH identifying an entire target rather than the one dot (good luck waving the rifle exactly over that dot), camouflage, smoke, flame, night, concealment, target movement, ambient wind, rangefinding, portability, power supply, bandwidth, coverage, uptime, and cost.
Admittedly, a human being can do this, so maybe someday an AI could, too, but if it can do it today, with a soldier's reaction time, I'm 99% certain I would have heard about it by now. And if it can do that for, say, $30 per round fired, why is the DoD going to pay that when the warrior who has to hold the gun anyway can do it for much less?
The Canadian Army did a small live trial with these a few years ago. I got to play around with something similar in a simulator. The tech works well when you have time and space to get a "lock." In close quarters battle you do not have that time or space. In the example you cite (a subway car), the decision-action cycle is tenths of a second or less, including observation of the threat, identification of the threat, deciding what to do about the threat, then performing the requisite actions (position the weapon, acquire the target, engage the target, assess, repeat as necessary). No doubt an AI-enabled weapon could do many of these things, but can it do it reliably under combat conditions (darkness/smoke/crowded/taking hits etc.) I seriously doubt it. Frankly, I would need a ton of demonstration and practise to even trust such a system in an environment full of bystanders.
Of course, the thing that would be most concerning to potential buyers would not be weapon effectiveness, but legal liability. When the system injures an innocent bystander, who can be held responsible?
This sounds very difficult to make work. You can't track someone's face, because they can just turn around. You can't track their position because they'll be moving. You can maybe track by line-of-sight so if they jump behind someone else the gun won't fire, but that also raises problems of sight obstacles like car doors or curtains, that you could easily shoot through but maybe now the tech stops you, and maybe that leads to dead police and kills the policy and gets the guns recalled. And that's all without accounting for glitches. Or multiple hostiles.
I know the military has tracking systems for their missiles, but their missiles also have computers all up in their asses, that measure if they're on-course and functioning properly. I doubt we've got the money to make the bullets themselves high-tech.
1. The gun, using accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetomers, et cetera, measures the exact orientation vector of the gun when you aim at the target and pull the trigger.
2. As you hold down the trigger for autofire (note: only works for autofire), the gun refrains from shooting unless its orientation exactly matches the stored memory of the "correct" orientation.
3. This should result in a slower rate of fire, but every single bullet should hit the exact same place every single time. It's a "Replay" system, so to speak.
4. When you release the trigger, the memory is reset, so the next time you hold down the trigger on autofire, the gun will now "lock" itself to that new orientation.
In fact, as I understand it, it's even slicker than that:
1. One problem with the above setup is that hitting the exact same spot every single time is actually arguably *bad*. You want some spread so it's more likely at least *one* bullet will hit the target, rather than a conga line of bullets all missing if you happen to have the muzzle off-target.
2. But too much spread is also bad.
3. And the right amount of spread at one distance (e.g. 10 Minute of Angle at 100 yards for a spread of 10 inches / 2.5 milliRadians at 100m for a spread of 25 cm) would be too much or too little at another distance (that same angular dispersion at 500 yards / 500m would be a spread of 50 inches / 1.25m -- much too wide! -- while at 20 yards / 20m it would be 2 inches / 5cm -- much too small!)
4. You'd need a system that can measure the distance to the target, then set the correct amount of spread accordingly. 10 Minute of Angle at 100 yards, but 50 at 20 yards and 2 at 500 yards, for a consistent 10 inch grouping no matter what / 2.5 milliRadians at 100m, but 12.5 milliRadians at 20m and 0.5 milliRadians at 500m, for a consistent 25cm grouping no matter what.
5. Arbel can.. kinda do that. In a clever low cost way. If it was the fancy NGSW/SIG XM-7 fire control system optic, it would have a laser rangefinder to directly measure the distance to the target. But Arbel is just a low cost replacement trigger assembly, it can't afford fancy optics.
6. So instead, it lets the *user* report the distance to the target. In a hopefully functional indirect way: it turns out the people tend to pull the trigger harder and faster when the target is at close range, and conversely slower & gentler when the target is far away. (Presumably because light trigger pulls are better for accuracy, while jerky pulls are better for raw speed).
7. So the system can measure that, estimate the distance to the target, calculate the correct amount of spread, and then set the amount of "looseness" the 'Replay' mechanism should have. If it thinks the target is 500 yards / 500m away, it can allow the gun to fire when the barrel is within 2 Minute of Angle / 0.5 milliRadians of its original orientation, rather than 0 or 100, so the bullets will be within 10 inches / 25cm of the original shot rather than 0 or 500.
8. If this all actually works, it'd be very cool indeed. (And at a good price tag.)
I suspect "shooting people in a crowded subway car while avoiding collateral damage" is a much harder problem we're not near solving yet, but you could imagine this tech improving to that point over time
(note that the current version of scopes is very expensive; aside from capabilities, the price would have to come down significantly for it to be worth issuing these scopes to normal law enforcement)
I've seen advertisements for gun-scope cameras to help hunters. I don't recall exactly where, but I seem to remember seeing a discussion of a system, like the one that you describe, to help a hunter ID a target and trigger the firearm when the scope has settled onto the target.
It's a complicated engineering challenge, mostly because a hunter (usually with a rifle or shotgun) must use their body to stabilize the firearm. If they are not holding the firearm correctly, any electronic signal that causes the gun to fire can lead to lots of unpredictable pathways for the bullet...and for the firearm itself, due to the recoil.
So the electronics that trigger the firing mechanism need to have lots of safety sensors that amount to "is the firearm being held in a stable way?" Not to mention sensors for Loaded/Unloaded, and SafetyOn/SafetyOff, HammerCocked/HammerUnCocked...
There there are the extra User-Interface challenges of making sure that the person holding the weapon is looking at the scope/screen, and has a button to push, and that the screen properly outlines the Intended Target that the computer is tracking... And that the Activate and Cancel buttons can be distinguished by touch. The system will also likely a bright red light somewhere on its User Interface that indicates Activated.
It's not easy, especially on a device that is intended for the level of preparation of hunter in the field.
It's much more challenging to do all that on a handgun which spends most of its time hanging in a holster, and needs to be activated in less than half a second by a Police officer who might be under all sorts of situational stress.
I think you've failed to account for the hundreds of millions of dollars cities have to pay out to innocent bystanders now hit by stray bullets. It's a lot cheaper to accurately hit what you're aiming at!
You could probably get it to work much of the time, but it only takes one or a couple failures to kill any such programs, and AI isn't exactly reliable so far.
Also, cops would never stand for it - you can barely get them to wear bodycams!
They could still lock the wrong target in a crowd. Anyway I think considering they fired in a freaking subway car and the sheer amount of lead police usually put in the air they already did an amazing job hitting only 3 bystanders. The more questionable thing is how did they let things get to the point where they thought their best option was firing a gun in a subway car?
There was a guy with a knife running to stab them from only a few yards away. If I remember correctly they were trying to run backwards, draw their weapon, and fire very quickly before the guy could kill them.
I think it might work, but may create other problems. For example, maybe a criminal could deliberately wear cloths with STOP sign to confuse the vision model?
But yeah, even with some loopholes I think it could still be an improvement.
So I'm half way through "Turtles all the way down: Vaccine Science and Myth" https://www.amazon.com/Turtles-All-Way-Down-Vaccine/dp/9655981045. Has anyone else read this book? It's a bit shocking. You can read the first chapter as a sample. There have been no childhood vaccines that have been tested against a 'true' placebo. In most cases the 'placebo' is the previous form of the vaccine. And sometimes for new vaccines it is the same drug cocktail minus the antigen. (Dead virus or bacteria part.) This tests the efficacy, but not the safety. I'm afraid I will be turned into an anti-vaxxer by the end of the book. (take that as a warning.)
Most vaccines don't have an inert (e.g saline) placebo because most are remakes of another vaccine against the same disease. Once we already have a safe vaccine for a disease, it would be unethical to withhold it to test a new vaccine, so we control with the old one in trials. The old vaccine is already a known quantity both from its original clinical trials and current data from monitoring systems like VAERS , VSD and PRISM, so it makes a valid control for new vaccine trials. Just like you wouldn't test a new type of chemotherapy by having some cancer patients get no chemo, you wouldn't test a vaccine remake by comparing it to no vaccine.
However that does not mean it is turtles all the way down. If you go back to the original vaccine they'll have a non-vaccine control. Sometimes that placebo is an inert saline placebo. Sometimes the placebo has adjuvants but no viral antigen (This isn't invalid as a control since we already know the effects of vaccine adjuvants, they've been used for decades.) Sometimes controls aren't injected with anything at all.
https://vaxopedia.org/2024/07/22/the-saline-placebo-pyramid/ is a good overview of some of the vaccines studied with inert saline placebo. In particular look up the Salk vaccine trial, it had over a million participants tracking vaccinated children, placebo children (they got antibiotics and formaldehyde in their injection but no antigen) and unvaccinated children. Note the lack of difference between unvaccinated and placebos, as well as the amazing efficacy of the vaccine against polio.
It's blatantly false for that book to claim no vaccine is tested against a true placebo, and considering that falsehood is apparently the thesis of the book I wouldn't trust anything it says.
Thanks for the saline placebo pyramid. The claim in the book is that no childhood vaccines had saline placebo testing. They first ones in the 50's and 60's were before our testing started using RCT. And as you say since then we've been assuming the first ones were safe and basing everything on that. I haven't gotten to polio yet, maybe they don't count that as a childhood vaccine? IDK. The book talks about VAERS, and VSD. For Vaers it's hard to get real numbers out of the data. IDK about VSD. Isn't that 'private' somehow.
Edit addition. First I'm an idiot, I know almost nothing. So your Saline pyramid lists MMR (Measles, Mumps Rubella) as having saline placebo testing. The book has a table at the end of chapter one listing the phase 3 clinical trails for childhood vaccines. Under MMR is says,
"Testing in several small to medium unblinded and partially randomized trails. The control group totaled about 1/10 the number of subjects in the trail groups and received no injection."
You're misreading the pyramid, it does not claim MMR had saline placebo testing. The bottom row, the one with the vials, are the vaccines that have been studied with saline placebos; the others are remakes or combinations of the bottom that can use them as controls. The point is that the ones above the bottom row were "built on top of" the bottom ones and are able to use them as a control.
I'm digging kinda obscure here to find open-access trials that specifically used inert saline placebo to counter the antivax talking point on that, but I want to reiterate that it is perfectly valid to not use saline placebos in placebo-controlled studies! Saline solution is not the gold standard for controls; in fact it's often preferred to use solutions that are the same as the vaccines but without active ingredients because saline placebos won't have redness at the site of injection or other reactions, so it's easier for those with a saline placebo to guess they were in the placebo group or just not feel like the vaccine worked, weakening the placebo effect. Since adjuvants are extremely well studied this isn't a problem!
BTW after a few ACX comments in a thread Substack sometimes just stops sending me notifications for some reason, so if you reply to me here and I don't respond after a day or so feel free to email me at fierysackboy[at]gmail[.com]
Thanks for all the work. Above and beyond the call of duty. I'm still reading the book. I don't mean to be disparaging but some of those have a low number of participants. So it's going to be hard to see something that effects only a few percent of the cases.
I haven’t but something I think is under-mentioned (because we needs must hate) is how the definition of a vaccine sort of morphed, and the role that might have played in people not wanting to get the Covid vaccine repeatedly.
I’m not saying it really did change, scientifically- but just: when we were kids we were vaccinated against mumps, and then we didn’t get mumps. That may have misled us a bit.
Oh, gotcha. So the problem was the American public actually was misinformed about the efficacy of vaccines, in the direction of thinking them nearly 100% effective as regards rabies, mumps, measles.
So the CDC changed the definition on its website to reflect what you’re saying, evidently realizing the public had got the wrong end of the stick.
Vaccines were never "defined" as being 100% effective. They've been around since Pasteur's time, and Pasteur didn't define them that way, nor were his vaccines excluded from the definition.
No, of course. Just a misimpression owing to the spectacular and I guess unique success of certain famous vaccines. And perhaps also the nomenclature of “flu shot” - I never heard anyone refer to it as a vaccine. A misimpression which in fact the CDC recognized and rectified - I’m not sure if you’re disputing that, I sense you are shadow boxing with someone else.
Good point. But a lot of us ignore those (no one got a flu shot when I was young, and I've never entertained getting one) and think back to those childhood vaccines, which seemed to work marvels.
I did all of my own volition - my mother wasn't there - get the shingles vaccine. I felt like a kid doing something grown-up. I didn't get a sugar cube after.
I'm super-happy whenever I remember I have had the shingles vaccine. It was free, done at the CVS.
That is really just begging the question. That said, studies do not have to be immaculate in order to provide a high level of confidence that vaccines are more beneficial than they are harmful. All common vaccines meet that bar.
There are ways around that. I'd volunteer my kid for a trial that might delay vaccines for a year.
But what is really unethical is the testing done on the new rotavirus vaccine. Instead of a real placebo they gave the kids in the control group the vaccine sans the antigen. And 1 in 30-40 control group subjects had a serious adverse effect! These were kids!
This is for childhood vaccines, though, right? So is it not a solution that the original standard treatment was a previously placebo tested vaccine as used for adults? We know generally that vaccines work on human bodies, I think, so the medical test process is used for degree of efficacy + side effects, not to determine whether a vaccine works at all
In the vast majority of all medical research it is usual to test an innovation against "usual care" which is the current recommendation. Testing against placebo would be unethical as it would mean actively denying someone the currently available treatment.
Yup but there are obvious ways around that. One easy one is to give half the group placebo this year and real thing next year, and visa versa for other half.
Oh I should add that this is the 'turtles all the way down' idea. We've only tested the safety of vaccines against other vaccines. The original was never tested.
Just a general observation: every time you learn about a new area of knowledge and think "there are obvious" whatever, consider that the only obvious thing is that you have no clue. Not as an insult, but a statement of fact - you just literally have no idea about the realities of the field.
Oh no doubt, no doubt. In my world where we patent rather than publish, even the most useless patents have piles of references, goes with the territory.
Before doing a study to delay the first DTaP dose from month 2 to month 14, the person proposing such a study would need to explain why Chester's Vaccine Schedule put it at month 2 in the first place.
There's a lot of wiggle room in the vaccine schedule as is. Dose 3 of Polio can take place any time between month 6 and month 18. We could absolutely do a double-blind test on that...
... but it wouldn't resolve anything. If no issues were found, the people fighting against childhood vaccines wouldn't say "oh, glad it's all cleared up now." They would say that the polio was a stupid distraction, and it's all about the HiB vaccine, or the pneumococcal vaccine, or *any* vaccine.
Well sure as parents we want to know the risks in all the vaccines. I don't know Chester's vaccine schedule from a bus schedule. But still if we wanted to test the side effects caused by vaccines I'm guessing some smart doctor could come up with a way to do that. (There's a whole chapter on the polio vaccine at the end of the book... i'm still reading.)
You aren't going to know all the risks of all the things. If I tell you vaccine X and vaccine Y are a dangerous combination, then you can spend millions of dollars and put a bunch of babies at risk to determine they aren't with 95% probability. Problem solved. But then I give you a different X-Y pair. Now you have to start all over.
Don't worry, if you get through all X-Y pairs, I'll start giving you X-Y-Z tuples.
Well I wasn't worried about combo's being dangerous. But it seems like there could be an easy way to test all the combo's you wanted... (Yeah again, I'm a bear of very little brain... and factorials are going top show up.) But given a large enough group you could test all the combos at once... 10k subjects in each group.
Not in the outcome, but the ruling dictatorship might have to up repression and fraud to stay in power.
(This is why Mark Galeotti encourages Russians to vote even though it can never make a difference for the outcome - it exposes the rulers more nakedly when they have to cheat increasingly worse.)
*Being* a candidate means towing the line or falling out a window, though.
This is why the communists are allowed to get a decent little vote-share - they get to have their party as long as they know not to be an actual opposition, and they're fine with that deal.
For the median Russian the danger is quite low. But the median Russian is unlikely to want to vote for an opposition candidate in the first place
For those who support opposition candidates, the danger usually is also quite low. The perceived danger depends on one's level of paranoia.
There are exceptions, sometimes government employees have to take a photo of the ballot and share it with their boss.
There are certain regions in Russia where government candidates have been getting 99% of votes rather than the usual 50-70%. There you'd stand out more and the danger would be higher. The same goes for prisons, psychiatric hospitals, the army.
What do readers think of the recent news that measurements of increasing confidence seem to show that the Cosmological "Constant", driven by so called Dark Energy, is said to have started declining in recent eons (from around 5 billion years ago) ?
I think it is possible that dark energy that drives cosmic expansion stems somehow from goings on inside black holes, perhaps inverted so that what is minute, and possibly contractive, inside the black hole is vast and expansive in its manifestations outside, sort of like comparing the views down either end of a telescope, ant-like at one end and normal sized at the usual viewing end.
Perhaps dark energy density is related to the rate at which mass is falling into black holes, so the increasing rarity of high accretion rates of quasars in early times to the mostly quiescent black holes in our neck of the woods, would account for the reducing dark energy.
It just highlights the gaps we have in our current theories. Maybe there is such a thing as dark energy, or maybe it's just a bad measurement or a bad theory of gravity compounding on itself.
I press [X] to doubt so far, because from general principles of quantum field theory, if vacuum energy (the only thing we know of that acts like "dark energy") could decline continuously from where it was 5 billion years ago, it would have done so long ago.
Vacuum energy is one popular candidate, but it's well-known that it's "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science", off by double or triple digits magnitudes. So I really wouldn't make conclusions about dark energy based on properties of vacuum energy.
Not sure. But cosmology gets stuck in the same type of group think that invades all science these days. (I blame it on the money.) Maybe the James Webb will break the group think. A favorite site for me is Triton station. All about MoND and cosmology. https://tritonstation.com/
Are there any organizations that are somewhat effective at smuggling civilians who want to leave and aren't violent out of Gaza/North Korea but don't have the financial means (hire actual smugglers, pay Egypt $5000, etc) to do so, into places that wouldn't be willing to take a large number but are in practice fine with a marginal few?
To the best of my knowledge, no. The closest possible match is that company owned by Al-Argani, the businessman close to the Egyptian regime and one of his companies is the one cornering the lucrative business of smuggling Gazans into Egypt, with the blessing of the regime. But I don't imagine they accept just about any random someone coming from outside the Middle East and paying them to smuggle N Gazans, where N is less than a 100. Maybe you can pretend to be a wealthy diaspora Gazan or some thing like that but that won't survive any close examination (e.g. "Speak Arabic, wealthy Gazan."). In all cases, I don't know if the company is still operating at all, Egypt has kinda soured on the whole smuggling Gazans thing since Trump started babbling about a resort in Gaza and wholesale Ethnic Cleansing.
One of your replies* have posted the new department of Ethnic Cleansing that Israel very recently approved. Not only is cooperating or funding this department of severely questionable second-order moral consequences (Thought Experiment: Is it moral to cooperate or fund Nazi Germany to deport Jews instead of murdering them? How do you guarantee that this is indeed where your money goes and not, say, new panzers or genocide fuel to burn Jews?), but also Israel is not the bottleneck in the Ethnic Cleansing project of Palestinians, a new target land for Ethnic Cleansing is. Just like the case for Nazi Germany and Jews, come to think of it.
(I think the latest cutting edge solution from the geniuses in Israel thinking about this goes something like "Every number is small if you're allowed to divide it arbitrarily, so if we scattered 20K Palestinians every which way, possibly across several decades, and across 100 country, maybe this will work", which... sounds plausible, let's see how/if they manage to do that while simultaneously screaming "Blood Libel" at the people and courts calling them genociders and ethnic cleansers.)
The only thing left is the individual GoFundMe-s that Gazans launch in desperation to raise the money for their individual smuggling, but like all tragedies this is an extremely fertile land for scams and abuse (Imagine the Nigerian prince, but referencing actual events and tragedies to lure the scam's victims). There is no organization that specializes in vetting the GoFundMes as far as I can know, so it's you and your personal detective skills and time trying to tease out actual Gazans from all the scammer (and scammer Gazans, of which plenty exist).
*: (whose author is hilariously fragile enough to have blocked me, but I can still their reply because I scan the thread on non-logged-in devices. What can I say, the wonderful discourse habits of the Pro-Israel)
They seem legitimate and claim to have helped over 1,000 North Koreans escape. I can't vouch for effectiveness, if that means "efficiency," since they're involved in activism and other projects besides just helping North Koreans escape.
They help North Koreans who cross the border into China continue to a destination of their choosing, rather than being sent back to NK or otherwise exploited in China.
They imply that they aren't involved in helping North Koreans cross the border into China - only in helping them continue their escapes, once they've crossed the border.
Achieving that is probably non-trivial in the first place, and they likely prefer if you have relatives that can get eaten alive by dogs or put in rape camps or something if you misbehave.
That's good, probably (very hard to figure out the game theoretic implications of everything that's going on).
I guess I'm hoping/looking for something done by non-governments that's primarily interested in the welfare/freedom of the refugees, that I could support directly financially?
You have a goat, and you want it to eat the grass of an exacly half-circle shaped meadow. All around, there are beautiful and poisonous flowers which the goat must not eat. Unfortunately, you cannot build an ugly fence. You have:
* Three wooden stakes which you can plant anywhere you like,
* As much rope as you want,
* Eye bolts through which the rope can glide freely,
* A knife to cut the rope to any length you need.
How do you plant the stakes and tie the ropes, so that the goat eats exactly that half-circle?
One stake in the center of the straight side of the semicircle, a rope goes to the goat, length equal to the circle's radius. This alone would permit the goat the graze a full circle.
Create a line of taut rope parallel to and the same length as the straight side of the semicircle, but tangential to the curved side of the circle. Around that taut rope tie a third piece of rope, looped loosely so the attachment point can move along the second rope. The other end goes to the goat, third rope's length is also one circle radius. The second and third ropes further limit the goat's movement to the intended semicircle.
I think this is the intended solution, funny I had not found it. My best call was to [rot13] gvr gur tbng gb gjb fgnxrf cynagrq ng k = unys gur enqvhf naq l = cyhfzvahf irel sne njnl. Guvf tvirf na ryyvcfr jvgu gur fgnxrf nf gur gjb sbpny cbvagf, fb gur tbng zvffrf n srj yrnirf bs tenff, ohg gur ryyvcfr vf nyzbfg fgenvtug sbyybjvat gur unys-pvepyr qvnzrgre.
Cool that Haegar found a similar solution with one stake less. But I like best George Wang's solution which needs only two stakes although a lot of rope.
