Are comments on old posts effectively hellbanned, ie you can write and post them but they never appear? This was my experience writing a fairly long response to the first POSIWID post — Substack appeared to accept it, but as far as I can tell it just disappeared into the ether.
If possible, it would be nice to be clear that comments have been disabled so people don’t waste a few hours writing a detailed contribution to a discussion that’s not happening.
Even if it isn't hellbanned, there's a good chance no one will see it, because there's no notification system AFAIK on Substack posts, beyond being notified if one of their comments gets a reply. I can't subscribe to one of Scott's posts and get an email whenever any of them gets a new comment. Scott might get one, but given his numbers, he probably stuffs them in a separate email folder and they might never be read.
As someone generally interested in Scott's commenters, I might browse any OT for about a week, searching for "new rep(ly|lies)" until they slow down and then I close that tab and never revisit it. (ETA: changed the expression above so it stops appearing in a search)
If you want other people to read it that badly, it's probably better to either post it top-level to the current OT, or start your own blog.
There are some shadowbanned phrases I think; I remember a long while back, referring to the original Macedonian Teens as, let's call it "false media" this time, and the posts never went through. So try rewording any buzzwords.
Do silicone valley types talk about ai when they mean automation because so few people have *any* experience working with their hands?
Improving labor hours to products is a question of *factories*, maybe some product design. Even the service industry is a distraction, to say nothing of the fire economy. When the insurance industry moves massive ammounts of money around to black rock while day traders take some pennies, the ai denies claims, while the state employees social workers, who vists a starbucks for lunch; a whole bunch of FUCK ALL happened. Factories stopped the hyper exponential improvement their fundamentals before I was born please have better theories as to why; so we can restart it; without delusions about chatbots becoming senitent.
A lot of the outcome of the election has to do with the unemployment and inflation rates. With the economy doing badly enough the incumbent tends to lose. I don't think it was your fault.
* the economy, and how the parties have approached this topic (because in a parallel universe I could imagine someone blaming the economy on Trump's first government)
* the general perception of Democrats as elites disconnected from the plebs, discussing the proper use of pronouns and bathrooms, ignoring the country falling apart (Democrats need to grow some balls and learn to say "no" to the extremists in their ranks)
* Russian propaganda that successfully convinced many Americans that the cool thing to do is destroy their own country (they don't call it this way of course, they use terms like "clearing the swamp", but the idea is always that the proper way to fix your country is to destroy its existing institutions, and then... better institutions will magically appear? if they quite predictably don't, more destruction is needed)
* a long-term failure of the Western civilization to let its wisdom trickle down to the masses, creating a cognitive underclass that is happy to take their wisdom from conspiracy videos (while it is true that you only need a small highly educated minority to advance the science, failing to satisfy the intellectual needs of the masses means that someone else will be happy to take the role, with a profit motive in the better case, and subversion in the worse case)
Today, I was trying to find the name of an Arthur background character that was only named decades into the show. Despite repeated searches, Google was completely unhelpful and useless, so I tried ChatGPT, which quickly identified the character (Maria). I know other people switched to using LLMs rather than web search long ago - perhaps I should do it more often, though it's hard to know in advance what Google will fail at.
Ironically, despite getting the right answer, all the *other* details ChatGPT provided in its response were complete hallucinations. ChatGPT claimed that "She didn't get a name until Season 9, in the episode "Bitzi's Beau" (2004), and only started having speaking roles and more presence afterward." However, Bitzi's Beau is actually a season 5 episode that aired in 2000, and Maria's named was actually first confirmed in the season 13 episode MacFrensky (2009). Her first speaking role came in the aptly named Maria Speaks in season 19 (2016).
It's funny how this example demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of an LLM. I wonder how many people who got that response from ChatGPT would bother to look up the details and discover that **every single claim** was incorrect.
I know absolutely nothing about software, software engineering, coding, programming, whatever the magic is that turns symbols into "make the computer do this", or AI (least of all AI), but this crossed my dash (as the young folks say).
Maybe the real alignment problem was human nature, all along.
#and now Google snippets read the readme and says so too
#no problems ever in mimmic software packige"
Original blog here all about AI, including "can AI tell if you drink beer from a knee x-ray?" (that's one of those questions which invite the answer "no", by the way):
"Using knee X-rays from the National Institutes of Health-funded Osteoarthritis Initiative, researchers demonstrated that AI models could “predict” unrelated and implausible traits, such as whether patients abstained from eating refried beans or drinking beer. While these predictions have no medical basis, the models achieved surprising levels of accuracy, revealing their ability to exploit subtle and unintended patterns in the data.
“While AI has the potential to transform medical imaging, we must be cautious,” said Peter L. Schilling, MD, MS, an orthopaedic surgeon at Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) and an assistant professor of orthopaedics in Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, who served as senior author on the study. “These models can see patterns humans cannot, but not all patterns they identify are meaningful or reliable. It’s crucial to recognize these risks to prevent misleading conclusions and ensure scientific integrity.”
Schilling and his colleagues examined how AI algorithms often rely on confounding variables—such as differences in X-ray equipment or clinical site markers—to make predictions rather than medically meaningful features. Attempts to eliminate these biases were only marginally successful—the AI models would just “learn” other hidden data patterns.
The research team’s findings underscore the need for rigorous evaluation standards in AI-based medical research. Over-reliance on standard algorithms without deeper scrutiny could lead to erroneous clinical insights and treatment pathways.
“This goes beyond bias from clues of race or gender,” said Brandon G. Hill, a machine learning scientist at DHMC and one of Schilling’s co-authors. “We found the algorithm could even learn to predict the year an X-ray was taken. It’s pernicious; when you prevent it from learning one of these elements, it will instead learn another it previously ignored. This danger can lead to some really dodgy claims, and researchers need to be aware of how readily this happens when using this technique.”
That's amazing in one way - the AI can recognise the year the x-ray was taken? it taught itself to do that? - but totally useless in another (how bad are the patient's knees based on this x-ray?) which is the question that the users want answered.
Whatever about the wider philosophical and ethical and "will it turn us all into paperclips?" implications of AI, the current "how does it work in the real world when companies try to monetise it?" state of play seems to be "anywhere from poor to not even wrong".
And given that everywhere is trying to impose AI on us (the couple of times I've interacted with those 'hi I'm a helpful chatbot replacing customer service humans' on websites have been worse than useless, and Windows is shoving Copilot down my throat which I as steadfastly refuse to use) for work and personal life, I think that's important to remember. We're not there yet, not even close to "we can fire all the lower level people and just use AI".
Over in the Classifieds, someone is asking if they can get AI to replace their paralegal (who seems to be retiring/has left) and I'd say things like this would mean "only if you triple-check everything it produces yourself".
> Maybe the real alignment problem was human nature, all along.
I have been shouting