You can do it with two stakes if you live on a sphere and not the infinite plain:
Bar fgnxr ng gur pragre bs gur pvepyr qrsvarq ol gur unys pvepyr naq bar fgnxr ng bar bs gur nagvcbqrf qrsvarq ol gur rdhngbe qrsvarq ol gur yvar phggvat gur unys pvepyr.
V cynag bar fgnxr ng rnpu raq bs gur unys-pvepyr naq hfr gur ebcr gb jrnir n srapr gung gur ebcr pnaabg cnff guebhtu.
V cynag gur guveq fgnxr ng gur pragre bs gur unys-pvepyr, naq gvr gur tbng gb gung fgnxr jvgu n cvrpr bs ebcr nf ybat nf gur enqvhf bs gur unys-pvepyr.
Can you write about aphantasia and hyperphantasia? I have been writing about it on my substack and I really wonder how you think about the vast differences in human internal visualization.
This is a fascinating topic. My partner describes hyperphantasia which is something I hear much less about than aphantasia, so I'm surprised that you say the former is more prevalent.
Yes hyperphantasia is apparently more prevalent (according to the Zeman research I cite) but there has been less research about it. Interestingly I have heard so much about "mixed marriages" from friends on FB where I posted my piece. Hyperphantasiacs married to aphantasiacs! So interesting.
So, was the description of Elon Musk in that book Scott reviewed about him a complete lie? Or did Musk used to be like that but only become insane later?
In Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography, Musk comes across as unhappy, implacable, driven, tyrannical, unstable. He seemed to fire almost all his employees sooner or later. Perhaps this is the secret of success.
He gave his subordinates impossible deadlines and threats of firing. The subordinates reasonably chose to do their jobs with the most risk-free traditional methods. Then Musk berated them for not experimenting with non-traditional methods. Apparently illustrating, over and over, how Musk is the fearless visionary.
> And this is part of why it’s important for me to believe in innate ability, and especially differences in innate ability. If everything comes down to hard work and positive attitude, then God has every right to ask me “Why weren’t you Srinivasa Ramanujan?” or “Why weren’t you Elon Musk?”
Personally, I think that at that time, Musk was definitely a net positive. Before Tesla, electrical cars were mostly bought purely for ideological reasons by people who were willing to pay more and accept lower performance to slow climate change. Tesla made electric cars cool: people who would have previously bought a fancy German car were now buying Tesla instead as a status symbol. This proved that you can actually make money selling electric vehicles, and has (partly) transformed the whole industry.
I am not sure when, how or why his fall to the dark side happened. Success is a hell of a drug, and I think he always was an asshole on twitter. And of course, the woke left was not exactly showering him in praise, as a cis-male white billionaire, there was a clear ceiling on how popular he could become.
Still, I am hopeful that his genius in making companies successful does not transfer to dismantling the government.
Lots of sources claim Elon changed a lot in recent years, his dad also changed personality in his 50s and became into astrology. But we can't really know, it could be an elaborate act (see Scott's review of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/), a mental health crisis, a drug related issue or the surfacing of his old personality.
...wait, are we finally admitting he's not a fully rational genius now? He was still being vehemently defended only a couple of weeks ago; I feel like I've missed a big opinion shift if we're now able to ask whether he was always weird without having to first get people to agree that he's weird.
When did the zeitgeist flip, and what was it that finally convinced people?
Your comment confuses me. Several things can all be true:
1. He was always at least kind of weird. This seemed obvious to me, although mostly in the socially awkward, doesn't care about normal things kind of way, perhaps to a somewhat greater extent than often seen. I managed to pick this up even though encountering _very_ little media with him. I also never got the impression that we weren't allowed to say that he was kind of weird.
2. He was and remains _extremely_ intelligent. Barring disease or injury, I don't really think people's intelligence changes much, and I think that his life's accomplishments are not possible for someone who isn't well above average intelligence, and as much as I dislike his current activities and behaviors, I don't think they undermine the previous evidence.
3. His current actions, including the things on twitter, betray both a whole lot of ignorance on a wide range of political topics and also a seeming lack of curiosity about the truth of those topics. He thinks he knows the answer, and seems to have the extreme arrogance to believe that there is no point listening to contrary ideas.
Basically, while his recent behaviors are bad (and unexpected), I don't think they really undermine the things that we actually knew about him:
that he is a smart, capable, but somewhat strange and socially inept person who is probably one of the worlds greatest talents at creating world changing businesses.
THe new information is that in areas outside of his core exptertise, he is prone to conspiracy thinking.
Honestly, per Scott's "Rule Thinker's In" article [1], we maybe *shouldn't* be that surprised that he believes and does crazy things in other areas (note that I'm citing that article merely for the stories about very smart people who believed and did very dumb things, not because I'm arguing that we should consider Elon Musk a thinker worth listening to)
"Barring disease or injury, I don't really think people's intelligence changes much" -- this statement depends on a pretty narrow (to me at least) definition of "intelligence".
The two smartest individuals I knew while attending an elite US college, each of whom at that time evidenced truly-elite IQs (the kind of person who would decide to take up chess as a spare-time hobby and in a few months have achieved grandmaster certification), had each by middle age become a full-blown raving can-barely-manage-daily-life person fixated on various conspiracy theories. Neither of them had become any less "intelligent" in the sense that aces IQ tests but....they'd become a lot less _something_.
Yes, I agree with this. Intelligence (in the narrow academic sense) is not necessarily the same thing as "ability to function in society", and a decent argument can be made that, whatever you want to call that second ability, Elon has lost some amount of it.
It depends what's being smuggled into "vehemently defended". Some people pretend that electric cars or re-usable rockets were just sitting around waiting for someone to show up and think about them and then they automatically exist, instead of Hard Problems that needed a lot of work and leadership to make happen, and when pointed out how silly that is they think that Musk is being "vehemently defended."
It seems like Tesla at least plausibly could have succeeded, at least engineering-wise, without Musk though. SpaceX is probably a better case for Musk contributing actual value and not just perception.
Lots of people who know him seem to be saying he changed post-covid, possibly as a result of social media and ketamine addiction (see e.g. Sam Harris's story).
He's up to I think it's 13 acknowledged children by a half-dozen different women, during the same decades of building/running multiple enormous enterprises. There are only so many hours in a day/month/year and kids are inherently demanding at even minimal levels of parental involvement. Of course he had very little to do with her in childhood, duh.
Up to 14 now by last count, that is including his first child by his first wife which was the child that died from SIDS.
"It is publicly known that Musk has as many as 14 children with 4 different mothers across a 20-year span: 6 including Vivian (and a child that passed away as a baby) with his ex-wife Justine Wilson; 4 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at the Musk-owned company Neuralink; and 3 with the musician Grimes. On February 14, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair announced a 13th child (who, as of this writing, Musk has yet to acknowledge), and on February 28, a 14th child with Zilis was reported."
Man is single-handedly trying to reverse the fertility decline!
Firstly, Elon did not have 13 children during Vivian's formative years. Secondly, Vivian disputes Elon's actual account of those years and believes that his dramatic "My poor gay autistic son was killed by the woke mind virus" story is just crocodile tears. After being essentially ignored by Elon as a child, to the point that he can't get details of her life right, she has suddenly become useful to him as a rhetorical weapon.
I'm sure that you felt you were making some kind of salient point, but you seem to have failed to understand what I was actually saying in the rush to get to the cathartic release of that wonderful "Duh".
Haven't read the biography but Vivian also claims in the Teen Vogue interview that she was vilified by Isaacson in order to make Elon look better, yet according to The Real Capgras, Isaacson does not present Elon as heroic:
"During that interview, Musk built on the picture of Wilson painted in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography Elon Musk. In that telling, according to Wilson, she was an angry, rebellious child, blinded by radical anticapitalist ideology and hurting her father with her rash decisions.
...VW: He had an agenda when writing his book, which was to make Elon look good, or look more complex than he is. In order to do that, he needed to villainize the trans teenager and make it seem like there were two reasonable sides to the story. (Isaacson did not respond to Teen Vogue’s request for comment.)"
I think this is a case of a familial falling-out and neither side is going to be giving the unvarnished objective truth but rather as how they see things. That is, Vivian was indeed a bratty, rebellious, angry teen who lapped up trendy socialism amongst other influences (and still is an angry, rebellious and trendy socialist twenty-year old) and Elon was that kind of guy as Capgras describes. And I do think Vivian is heavily influenced by (a) being extremely opposed to her father (b) drag queen/gay culture - the amount of "Girl! Fabulous! Two snaps up!" vocabulary in that Teen Vogue article made me think of Chappell Roan and her drag-persona (without which she'd be your average white girl singer-songwriter).
So it's pretty obvious that Vivian has been influenced by social media/particular elements of queer culture, and it's not too far-fetched to imagine that a rebellious, autistic 13 year old struggling to get Daddy's attention* did get influenced by social contagion towards being trans.
*The Teen Vogue interview also makes it clear that Vivian has no interest at all, very much the opposite in fact, in her half-siblings by the new mothers, so it's looking like a case of still struggling for Daddy's attention, this time by being the thorn in his side (negative attention is better than none). For someone who allegedly wants nothing more to do with Elon and changed their name and the rest of it, Vivian sure talks a whole lot about him.
What's interesting is that this child is a twin, they were both twin boys. I have no idea if they were fraternal or identical, but given that the other twin does not seem to be trans that makes it interesting about "so what about 'born this way' or effect of hormones in utero on being trans?"
Also by the photos they look neurodivergent in some way, possibly autistic. So the commonly quoted link between transness and autism may be at play there as well. And I can see why Elon thinks this is down to social contagion (given the twin brother who isn't making any news in any way).
For someone who says they have nothing to do with their father and don't even think about him, all their interviews certainly have a lot of content about Elon. The only reason this person is currently famous is precisely because of the Musk connection, and that probably stokes even more discord in the relationship that's already rocky. Nobody cares about Vivian Wilson as "trans kid of some Canadian writer of paranormal romance" but they're hella interested in "Elon Musk's trans daughter".
This explains the change in opinions about doctors, but he also seems to have become generally more erratic and less evidence based around then, which seems more like a personality change than something driven by a specific event.
In March 2020, Musk said that there would be 0 new COVID cases by April 2020.
The ways that "institutions" got things wrong during COVID don't hold a candle to the ways *Musk* and others like him got things wrong during COVID, and I think that you can trace a lot of "loss of faith in institutions" to *that*.
I think institutions are pretty good at operating in the day to day way they are generally expected to perform. Far from perfect, but good enough for a society. But they have a hard time adapting to a novel emergency of any kind like COVID. We make plans for emergencies, but things move fast and change at a rapid pace during them, and institutions just don't have the flexibility to respond in the correct way.
That’s an important piece of the story… but not quite complete. I was young then, but I remember the H1N1 “swine” flu thing in 2009. I remember queueing for a couple of hours to get vaccinated – and that flu didn’t amount to much anyway.
The point is, even in kind-of novel situations, institutions can adapt and do a lot of good work. But it’s not always their natural course and you need people inside (aka people monitoring the situation and sounding the alarm) and outside (politics-adjacent) to set them towards the right course of action.
The man managed to build a net worth of hundreds of billions of dollars mostly on hot air and a cult of personality, and bullshits with reckless abandon. Hmmm, could a biography that paints him as a genius possibly be bullshit as well? Let me think...
To elaborate: I think the original post raises a false dilemma. It's quite plausible that Musk has become more unhinged in the last couple of years, but that doesn't mean he was a benevolent genius inventor-entrepreneur earlier. From what I gather, he was always a sociopathic manipulator and pathological liar, but he managed to mask his character better.
And there are a lot more runners than there are people as fast as Usain Bolt. Sometimes there's a confluence of entrepreneurial talent, being in the right place at the right time, being connected to the right people, being equipped with a well-filled bank account, AND having an unlimited amount of chuzpah.
Musk's multiple companies are more than "being in the right place at the right time", he would have to be at multiple right places at multiple right times.
Isn't the only really successful company he really built from the ground up pretty much by himself SpaceX? Don't get me wrong, that's impressive, and it's even kind of impressive that he managed to do what he did to Twitter's workforce while only enshittifying the platform and not having the wheels come off completely, but his record is not at the level where we can really discount luck playing a significant role in elevating him from an "ordinary" tech oligarch to ThE RiChEsT MaN In ThE wOrlD.
In "the system", Donald Trump was elected POTUS *TWICE*. Yeah, it's safe to say "the system is broken".
Elon is clearly a master manipulator (as is Trump), and he clearly has a knack for buying promising companies and hiring talented people. But... all successful Tesla models followed the roadmap laid out by the original founders, and the products that were envisioned by Musk were the Semi and the Cybertruck. Not sure if that's a great track record.
Those are two different systems. One is capitalism, the other a flawed democracy. I’m actually in favour of replacing capitalism but with what I don’t know.
Buying companies and making money is a skill in and of itself.
I'm not sure they're that different, at least in the US, where having massive amounts of money is almost a necessity for a political career, and convincing people that you're hot shit is very helpful for earning massive amounts of money.
"Buying companies and making money is a skill in and of itself." - sure, and if Musk had been content with being the guy running a medium-size electric car company and a successful rocket company, he'd have my respect. But then he'd just be "successful entrepreneur" Elon Musk, not "memelord supergenius richest man in the world" Elon Musk. THAT required a lot of boardroom shenanigans, fraud and vaporware BS.
> He has a painting in the attic that is that rad now
So you're positing he finally stabbed the painting containing all the downsides to his demanding and driven personality and otherworldly success, and in an instant, switched places, Dorian Gray style?
Seems as good a hypothesis as any around here. :-)
I have an aunt whose tourist visa to the U.S. was denied because her husband has a record in Greece (which I don't fully understand because he has Greek papers and routinely enters and exits the country without issue) and was told that for her to be approved her husband must clear his record. My aunt's daughter is married and living in the United States and due to give birth in May, this was the main reason that my aunt wanted to visit, so it was especially heartbreaking when she was denied. Besides illegally smuggling my aunt into the country, does anyone know anything that I can do? It's not clear to me why her husband having a record should prevent her from travelling.
Your aunt's daughter should contact her congressperson right away. Every Congressperson has staff who attempt to help people with immigration issues. It might not work, but it is your best bet.
Worth trying. Also, IANAL, but what if she divorced her husband? Could that work?
Seriously though, I would also contact a lawyer who specializes in immigration/visas. Maybe there’s one in this comment section, but even so there’s often a back and forth about case specifics that is easier when you pay someone for that expertise.
We've discussed them legally divorcing in the past but thought it would appear too obvious as to why and didn't want to risk them being accused of fraud.
Getting divorced just to secure a visa could be seen as fraud and civil services in Albania aren't exactly known for their integrity so we didn't want to risk it.
I have not generally been impressed. His track record of being right on stuff I know about is not particularly good, such as a theory that drones are transforming naval warfare (already happened, new stuff matters little at sea, a lot more on land) and ignorance of what China has been up to at sea. Also, the degree of credence he puts in geographic and demographic factors is... more than seems to make sense. I agree that China's demographics are going to give it serious problems, but his take seems optimized for being interesting rather than accurate.
His belief that the Han Chinese are going to disappear is nonsense. Really small ethnicities continue just fine. And there's a big Chinese diaspora.
It's quite possible the Chinese government will collapse. It's quite possible there will be a lot fewer Chinese than there are now because of the low birth rate. And neither of these resemble the ethnicity disappearing.
Otherwise? He's been repeating that the US was going to stop guaranteeing the safety of marine commerce, and this would cause the world to reshape. There would (could?) be a solid commercial alliance between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and it would (could?) be the most prosperous place in the world.
Well, he might be right about the safety of marine commerce.
I've followed him for a while. He got a decent popularity bump a while back for "successfully predicting not only that the Ukraine invasion would happen, but that it would happen in 2020".
I think of him less of a superpredictor and more of a systems guy. He has a great track record for being directionally correct about things (sometimes way before everybody else is), but he has a less good track record of being correct about the exact magnitude. He'll be the first to point out a potential threat or challenge from X scenario, but he'll suggest the worst possible outcome (e.g. widespread famine or death) which usually doesn't end up coming to pass. One issue is that he's not a Bayesian -- his predictions are often binary and hyperbolic, I think partially due to his audience being mostly business types who are more receptive to confident exaggeration (because everybody in that world confidently overexaggerates to some extent so you have to adjust to the volume of the room).
I watch Zeihan's YouTube videos and think his track record is just 50/50. For example, right after the Ukraine War started, he predicted mass famine in Africa and the Middle East within months due to the interruption in grain shipments. He also predicted "Kamala Harris will win the election unless she shits the bed" or something to that effect.
Here's a great analysis of how the predictions from one of his books, The Accidental Superpower, turned out:
In particular, he predicted famine from the Ukraine war because some 30% of wheat production came from that region. What he got wrong is that 30% of wheat *exports* came from the region, but most of the wheat in the world is produced and consumed in the same country.
This isn't just a mistake, it's a mistake about the kind of thing he specializes in knowing.
Highly confidential chats and the sharing of detailed of war plans -- documents having the highest possible classification status for which not all participants had clearance even before the journalist was inadvertently and to his own surprise, added.
All of which they were doing on Signal instead of the multiple secured systems they all have access to both in DC and when traveling. From the conversation it appears that this has been a regular practice among that group of individuals.
That compares to Hillary Clinton's email server and Trump's taking classified files to Mar-A-Lago, roughly as how driving while drunk compares to jaywalking.
I mostly agree with you, but in the interest of fairness I think it's important to point out that Signal is actually a really good option for secure communication, and if the government were to officially adopt it, it would probably be an improvement over whatever the official platform is right now.
Nothing that runs on any commercial smartphone is a good option for secure communication, sorry. Maybe if your threat maxxes out as credit-card scammers and script kiddies in it for the lulz, but not against "advanced persistent threats". It doesn't matter if the folks at Signal wrote metaphysically perfect code that incorporates theoretically unbreakable conscription; as soon as you load it no to your iPhone or Android or whatever you can't count on the phone actually running the code Signal wrote.
It would be nice if a reliably secure smartphone existed, and I've long thought it would be worth sending a gigabuck or so the NSA's way to make it so, but nobody has done it yet.
Depends on what the threat is. If it's the "Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis of evil" boogeyman, fine. But if it's the next administration, then Signal is better than any official channel that archives all your communications.
My comment was based on the assumption that the alternative to using Signal was using some other communication platform on the same phone (I don't know if they used regular commercial phones or something more secure).
If the complaint is about the security of the phone itself (as opposed to the Signal app) then I agree the complaint is valid.
Not using smartphones for this sort of thing, period, is OPSEC 101; it's one of the things Jeff and Tina used to preemptively scold us all about in mandatory annual training. Something like e.g. the exact time of a planned attack against an enemy, defaults to Top Secret from birth, and typing it into a smartphone is a federal crime no matter what app you're using(*).
Agreed that if you're doing something secretive over the phone, Signal is probably as good as it gets. But when you're dealing with TS, what you use Signal for is the one-line message that says "Get your ass to a SCIF, ASAP, and check your high-side email".
* As I've been careful to point out since it was Hillary's Emails, it's a crime that is *usually* handled with a stern warning and being fired+blacklisted from any jobs involving classified information; you really have to work at it to get the Feds to throw you in jail over this.
Haven't used it myself....interesting that it's actually a US non-profit.
Apparently though using Signal is not as secure as current federal-intelligence practices. This is from the BBC:
----
"That "gold standard claim" is what makes Signal appealing to cybersecurity experts and journalists, who often use the app. But even that level of security is considered insufficient for very high level conversations about extremely sensitive national security matters.
That is because there is a largely unavoidable risk to communicating via a mobile phone: it is only as secure as the person that uses it. If someone gains access to your phone with Signal open - or if they learn your password - they'll be able to see your messages. And no app can prevent someone peeking over your shoulder if you are using your phone in a public space.
Data expert Caro Robson, who has worked with the US administration, said it was "very, very unusual" for high ranking security officials to communicate on a messaging platform like Signal. "Usually you would use a very secure government system that is operated and owned by the government using very high levels of encryption," she said.
She said this would typically mean devices kept in "very secure government controlled locations".
The US government has historically used a sensitive compartmented information facility (Scif - pronounced "skiff") to discuss matters of national security. A Scif is an ultra-secure enclosed area in which personal electronic devices are not allowed.
"To even access this kind of classified information, you have to be in a particular room or building repeatedly swept for bugs or any listening devices," said Ms Robson. Scifs can be found in places ranging from military bases to the homes of officials.
"The whole system is massively encrypted and secured using the government's own highest standards of cryptography," she said. "Especially when defence is involved."
Aaaand....it turns out (per open-source flight information and Russian media reports) that one of the participants in that Signal chat session was at the time in _Moscow_, and was either at or on his way to the Kremlin waiting for his appointment with Vladimir Putin. He was added to the Signal chat, using his personal smartphone, 76 minutes prior to his meeting with Putin.
So did that Trump appointee bring and use his personal unsecured smartphone literally inside the _Kremlin_?
(Also this person -- Steve Witkoff whose job title is "Ukraine and Middle East Special Envoy" -- stated the name of an active CIA intelligence officer in the chat.)
Also, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard admitted under oath today that she was "overseas" while participating in the Signal group chat. She refused, under questioning during a Congressional hearing, to say where exactly she was at that time.
Quoting now from CBS News:
"Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal....the Google Threat Intelligence Group warned just last month of "increasing efforts from several Russia state-aligned threat actors to compromise Signal Messenger accounts used by individuals of interest to Russia's intelligence services."....Ukraine's top cyber defense agency warned just last week about targeted attacks prompting compromised Signal accounts to send malware to employees of defense industry firms and members of Ukraine's armed forces. The bulletin issued by Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) on March 18 indicates that attacks started this month...."
I agree, using a personal smartphone is a 100% valid complaint, as is communicating from a hostile country and everything else you quoted (not to mention including a random journalist that somehow went unnoticed for days).
I just felt bad about the framing that using the Signal app was the core of the problem, whereas the actual problem is, well, literally everything else except that one part.
Sure that makes sense. Signal wasn't the problem here at all and doesn't deserve any blowback from it.
Meanwhile, because Trump and his toadies had spent two days publicly calling the Atlantic and the individual journalist liars, the latter reached their fuck-you boundary and this morning went ahead and released the entire text conversation. Guess which side had been accurately describing it...?
And the details here, oh boy. Turns out that:
-- Hegseth posted the start time and target name of a US military operation aimed at assassinating a key Houthi terrorist, two hours prior to that launch.
-- later in the text string Waltz posted details on the results of that raid, details which contradict the public statement being issued by the Pentagon.
-- Waltz's insistence during the last two days that the text conversation had included "No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS. Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent", is provably bullshit.
-- no U.S. military officer, not even the chair of the Joint Chiefs, was invited into that text conversation. It was an entirely-civilian circle jerk meaning no one was present having the gravitas to say "WHOA we are not going to spill operational specifics about an imminent field mission by our soldiers and sailors!"
What attack vectors are we talking about here? Is it closer to "if you installed TikTok then your phone is spying on you" or closer to "if you browse the web with javascript enabled then your phone is spying on you"?
there are repeatedly been zero interaction hacks from isreal
pdfs are so poorly designed they can contain programs
theres a smaller computer inside every processer that *never turns off* "management engine"
an air gaped computer can send infomation via harddrive spinning speed and above human hearing chrips of speakers, and the most paranid encyption is ussally 512 bits
So what's the biggest concrete risk? I don't do anything financial on my phone and I'm not important enough to be worth blackmailing with my politically-incorrect texts. What is the worst thing that a malicious hacker is going to do to me by infiltrating my phone?
You're not worth blackmailing yet. Every someone worth blackmailing was, once upon a time, not worth blackmailing. When that changed, criminals or states blackmailed them.
> What is the worst thing that a malicious hacker is going to do to me by infiltrating my phone?
Worst case is capturing continuous streams of intimate data (e.g. you and the people in your house naked) and demanding ransom so as to not release it. Or encrypting all your data and demanding ransom, if your data is sufficiently hard, tedious or impossible to replicate (e.g. photos of a family baby from 10 years ago) and you're willing to keep it then you either have to pay or keep the encrypted drive around hoping for the fabled Quantum Computers of the future to break it before the storage degrades. (In practice, you can't "keep the drive" because phone parts are not repairable or replaceable, so to add insult to injury you have to buy a new phone.)
If all else fails, your data will be bundled with the data of millions of others and sold en-masse to analytics companies that try to predict large-scale patterns, for example insurance companies and propaganda companies that try to predict and affect voting patterns.
>Worst case is capturing continuous streams of intimate data (e.g. you and the people in your house naked) and demanding ransom so as to not release it.
I'm a middle-aged man. That data would do more harm to them than to me. They're welcome to see me naked, it's their funeral. I don't have any important data on my phone. All of my pics are backed up on Google's cloud and even if they weren't I don't *really* care. If my phone gets locked then I drop it in the trash and buy another.
>your data will be bundled with the data of millions of others and sold en-masse to analytics companies that try to predict large-scale patterns,
This poses zero personal risk for me. If they're doing this then having my marginal data doesn't impact their analysis at all.
I don't see you addressing the effect on your family. Your phone camera and microphone are capturing everything, its GPS is capturing every place you go, etc...
> If my phone gets locked then I drop it in the trash and buy another.
They hack the new one and force you to throw it in the trash too. Then what? At which point you're willing to pay? They can do this forever. (Or until they bored and/or you block your new phone from ever connecting to the internet.)
> This poses zero personal risk for me.
But it could allow anyone to give a vital push to a politician you don't like to win the election and wreck havoc on - among other things - you and your property. Also, insurance companies and/or banks to refuse your insurance and loan requests, that's very personal as far as I can see.
Dont take a even slightly distrusted gps system to the front lines of a war; ever. Thats a way to get a drone with a grenade to give you a vist.
If you dont consider the cia your enemy and on america territory(including its vassels), you probably could ignore it entirely; if you do; well there was a lovely write up by kulak about advice for future lugies.
> What is the worst thing that a malicious hacker
Kill you, your family, horribly, cartel-gore or suicide by shotgun to the back of the head. Everything that matters will need to eventually be physical.
> my politically-incorrect texts.
Im unsure how edgy you feel you are; but this would matter if your a "male feminist"-groomer type lefty, or could easily wouldnt matter at all; the left can only now eat itself.
>Kill you, your family, horribly, cartel-gore or suicide by shotgun to the back of the head. Everything that matters will need to eventually be physical.
And how does my phone expose me in ways I'm not already exposed? If a cartel wants to kill me I'm dead anyway. If I start running cocaine maybe I'll change my attitude towards my phone. For now I'm not going to worry about it.
Come on, I'm looking for *plausible* reasons that a normal person should care about this.
This is the standard "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" argument. You've used it twice today (also in the 23andMe thread below).
The majority of the world in actually outside of america, while the light on the hill ought to reach all, it may not always be bright enough ;__;
*All* security is situational; the most pressing threat is your political beliefs and your nation state activity on the matter; if your in the uk, germany, france, theres wrong-think cop vists and do you personally imagine you would a) enjoy the argument and film it for clot b) break; thats something for you to answer, while I wish to strong suggest A is better for you and the world, I know all to well thats not everyone.
China has allot of people, and beyond that firewall is a very different story to my situation.
etc. there isnt really a "normal" person here, the break downs matter to much.
That article's description of what was in the messages has major "I ran this article past a lawyer to see if I would go to jail for sharing this" vibes.
"I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel"
The short answer is that Transformers need a lot of data that we do not have, Transformers are good at dependencies between tokens which is not that important for tasks like polygenic trait prediction for specific bio reasons, and that Transformers are actually being used already for genomic foundation models, but they're just not that good (most of them have ~0 signal according to a paper a while back).
First, one of the big-fundamental things for LLMs is the word embedding table, which allows us to convert word/word-tokens to numbers. So, the phrase "A puppy", which is hard for computers to interpret, becomes ["A"," ", "pup", "py"] which then becomes, say, [123, 0, 65907, 34671], which is much easier for computers to process. "A kitten", by contrast, might become ["A", " ", "kit", "ten], which might then become [123, 0, 48596, 97864]. So the numbers are kinda arbitrary but they're consistent, "A" being 123 doesn't mean anything but 123 is always "A".
But this is kinda pointless for DNA because there's just not that much to encode. Everything is a "CG", "GC", "TA", "AT". So even if we did strings over 6 specific codes, eg "CGATATTAGCCG" is a token...that's only ~4000 possible combinations. It's not clear how we'd get the same kind of benefit we got with words where we dramatically made language simpler by converting word tokens to numbers.
Second, probably more importantly, is that one of the big jumps in language is that it's kinda sequential. If I pass you a partially completed sentence and asked you to guess the next word, every previous word is very important. For example:
"The cow jumped over the (guess)"
"...jumped over the (guess)"
"the (guess)"
These are all the same sentence but how much of the previous words you can see has a huge impact on what you guess. One of the big things LLMs did was allow the computer to use all the previous words to guess the next word token. And that works off there being big sequential impacts to speech. What you said previously is really important for understanding what you're saying now.
But genes (probably) don't work like that. If I ask you to guess the next gene, whether I give you "CGTAATGC (guess)" or "...ATGC (guess)" doesn't really matter because the previous 30 genes don't really matter for guessing the next one.
As always, there's someone smarter on this stuff than me out there, would love to be corrected.
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
In 2005, Palm Beach police began investigating Jeffrey Epstein after a parent reported he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter. The investigation uncovered allegations from dozens of underage girls, leading to a 2008 plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta.
It was called “the deal of the century:” Epstein pleaded guilty to two state charges—procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting prostitution. He got 18 months in the Palm Beach County jail, not a state prison, with work release allowing him out 12 hours a day, six days a week, to his office. He served 13 months before release to house arrest, paid restitution to victims, and registered as a sex offender. In exchange, federal charges were dropped, and a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) shielded him—and potentially his co-conspirators—from further federal prosecution in that district.
The sentence was a slap on the wrist compared to what federal statutes like 18 U.S.C. § 1591 (sex trafficking of minors) could’ve brought—up to life in prison if proven. The work-release perk was unheard of for typical sex offenders, and the NPA effectively paused deeper investigation into his network at the time. Victims weren’t properly consulted, a violation later confirmed by a 2021 federal court ruling that the deal breached the Crime Victims’ Rights Act—though that didn’t undo it. In 2017, during vetting for his role as Trump’s Labor Secretary, Acosta reportedly told Trump transition officials he’d been instructed to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence” and it was “above his pay grade.”
Epstein had extensive relationships with elite individuals (Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Leslie Wexner, Bill Gates, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, to name a few.) A 2003 Vanity Fair profile noted his knack for collecting “valuable people,” hinting at kompromat—though hard evidence (tapes, photos) remains elusive beyond speculation and his own boasts, like claiming to Virginia Giuffre he had “dirt” on powerful men. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, was a media mogul with documented Mossad ties before his 1991 death—confirmed by Israeli officials at his funeral and books like Gordon Thomas’s Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy. Some speculate Epstein inherited a similar role, possibly with Mossad or the CIA, using his wealth and properties (like Little Saint James) to gather compromising material on elites for blackmail—an operation too valuable to dismantle.
In 2016, Julian Assange/WikiLeaks published a trove of emails from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, after they were obtained through a cyberattack widely attributed to Russian hackers. People on Reddit and 4Chan noticed that some emails were strangely worded, for example -
“Hi John, The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus? They can send it if you want. I know you’re busy, so feel free not to respond if it’s not yours or you don’t want it.”
“Still in torture chamber. Another question: do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?”
Several emails mentioned Podesta’s connections to James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. “James Alefantis” sounds remarkably like “j'aime les enfants,” French for “I love children.” Two doors down from Comet Ping Pong Pizza was a place called Besta Pizza (no longer in business). Before the PizzaGate narrative blew up, Besta Pizza's logo – a stylised pizza slice, looking like a spiral-shaped triangle – looked remarkably similar to a symbol commonly used by paedophiles to identify themselves to one another.
A June 2015 email from performance artist Marina Abramovic invited Podesta's brother, Tony, to a “spirit cooking” dinner – a performance art piece involving pig's blood and symbolic recipes. Diners, including Hollywood megastars such as Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani, ate food off plates that looked like mutilated human corpses. Abramovic herself posed next to writing in pig's blood reading “mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk drink on earthquake nights” and “with a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand eat the pain.” Tony Podesta was apparently into this stuff, as well as extremely disturbing artwork featuring children, which you can see for yourself here – but be warned, don't click this link unless you have a strong stomach.
https://subscribe.martyrmade.com/p/anatomy-of-a-conspiracy-theory?r=1e5u7u&utm_medium=ios
This was the setting in which “Q” appeared. On October 28, 2017, an anonymous 4chan user first posted on /pol/, alleging that they had high level security clearance and that Democrats, Hollywood stars and billionaire bankers were all part of an elite Satanic paedophilic cabal. Epstein and Podesta were both involved, as was the CIA, who (together with Mossad) used compromising information gathered by Epstein on high-value individuals to control them with blackmail. Q alleged that then-President Donald Trump (he of “drain the swamp” and “I have lots of money... no one can bribe me”) was secretly working to bring down this cabal, which is why shortly after his ride down the golden escalator in 2015, the mainstream media (controlled by a handful of elite billionaires) turned him from all-American real estate billionaire into Hitler-loving, rapist wannabe dictator.
Q's claims were incredulous, but over the subsequent years he was able to build a substantial following, despite being repeatedly banned from various online forums (his posts have since been completely scrubbed from the Internet.) In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again on federal sex-trafficking charges involving minors in Florida and New York. While awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, he was found dead by hanging in his cell on August 10, 2019. This was officially ruled a suicide. However, there were numerous irregularities – the autopsy revealed Epstein had multiple fractures in his neck, including the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden, hired by Epstein’s brother Mark, argued in a 2019 60 Minutes interview that these injuries—three fractures—were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with homicidal strangulation. Two cameras outside Epstein’s cell corridor were inoperative that night. The two officers assigned to Epstein's unit both fell asleep and did not conduct required 30-minute checks, leaving Epstein unchecked for about three hours before being found at 6:30 a.m., a major breach of protocol for a high-profile inmate. Some find these irregularities too coincidental for a man with “kompromat” on powerful people.
Not to worry: Q assured his followers they could “trust the plan” and that “nothing can stop what is coming.” Trump would be re-elected, he declared, and his followers decided that JFK Jr would reveal that his death in a plane crash circa 1999 was faked, and join the Trump campaign, as part of a great revealing. After Trump's loss in 2020, Q disappeared entirely, although interestingly his prediction about Trump subsequently winning re-election (and a Kennedy joining with him) was later proven right.
On July 13, 2024, then-Presidental candidate Donald Trump narrowly avoided assassination by a last-second turning of his head which he attributed to the grace of God. Significant Secret Service failures occurred on that day and later investigation into them was hobbled by radio communications being fragmented and/or deleted. The would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Brooks, was and remains largely an unknown quantity, with no published manifesto and minimal social media presence, and his body was cremated 10 days after the event. Interestingly out of 100+ Trump rallies, CNN chose the July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania as the only one to livestream.
On September 16, 2024, Sean “Diddy” Combs was arrested on charges of sexual abuse and exploitation of women over more than a decade, dating back to at least 2008. There has been alleged underage presence at his infamous White Parties or “Freak Offs” and allegations that he raped Justin Bieber when the latter was 14 years old. Rumors are flying around other Hollywood celebrity involvement (Jay-Z/Beyonce, Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, John Legend/Chrissy Teigen) but so far no charges have been laid against these individuals.
Following Trump's re-election, his followers have demanded full transparency and release of the Epstein files. His FBI director Kash Patel and his Attorney General Pam Bondi have both expressed a desire to move forward with this, but so far, there has been no new material information made public.
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/)
But even E. coli is compartmentalized and proteins/molecules are targeted to different membranes and compartments. Just as one example, the outer leaflet of the outer membrane is almost entirely lipopolysaccharide, while the inner leaflet is almost entirely phospholipids. So it's certainly not the case that any molecule within the cytoplasm will interact with the lipopolysaccharide on the cell surface once per second, or ever.
I'm not against the idea that stochastic processes are important biologically, but I can't look at even the fundamental process of transcription/translation and see something that is *defined* by stochasticity.
"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."
Could you expand on this and how you determined it? Given the number of molecules inside a single cell it strikes me as very unlikely that one molecule could bump into all the others within a second.
At a very crude level - the first few Google results suggest on the order 10^6 proteins per cell for E. Coli, while the collision frequency for molecules is usually on the order of 10^9 /s. So in 1 s, each protein experiences ~1000x more collisions than there are proteins in the cell. That doesn't prove it, since proteins could hit eachother multiple times, but it does make it plausible.
There's a probable exception here for molecules forming the cell membrane. The inner membrane molecules might collide with every molecule in the interior, but probably not with other inner membrane molecules other than their immediate neighbors. And the outer membrane molecules probably rarely encounter interior molecules, etc.
Well, I was about to start a similar calculation but I'm glad I was beaten to the punch. It's important to remember here that 1) cells are really small, 2) molecules move really fast (relative to their size), and 3) molecules have varying affinities for each other so the ones that are supposed to interact can immediately stick to each other. Eukaryotic cells are about three orders of magnitude larger than bacteria but, as mentioned below, they also have complex transport and tagging systems that make the correct interactions more likely.
David Goodsell's paintings are excellent to understand how crowded and complex the interior of cells is: I recommend https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bmb.20345 (Escherichia coli), https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.20494 (eukaryotic cell), https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bmb.20636 (viruses)
Thanks for the links, very cool illustrations.
Hmmm. Respectfully, there are active transport mechanisms within Eukaryotic cells. Thanks, @NancyLebovitz, for sending me down an Internet rabbit hole. It's always an educational experience when that happens. Anyway, according to the literature, there are several transport mechanisms within cells (at least within eukaryotic cells). The most important two are...
1. The cytoskeletal proteins within a cell act as a framework for the cell, but they also directionally move proteins along their filaments (microtubules) using dynein and kinesin as "motor" proteins. In the kinesin entry below, it shows the kinesin protein "walking" its payload along a microtubule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracellular_transport
2. Then we've got vesicular transport through the external membrane of the cell, but vesicular transport is also involved in carrying proteins from the ER-Golgi Transport. Vesicles bud off from the ER exit sites and carry proteins to the Golgi along the microtubule filaments mentioned above. These "sacks" of proteins are moved between the EF and Golgi apparatus along the microtubule filaments by powered along by Dynein and Kinesin.
I misread Triplebyte as Trilobite.
Thought for a moment we were getting them back.
Are people socialist or libertarian about certain domains for mostly ideological reasons or empirical reasons?
I'm mostly interested in the domains of, say prison construction/administration, or water supply and sewage sanitation and maintenance, or 911 emergency response services, or firefighting, or nursing homes for the not very wealthy.
Do you have strong views about whether these should be public or private, and did you mostly come to your views by some kind of first-principles reasoning (economic, philosophical) that such things would be more effectively/efficiently/justly administered through the public/private space, or did you experience or read comparative studies that things done one way turned out very well and things done the other way turned out poorly, and come to your views by such experience/studies?
As a test case, I wonder how empirically revisable your commitments are. if you're a libertarian and there was some town that had some kind of public nursing home facility that was doing pretty well, paid by local taxes, would that be fine, or would we have to privatize it because its just better if it were owned and managed for profit?
Or if you're a socialist, and there was a town where all the water is owned by and bought from a for-profit company, but it was working fine for that town, would we have to make it public because that's just better?
I think I'm mostly libertarian, based on the sense that I appear to agree with most of the positions of other people who call themselves libertarian, but not all of them. I also notice that I am contingently (mostly) libertarian, as opposed to necessarily so; if I encountered a situation where libertarian methods would appear to lead to worse outcomes than some other methods, I would prefer the latter (although I admittedly would check carefully - my heuristics have led me back to libertarianism more often than to some alternative, and the alternatives mostly involve a specific domain or two).
One of the more bedrock assumptions I make is that human beings - so far, the entities I've decided to care most about - possess incentives which make them more likely to behave in certain ways than in others. These incentives are informed in part by base instincts (same as animals, and arguably plants), and in part by reasoning from sensory data.
So far, I've benefited from reading David Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_, as well as his blog, and now, his Substack. (Friedman has also commented here before, and hosts SSC meetups.) TMoF argues for anarcho-capitalism, a radical way to organize economics (by Friedman's own characterization), but more importantly, it does so from the same assumption I use - that humans possess incentives and act on them. (It's also not a tribal polemic. Friedman himself has made arguments against libertarianism, while also identifying as one.) TMoF provides shortcuts to many arguments from incentives, which is useful even if you don't come away convinced to be ancap yourself.
I believe a great many currently public institutions could be privatized and lead to a net benefit - people would be generally better off. If I believed they wouldn't be, I wouldn't support privatizing the institution in question. If I believed they would be better, but only slightly, I would say so, and also point out the low margin and the need to consider how long the benefit would take to pay for the transition.
For example, firefighting might benefit from privatization in much the same way any privatization would: it aligns the incentives of people who want fires to be put out if they start, and of people who want to trade the service of putting out such fires for other things they want. People who want fires put out also want to pay as little for that service as they can get away with; people who want to provide that service want to charge as much as they can manage, and keep its own costs low. A public fire fighter, then, might lobby for a greater share of taxes, while buying the bare minimum of equipment and training necessary to persuade the people who allocate tax revenue will believe he is doing his job. The most efficient way to do this is not to put out all fires everywhere, but rather to put out fires in the most affluent places (particularly the homes and workplaces of the people most likely to complain to the people in charge of tax allocation, as well as nearby natural areas), and if necessary, also have ready explanations for why this or that fire was impossible to put out. Meanwhile, it also incentivizes public firefighters to justify high pay by citing the cost of quality equipment and amenities, but not to try reduce the cost of the service - especially if it's cheaper to just claim that some fires are too difficult to put out quickly. Given that a public firefighter typically has a monopoly on the service, there is no danger of a rival service proving him wrong.
OTOH, putting out fires also incurs noticeable risk, and is sometimes unavoidable - a firefighter who's never seen doing anything, except perhaps justifying why the latest fire was too difficult for him to fight, is very likely to be defunded. At the same time, it's a heroic task; a firefighter looks good when doing it. This is good news for taxpayers, as it selects for people who can competently put out at least some of the fires that start, and who like looking heroic by risking their lives. This means that even a public firefighter will do his job at least some of the time, and possibly even in less affluent areas. Putting out fires also makes people feel good about themselves (provided they didn't start them), so the occupation also selects for people who genuinely want to protect against property damage and lost lives.
For these reasons, it seems to me that privatizing firefighting would be good, to the extent that it motivates people to put out fires more efficiently. At the same time, the gains might be small, given the incentives already present to fight at least some of them. Whether this balance ultimately favors privatization may depend on local factors, such as whether someone lives in a wetland with little flammable material, or a richer neighborhood adjacent to an area known for wildfires.
I feel like the reasoning above should predict we would have more buildings burning down in the slums than is actually the case and that this should cause you to reexamine your assumptions.
It suggests that both of us should.
Admittedly, one thing I meant to cover above was the capability of fires to spread; it suggests people have an incentive to fight fires in not only their own neighborhoods, but in adjacent ones. But this applies to both private and public frameworks. It also incentivizes people to put up firebreaks or live and work in more isolated areas if that would be cheaper than paying for some share of firefighting in adjacent areas (which in turn depends on how likely fires are to start in those areas). It also incentivizes people to build structures out of less flammable materials, again, when more affordable than prevention and fighting.
All of this suggests that, indeed, less affluent neighborhoods would be expected to see more damage from fire (measured in area, not wealth lost), and in fact, I believe this is the case. The precise difference in area is not clear, and I expect it to not be grossly disproportionate, and also to be dominated by other factors in many cases.
You might be interested in the Wikipedia article on political socialization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_socialization
> Are people socialist or libertarian about certain domains for mostly ideological reasons or empirical reasons?
I am moderately leaning towards how I think my in-group thinks. I am in it for empirical reasons, but I can say with some certainty, that my out-group is heavily skewed by ideological reasons.
> As a test case ...
yes. In theory I would update my priors every time new evidence is presented. In practice I will find some reason why "that" specific example is not relevant for the issue at large.
(sorry, but I could not resist...)
Libertarian-leaning, mostly by first principles.
One big issue I haven't seen mentioned explicitly is systemic robustness. When something is government-provided, the government becomes a single point of failure for it; the more things are provided by the same government, the more easily everything can go to shit simultaneously (applicability to current events is left as an exercise for the reader).
This should also lead to the conclusion that it's fine for a city state to be pretty totalitarian, whereas a large empire with scores or hundreds of millions of inhabitants should be more liberal/decentralized.
I'd object to "pretty totalitarian", but "comparatively totalitarian" would suffice.
Systemic robustness is not my *only* reason for leaning libertarian, just the most important one that no other commenter had already brought up.
I always take everything back to first principles and moral intuitions, its probably a side effect of having my earliest higher education centered around Plato. The world is extremely complicated, and for any given system there are a thousand trade-offs and unintended consequences. Since my priors are all heavily grounded in a lot of debate about values and consistency, real world examples either for or against any particular point tend not to move the needle as much, although if evidence is overwhelming, I will of course go back to the drawing board.
I consider myself libertarian-leaning. It's a combination of both, depending on the subject at hand. For example, my opinions on UBI are purely ideological, since I'm not aware of anyone actually testing something like that. My opinions on the government vs private sector doing things in general is based on both, but the empirical parts are admittedly hearsay. I haven't actually seen studies on exactly how much the government spends, but I always here it's a lot, and it makes sense that it would be.
Also, I'd like to add that it's only ideological in the sense of theories about how the economy and such works, and not deontology where I think only a certain kind of government is ethical.
> if you're a libertarian and there was some town that had some kind of public nursing home facility that was doing pretty well, paid by local taxes, would that be fine, or would we have to privatize it because its just better if it were owned and managed for profit?
If it's cost-effective, then I'd want it to keep existing, but it would be better if there was a system where if someone set up a private nursing home that's better and costs the same, people could just go there and have the government pay them instead.
Here's my version of the question: Does anyone think that their preferred system is worse to live in, but should be done for ideological reasons? That it's immoral for people to not own what they create, and this will lead to a capital dystopia but a moral victory? Or that property is theft, and Communism is the only moral form of government, even though it will lead to everyone being poor? People often give ideological arguments for why a form of government is moral that's completely separate from it being effective, but do they ever really hold to that?
i think part of the problem is that "better" and "worse" aren't completely separate from moral and ideological questions of normative value.
I studied economics in college and that gave me the strong philosophical belief that most things are better off in the private sector, except 1) natural monopolies like utilities, 2) goods with lots of positive externalities that are hard to capture, like nursing homes where the clients can rarely pay enough for the value they provide. I then went to work for a public utility and after 10 years of seeing the evidence of public and private utilities in action, I generally stand by the philosophical opinion with the important caveat that bad people (evil or incompetent) serving a public good will be bad and good people (beneficent and competent) in a private utility will be good. So the economic incentives tend to push in one direction, but actual humans in the mix can resist that pressure.
So for me personally, the philosophy has stuck and been, at most, informed and tweaked by the data. I don't like to think I'm obstinate here, and can think of examples where I changed my mind about things due to data (health research comes to mind). So my justification is that big complicated systems like government are so heard to get good data on - experimentation not being possible really - that empiricism is deeply ineffective. For big systems philosophy is more likely to lead to truth - assuming it's properly rigorous itself. I think many people's "philosophy" falls short though - ex. libertarianism, if you really read up the key philosophers - likely believes in a lot more state intervention than people would want due to starting state inequality breaking it's assumptions.
I'm noticing some variation in the kind of private ownership and I'm not sure its only a matter of good or bad people. Private equity's acquisition of some of these, for example, don't look good on any dimension. Waste Management or Athens picking up municipal garbage disposal contracts, no problem.
i'd be opposed to private companies owning water (or most other things) on general principle.
What general principle is that?
For some reason, governments are much better at supplying water than food. My tentative theory is that water is much simpler.
I think one of the reasons is that water is too mobile for its ownership to be tracked the same way as, say, land. If I own a lake and put something in it to make more edible plants grow for the fish there, that's nominally permissible; if that thing I added interacts with the soil to make something that leaches into the drinking water of people downstream, that's nominally wrong - but not obvious. There's an argument that I ought to own the water in that lake, but it's hard to legislate what should happen if that water moves elsewhere of its own accord. Any law that prevents harm on consistent and strict principle would prevent any of us from doing anything, since we're all in each other's event cones.
A similar argument exists for air.
I think government manages to provide water because everyone largely understands how hard it is to track ownership, and also is largely satisfied with the scheme their government ultimately came up with. But I notice this is likely only possible because most people do not know exactly how their government is making water decisions, or do not know of an obviously better way. If, for example, everyone was perfectly aware of exactly who uses how much water in California, there might be a movement to burn down all the almond farms.
It's an interesting distinction between a government subsidizing and/or protecting farmers, which is pretty common and possibly suboptimal, as compared to supplying food, which is relatively rare and has some possibilities for disaster.
In extreme cases (the Holodomor), if the government doesn't like you, you're likely to die. In less extreme cases (Egypt, I think) people don't have good alternatives to government-supplied food, and if the government decides to raise prices, there are food riots.
I do think it's true that central planning (which is not the same as state ownership) tends to work less well when the value of the goods being produced is more subjective (i.e. dependent on individual preference) and less objective (dependent on clear metrics).
Like, state run oil companies or copper mines tend to work fine- state run women's fashion boutiques, not so much. Water would be more in the first category. (Hungary did fine exporting wine, but they combined a fair amount of market and semi-market pricing into their model of communism).
I agree, but I wouldn't overstate the problems with governments providing food, either.
The Soviets' chronic issues with their agricultural sector (which persisted after the last actual famine in 1948, though there were no more famines) stemmed in part from poor policy decisions, partly for dumb ideological reasons and partly for short term political reasons. Most of the other Eastern European countries did a much better job with agricultural production though. It's been a while since I looked at the contemporary CIA statistics, but IIRC their estimates were that in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary the state agricultural sector was of comparable productivity to the private or cooperative plots. Hungary and Czechoslovakia in particular were quite agriculturally productive and Hungary was a major agricultural exporter.
The Soviets' problems with food production were largely because 1) food prices were too low, 2) agricultural wages were too low, and 3) investment in rural communities was too low, which are, again, dumb and destructive policy choices but I don't think are a necessary component of socialism or communism.
Alec Nove (market socialist, and very much a *sympathetic* critic of the centrally planned socialist economies) was good on this stuff.
or semi-market socialist, would be a better term
My theory is that having each company set up their own network to pipe water to people's homes would both be very expensive and ultimately reliant on the government to give them permission to put those pipes in the ground.
Food isn't a natural monopoly. It doesn't require digging in land you don't own. Anyone can make food.
I agree. I think governments could potentially be similarly good at providing food, if it was a single, simple kind of food paste or something - as is basically the case with water. The government doesn't have to provide apple juice so you don't die of thirst, but it would have to provide a varied and minimally appealing diet to ensure you don't starve. The second problem seems fundamentally harder the first.
Pipe Soylent into every house?
Haven't heard of it but looks like it could do the job.
Imo almost everyone thinks they're empirical, but only a minority is even remotely being fair when evaluating such experiences/studies. Sometimes, unfortunately, even with good reasons.
On the topic at hand, I certainly lean libertarian, but imo one general issue is that large and complex organizations can hide a lot of inefficiency, waste and general dysfunction, and that in absence of proper incentives and cleaning house it just accumulates forever. Especially complexity can be a toxic feedback loop unto itself.
Governmental institutions tend to be the very largest and most complex, lack incentives by default and almost never clean house, so they're often hardest hit. But plenty of large private organizations can be pretty fucked up, too. Sometimes even small ones, like some charities getting a default money stream based on a nice-sounding name and good vibes, without anyone checking whether they actually do anything.
<Are people socialist or libertarian about certain domains for mostly ideological reasons or empirical reasons?
I think most people have the views they do for sociological reasons. They absorb them from their family, peers and authority figures.
I'm libertarian about most things but the size and makeup of a state definitely matters regarding my opinion(s) of how a given state should be run. I would happily change my mind if it was proven that the other way was better and my views are mostly based on economic reasoning.
My guess is most people are empirical on the issues that don’t have a tribal component and status/social plus empirical on tribal issues like healthcare and schools. And then some things (roads) are a function of it being way simpler to think about being public, so that’s the default
I'm more empirical about it - I think the state should run more things in places it runs well (e.g. in America I think the state should double down on brightline, maybe even help set up some competitors, since Amtrak and cahsr are such a mess; in Sweden it makes sense to have government just run all the services).
That said, there are limits - social housing is mostly worse than market rate housing even in places like Sweden with famously efficient governments, and running transit requires some direct state management even in America.
isn't social housing worse largely because it tends to attract, e.g. unemployed pr marginally employed people who can't afford market rate housing? The problem then would be with the residents, and the job market, not with the quality o the housing.
That depends on the area, but often the quality of the housing itself is fine (as wasser points out about Sweden) in places where it's more common. The issue is that it's still just a worse way to provision housing, with endless waitlists and lotteries or applications and much less control over your preferences of where you want to live (and these parts seem universal, even in places where the housing itself is nice).
Not sure what they meant by it being worse than market-rate housing. The actual housing in social housing in Sweden is pretty great, and market-rate rental housing is generally worse, since it's mostly a black market (because rent control applies to most apartments). The problem is that to get an apartment in an attractive area, you have to wait in line for decades (and you even have to wait in line for years to get one in a no-go zone in Stockholm), and once you've gotten one, you're incentivized not to move even if your needs change, since moving means forfeiting a valuable rental contract.
I definitely don't know much about Sweden! I also don't know that state-subsidized housing developments in the US are worse than comparable market rate once- that's the conventional wisdom, but the CW is very often wrong. I'm just sayng that *even if it was true*, it's quite possible that the state-subsidized apartments are worse for reasons entirely separate from them being state subsidized. Any community with high levels of unemployment is going to suck, because unemployment and underemployment are really terrible for people.
market rate housing is a humanitarian disaster
Most Swedes disagree that the government should run all the services. E.g. about 30% of high school students in Sweden attend a privately owned school, and even the party formerly known as the communist party doesn't want to abolish the voucher system (they just want to just regulate it much more).
Yeah sorry, I should have specified "public transportation services" there; like with housing, even a more competent government has areas I don't want it to fully (or sometimes even partially) manage.
Ah, sorry about the misunderstanding. But my impression is that the deregulation of railway traffic in Sweden has also largely been a success (I read somewhere that it's the most deregulated such system in the world), resulting in lower prices and higher passenger satisfaction. Currently, only the party formerly known as the communist party wants the government to take back control over all railway traffic.
So that's interesting. My main source of reading this has been about transit construction, where Alon Levy has pointed out that Scandinavian systems have been outsourcing more of the planning to consultants in recent years and as a result have lost their ability to build more cost effectively than the rest of Europe.
But also on regulations - worth noting there's a difference between deregulation and privatization (and they can often go together). Deregulation is about how many rules there are to make things harder (and can apply to the government itself), privatization is whether the agency running the trains is the government itself or a private company (sometimes, like in Singapore, it's an odd mix).
I read some article saying we should consider it deregulation rather than privatization because the government didn't get rid of its train company – it just started allowing other companies to bid for using the tracks. One thing about deregulation, though, is that it also requires some skill on the part of government, as was demonstrated by the failure that was the British deregulation/privatization of railway traffic, which happened around the same time as the Swedish one.
I don't know much about the construction/maintenance side, but I think I'd rather look at it from a "firms vs markets" perspective (which a lot of dispassionate analysis has gone into) than a "governments vs markets" perspective (which I think people generally find hard to think dispassionately about), because the tradeoffs seem identical to me as when a firm decides whether to do something in-house or to outsource it.
I wrote a substack piece a few days ago about how the US military did biological weapons testing (specifically dumping Cadmium on St. Louis and Minneapolis) during the 1950s, and maybe this had some long term heath consequences. Unfortunately finding health incidence data going back that far is hard, even when the Rochester Epidemiological Project exists. Does anyone have any advice navigating the IRB system to find such data?
https://goflaw.substack.com/p/did-the-army-poison-a-bunch-of-women?r=41a8s8
I got curious and asked a variant of GPT
called GPT Research. This is what it said:
Here are some sources and avenues to explore for historical data on population health (deaths, births, diagnoses, causes of death, disability diagnoses) in St. Louis, MO, and Minneapolis, MN, from 1940 to 1980:
St. Louis, MO
Missouri Vital Statistics Reports
The Missouri Department of Social Services provides historical statistics, including births, deaths, and population data, in archived reports like the Missouri Vital Statistics 1980. These reports may include data from earlier decades as well.
Access here
Missouri Census Data Center (MCDC)
The University of Missouri offers historical data on population changes, including births, deaths, and migration for St. Louis.
MCDC Historical Data
City of St. Louis Health Reports
The City of St. Louis provides access to local health assessments and statistical reports. While recent data is emphasized, historical trends may also be available.
Health Reports and Data - St. Louis
Federal Reserve Data (FRED)
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis maintains historical population data for the city, which includes information derived from Census data and other demographic trends.
Resident Population Data
Minneapolis, MN
Minnesota Center for Health Statistics (MCHS)
MCHS provides access to vital statistics, including births, deaths, leading causes of death, and disability data at the state and county levels.
Minnesota Health Statistics
Annual Summary of Minnesota Health Statistics
This publication includes data on fertility rates, causes of death, and mortality trends from 1940 to 1980. It may also have county-level insights for Minneapolis.
Annual Summaries
University of Minnesota Libraries – Health Data Sources
The University of Minnesota offers access to interactive vital statistics queries, including historical birth and death data for the state and counties.
Health Statistics and Data Sources
FamilySearch – Minnesota Census Data
FamilySearch contains population schedules from the 1940 census, which can provide supplementary information on births, deaths, and disabilities in Minneapolis.
Minnesota Census Data
Recommendations
To access detailed data:
Check state public health departments for archived health reports.
Use the National Archives for vital statistics from the Census Bureau.
Explore university libraries for digitized historical reports and records.
Thanks! A few of these look promising...
Another interesting historical tidbit is that Lawrence Livermore labs accidentally distributed treated sewer sludge that was contaminated with plutonium to the surrounding community In the 1960s and 1970s. The public was allowed to use the sewer sludge as a soil amendment for their yards. After several decades of study, state and federal authorities were not able to find any health impacts.
This is maybe pedantic, but wouldn't that be chemical weapons testing? My understanding was that biological weapons meant specifically living organisms such as viruses, bacteria, or maybe fungi.
-edit- ok, after reading a bit, I see why you chose that. They were interested in how biological weapons would work (apparently anthrax) and chose a non-biological agent to simulate it. From a pedantic perspective I would still maybe phrase it differently since they weren't testing actual biological weapons. They were doing research that was relevant to and inspired by biological weapons, but not actually testing them. I dunno, admittedly a grey area.
I'll take off my pedantic hat now. Interesting (and horrifying!) bit of history either way.
Scott had a long piece a few months back to the effect that Covid didn’t come from the lab. But that theory seems more popular than ever (apparently just about every intelligence agency on earth believes it). Did something change? Did new evidence emerge?
Yeah I find this confusing too. Not an expert but I found the rootclaim debate very convincing. Is that wrong? Take the argument that the genetic sequence of the furin cleavage site was a) unlike any human-engineered version ever on record and b) likely the result of a frame-shift mutation. Am I wrong in thinking that this is a semi slam-dunk? What's the strongest lab-leak response to this?
"Take the argument that the genetic sequence of the furin cleavage site was a) unlike any human-engineered version ever on record".
Take a look at the EnAC motif which was discovered over a decade ago by UNC researchers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3404201/pdf/nihms369578.pdf
What is this supposed to show, exactly? I'm not a biologist but I don't see that it mentions either the standard RRKR or Covid PRRAR sequences.
It was noticed very early in the pandemic by Anand et al. that ENaC is cleaved by furin very similarly to how SARS2's spike gene is cleaved. See figure 1 here.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/58603
The paper linked before shows the professional confluence between UNC researchers. It's likely that Baric knew about the ENaC work when the FCS insertion was proposed in the DEFUSE grant. This idea was studied extensively by his colleagues.
Thanks. Ok, so the first paper establishes that it was understood that nonstandard sequences were compatible with furin, though not the exact sequence found in Covid. It still feels like a bit of a leap to go from that to someone inserting a novel cleavage site. And hey, maybe that was the point of the experiment. It still feels more parsimonious to me to think that a researcher interested in gain-of-function would use something already known to cause gain-of-function, but I hear you that this makes it at least seem plausible.
What about the frame-shift mutation? That feels like the fingerprint of random mutation, not human design.
Without knowing the progenitor sequence, it's hard to definitely conclude it's a frameshift or not.
Not an expert on the engineering question, but I'm told people who do this sort of work wouldn't really care if it was in frame or not.
No, no new information emerged. I'm not sure why intelligence agencies should be the go-to source for this sort of assessment. I doubt if the CIA and DIA have virologists and biochemists on staff — maybe — but most virologists, biochemists, and epidemiologists say the genomic evidence points to its zoonotic origin — plus the epidemic spread outward from the Huanan market (which is ten miles away and across the river from the WIV). Yes, it's a coincidence that WIV is in the same city where the outbreak happened, but Wuhan happens to also be the center of the wild animal trade in China.
As for intelligence agency assessments, US Intel agencies have a long history of bad assessments. They failed to predict the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, they made the mistaken assessment that Iraq had WMDs (2003), and they predicted that Ukraine would be conquered by Russia within a couple of weeks.
"I doubt if the CIA and DIA have virologists and biochemists on staff"
The Department of Energy, one of the intelligence agencies favoring Lab Leak, actually does have virologists and biochemists on staff(*). The CIA and DIA almost certainly have virologists and biochemists on retainer as consultants, to help assess intelligence reports in that area, and they probably have the ability to read the email of Chinese virologists and biochemists who are better positioned to understand the origins of COVID than anyone in the United States but may not be entirely candid in their public statements about same.
Dismissing the assessments of the intelligence community out of hand, is simply foolish.
* Because "Department of Energy" mostly means "Department of Making Sure our H-Bombs go Boom on Demand, plus some other stuff to greenwash that unpleasantness", and the set of National Laboratories that do nuclear-weapons work also got tasked with some of the biological and chemical weapons stuff as well.
Granted, the assessment that I linked below doesn't mention the case cluster around the Huanan Market. An epidemiologist would've pointed that out immediately. This fact was known publicly by late January 2020 and confirmed by subsequent investigative follow-ups by April 2020. That's why I didn't think they were consulting with scientists. OTOH, they mentioned that they didn't put any credence on the idea the virus was engineered, which suggests that someone was looking at the evidence presented by the genome.
> the genomic evidence points to its zoonotic origin
Does this run counter to the intelligence agencies? Do they say it was bio-engineered?
From the CBS News report of on the change in the CIA's position...
"The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory, according to an assessment released Saturday that points the finger at China even while acknowledging that the spy agency has "low confidence" in its own conclusion."
And Reuters echoed that puzzling wording.
WTF does that mean? Does "originated from a lab" mean it was human-engineered? Was it a sample of a wild virus that escaped? Was it released on purpose? Was it released by accident? And how can they say "most likely" when they have "low confidence" in their conclusions?
But the CIA still hasn't released the text of its January 2025 assessment regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. These news stories seem to have come from a press conference, and our moronic press corps either didn't know what questions to ask or the CIA refused to answer them in a clear way.
Also did they consult with the virology community before they made that statement?
BTW, the assessment is still classified. Why? Are they protecting HUMINT sources? If so, do they have low confidence in the reliability of those sources?
The assessment seems to still be classified, and yes, that's probably to protect sources. But not necessarily HUMINT sources; e.g. pretty much everything that comes from SIGINT and IMINT satellites stays classified to protect the capabilities of those assets.
The "low confidence" could be in the source, or in the interpretation of what the source indicates. But note that "low confidence" still means "probably true", just not "smoking-gun proof". As a very rough guideline, when I'm translating IC-speak to Bayesian statistics, I use:
"Low confidence", p=0.6
"Medium confidence", p=0.8
"High confidence", p=0.9
> WTF does that mean? Does "originated from a lab" mean it was human-engineered?
A scientist down-thread confidently tells me that the CIA hypothesis is that it wasn't bioweapon engineering and just accidental leaking.
> And how can they say "most likely" when they have "low confidence" in their conclusions?
There's no contradiction here. Without getting into the specific claims, just those two terms, they have several theories with different amounts of likelihood, and one of them has the most likelihood. But there are large error bars.
That looks like you're referring to me.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on covid, only someone who has looked into it occasionally. In the case of the post below, I described exactly what I did - and it's not particularly comprehensive. You can (and should) do at least that much, too.
I'm definitely not an expert on American intelligence agencies - the "not a bioweapon statement comes from here: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf
"We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon."
I don't know how related that is to the CIA. The dni.gov homepage is "OFFICE of the DIRECTOR of NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE", and seems to be a sort of umbrella organisation - of which the CIA is only one of 18 agencies/organisations.
So I guess there's still scope for the CIA itself to be very sure it's an escaped bioweapon. But if so - that's not what they're saying publicly, because other recent news articles say things like <<A spokesperson said that a "research-related origin" of the pandemic "is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting".>>
So if they're meaning 'escaped bioweapon' then they're understating their case rather.
Do you have a date for that document? I think this is from the previous round of reports that the Biden administration had the DNI put together. I could be wrong about that, though. There's another more detailed assessment, here (below) that I think was released in 2023...
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf
Are you sure it's not just the CIA and the Germany's foreign intelligence service?
With both having low confidence in this conclusion.
I checked the top four pages of a google search for "covid from lab intelligence agency", and those seemed to be it, apart from a couple from dni.gov - I'm not sure what that is exactly, but they report no consensus, and I'm guessing probably involves the same people as the CIA.
It's kind of frustrating that the 'positive' claims get much more press than the negative ones, which gives people generally the impression it's settled that way.
But last time I checked the consensus in scientific circles seems to be in favour of a natural origin.
It seems these decisions towards lab-leak put more weight on evidence of the possibility of gain-of-function experiments being carried out, that is, conspiracy stuff, while those against generally prioritise scientific data.
Speaking as a scientist ... you really shouldn't trust "scientific consensus" on this one. The loudest people with the strongest opinion who shape the official consensus tend to be deeply compromised. Tbh, this sadly goes for most politically relevant questions. Science functions best when it's as far as possible from current-day politics.
Also speaking as a scientist (and having read a number of the papers on the subject), you probably shouldn't trust the CIA on that either - particularly not if you're worried about organisations being politically compromised.
Shouldn't that be "speaking as a CIA agent...", if you're speaking to the credibility of the CIA?
OK, we probably don't have one of those here, at least not who's willing to admit it. But I'm both peripherally a scientist and peripherally a member of the intelligence community, and I think I have a pretty good idea where the bounds of trust are on both sides of that fence.
In this area, you should listen to both the scientists and the spooks. If they disagree, you should almost certainly not hold *any* position on the matter with high confidence.
Sure, but I hardly know anyone foolish enough to really trust a intelligence agency, so that kind of goes without saying. On the other hand, *scientific consensus* is often treated as this slam-dunk argument - how can you be against it, what are you, a crank? - that it just isn't when it comes to political topics.
I trust Michael Worobey's analysis...
"Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic"
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2?_hsmi=324423428
"Confirmation of the centrality of the Huanan market among early COVID-19 cases"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05859
Consider 2 large cosmopolitan cities of roughly 10M people, Wuhan and NYC. In Wuhan we're trying to figure out where the virus emerged, because we don't know. What's interesting about NYC is that *we do know* where the virus emerged, and it was clearly at the airports where people flew in. Do early NYC cases cluster around the airports there?
No. The earliest known hospitalizations were people who lived in Westchester, not near the airports.
You shouldn't.
"Low confidence" in a lab leak doesn't mean "we don't think it was a lab leak."
It means "we think it was a lab leak, but only like 60/40."
> gain-of-function experiments being carried out, that is, conspiracy stuff
Gain of function is normal and sometimes prudent research. It can be done completely benevolently.
"Lab leak" runs the gamut from "the Chinese virus deliberately engineered as something never before seen in nature as a bioweapon to be unleashed upon the Western world" all the way down to "they had this virus at the lab, because it was a dangerous virus discovered nearby and so they naturally were studying it, and just weren't careful enough and someone at work got sick from it."
//Gain of function is normal and sometimes prudent research. It can be done completely benevolently.//
I am fully aware, having done such experiments myself.
The conspiracies I was talking about was the Chinese system covering up things which someone in authority thinks makes China look bad - which is something everybody knows to happen.
The fact that sort of thing happened early in the outbreak has very little bearing on whether a lab-leak actually happened.
Also, the CIA position as widely reported online is that it thinks there was (probably) an accidental lab leak, and definitely not bioweapon engineering. In the context of this discussion, you might as well stick to that, everything beyond that is kind of irrelevant.
> every intelligence agency believes it
I think they still have split opinions? Enough of them believe it that lab leak proponents can easily pick the three most confident to make it sound very convincing, but a lot of them are on the fence (like the CIA)
I'm sort of confused by people's continued interest in this topic. Several things seem relatively obvious to me:
1. We are never going to know for certain (barring the possibility that it did come from the lab and the Chinese government knows and has the evidence and chooses at some point the future to release it)
2. It is certainly *possible* that it came from a lab, and if it didn't it's certainly possible that, barring large changes to the kinds of research we do, that a different disease in the future could
3. Our institutions basically lied to us about the level of certainty we should have had early on in the pandemic, and treated people who even questioned the official line as pariahs and cranks in a way that was pretty damning for their credibility and trustworthiness as well as (in my opinion) probably working to unconstitutionally undermine people's first amendment rights through "jawboning".
None of these things seem to hinge on whether or not COVID *did* actually come from a lab. And also, in my opinion, the actions we should take also don't hinge on whether or not it did. The fact that it *could* have, and that future diseases also might, seems like plenty, and both of those seem to be relatively obviously true.
I believe you're largely right that the actions we should take are the same either way. Continuing to talk about it makes it more likely that Americans will want to:
1. Maintain restrictions on GOF research
2. Think of the Chinese as liars
3. Distrust public health authorities
#1 is definitely good, #2 is sensible, and #3 is necessary to force those authorities to rebuild public trust. At some point in the future, we probably would like the PH establishment to have some trust back, because right now if we had a new pandemic I don't think they could get a critical mass of people to do ANYTHING about it. Unless I saw people turning into zombies around me, I would not be inclined to take any PH mouthpiece seriously, and would be highly suspicious of any NPIs suggested and very unlikely to comply with them. It would probably do them a world of good right now, whether they really believe it or not, to embrace the lab leak theory, apologize, admit their mistakes, and vow to do better. Covid was pretty mild compared to the types of pandemic that might still happen, and burning all their credibility on it to maximize compliance for NPIs of questionable effectiveness was a poor strategic choice. Somehow they've skated by without any real reckoning, learned no lessons from this, and are still going to be yelling about "science!" fruitlessly as nobody listens to them in 2032 when we're ravaged by some AI-created superflu.
> Our institutions basically lied to us about the level of certainty we should have had early on in the pandemic...
What institutions lied? And what lies did they make?
THe media, the CDC, and more, early on, were, within the rules of Bounded Distrust [1], trying their hardest to push the idea that it absolutely didn't come out of a lab and to think it might have was both misinformation and racist. Here is just one example, a CNN article written about an interview that Fauci gave:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/fauci-trump-coronavirus-wuhan-lab/index.html
Again, note that, the very specific things he is saying are (as I understand the state of evidence) true:
>is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated …
We have no reason to believe that COVID was to any degree genetically engineered, so the statement is true. But he was using those true facts to discredit a related, but _very importantly different_ hypothesis: that it was a naturally occurring virus that had been studied in a lab and leaked from the lab.
That second one, there remains to this day a great deal of uncertainty about, and there was absolutely not good reasoning for official sources to be discrediting.
I think it's fair to decide (as Scott does in the Bounded Distrust article) to not call this kind of thing a lie. I'm sure that there were statements made by officials that were less careful, and would would cross the line that I don't care enough to go and dig up. But even this careful non-lie is, in my opinion, well into misleading territory, to the extent that one should decided to deeply distrust the person making the statement. But that's an opinion, and you are free to make your own judgment on it.
[1]https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust
You bring up bounded distrust, but I think a better description of the US public health officials' behavior falls into Herbert Simon's idea of bounded rationality — especially when the key players were publicly sharing their discourse in real-time — including their admissions of ignorance, puzzlements, and speculations — on Twitter and in preprints. The media did a lousy job covering the science, though (but what do you expect from a bunch of scientifically uninformed journalists and headline writers?).
But at the risk of being tiresome, I'll post this timeline again. Here's how the lab leak conspiracy theory got started. Spoiler alert: it wasn't scientists or intelligence agencies that started the bioweapons and/or lab leak narrative.
> The whole lab leak story was originally cooked up by the rightwing commentariat and took a life of its own with little in the way of supporting evidence—scientific or documentary. And, yes, it was a xenophobic response—just like all the plagues since the Black Death have been blamed on the malevolence of others. Here's the timeline...
> On 26 Jan 2020, the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization, published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program,” which immediately gets picked up by global media. This is the earliest reference to a lab leak in the public media.
> 31 Jan 2020: Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. This got lots of media play until other scientists pointed out that these gene sequences are found in lots of non-HIV viruses. But claims continued to circulate in the conspiracy world for years afterward that HIV genes were purposely incorporated into SARS-CoV-2 as part of the Chinese Biowarfare program.
> 1 Feb 2020: Anthony Fauci sends out an email calling a meeting of senior scientists after he has a phone call with Kristian Andersen. Andersen raised some concerns that some features of the virus may indicate lab origins... ADDITIONAL NOTE: I believe it was the really unusual CGG codon pair at the Furin cleavage site that may have raised his suspicions, but I got that indirectly from other side conversations on Twitter.
> 2 Feb 2020: There's a meeting between Andersen and key players. Andersen's concerns are addressed. Lab Origin was shot down, but the Leakers are already hyper-vocal on social media... ADDITIONAL NOTE: it came out in the following weeks that the mysterious Furin cleavage site didn't show any splicing scars from CRISPR or any other signs of tampering with known techniques.
> 15 Feb 2020: Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. makes the claim on Fox News Sunday Morning program that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab.
> 17 Feb 2020: Andersen submitted a preprint of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" where he stated, "the virus is not a laboratory product". It was revised and published 17 March 2020. Andersen's public change of opinion is attacked by Leakers as a sign of a bigger cover-up. Andersen is chased off Twitter because of threats and libels made against him.
> 17 Feb 2020: Richard Ebright and others push back on Cotton's claims in the Washington Post. He wrote: "There's absolutely nothing in the genome sequence that indicates the virus was engineered. The possibility this was deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded." Later on, Ebright moved into the Leaker camp, and he has since called for a ban on all GoF research. However when I asked him why he changed his mind from his previous opinion, he blocked me on Twitter.
> 19 Feb 2020: 27 scientists publish a statement in The Lancet to "condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" They write that data overwhelmingly shows the "coronavirus originated in wildlife." Later it comes out that Peter Daszak organized this letter, and Daszak is then accused of a conflict of interest because his EcoHealth Alliance procured grants for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and put proposals before NIH and DoD to GoF experiments with wild viruses. The funded grants that were shared with WIV were only for virus sampling surveys in Horseshoe Bats. And no CoV with the SARS-CoV-2 cleavage site was ever listed in the WIV database of viruses.
> 16 April 2020: CNN reports US officials were investigating the claim the virus was released from the lab accidentally as scientists were studying infectious diseases (intelligence officials said they didn't believe the virus is man-made or developed as a bioweapon.)
> 16 April 2020: Fox News reports that anonymous sources claim "patient zero" worked at the laboratory. The lab employee was accidentally infected before spreading the disease across Wuhan. When asked about this, President Trump says: "more and more we're hearing the story". Over the next few weeks, anonymous sources repeat this claim to the WSJ and Forbes. The anonymous sources, later on, name three WIV researchers, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Zhu Yan as the patient(s) zero. But no evidence is presented that suggest they were ever infected or were hospitalized. Over a year passed, and on 19 November 2021, Michael Worobey, through genomic analysis from samples gathered from Wuhan hospitals, identified patient zero as a woman who worked in the Huanan Market. The media doesn't pay much attention.
> 21 April 2020. Trump gets more questions and says the theory "makes sense." Fauci pushes back. Tom Cotton writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, writing: "While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story."
> 1 May 2020: 1 May 2020: CNN reports that Trump said he's seen evidence of a lab leak. But that same day, the NYTimes reports that Mike Pompeo directed intelligence agencies to continue to look for lab leak evidence—which suggests that our intelligence agencies had no evidence to support a lab leak at that time.
So, yes, I think some of the players in this story were lying. But it wasn't scientists or public health officials.
"We are never going to know for certain (barring the possibility that it did come from the lab and the Chinese government knows and has the evidence and chooses at some point the future to release it." This literally happened in the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
And even then for purely self-interested reasons western scientists "investigated" and swore up and down the Anthrax was naturally occurring and said we must believe the Soviet scientists even though they're commies, etc.
I'm not at all ignoring that. I agree with you that, *if* they had such evidence, destroying it is most likely what they did. I was merely pointing out that we probably won't ever know for sure *unless* they kept it and it is therefore eventually released.
I personally just don't think it matters. None of my opinions or beliefs around disease risk and what society should do about it, or how I think about governments, institutions, and state power, would be greatly impacted either way.
About the only related thing that *would* cause a non-trivial change in my beliefs and opinions is if we found out that not only
A) it had a lab origin
and B) The Chinese government knew
but C) the *US Government* also knew at the time.
This last one would actually shift my opinions. I already think many institutions were lying about certainty and abusing their power for political reasons. But I think that they were operating under uncertainty and decided that pretending certainty was useful to them. To find out that that the pretended certainty was in contrast to the actual real knowledge of the opposite truth would be a big deal (for me), but I find that pretty unlikely.
In rational world those things don’t hinge on it, but in the real world they do (or at least there’s a chance)
I see the CIA changed their opinion to 'more likely than not', but also with 'low confidence'. I think it's still a perfectly reasonable thing to think given the evidence, but no one should have 100% confidence in their answer either way until a natural reservoir is found, which would be the only the way to get a conclusive answer.
You seem to hold 100% confidence that it was not a lab leak. Or else I'd expect you'd have noticed that there is another way to get a conclusive answer.
And what would that be? If it was a lab leak I'm sure China has scrubbed everything from everywhere that could prove it. The most that could happen is some scientist coming out and saying it was. I don't think you could call that 'conclusive' unless they had other data/info that corroborated their story.
You may be "sure" that China has scrubbed "everything", but you may be wrong about that. It is entirely plausible that e.g. some Chinese academic has secretly filed away a private copy of everything, or that the CIA has the whole thing but can't talk about it while the asset that delivered it is still in play, or that China had foreign partners in this enterprise who have their own records beyond China's ability to "scrub".
It is possible that documents conclusively proving that COVID was created in a laboratory will someday be publicly released, in exactly the way it is possible that samples from a natural reservoir predating 11/19 may someday be discovered. Or we may get neither of those things, ever, but it's strange that you would consider only one of them to be possible.
What consequences would forcible annexation of Greenland to the US have?
From Europe, I believe that the entire F-35 program would be toast in Europe, and NATO probably as well. That would just be a bridge too far, you cannot be allied to someone who acts aggressively towards you.
But it is not clear to me what the consequences in the US would be. Would a future Democratic White House give up the territory again or would they go "fuck some white men's tears, its is ours anyway"?
Would the US military go along with a hostile invasion assuming it was opposed by the majority of Americans?
Yes, especially if it could be accomplished quickly and easily, as would be true with Greenland.
Yes. No question on that.
Does Congress declare war?
They will after Trump fires anyone who doesn't and replaces them with a spineless lackey.
(Although it probably doesn't even have to go that far - it's not as the though U.S. military has ever blocked any other egregious war.)
Trump can't fire congressmen. And it isn't clear that the United States Military will carry out an unprovoked invasion without a declaration of war, er, "congressional authorization for use of military force", even if the President does order it.
And I don't think Trump knows enough competent but spineless military officers to carry out the necessary restaffing.
"You don't have to be a spineless lackey to work here, but it helps"
It is my impression that the MAGA crowd doesn't yearn for another big war a la Iraq, but would be happy with some quickie which would result in almost 0 casualties, and Greenland unfortunately fits the bill.
yea unfortunately Greenland's geography doesn't really allow them to fight a war of resistance like in Afghanistan or Vietnam.
I know this seems like a tautology, but people hate unpopular wars and like popular wars.
What's the chance of China and Russia declaring war on the U.S. due to the annexation?
What would C&R accomplish by that?
1.- If Denmark doesn't react with force against the annexation, then NATO doesn't fracture/disappear. If C&R declare war, then every NATO country has to chose between: a) not helping the U.S. against C&R, thus probably bringing an end to NATO; b) helping the U.S. to keep C&R forces away from European invaded territory (Greenland). This includes NATO members Canada, Denmark and every neighbor of Denmark. Probable outcome is the break-up of NATO.
2.- Regarding Taiwan, I assume everyone is operating under the assumption that China is preparing a possible invasion, evaluating scenarios, trying to figure the best possible time, etc. If you don't know how your armed forces will perform in a real war (last time China went to war was in the 1980s), well, taking part in a real war might help to gauge how well prepared you are.
Open war, no, that's not how these things work. These are nuclear powers, those do proxy wars, and if an open war does develop (god forbid) it'll be over a flashpoint of much greater importance to both sides.
However, there will be recognition of a Greenlandic government-in-exile and targeted sanctions against specific US officials and companies. Maybe arms or volunteers to a resistance movement, if one develops.
A proxy war would be much less effective politically, I believe. A limited - only Greenlandic territory and territorial waters - war would be more effective as training and to drive a wedge between NATO members.
Taiwan is in China's sphere, as is Ukraine in Russia's. That's not to say that they own them or should, or anything concrete like that, but just that they're local and what happens there matters a lot to those countries.
Greenland could hardly matter less to China. It would be difficult to theorycraft a location that's further away both physically and in interests from anything China cares about. They wouldn't step in against the US for Greenland.
Russia has a good bit more interest, but it's still very little. And Russia wouldn't stand a chance against the US, and wouldn't want to try.
The EU might care enough, but they've got much better tools to dissuade the US from attacking, even with Trump running the show. I don't know that the EU would care if the US owned Greenland instead of Denmark, except how it went about getting it. Offering Denmark $100 billion to buy it would probably be perfectly fine by the EU.
China would gain significant international credibility and influence as "defender of national sovereignty" though.
I didn't say China cares for Greenland. But I think they do care about breaking-up NATO. And Russia even more so.
> The EU might care enough, but they've got much better tools to dissuade the US from attacking, even with Trump running the show.
This is just speculation on my part, assuming the US does attack Greenland.
Russia has absolutely no chance in a war, and would just be crushed in an instant. Meanwhile, China instead uses it as a pretext to annex other places they like (possibly but not necessarily up to and including Taiwan). They both fully support the idea that great powers should get to annex stuff and that international law shouldn't stop them.
I think the F35s would be the least of the problems.
Denmark (including Greenland) is a NATO member. Trying to annex Greenland would trigger Article 5, forcing the rest of NATO to help fend off the US.
Either they do so, and it's war between Europe and the US.
Or they don't, and NATO is officially dead, and it's war in Europe as Russia gobbles up the Baltic states.
So... Americans... pretty please, can you stop the lunatic that you elected President before he drags the world down with him?
While forcibly annexing Greenland would kill NATO as a transcontinental alliance, the notion that it would lead to Russia invading the Baltics is a massive reach. European NATO countries are still fairly credible as allies to each other (maybe a couple outliers like Hungary notwithstanding).
Given how poorly the war in Ukraine has gone for Russia, the prospect of fighting a war against even just the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany (which has troops stationed in the Baltic countries) is probably a losing proposition for Russia. Plus France, the UK, and Scandinavia, it’d be an obvious suicide mission for Russia.
I’m honestly surprised how many people still hold Russia in such high regard as an imminent military threat. 1940 Germany it is not. It’s taken them over 3 years to gain essentially no land in a war against a much smaller, much weaker, much poorer, not very well prepared country.
They certainly won't attack the Baltics overnight. They need to replenish their forces, and that may take up to ten years. Russian demography is atrocious.
That said, it turned out that the strongest weapon of the Russians is propaganda, they were able to sway tens of millions of people across the Western civilization to listen to them, and they now have a good foothold in the very White House. Hearing Witkoff parroting Russian talking points about Donbass verbatim was ghastly.
If the Baltics are to be conquered, the first and foremost preparation will be turning at least Germany and France neutral. Russia cannot hope to neuter the Poles, they hate Russian imperialism with passion. But Poland alone, or even in tandem with Finland, won't be in shape to defend the Baltics. And both Germany and France have a lot of people who will say "why die for Tallinn?"
God I hate reading this and nodding in total agreement. We, "The West", are weak and stupid. Our only hope really is that Russia implodes from within; anything short of that means they will walk all over us.
That's nonsense. Europe could crush Russia on their own. If the U.S. helps, it's downright trivial and everything is over in a couple of weeks. In a couple of years, Poland can defeat Russia on their own.
Russia has proven again and again just how godawful they are at fighting a war.
I like your optimism, but did you read Marian’s comment I agreed with? To the point, Europe certainly “could”, but… would it? The events of the last three years don’t leave me optimistic.
Nope, article 5 does not force anyone to enter the war, read it carefully. In practice, Europe would not wage war against the US.
I fully agree that the very idea is madness on steroids, and that the consequences would be stark, but neither France nor the UK (realistically the only two European countries capable of projecting power overseas) would defend Greenland against the US.
So according to your interpretation, what's the least thing the Europeans could do that fulfills "if such an armed attack occurs, each of them [...] will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area." ?
Yes, a shooting war is not very realistic, but I would expect, at the very least, dramatic economic and political sanctions. (I also wonder what would happen to the US military bases in Europe - could they be held hostage?)
I am not sure. Given how Europe usually works from the inside, I would expect at least a few countries to start licking Trump's boots immediately, with a vague hope to be allowed to pull off something similar against their own neighbors.
Hungary for one - they have a national trauma from the Trianon Peace Treaty and taking, say, Ruthenia from Ukraine would certainly please the local nationalists.
of course they would give back Greenland (though it's quite likely Greendland would go independent, formally anyway, rather than go back to Denmark).
nobody in america actually cares about owning Greenland, this is just the insane personal obsession of Donald J. Trump and his advisers.
60 thousand people thinly spread on a vast unforgiving territory isn't a really good recipe for independence. At the very least, they would require some actual protecting military power, otherwise anyone (incl. Russia) could annex them again.
Denmark currently subsidizes Greenland to the tune of €17,000 per capita yearly. I doubt that anyone is going to be willing to take over the subsidy to independent Greenland, and without it, living standards of the Greenlanders will plummet.
The US has granted independence (again, formal independence anyway) to colonies before that are way less economically viable than Greenland (FS Micronesia, etc.) so clearly it can be done.
Greenlanders have voted pretty decisively for pro independence political parties (most of the major parties now are pro independence, the debate is fast vs. slow track to independence) so clearly they don't care about this stuff as much as you do.
"Clearly?" This is not so clear cut. SNP is strong in Scotland, but the independence movement still lost the referendum.
I would wait for an actual referendum before declaring anything to be sure and clear. Parties are a multi-faceted proxy, and voters vote for them without endorsing 100 per cent of their programs with absolute dedication.
Fair point.
Note that the referendum was in 2014, two years before the Brexit mess. One of the most effective messages against Scottish independence that may have just moved enough voters was "if we declare independence we lose EU membership". So they voted to stay, only to be taken out of EU anyway. It may have been very different if the referendum happened after Brexit.
We'll see if they end up getting another chance.
I know, but even contemporary polls don't indicate a pro-independence majority.
I saw the dissolution of Czechoslovakia personally. I can tell you with confidence that if there was a referendum, it would have resulted in some sort of confederation instead. People like to play with big ideas, but once a serious discussion of all upsides and downsides begins, a lot of ordinary voters grow more conservative and don't rock the boat.
Splitting the country guarantees you high bills for all the necessary adaptations, but doesn't guarantee you better governance. Especially in the democratic world, the benefits aren't that great. It would be a different story if the seceding nation was subject to serious abuse from the dominant party (Ireland, Bangladesh, South Sudan etc.)
There are a number of advantages, though. Fishing and mining rights per capita, especially in a warmer future, would be insane. And you can do all those things that small island nations do - set up tax havens, low-inspection web hosting, and so on.
I'm sure they would make some mineral deal or something with the US if they went independent to get a sovereign wealth fund or something to pay out at least that much. Otherwise, yes, it would be very difficult for them to support themselves.
The US has given up territory in the past, and I think the next Democratic administration would be willing to give up Greenland to rekindle foreign alliances. What I think they wouldn't have the will to do is what's necessary to make it plausible to erstwhile allies that we won't have another administration that out of control again. So maybe if they think they can't recover the alliances anyway they would keep Greenland as a shitty consolation prize.
That's exactly what I was referring to by
>What I think they wouldn't have the will to do is what's necessary to make it plausible to erstwhile allies that we won't have another administration that out of control again.
The *nice* and *legal* and *not rocking the boat* way to do this is to have a Constitutional convention where the South gets devolved to its own nation and the states that remain in the US adopt a parliamentary system of national government. (The parliamentary system might be enough "strong medicine" for the allies to give it another go, but making "letting go of the South" part of it is the only way to possibly get enough buy-in to have a Constitutional convention in the first place.)
It is unrealistic to expect the Greenlanders to vote themselves into the US. About 85 per cent are against it, and no campaign on X can sway such a lopsided ratio.
BTW the US last declared war in 1943. Everything since then are "kinetic military actions" etc. Even Russia still calls the war in Ukraine "special military operation". Declaration of war went out of fashion.
The EU wouldn't use nukes on the US over Greenland, so no WW3. The only person with authority to use nukes in the EU is the French president, and he made it clear that the French nuclear force only protects vital French interests.
"he made it clear that the French nuclear force only protects vital French interests."
this is the opposite of what NPR was saying a while ago, but maybe they were wrong?
The main question is what constitutes "vital French interests".
I understand their unwillingness to hard commitments in distant parts of Europe.
Also, presidents change, and, in a presidential system, that might mean a major pivot in policies (see also: US). If, hypothetically, Marine Le Pen wins the presidency, her concept of vital French interests may differ significantly from Macron's.
the NPR piece was suggesting that De Gaulle saw France's nuclear program as serving as a defensive umbrella for Western Europe in general, but maybe that was wrong.
Of course as I said re: China, France would also gain some international credibility and goodwill by posing as the defender of Greenlandic sovereignty- this is especially the case since both France and China are often resented for throwing their weight around and acting in a "neo imperiel" fashion.
An associated state isn't really "in the US", although it would allow Trump to boast on twitter about how he annexed Greenland, it wouldn't be the legal reality. For a start, they would be free to leave Associated State status once trump dies (I'm assuming trump is going to try to remain president for life, never mind the pesky issue banning thrid terms), and a sane administration is in power.
I think if Trump tries for a third term, he will quickly find out that the previous assassination attempts were amateur-hour shenanigans.
Yea, well, then, they'll just beef up security, and if necessary keep him secluded in Mar a Lago for four years (or eight, or 12, or however long the gods, or the devils, choose to keep his heart going) where he can issue executive orders over twitter to his heart's content.
At several times french presidents have mentioned that EU could be included in french interests. There is an ambiguity on this that is sort of maintained on purpose, but both Jacques Chirac, Francois Hollande and Emmanuel Macron have at time hinted so. This said, I cannot see France using its nuclear weapon against the US over Greenland.
Edit: (in french) https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/verification-emmanuel-macron-veut-il-mettre-la-dissuasion-francaise-a-disposition-des-europeens-20240205
Everyone has a price.
Greenland receives ~$650 Million in subsidies from Denmark ever year. The US could match that while only increasing the federal budget by 0.01%. They could multiple it by ten, or just double it and give every greenlander a one-time payment of $100,000 for an amount that is an effective rounding error.
The US doesn't have to do much to convince Greenland to vote for independence, since they already want that. What comes after is simply a matter of how sweet they are willing to make the deal to get 50% to vote to become an associated state, as the US can make any deal arbitrarily attractive with more money.
I wouldn't agree that everyone has a price, although more people do than a lot of people like to think. Even if they did, though, why would Greenlanders trust Donald Trump, of all people, to keep his promises?
Despite any of Trumps proclivities to outright lie, international treaties are still generally enforced. It's a long conversation as to how to make international agreements enforceable without an arbiter more powerful than both players, but it is usually a factor of pre-commitment. I.E. The US sending a billion dollars worth of aid before any independence vote, or simply an international treaty promising Greenland double the aid of Denmark should they become an associated state of America.
Trump has already used outright lies to "lawfully" avoid treaty obligations once. All he'd have to do is declare the deficit a "national security crisis" like he did with fentanyl or something and yank the aid.
Couldn't we use computer vision to improve gun accuracy? I was reading a story about NYC police firing on a suspect in a subway car recently, and hitting him but also 3 bystanders. Not meant to be critical of the police per se, and I've fired enough handguns to understand how difficult it is to be accurate.
My proposed idea would be for a scope/red dot to sit on top of a handgun or carbine. The user aims the weapon and sights a potential target. Pulling the trigger just means that the identified target is now 'locked', and the gun will release a stream of 6 or however many bullets *when it determines that the barrel is facing the now-locked in target and will result in a direct hit*. So if the user's hand moves the gun's minute of angle off of the target for a split second, the gun will simply stop firing- once their hand has moved the gun back onto the target, firing will resume. (Gun will probably need a big emergency stop button on the side for the user to hit, if needed). Basically the user is simply aiming the gun in the general direction of the target, and using computer vision and maybe lidar the gun's computer is taking care of shot selection. Doesn't solve overpenetration but should solve human aiming/fine motor control error, especially at handgun range.
Could this work? Isn't computer vision at the level now where this is realistic? Maybe not necessarily affordable I suppose
How does the AI tell the difference between an "innocent bystander" and a "potential target"? If it's possible for a bullet aimed (even poorly) at a legitimate target to hit an innocent bystander, then there must be innocent bystanders and legitimate targets standing pretty close to one another. If the gun is pointed vaguely towards both, what stops the AI from picking the innocent bystander and saying "yeah, that one, I'm obviously supposed to shoot that one and absolutely not the other guy"?
If the answer is the ineffably awesome infallibility of AI, then no, just no. This really isn't the sort of thing AIs are good at, and it is the sort of thing even moderately clever people are quite capable of bollixing them about.
I'm not sure I explained my concept properly. There's no 'AI' and there's no computer out there determining its own target. The user 'locks' 1 specific person by sighting them the scope on their face and pressing the trigger. Computer vision was advanced enough 12+ years ago to identify and stay with 1 person. If the scope doesn't continue to see the identified person in its sights, it doesn't fire
If the person can literally put the reticle on the intended target's face, then there's no need for the fancy electronics - just launch the bullet as soon as the shooter activates the "yes, this is what I want to shoot" control. Also known as the trigger. Assuming the sights are properly aligned, the bullet will go where the reticle is, which is the target.
The problem, is that people can't reliably put the reticle literally on the target in the stress and chaos of combat. Their choices often come down to "put the sights somewhere in the general vicinity of the target at hope that's good enough" or "wait until the stress and chaos are over and see if I haven't been shot myself by then".
The fancy electronics don't do anything helpful unless they can address the case where the reticle *isn't* on the target, and there are one or more innocent bystanders in the field of view as well as the target.
Imagine the targeting square in this picture is red, and the user is looking through a red dot on top of the gun. Once the square 'locks' on a person, and the user sees that square on them through the red dot sight, just pull the trigger to engage them. I think you're imagining like a laser, which of course already exists. This is 'the computer is selecting 1 face at a time, press button when face selected is your target'.
https://images.app.goo.gl/be9iUEBEFN5TvCYq5
You need vastly less accuracy than actually putting a bullet into a target. I'm assuming you've shot a handgun before, it's surprisingly difficult to be accurate, especially after the 1st shot.
If anything the CV part of my idea is the easiest part. It's the 'gun calculates when it's on target' part that's much harder
Am I to assume that the computer vision system is going to put the square on the target's face if there's a face anywhere in the field of view? If so, that makes it much easier to shoot people in the face, yes.
But if there are two people in the field of view, a legitimate target and an innocent bystander, or many innocent bystanders, how does the computer vision system know which face to lock on to? Because the version where I have to scroll through a menu of target choices is probably just going to get *me* killed.
And if there aren't any innocent bystanders in the FOV, then there wasn't a risk to innocent bystanders in the first place and I'm merely wasting bullets if my aimpoint isn't on target.
So, useful in some circumstances, and I'd like to have the option, but I don't think it solves the innocent-bystander problem. Just the "how can I be John Wick" problem.
>But if there are two people in the field of view, a legitimate target and an innocent bystander, or many innocent bystanders, how does the computer vision system know which face to lock on to?
It just does 1 face at a time, and it can change by the user slightly moving the gun. Imagine the digital square from the picture, but only on 1 target at a time. Want to change targets? The user moves where the end of the gun is pointed
Does it address the six shots problem? If the police feel they need six shots to stop the target, and the target is moving in a crowd of ppl, it seems inevitable theyd hit bystanders. With this solution so long as they hit the mark with the first shot, which is probably the easiest? Then they stop the target with out hitting any bystanders.
Image segmentation is one thing AI actually does well at today. If you once pick out a person in a video feed, AI is able to track that person through successive frames. So, the operator clicks on the guy they want to shoot, and AI takes it from there.
How are you expecting this to work if there's no video feed? I took the OP to be referring to an LEO aiming an actual gun at an actual target surrounded by actual non-targets. Not some guy operating a drone (good luck getting a drone on a subway, by the way). And there's not enough time for an LEO to shoot a phone video and then call timeout and review instant replay.
OP's "Pulling the trigger just means that the identified target is now 'locked'" assumes some form of camera and image processing (or perhaps its moral equivalent using something other than visible light) built into the gun (or alternatively the heavy processing can happen in a pack the person carries, which is connected to the gun). There is no other way to stay "locked" on a target that is itself moving.
Between the electronics modern troops are kitted out with right now, and off-the-shelf hardware that consumers can buy today, this is not actually a very large assumption.
It sounds like you're saying a modern US warfighter (or cop, but ignore that for now) could go in with his firearm with mounted "smart scope", see a laser dot on the desired target, pull the "lock" trigger, and now just hold it down and the bullets fly whenever the smart scope determines that they would hit that same target.
If so, I am about 99% skeptical that any such thing exists, and 99.9999% skeptical that it exists for a price that wouldn't break the US defense budget, let alone any other nation. There's all sorts of problems to solve here, including OTTOMH identifying an entire target rather than the one dot (good luck waving the rifle exactly over that dot), camouflage, smoke, flame, night, concealment, target movement, ambient wind, rangefinding, portability, power supply, bandwidth, coverage, uptime, and cost.
Admittedly, a human being can do this, so maybe someday an AI could, too, but if it can do it today, with a soldier's reaction time, I'm 99% certain I would have heard about it by now. And if it can do that for, say, $30 per round fired, why is the DoD going to pay that when the warrior who has to hold the gun anyway can do it for much less?
Similar technology exists, developed in Israel. Context: the IDF wanted way to make conscripts more accurate with minimal training.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMASH_Handheld
The Canadian Army did a small live trial with these a few years ago. I got to play around with something similar in a simulator. The tech works well when you have time and space to get a "lock." In close quarters battle you do not have that time or space. In the example you cite (a subway car), the decision-action cycle is tenths of a second or less, including observation of the threat, identification of the threat, deciding what to do about the threat, then performing the requisite actions (position the weapon, acquire the target, engage the target, assess, repeat as necessary). No doubt an AI-enabled weapon could do many of these things, but can it do it reliably under combat conditions (darkness/smoke/crowded/taking hits etc.) I seriously doubt it. Frankly, I would need a ton of demonstration and practise to even trust such a system in an environment full of bystanders.
Of course, the thing that would be most concerning to potential buyers would not be weapon effectiveness, but legal liability. When the system injures an innocent bystander, who can be held responsible?
This sounds very difficult to make work. You can't track someone's face, because they can just turn around. You can't track their position because they'll be moving. You can maybe track by line-of-sight so if they jump behind someone else the gun won't fire, but that also raises problems of sight obstacles like car doors or curtains, that you could easily shoot through but maybe now the tech stops you, and maybe that leads to dead police and kills the policy and gets the guns recalled. And that's all without accounting for glitches. Or multiple hostiles.
I know the military has tracking systems for their missiles, but their missiles also have computers all up in their asses, that measure if they're on-course and functioning properly. I doubt we've got the money to make the bullets themselves high-tech.
Seems to me that you've reinvented the IWI's "Arbel" system, but a little more high tech:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1776177010802311171.html,
https://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/8262/1, &
https://www.edrmagazine.eu/increasing-accuracy-reducing-ammo-consumption-iwi-arbel-computerised-system.
If I understand it correctly, it works like this:
1. The gun, using accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetomers, et cetera, measures the exact orientation vector of the gun when you aim at the target and pull the trigger.
2. As you hold down the trigger for autofire (note: only works for autofire), the gun refrains from shooting unless its orientation exactly matches the stored memory of the "correct" orientation.
3. This should result in a slower rate of fire, but every single bullet should hit the exact same place every single time. It's a "Replay" system, so to speak.
4. When you release the trigger, the memory is reset, so the next time you hold down the trigger on autofire, the gun will now "lock" itself to that new orientation.
In fact, as I understand it, it's even slicker than that:
1. One problem with the above setup is that hitting the exact same spot every single time is actually arguably *bad*. You want some spread so it's more likely at least *one* bullet will hit the target, rather than a conga line of bullets all missing if you happen to have the muzzle off-target.
2. But too much spread is also bad.
3. And the right amount of spread at one distance (e.g. 10 Minute of Angle at 100 yards for a spread of 10 inches / 2.5 milliRadians at 100m for a spread of 25 cm) would be too much or too little at another distance (that same angular dispersion at 500 yards / 500m would be a spread of 50 inches / 1.25m -- much too wide! -- while at 20 yards / 20m it would be 2 inches / 5cm -- much too small!)
4. You'd need a system that can measure the distance to the target, then set the correct amount of spread accordingly. 10 Minute of Angle at 100 yards, but 50 at 20 yards and 2 at 500 yards, for a consistent 10 inch grouping no matter what / 2.5 milliRadians at 100m, but 12.5 milliRadians at 20m and 0.5 milliRadians at 500m, for a consistent 25cm grouping no matter what.
5. Arbel can.. kinda do that. In a clever low cost way. If it was the fancy NGSW/SIG XM-7 fire control system optic, it would have a laser rangefinder to directly measure the distance to the target. But Arbel is just a low cost replacement trigger assembly, it can't afford fancy optics.
6. So instead, it lets the *user* report the distance to the target. In a hopefully functional indirect way: it turns out the people tend to pull the trigger harder and faster when the target is at close range, and conversely slower & gentler when the target is far away. (Presumably because light trigger pulls are better for accuracy, while jerky pulls are better for raw speed).
7. So the system can measure that, estimate the distance to the target, calculate the correct amount of spread, and then set the amount of "looseness" the 'Replay' mechanism should have. If it thinks the target is 500 yards / 500m away, it can allow the gun to fire when the barrel is within 2 Minute of Angle / 0.5 milliRadians of its original orientation, rather than 0 or 100, so the bullets will be within 10 inches / 25cm of the original shot rather than 0 or 500.
8. If this all actually works, it'd be very cool indeed. (And at a good price tag.)
This is a thing now for shooting down drones
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a32758215/drone-scope-smash-2000-plus/
I suspect "shooting people in a crowded subway car while avoiding collateral damage" is a much harder problem we're not near solving yet, but you could imagine this tech improving to that point over time
(note that the current version of scopes is very expensive; aside from capabilities, the price would have to come down significantly for it to be worth issuing these scopes to normal law enforcement)
I've seen advertisements for gun-scope cameras to help hunters. I don't recall exactly where, but I seem to remember seeing a discussion of a system, like the one that you describe, to help a hunter ID a target and trigger the firearm when the scope has settled onto the target.
It's a complicated engineering challenge, mostly because a hunter (usually with a rifle or shotgun) must use their body to stabilize the firearm. If they are not holding the firearm correctly, any electronic signal that causes the gun to fire can lead to lots of unpredictable pathways for the bullet...and for the firearm itself, due to the recoil.
So the electronics that trigger the firing mechanism need to have lots of safety sensors that amount to "is the firearm being held in a stable way?" Not to mention sensors for Loaded/Unloaded, and SafetyOn/SafetyOff, HammerCocked/HammerUnCocked...
There there are the extra User-Interface challenges of making sure that the person holding the weapon is looking at the scope/screen, and has a button to push, and that the screen properly outlines the Intended Target that the computer is tracking... And that the Activate and Cancel buttons can be distinguished by touch. The system will also likely a bright red light somewhere on its User Interface that indicates Activated.
It's not easy, especially on a device that is intended for the level of preparation of hunter in the field.
It's much more challenging to do all that on a handgun which spends most of its time hanging in a holster, and needs to be activated in less than half a second by a Police officer who might be under all sorts of situational stress.
Sounds expensive and complicated
Guns are cheap and simple
I think you've failed to account for the hundreds of millions of dollars cities have to pay out to innocent bystanders now hit by stray bullets. It's a lot cheaper to accurately hit what you're aiming at!
You could probably get it to work much of the time, but it only takes one or a couple failures to kill any such programs, and AI isn't exactly reliable so far.
Also, cops would never stand for it - you can barely get them to wear bodycams!
They could still lock the wrong target in a crowd. Anyway I think considering they fired in a freaking subway car and the sheer amount of lead police usually put in the air they already did an amazing job hitting only 3 bystanders. The more questionable thing is how did they let things get to the point where they thought their best option was firing a gun in a subway car?
There was a guy with a knife running to stab them from only a few yards away. If I remember correctly they were trying to run backwards, draw their weapon, and fire very quickly before the guy could kill them.
Sounds like they should have been armed with swords or spears in addition to guns.
I think it might work, but may create other problems. For example, maybe a criminal could deliberately wear cloths with STOP sign to confuse the vision model?
But yeah, even with some loopholes I think it could still be an improvement.
So I'm half way through "Turtles all the way down: Vaccine Science and Myth" https://www.amazon.com/Turtles-All-Way-Down-Vaccine/dp/9655981045. Has anyone else read this book? It's a bit shocking. You can read the first chapter as a sample. There have been no childhood vaccines that have been tested against a 'true' placebo. In most cases the 'placebo' is the previous form of the vaccine. And sometimes for new vaccines it is the same drug cocktail minus the antigen. (Dead virus or bacteria part.) This tests the efficacy, but not the safety. I'm afraid I will be turned into an anti-vaxxer by the end of the book. (take that as a warning.)
Most vaccines don't have an inert (e.g saline) placebo because most are remakes of another vaccine against the same disease. Once we already have a safe vaccine for a disease, it would be unethical to withhold it to test a new vaccine, so we control with the old one in trials. The old vaccine is already a known quantity both from its original clinical trials and current data from monitoring systems like VAERS , VSD and PRISM, so it makes a valid control for new vaccine trials. Just like you wouldn't test a new type of chemotherapy by having some cancer patients get no chemo, you wouldn't test a vaccine remake by comparing it to no vaccine.
However that does not mean it is turtles all the way down. If you go back to the original vaccine they'll have a non-vaccine control. Sometimes that placebo is an inert saline placebo. Sometimes the placebo has adjuvants but no viral antigen (This isn't invalid as a control since we already know the effects of vaccine adjuvants, they've been used for decades.) Sometimes controls aren't injected with anything at all.
https://vaxopedia.org/2024/07/22/the-saline-placebo-pyramid/ is a good overview of some of the vaccines studied with inert saline placebo. In particular look up the Salk vaccine trial, it had over a million participants tracking vaccinated children, placebo children (they got antibiotics and formaldehyde in their injection but no antigen) and unvaccinated children. Note the lack of difference between unvaccinated and placebos, as well as the amazing efficacy of the vaccine against polio.
It's blatantly false for that book to claim no vaccine is tested against a true placebo, and considering that falsehood is apparently the thesis of the book I wouldn't trust anything it says.
Thanks for the saline placebo pyramid. The claim in the book is that no childhood vaccines had saline placebo testing. They first ones in the 50's and 60's were before our testing started using RCT. And as you say since then we've been assuming the first ones were safe and basing everything on that. I haven't gotten to polio yet, maybe they don't count that as a childhood vaccine? IDK. The book talks about VAERS, and VSD. For Vaers it's hard to get real numbers out of the data. IDK about VSD. Isn't that 'private' somehow.
Edit addition. First I'm an idiot, I know almost nothing. So your Saline pyramid lists MMR (Measles, Mumps Rubella) as having saline placebo testing. The book has a table at the end of chapter one listing the phase 3 clinical trails for childhood vaccines. Under MMR is says,
"Testing in several small to medium unblinded and partially randomized trails. The control group totaled about 1/10 the number of subjects in the trail groups and received no injection."
You're misreading the pyramid, it does not claim MMR had saline placebo testing. The bottom row, the one with the vials, are the vaccines that have been studied with saline placebos; the others are remakes or combinations of the bottom that can use them as controls. The point is that the ones above the bottom row were "built on top of" the bottom ones and are able to use them as a control.
It'd be odd to not count polio as a childhood vaccine, since it's given to children ages 2 months to 6 years old https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/current-vis/polio.html
Additionally Gardasil has been tested in pure saline placebos in children 9-15 years old https://web.archive.org/web/20220527061912/https://sciblogs.co.nz/diplomaticimmunity/2017/02/20/gardasil-vaccine-compared-placebo/
A rotavirus vaccine was tested against "sterile saline solution" in infants and adults https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30001-3/fulltext
Here's an older study looking at measles vaccine in children a few years old, with saline placebos https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/266590/PMC2554544.pdf?sequence=1
I'm digging kinda obscure here to find open-access trials that specifically used inert saline placebo to counter the antivax talking point on that, but I want to reiterate that it is perfectly valid to not use saline placebos in placebo-controlled studies! Saline solution is not the gold standard for controls; in fact it's often preferred to use solutions that are the same as the vaccines but without active ingredients because saline placebos won't have redness at the site of injection or other reactions, so it's easier for those with a saline placebo to guess they were in the placebo group or just not feel like the vaccine worked, weakening the placebo effect. Since adjuvants are extremely well studied this isn't a problem!
BTW after a few ACX comments in a thread Substack sometimes just stops sending me notifications for some reason, so if you reply to me here and I don't respond after a day or so feel free to email me at fierysackboy[at]gmail[.com]
Thanks for all the work. Above and beyond the call of duty. I'm still reading the book. I don't mean to be disparaging but some of those have a low number of participants. So it's going to be hard to see something that effects only a few percent of the cases.
I haven’t but something I think is under-mentioned (because we needs must hate) is how the definition of a vaccine sort of morphed, and the role that might have played in people not wanting to get the Covid vaccine repeatedly.
I’m not saying it really did change, scientifically- but just: when we were kids we were vaccinated against mumps, and then we didn’t get mumps. That may have misled us a bit.
There was no change in "definition". Vaccines have always varied in efficacy.
Oh, gotcha. So the problem was the American public actually was misinformed about the efficacy of vaccines, in the direction of thinking them nearly 100% effective as regards rabies, mumps, measles.
So the CDC changed the definition on its website to reflect what you’re saying, evidently realizing the public had got the wrong end of the stick.
“Gullible” is a national trait, so not much new.
Vaccines were never "defined" as being 100% effective. They've been around since Pasteur's time, and Pasteur didn't define them that way, nor were his vaccines excluded from the definition.
No, of course. Just a misimpression owing to the spectacular and I guess unique success of certain famous vaccines. And perhaps also the nomenclature of “flu shot” - I never heard anyone refer to it as a vaccine. A misimpression which in fact the CDC recognized and rectified - I’m not sure if you’re disputing that, I sense you are shadow boxing with someone else.
You really never heard of the flu shot as a vaccine? What else could people have thought it to be?
There have been short-acting vaccines for quite a while, like the vaccines for flu and Lyme's disease.
Good point. But a lot of us ignore those (no one got a flu shot when I was young, and I've never entertained getting one) and think back to those childhood vaccines, which seemed to work marvels.
I did all of my own volition - my mother wasn't there - get the shingles vaccine. I felt like a kid doing something grown-up. I didn't get a sugar cube after.
I'm super-happy whenever I remember I have had the shingles vaccine. It was free, done at the CVS.
That's because it would be grossly unethical to withhold vaccines from a kid.
That is really just begging the question. That said, studies do not have to be immaculate in order to provide a high level of confidence that vaccines are more beneficial than they are harmful. All common vaccines meet that bar.
There are ways around that. I'd volunteer my kid for a trial that might delay vaccines for a year.
But what is really unethical is the testing done on the new rotavirus vaccine. Instead of a real placebo they gave the kids in the control group the vaccine sans the antigen. And 1 in 30-40 control group subjects had a serious adverse effect! These were kids!
This is for childhood vaccines, though, right? So is it not a solution that the original standard treatment was a previously placebo tested vaccine as used for adults? We know generally that vaccines work on human bodies, I think, so the medical test process is used for degree of efficacy + side effects, not to determine whether a vaccine works at all
It's the side effects that seem to be missing from a lot of testing... but I'm still reading the book.
In the vast majority of all medical research it is usual to test an innovation against "usual care" which is the current recommendation. Testing against placebo would be unethical as it would mean actively denying someone the currently available treatment.
Yup but there are obvious ways around that. One easy one is to give half the group placebo this year and real thing next year, and visa versa for other half.
Oh I should add that this is the 'turtles all the way down' idea. We've only tested the safety of vaccines against other vaccines. The original was never tested.
"Yup but there are obvious ways around that."
Just a general observation: every time you learn about a new area of knowledge and think "there are obvious" whatever, consider that the only obvious thing is that you have no clue. Not as an insult, but a statement of fact - you just literally have no idea about the realities of the field.
Grin, sure! A dangerous thing, a man with a little bit of knowledge. :^) The book is highly referenced. https://tinyurl.com/TurtlesBookEngRef
Oh no doubt, no doubt. In my world where we patent rather than publish, even the most useless patents have piles of references, goes with the territory.
Before doing a study to delay the first DTaP dose from month 2 to month 14, the person proposing such a study would need to explain why Chester's Vaccine Schedule put it at month 2 in the first place.
There's a lot of wiggle room in the vaccine schedule as is. Dose 3 of Polio can take place any time between month 6 and month 18. We could absolutely do a double-blind test on that...
... but it wouldn't resolve anything. If no issues were found, the people fighting against childhood vaccines wouldn't say "oh, glad it's all cleared up now." They would say that the polio was a stupid distraction, and it's all about the HiB vaccine, or the pneumococcal vaccine, or *any* vaccine.
Well sure as parents we want to know the risks in all the vaccines. I don't know Chester's vaccine schedule from a bus schedule. But still if we wanted to test the side effects caused by vaccines I'm guessing some smart doctor could come up with a way to do that. (There's a whole chapter on the polio vaccine at the end of the book... i'm still reading.)
You aren't going to know all the risks of all the things. If I tell you vaccine X and vaccine Y are a dangerous combination, then you can spend millions of dollars and put a bunch of babies at risk to determine they aren't with 95% probability. Problem solved. But then I give you a different X-Y pair. Now you have to start all over.
Don't worry, if you get through all X-Y pairs, I'll start giving you X-Y-Z tuples.
Well I wasn't worried about combo's being dangerous. But it seems like there could be an easy way to test all the combo's you wanted... (Yeah again, I'm a bear of very little brain... and factorials are going top show up.) But given a large enough group you could test all the combos at once... 10k subjects in each group.
Are the riots in Turkey likely to amount to anything?
Not in the outcome, but the ruling dictatorship might have to up repression and fraud to stay in power.
(This is why Mark Galeotti encourages Russians to vote even though it can never make a difference for the outcome - it exposes the rulers more nakedly when they have to cheat increasingly worse.)
How dangerous is it for a Russian citizen to vote for an opposition candidate? (Perhaps more to the point, how dangerous does it *feel*?)
None, really.
*Being* a candidate means towing the line or falling out a window, though.
This is why the communists are allowed to get a decent little vote-share - they get to have their party as long as they know not to be an actual opposition, and they're fine with that deal.
The answer is it depends.
For the median Russian the danger is quite low. But the median Russian is unlikely to want to vote for an opposition candidate in the first place
For those who support opposition candidates, the danger usually is also quite low. The perceived danger depends on one's level of paranoia.
There are exceptions, sometimes government employees have to take a photo of the ballot and share it with their boss.
There are certain regions in Russia where government candidates have been getting 99% of votes rather than the usual 50-70%. There you'd stand out more and the danger would be higher. The same goes for prisons, psychiatric hospitals, the army.
It's not hard to be more popular than a military junta, which is what I think was the regime in Turkey before.
It also depends on what you're arrested for. We have seen that in the US in recent years...
And Romania last month.
What do readers think of the recent news that measurements of increasing confidence seem to show that the Cosmological "Constant", driven by so called Dark Energy, is said to have started declining in recent eons (from around 5 billion years ago) ?
I think it is possible that dark energy that drives cosmic expansion stems somehow from goings on inside black holes, perhaps inverted so that what is minute, and possibly contractive, inside the black hole is vast and expansive in its manifestations outside, sort of like comparing the views down either end of a telescope, ant-like at one end and normal sized at the usual viewing end.
Perhaps dark energy density is related to the rate at which mass is falling into black holes, so the increasing rarity of high accretion rates of quasars in early times to the mostly quiescent black holes in our neck of the woods, would account for the reducing dark energy.
It just highlights the gaps we have in our current theories. Maybe there is such a thing as dark energy, or maybe it's just a bad measurement or a bad theory of gravity compounding on itself.
I press [X] to doubt so far, because from general principles of quantum field theory, if vacuum energy (the only thing we know of that acts like "dark energy") could decline continuously from where it was 5 billion years ago, it would have done so long ago.
Vacuum energy is one popular candidate, but it's well-known that it's "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science", off by double or triple digits magnitudes. So I really wouldn't make conclusions about dark energy based on properties of vacuum energy.
Not sure. But cosmology gets stuck in the same type of group think that invades all science these days. (I blame it on the money.) Maybe the James Webb will break the group think. A favorite site for me is Triton station. All about MoND and cosmology. https://tritonstation.com/
Are there any organizations that are somewhat effective at smuggling civilians who want to leave and aren't violent out of Gaza/North Korea but don't have the financial means (hire actual smugglers, pay Egypt $5000, etc) to do so, into places that wouldn't be willing to take a large number but are in practice fine with a marginal few?
Gaza:
To the best of my knowledge, no. The closest possible match is that company owned by Al-Argani, the businessman close to the Egyptian regime and one of his companies is the one cornering the lucrative business of smuggling Gazans into Egypt, with the blessing of the regime. But I don't imagine they accept just about any random someone coming from outside the Middle East and paying them to smuggle N Gazans, where N is less than a 100. Maybe you can pretend to be a wealthy diaspora Gazan or some thing like that but that won't survive any close examination (e.g. "Speak Arabic, wealthy Gazan."). In all cases, I don't know if the company is still operating at all, Egypt has kinda soured on the whole smuggling Gazans thing since Trump started babbling about a resort in Gaza and wholesale Ethnic Cleansing.
One of your replies* have posted the new department of Ethnic Cleansing that Israel very recently approved. Not only is cooperating or funding this department of severely questionable second-order moral consequences (Thought Experiment: Is it moral to cooperate or fund Nazi Germany to deport Jews instead of murdering them? How do you guarantee that this is indeed where your money goes and not, say, new panzers or genocide fuel to burn Jews?), but also Israel is not the bottleneck in the Ethnic Cleansing project of Palestinians, a new target land for Ethnic Cleansing is. Just like the case for Nazi Germany and Jews, come to think of it.
(I think the latest cutting edge solution from the geniuses in Israel thinking about this goes something like "Every number is small if you're allowed to divide it arbitrarily, so if we scattered 20K Palestinians every which way, possibly across several decades, and across 100 country, maybe this will work", which... sounds plausible, let's see how/if they manage to do that while simultaneously screaming "Blood Libel" at the people and courts calling them genociders and ethnic cleansers.)
The only thing left is the individual GoFundMe-s that Gazans launch in desperation to raise the money for their individual smuggling, but like all tragedies this is an extremely fertile land for scams and abuse (Imagine the Nigerian prince, but referencing actual events and tragedies to lure the scam's victims). There is no organization that specializes in vetting the GoFundMes as far as I can know, so it's you and your personal detective skills and time trying to tease out actual Gazans from all the scammer (and scammer Gazans, of which plenty exist).
*: (whose author is hilariously fragile enough to have blocked me, but I can still their reply because I scan the thread on non-logged-in devices. What can I say, the wonderful discourse habits of the Pro-Israel)
https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_in_North_Korea
They seem legitimate and claim to have helped over 1,000 North Koreans escape. I can't vouch for effectiveness, if that means "efficiency," since they're involved in activism and other projects besides just helping North Koreans escape.
They help North Koreans who cross the border into China continue to a destination of their choosing, rather than being sent back to NK or otherwise exploited in China.
They imply that they aren't involved in helping North Koreans cross the border into China - only in helping them continue their escapes, once they've crossed the border.
I will read more about them, thank you
I imagine you need contacts in Hamas for Gaza, and that it's not doable at all for North Korea.
Yeah, good point.
Achieving that is probably non-trivial in the first place, and they likely prefer if you have relatives that can get eaten alive by dogs or put in rape camps or something if you misbehave.
The Israeli government is setting one up now that there's a US administration that's okay with it
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bkbnvha3jl
That's good, probably (very hard to figure out the game theoretic implications of everything that's going on).
I guess I'm hoping/looking for something done by non-governments that's primarily interested in the welfare/freedom of the refugees, that I could support directly financially?
The trick is finding someone who wants to receive them. Egypt obviously and naturally doesn't, nor anyone else.
(for Gaza, not NK)
Here is a geometry puzzle for you!
You have a goat, and you want it to eat the grass of an exacly half-circle shaped meadow. All around, there are beautiful and poisonous flowers which the goat must not eat. Unfortunately, you cannot build an ugly fence. You have:
* Three wooden stakes which you can plant anywhere you like,
* As much rope as you want,
* Eye bolts through which the rope can glide freely,
* A knife to cut the rope to any length you need.
How do you plant the stakes and tie the ropes, so that the goat eats exactly that half-circle?
You can do it with one stake if you drive it through the goat.
You need no stake at all if you garotte the goat with the rope. But then who's going to eat all the grass?
Two post solution on infinite plane:
Gjb cbfg fbyhgvba:
Svefg cbfg rknpgyl unys jnl orgjrra gur gjb pbearef bs gur unyspvepyr.
Frpbaq yvar va (arneyl) vasvavgr qvfgnapr ba gur crecraqvphyne yvar pebffvat gur unys pvepyrf fgenvtug yvar va gur cbvag jurer gur svefg cbfg vf.
svefg ebcr jvgu enqvhf e rhdny gb gur unys pveyprf enqvhf nggnpurq gb gur svefg cbfg.
frpbaq ebcr jvgu yratgu n guebhtu gur frpbaq cbfg.
Yratgu n vf gur (arne vasvavgr) qvfgnapr orgjrra gur gjb cbfgf.
One stake in the center of the straight side of the semicircle, a rope goes to the goat, length equal to the circle's radius. This alone would permit the goat the graze a full circle.
Create a line of taut rope parallel to and the same length as the straight side of the semicircle, but tangential to the curved side of the circle. Around that taut rope tie a third piece of rope, looped loosely so the attachment point can move along the second rope. The other end goes to the goat, third rope's length is also one circle radius. The second and third ropes further limit the goat's movement to the intended semicircle.
Many thanks to all who answered!
I think this is the intended solution, funny I had not found it. My best call was to [rot13] gvr gur tbng gb gjb fgnxrf cynagrq ng k = unys gur enqvhf naq l = cyhfzvahf irel sne njnl. Guvf tvirf na ryyvcfr jvgu gur fgnxrf nf gur gjb sbpny cbvagf, fb gur tbng zvffrf n srj yrnirf bs tenff, ohg gur ryyvcfr vf nyzbfg fgenvtug sbyybjvat gur unys-pvepyr qvnzrgre.
Cool that Haegar found a similar solution with one stake less. But I like best George Wang's solution which needs only two stakes although a lot of rope.
Well done!
"looped loosely" - ah, I think that's where the eye bolts are supposed to come into play. I think you nailed it.
Good point, guess I didn't read that bit
You can do it with two stakes if you live on a sphere and not the infinite plain:
Bar fgnxr ng gur pragre bs gur pvepyr qrsvarq ol gur unys pvepyr naq bar fgnxr ng bar bs gur nagvcbqrf qrsvarq ol gur rdhngbe qrsvarq ol gur yvar phggvat gur unys pvepyr.
Crud, I forgot to use rot13. Will repost when I'm back at my computer.
This is probably not the intended solution, but:
V cynag bar fgnxr ng rnpu raq bs gur unys-pvepyr naq hfr gur ebcr gb jrnir n srapr gung gur ebcr pnaabg cnff guebhtu.
V cynag gur guveq fgnxr ng gur pragre bs gur unys-pvepyr, naq gvr gur tbng gb gung fgnxr jvgu n cvrpr bs ebcr nf ybat nf gur enqvhf bs gur unys-pvepyr.
Do the wooden stakes all have to be inside the field?
No.
Can you write about aphantasia and hyperphantasia? I have been writing about it on my substack and I really wonder how you think about the vast differences in human internal visualization.
This is a fascinating topic. My partner describes hyperphantasia which is something I hear much less about than aphantasia, so I'm surprised that you say the former is more prevalent.
Yes hyperphantasia is apparently more prevalent (according to the Zeman research I cite) but there has been less research about it. Interestingly I have heard so much about "mixed marriages" from friends on FB where I posted my piece. Hyperphantasiacs married to aphantasiacs! So interesting.
I'm not here to plug my own writing but I've gotten a lot of mail about this piece on hyperphantasia and really wonder how you think about this phenomenon. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/aphantasia-and-the-sixth-sense
So, was the description of Elon Musk in that book Scott reviewed about him a complete lie? Or did Musk used to be like that but only become insane later?
People who know him say he's degenerated in scary ways since earlier.
I'm sure Ketamine doesn't help, either.
In Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography, Musk comes across as unhappy, implacable, driven, tyrannical, unstable. He seemed to fire almost all his employees sooner or later. Perhaps this is the secret of success.
He gave his subordinates impossible deadlines and threats of firing. The subordinates reasonably chose to do their jobs with the most risk-free traditional methods. Then Musk berated them for not experimenting with non-traditional methods. Apparently illustrating, over and over, how Musk is the fearless visionary.
Did you know that you can put links in posts? Revevant book review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
Also relevant is https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/ from 2015, where Scott uses Musk as an example of a extraordinarily successful pro-social person:
> And this is part of why it’s important for me to believe in innate ability, and especially differences in innate ability. If everything comes down to hard work and positive attitude, then God has every right to ask me “Why weren’t you Srinivasa Ramanujan?” or “Why weren’t you Elon Musk?”
Personally, I think that at that time, Musk was definitely a net positive. Before Tesla, electrical cars were mostly bought purely for ideological reasons by people who were willing to pay more and accept lower performance to slow climate change. Tesla made electric cars cool: people who would have previously bought a fancy German car were now buying Tesla instead as a status symbol. This proved that you can actually make money selling electric vehicles, and has (partly) transformed the whole industry.
I am not sure when, how or why his fall to the dark side happened. Success is a hell of a drug, and I think he always was an asshole on twitter. And of course, the woke left was not exactly showering him in praise, as a cis-male white billionaire, there was a clear ceiling on how popular he could become.
Still, I am hopeful that his genius in making companies successful does not transfer to dismantling the government.
Lots of sources claim Elon changed a lot in recent years, his dad also changed personality in his 50s and became into astrology. But we can't really know, it could be an elaborate act (see Scott's review of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/), a mental health crisis, a drug related issue or the surfacing of his old personality.
...wait, are we finally admitting he's not a fully rational genius now? He was still being vehemently defended only a couple of weeks ago; I feel like I've missed a big opinion shift if we're now able to ask whether he was always weird without having to first get people to agree that he's weird.
When did the zeitgeist flip, and what was it that finally convinced people?
Your comment confuses me. Several things can all be true:
1. He was always at least kind of weird. This seemed obvious to me, although mostly in the socially awkward, doesn't care about normal things kind of way, perhaps to a somewhat greater extent than often seen. I managed to pick this up even though encountering _very_ little media with him. I also never got the impression that we weren't allowed to say that he was kind of weird.
2. He was and remains _extremely_ intelligent. Barring disease or injury, I don't really think people's intelligence changes much, and I think that his life's accomplishments are not possible for someone who isn't well above average intelligence, and as much as I dislike his current activities and behaviors, I don't think they undermine the previous evidence.
3. His current actions, including the things on twitter, betray both a whole lot of ignorance on a wide range of political topics and also a seeming lack of curiosity about the truth of those topics. He thinks he knows the answer, and seems to have the extreme arrogance to believe that there is no point listening to contrary ideas.
Basically, while his recent behaviors are bad (and unexpected), I don't think they really undermine the things that we actually knew about him:
that he is a smart, capable, but somewhat strange and socially inept person who is probably one of the worlds greatest talents at creating world changing businesses.
THe new information is that in areas outside of his core exptertise, he is prone to conspiracy thinking.
Honestly, per Scott's "Rule Thinker's In" article [1], we maybe *shouldn't* be that surprised that he believes and does crazy things in other areas (note that I'm citing that article merely for the stories about very smart people who believed and did very dumb things, not because I'm arguing that we should consider Elon Musk a thinker worth listening to)
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
"Barring disease or injury, I don't really think people's intelligence changes much" -- this statement depends on a pretty narrow (to me at least) definition of "intelligence".
The two smartest individuals I knew while attending an elite US college, each of whom at that time evidenced truly-elite IQs (the kind of person who would decide to take up chess as a spare-time hobby and in a few months have achieved grandmaster certification), had each by middle age become a full-blown raving can-barely-manage-daily-life person fixated on various conspiracy theories. Neither of them had become any less "intelligent" in the sense that aces IQ tests but....they'd become a lot less _something_.
Yes, I agree with this. Intelligence (in the narrow academic sense) is not necessarily the same thing as "ability to function in society", and a decent argument can be made that, whatever you want to call that second ability, Elon has lost some amount of it.
It flipped a while ago, at latest earlier this year with his involvment in the current administration but definitely more than just a few weeks ago.
It depends what's being smuggled into "vehemently defended". Some people pretend that electric cars or re-usable rockets were just sitting around waiting for someone to show up and think about them and then they automatically exist, instead of Hard Problems that needed a lot of work and leadership to make happen, and when pointed out how silly that is they think that Musk is being "vehemently defended."
It seems like Tesla at least plausibly could have succeeded, at least engineering-wise, without Musk though. SpaceX is probably a better case for Musk contributing actual value and not just perception.
Lots of people who know him seem to be saying he changed post-covid, possibly as a result of social media and ketamine addiction (see e.g. Sam Harris's story).
He himself dates the change to around then, but cites a different reason: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1815519696424161361
Vivian highly disputes musk's version of events and claims he had very little to do with her in childhood, even pre-transition.
Regardless, she seems to be living her best life and enjoying studying in Tokyo.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/vivian-jenna-wilson-elon-musk-trans-youth
He's up to I think it's 13 acknowledged children by a half-dozen different women, during the same decades of building/running multiple enormous enterprises. There are only so many hours in a day/month/year and kids are inherently demanding at even minimal levels of parental involvement. Of course he had very little to do with her in childhood, duh.
Up to 14 now by last count, that is including his first child by his first wife which was the child that died from SIDS.
"It is publicly known that Musk has as many as 14 children with 4 different mothers across a 20-year span: 6 including Vivian (and a child that passed away as a baby) with his ex-wife Justine Wilson; 4 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at the Musk-owned company Neuralink; and 3 with the musician Grimes. On February 14, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair announced a 13th child (who, as of this writing, Musk has yet to acknowledge), and on February 28, a 14th child with Zilis was reported."
Man is single-handedly trying to reverse the fertility decline!
Firstly, Elon did not have 13 children during Vivian's formative years. Secondly, Vivian disputes Elon's actual account of those years and believes that his dramatic "My poor gay autistic son was killed by the woke mind virus" story is just crocodile tears. After being essentially ignored by Elon as a child, to the point that he can't get details of her life right, she has suddenly become useful to him as a rhetorical weapon.
I'm sure that you felt you were making some kind of salient point, but you seem to have failed to understand what I was actually saying in the rush to get to the cathartic release of that wonderful "Duh".
Not at all. I was, based on my own firsthand experiences, expressing support for the plausibility of Vivian's view of events.
You sure read a whole lot into a little three-letter word.
Haven't read the biography but Vivian also claims in the Teen Vogue interview that she was vilified by Isaacson in order to make Elon look better, yet according to The Real Capgras, Isaacson does not present Elon as heroic:
"During that interview, Musk built on the picture of Wilson painted in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography Elon Musk. In that telling, according to Wilson, she was an angry, rebellious child, blinded by radical anticapitalist ideology and hurting her father with her rash decisions.
...VW: He had an agenda when writing his book, which was to make Elon look good, or look more complex than he is. In order to do that, he needed to villainize the trans teenager and make it seem like there were two reasonable sides to the story. (Isaacson did not respond to Teen Vogue’s request for comment.)"
I think this is a case of a familial falling-out and neither side is going to be giving the unvarnished objective truth but rather as how they see things. That is, Vivian was indeed a bratty, rebellious, angry teen who lapped up trendy socialism amongst other influences (and still is an angry, rebellious and trendy socialist twenty-year old) and Elon was that kind of guy as Capgras describes. And I do think Vivian is heavily influenced by (a) being extremely opposed to her father (b) drag queen/gay culture - the amount of "Girl! Fabulous! Two snaps up!" vocabulary in that Teen Vogue article made me think of Chappell Roan and her drag-persona (without which she'd be your average white girl singer-songwriter).
So it's pretty obvious that Vivian has been influenced by social media/particular elements of queer culture, and it's not too far-fetched to imagine that a rebellious, autistic 13 year old struggling to get Daddy's attention* did get influenced by social contagion towards being trans.
*The Teen Vogue interview also makes it clear that Vivian has no interest at all, very much the opposite in fact, in her half-siblings by the new mothers, so it's looking like a case of still struggling for Daddy's attention, this time by being the thorn in his side (negative attention is better than none). For someone who allegedly wants nothing more to do with Elon and changed their name and the rest of it, Vivian sure talks a whole lot about him.
What's interesting is that this child is a twin, they were both twin boys. I have no idea if they were fraternal or identical, but given that the other twin does not seem to be trans that makes it interesting about "so what about 'born this way' or effect of hormones in utero on being trans?"
Also by the photos they look neurodivergent in some way, possibly autistic. So the commonly quoted link between transness and autism may be at play there as well. And I can see why Elon thinks this is down to social contagion (given the twin brother who isn't making any news in any way).
For someone who says they have nothing to do with their father and don't even think about him, all their interviews certainly have a lot of content about Elon. The only reason this person is currently famous is precisely because of the Musk connection, and that probably stokes even more discord in the relationship that's already rocky. Nobody cares about Vivian Wilson as "trans kid of some Canadian writer of paranormal romance" but they're hella interested in "Elon Musk's trans daughter".
So it _was_ the transgenders who ended up bringing the end of the Western civilization! /s
This explains the change in opinions about doctors, but he also seems to have become generally more erratic and less evidence based around then, which seems more like a personality change than something driven by a specific event.
Covid changed a lot of people. Kinda the last straw in having faith in our institutions.
In March 2020, Musk said that there would be 0 new COVID cases by April 2020.
The ways that "institutions" got things wrong during COVID don't hold a candle to the ways *Musk* and others like him got things wrong during COVID, and I think that you can trace a lot of "loss of faith in institutions" to *that*.
I think institutions are pretty good at operating in the day to day way they are generally expected to perform. Far from perfect, but good enough for a society. But they have a hard time adapting to a novel emergency of any kind like COVID. We make plans for emergencies, but things move fast and change at a rapid pace during them, and institutions just don't have the flexibility to respond in the correct way.
That’s an important piece of the story… but not quite complete. I was young then, but I remember the H1N1 “swine” flu thing in 2009. I remember queueing for a couple of hours to get vaccinated – and that flu didn’t amount to much anyway.
The point is, even in kind-of novel situations, institutions can adapt and do a lot of good work. But it’s not always their natural course and you need people inside (aka people monitoring the situation and sounding the alarm) and outside (politics-adjacent) to set them towards the right course of action.
The man managed to build a net worth of hundreds of billions of dollars mostly on hot air and a cult of personality, and bullshits with reckless abandon. Hmmm, could a biography that paints him as a genius possibly be bullshit as well? Let me think...
To elaborate: I think the original post raises a false dilemma. It's quite plausible that Musk has become more unhinged in the last couple of years, but that doesn't mean he was a benevolent genius inventor-entrepreneur earlier. From what I gather, he was always a sociopathic manipulator and pathological liar, but he managed to mask his character better.
There are a lot more liars than there are people as successful as Musk.
And there are a lot more runners than there are people as fast as Usain Bolt. Sometimes there's a confluence of entrepreneurial talent, being in the right place at the right time, being connected to the right people, being equipped with a well-filled bank account, AND having an unlimited amount of chuzpah.
Musk's multiple companies are more than "being in the right place at the right time", he would have to be at multiple right places at multiple right times.
Isn't the only really successful company he really built from the ground up pretty much by himself SpaceX? Don't get me wrong, that's impressive, and it's even kind of impressive that he managed to do what he did to Twitter's workforce while only enshittifying the platform and not having the wheels come off completely, but his record is not at the level where we can really discount luck playing a significant role in elevating him from an "ordinary" tech oligarch to ThE RiChEsT MaN In ThE wOrlD.
If somebody can make that kind of billions out of just hot air and a personality cult then the system is surely broken.
Elon is clearly smart and adding some value from his companies, politics aside.
In "the system", Donald Trump was elected POTUS *TWICE*. Yeah, it's safe to say "the system is broken".
Elon is clearly a master manipulator (as is Trump), and he clearly has a knack for buying promising companies and hiring talented people. But... all successful Tesla models followed the roadmap laid out by the original founders, and the products that were envisioned by Musk were the Semi and the Cybertruck. Not sure if that's a great track record.
Those are two different systems. One is capitalism, the other a flawed democracy. I’m actually in favour of replacing capitalism but with what I don’t know.
Buying companies and making money is a skill in and of itself.
I'm not sure they're that different, at least in the US, where having massive amounts of money is almost a necessity for a political career, and convincing people that you're hot shit is very helpful for earning massive amounts of money.
"Buying companies and making money is a skill in and of itself." - sure, and if Musk had been content with being the guy running a medium-size electric car company and a successful rocket company, he'd have my respect. But then he'd just be "successful entrepreneur" Elon Musk, not "memelord supergenius richest man in the world" Elon Musk. THAT required a lot of boardroom shenanigans, fraud and vaporware BS.
Remember when Waitbutwhy called him "the raddest man in the world"?
He has a painting in the attic that is that rad now
> He has a painting in the attic that is that rad now
So you're positing he finally stabbed the painting containing all the downsides to his demanding and driven personality and otherworldly success, and in an instant, switched places, Dorian Gray style?
Seems as good a hypothesis as any around here. :-)
I have an aunt whose tourist visa to the U.S. was denied because her husband has a record in Greece (which I don't fully understand because he has Greek papers and routinely enters and exits the country without issue) and was told that for her to be approved her husband must clear his record. My aunt's daughter is married and living in the United States and due to give birth in May, this was the main reason that my aunt wanted to visit, so it was especially heartbreaking when she was denied. Besides illegally smuggling my aunt into the country, does anyone know anything that I can do? It's not clear to me why her husband having a record should prevent her from travelling.
Your aunt's daughter should contact her congressperson right away. Every Congressperson has staff who attempt to help people with immigration issues. It might not work, but it is your best bet.
Thank you for this suggestion, I'll try reaching out on her behalf (her English is not great).
Worth trying. Also, IANAL, but what if she divorced her husband? Could that work?
Seriously though, I would also contact a lawyer who specializes in immigration/visas. Maybe there’s one in this comment section, but even so there’s often a back and forth about case specifics that is easier when you pay someone for that expertise.
We've discussed them legally divorcing in the past but thought it would appear too obvious as to why and didn't want to risk them being accused of fraud.
I'm not clear why that would be fraud.
Getting divorced just to secure a visa could be seen as fraud and civil services in Albania aren't exactly known for their integrity so we didn't want to risk it.
High-resolution video call
What is the prediction track record of Peter Zeihan, if something like that exists (explicitly or implicitly)?
Im unimpressed with his track record, he didnt predict trump would win he cant be better then 50/50
he does however cite off numbers allot and I do need more of that.
I have not generally been impressed. His track record of being right on stuff I know about is not particularly good, such as a theory that drones are transforming naval warfare (already happened, new stuff matters little at sea, a lot more on land) and ignorance of what China has been up to at sea. Also, the degree of credence he puts in geographic and demographic factors is... more than seems to make sense. I agree that China's demographics are going to give it serious problems, but his take seems optimized for being interesting rather than accurate.
His belief that the Han Chinese are going to disappear is nonsense. Really small ethnicities continue just fine. And there's a big Chinese diaspora.
It's quite possible the Chinese government will collapse. It's quite possible there will be a lot fewer Chinese than there are now because of the low birth rate. And neither of these resemble the ethnicity disappearing.
Otherwise? He's been repeating that the US was going to stop guaranteeing the safety of marine commerce, and this would cause the world to reshape. There would (could?) be a solid commercial alliance between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and it would (could?) be the most prosperous place in the world.
Well, he might be right about the safety of marine commerce.
I've followed him for a while. He got a decent popularity bump a while back for "successfully predicting not only that the Ukraine invasion would happen, but that it would happen in 2020".
I think of him less of a superpredictor and more of a systems guy. He has a great track record for being directionally correct about things (sometimes way before everybody else is), but he has a less good track record of being correct about the exact magnitude. He'll be the first to point out a potential threat or challenge from X scenario, but he'll suggest the worst possible outcome (e.g. widespread famine or death) which usually doesn't end up coming to pass. One issue is that he's not a Bayesian -- his predictions are often binary and hyperbolic, I think partially due to his audience being mostly business types who are more receptive to confident exaggeration (because everybody in that world confidently overexaggerates to some extent so you have to adjust to the volume of the room).
Basically the classic "nine of the last five recessions."
This overview of Zeihan on the multipolarity podcast was pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njz5hDAz_hc
Specifically about his predictions, I remember him being embarrassed after predicting Prigozhin would overthrow Putin.
I watch Zeihan's YouTube videos and think his track record is just 50/50. For example, right after the Ukraine War started, he predicted mass famine in Africa and the Middle East within months due to the interruption in grain shipments. He also predicted "Kamala Harris will win the election unless she shits the bed" or something to that effect.
Here's a great analysis of how the predictions from one of his books, The Accidental Superpower, turned out:
https://www.militantfuturist.com/the-accidental-superpower-and-my-volcanic-epiphany/
In particular, he predicted famine from the Ukraine war because some 30% of wheat production came from that region. What he got wrong is that 30% of wheat *exports* came from the region, but most of the wheat in the world is produced and consumed in the same country.
This isn't just a mistake, it's a mistake about the kind of thing he specializes in knowing.
The china is doomed crowd is generally unreliable. Someday they may kick it out of the park.
Highly confidential chats and the sharing of detailed of war plans -- documents having the highest possible classification status for which not all participants had clearance even before the journalist was inadvertently and to his own surprise, added.
All of which they were doing on Signal instead of the multiple secured systems they all have access to both in DC and when traveling. From the conversation it appears that this has been a regular practice among that group of individuals.
That compares to Hillary Clinton's email server and Trump's taking classified files to Mar-A-Lago, roughly as how driving while drunk compares to jaywalking.
As I understand it, Signal has good encryption, but no way of being sure extra people aren't listening in.
I mostly agree with you, but in the interest of fairness I think it's important to point out that Signal is actually a really good option for secure communication, and if the government were to officially adopt it, it would probably be an improvement over whatever the official platform is right now.
Nothing that runs on any commercial smartphone is a good option for secure communication, sorry. Maybe if your threat maxxes out as credit-card scammers and script kiddies in it for the lulz, but not against "advanced persistent threats". It doesn't matter if the folks at Signal wrote metaphysically perfect code that incorporates theoretically unbreakable conscription; as soon as you load it no to your iPhone or Android or whatever you can't count on the phone actually running the code Signal wrote.
It would be nice if a reliably secure smartphone existed, and I've long thought it would be worth sending a gigabuck or so the NSA's way to make it so, but nobody has done it yet.
Depends on what the threat is. If it's the "Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis of evil" boogeyman, fine. But if it's the next administration, then Signal is better than any official channel that archives all your communications.
True, but that just raises a whole new set of questions.
There's also the matter that parts of the discussion needed to be kept secure against our European allies, or perhaps former allies.
My comment was based on the assumption that the alternative to using Signal was using some other communication platform on the same phone (I don't know if they used regular commercial phones or something more secure).
If the complaint is about the security of the phone itself (as opposed to the Signal app) then I agree the complaint is valid.
Not using smartphones for this sort of thing, period, is OPSEC 101; it's one of the things Jeff and Tina used to preemptively scold us all about in mandatory annual training. Something like e.g. the exact time of a planned attack against an enemy, defaults to Top Secret from birth, and typing it into a smartphone is a federal crime no matter what app you're using(*).
Agreed that if you're doing something secretive over the phone, Signal is probably as good as it gets. But when you're dealing with TS, what you use Signal for is the one-line message that says "Get your ass to a SCIF, ASAP, and check your high-side email".
* As I've been careful to point out since it was Hillary's Emails, it's a crime that is *usually* handled with a stern warning and being fired+blacklisted from any jobs involving classified information; you really have to work at it to get the Feds to throw you in jail over this.
Haven't used it myself....interesting that it's actually a US non-profit.
Apparently though using Signal is not as secure as current federal-intelligence practices. This is from the BBC:
----
"That "gold standard claim" is what makes Signal appealing to cybersecurity experts and journalists, who often use the app. But even that level of security is considered insufficient for very high level conversations about extremely sensitive national security matters.
That is because there is a largely unavoidable risk to communicating via a mobile phone: it is only as secure as the person that uses it. If someone gains access to your phone with Signal open - or if they learn your password - they'll be able to see your messages. And no app can prevent someone peeking over your shoulder if you are using your phone in a public space.
Data expert Caro Robson, who has worked with the US administration, said it was "very, very unusual" for high ranking security officials to communicate on a messaging platform like Signal. "Usually you would use a very secure government system that is operated and owned by the government using very high levels of encryption," she said.
She said this would typically mean devices kept in "very secure government controlled locations".
The US government has historically used a sensitive compartmented information facility (Scif - pronounced "skiff") to discuss matters of national security. A Scif is an ultra-secure enclosed area in which personal electronic devices are not allowed.
"To even access this kind of classified information, you have to be in a particular room or building repeatedly swept for bugs or any listening devices," said Ms Robson. Scifs can be found in places ranging from military bases to the homes of officials.
"The whole system is massively encrypted and secured using the government's own highest standards of cryptography," she said. "Especially when defence is involved."
----
Aaaand....it turns out (per open-source flight information and Russian media reports) that one of the participants in that Signal chat session was at the time in _Moscow_, and was either at or on his way to the Kremlin waiting for his appointment with Vladimir Putin. He was added to the Signal chat, using his personal smartphone, 76 minutes prior to his meeting with Putin.
So did that Trump appointee bring and use his personal unsecured smartphone literally inside the _Kremlin_?
(Also this person -- Steve Witkoff whose job title is "Ukraine and Middle East Special Envoy" -- stated the name of an active CIA intelligence officer in the chat.)
Also, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard admitted under oath today that she was "overseas" while participating in the Signal group chat. She refused, under questioning during a Congressional hearing, to say where exactly she was at that time.
Quoting now from CBS News:
"Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal....the Google Threat Intelligence Group warned just last month of "increasing efforts from several Russia state-aligned threat actors to compromise Signal Messenger accounts used by individuals of interest to Russia's intelligence services."....Ukraine's top cyber defense agency warned just last week about targeted attacks prompting compromised Signal accounts to send malware to employees of defense industry firms and members of Ukraine's armed forces. The bulletin issued by Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) on March 18 indicates that attacks started this month...."
I agree, using a personal smartphone is a 100% valid complaint, as is communicating from a hostile country and everything else you quoted (not to mention including a random journalist that somehow went unnoticed for days).
I just felt bad about the framing that using the Signal app was the core of the problem, whereas the actual problem is, well, literally everything else except that one part.
Sure that makes sense. Signal wasn't the problem here at all and doesn't deserve any blowback from it.
Meanwhile, because Trump and his toadies had spent two days publicly calling the Atlantic and the individual journalist liars, the latter reached their fuck-you boundary and this morning went ahead and released the entire text conversation. Guess which side had been accurately describing it...?
And the details here, oh boy. Turns out that:
-- Hegseth posted the start time and target name of a US military operation aimed at assassinating a key Houthi terrorist, two hours prior to that launch.
-- later in the text string Waltz posted details on the results of that raid, details which contradict the public statement being issued by the Pentagon.
-- Waltz's insistence during the last two days that the text conversation had included "No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS. Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent", is provably bullshit.
-- no U.S. military officer, not even the chair of the Joint Chiefs, was invited into that text conversation. It was an entirely-civilian circle jerk meaning no one was present having the gravitas to say "WHOA we are not going to spill operational specifics about an imminent field mission by our soldiers and sailors!"
What attack vectors are we talking about here? Is it closer to "if you installed TikTok then your phone is spying on you" or closer to "if you browse the web with javascript enabled then your phone is spying on you"?
>My impressions were that I should be much more paranoid of how my phone spies on me
Could you expand on this a bit? In your view, what's the biggest concrete risk? Are they stealing bank logins?
?
there are repeatedly been zero interaction hacks from isreal
pdfs are so poorly designed they can contain programs
theres a smaller computer inside every processer that *never turns off* "management engine"
an air gaped computer can send infomation via harddrive spinning speed and above human hearing chrips of speakers, and the most paranid encyption is ussally 512 bits
So what's the biggest concrete risk? I don't do anything financial on my phone and I'm not important enough to be worth blackmailing with my politically-incorrect texts. What is the worst thing that a malicious hacker is going to do to me by infiltrating my phone?
You're not worth blackmailing yet. Every someone worth blackmailing was, once upon a time, not worth blackmailing. When that changed, criminals or states blackmailed them.
> What is the worst thing that a malicious hacker is going to do to me by infiltrating my phone?
Worst case is capturing continuous streams of intimate data (e.g. you and the people in your house naked) and demanding ransom so as to not release it. Or encrypting all your data and demanding ransom, if your data is sufficiently hard, tedious or impossible to replicate (e.g. photos of a family baby from 10 years ago) and you're willing to keep it then you either have to pay or keep the encrypted drive around hoping for the fabled Quantum Computers of the future to break it before the storage degrades. (In practice, you can't "keep the drive" because phone parts are not repairable or replaceable, so to add insult to injury you have to buy a new phone.)
If all else fails, your data will be bundled with the data of millions of others and sold en-masse to analytics companies that try to predict large-scale patterns, for example insurance companies and propaganda companies that try to predict and affect voting patterns.
>Worst case is capturing continuous streams of intimate data (e.g. you and the people in your house naked) and demanding ransom so as to not release it.
I'm a middle-aged man. That data would do more harm to them than to me. They're welcome to see me naked, it's their funeral. I don't have any important data on my phone. All of my pics are backed up on Google's cloud and even if they weren't I don't *really* care. If my phone gets locked then I drop it in the trash and buy another.
>your data will be bundled with the data of millions of others and sold en-masse to analytics companies that try to predict large-scale patterns,
This poses zero personal risk for me. If they're doing this then having my marginal data doesn't impact their analysis at all.
Anything else?
I don't see you addressing the effect on your family. Your phone camera and microphone are capturing everything, its GPS is capturing every place you go, etc...
> If my phone gets locked then I drop it in the trash and buy another.
They hack the new one and force you to throw it in the trash too. Then what? At which point you're willing to pay? They can do this forever. (Or until they bored and/or you block your new phone from ever connecting to the internet.)
> This poses zero personal risk for me.
But it could allow anyone to give a vital push to a politician you don't like to win the election and wreck havoc on - among other things - you and your property. Also, insurance companies and/or banks to refuse your insurance and loan requests, that's very personal as far as I can see.
Depends on goals and your enemies.
Dont take a even slightly distrusted gps system to the front lines of a war; ever. Thats a way to get a drone with a grenade to give you a vist.
If you dont consider the cia your enemy and on america territory(including its vassels), you probably could ignore it entirely; if you do; well there was a lovely write up by kulak about advice for future lugies.
> What is the worst thing that a malicious hacker
Kill you, your family, horribly, cartel-gore or suicide by shotgun to the back of the head. Everything that matters will need to eventually be physical.
> my politically-incorrect texts.
Im unsure how edgy you feel you are; but this would matter if your a "male feminist"-groomer type lefty, or could easily wouldnt matter at all; the left can only now eat itself.
>Kill you, your family, horribly, cartel-gore or suicide by shotgun to the back of the head. Everything that matters will need to eventually be physical.
And how does my phone expose me in ways I'm not already exposed? If a cartel wants to kill me I'm dead anyway. If I start running cocaine maybe I'll change my attitude towards my phone. For now I'm not going to worry about it.
Come on, I'm looking for *plausible* reasons that a normal person should care about this.
This is the standard "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" argument. You've used it twice today (also in the 23andMe thread below).
Rather than rehashing I'll just link the Wikipedia page with some standard rebuttals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
> normal person
The majority of the world in actually outside of america, while the light on the hill ought to reach all, it may not always be bright enough ;__;
*All* security is situational; the most pressing threat is your political beliefs and your nation state activity on the matter; if your in the uk, germany, france, theres wrong-think cop vists and do you personally imagine you would a) enjoy the argument and film it for clot b) break; thats something for you to answer, while I wish to strong suggest A is better for you and the world, I know all to well thats not everyone.
China has allot of people, and beyond that firewall is a very different story to my situation.
etc. there isnt really a "normal" person here, the break downs matter to much.
That article's description of what was in the messages has major "I ran this article past a lawyer to see if I would go to jail for sharing this" vibes.
"I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel"
There are lawyers regularly involved, and this is absolutely one where you call the one on speed-dial.
But Goldberg isn't some blogger trying to establish his bona fides. He doesn't need to quote the specific operational information.
I really want to know what happened in that chat after the message "Jeffrey Goldberg has left the group" appeared.
You beat me to this by a minute.
Putting the whole Opsec failure thing aside, it's an absolutely fascinating read. Highly recommend it
The short answer is that Transformers need a lot of data that we do not have, Transformers are good at dependencies between tokens which is not that important for tasks like polygenic trait prediction for specific bio reasons, and that Transformers are actually being used already for genomic foundation models, but they're just not that good (most of them have ~0 signal according to a paper a while back).
Two problems would be my guess.
First, one of the big-fundamental things for LLMs is the word embedding table, which allows us to convert word/word-tokens to numbers. So, the phrase "A puppy", which is hard for computers to interpret, becomes ["A"," ", "pup", "py"] which then becomes, say, [123, 0, 65907, 34671], which is much easier for computers to process. "A kitten", by contrast, might become ["A", " ", "kit", "ten], which might then become [123, 0, 48596, 97864]. So the numbers are kinda arbitrary but they're consistent, "A" being 123 doesn't mean anything but 123 is always "A".
But this is kinda pointless for DNA because there's just not that much to encode. Everything is a "CG", "GC", "TA", "AT". So even if we did strings over 6 specific codes, eg "CGATATTAGCCG" is a token...that's only ~4000 possible combinations. It's not clear how we'd get the same kind of benefit we got with words where we dramatically made language simpler by converting word tokens to numbers.
Second, probably more importantly, is that one of the big jumps in language is that it's kinda sequential. If I pass you a partially completed sentence and asked you to guess the next word, every previous word is very important. For example:
"The cow jumped over the (guess)"
"...jumped over the (guess)"
"the (guess)"
These are all the same sentence but how much of the previous words you can see has a huge impact on what you guess. One of the big things LLMs did was allow the computer to use all the previous words to guess the next word token. And that works off there being big sequential impacts to speech. What you said previously is really important for understanding what you're saying now.
But genes (probably) don't work like that. If I ask you to guess the next gene, whether I give you "CGTAATGC (guess)" or "...ATGC (guess)" doesn't really matter because the previous 30 genes don't really matter for guessing the next one.
As always, there's someone smarter on this stuff than me out there, would love to be corrected.
Could you explain in more detail?
Like, did someone make an argument somewhere that transformer model is bad for genetic data? Or did it yield bad results, and no one knows why?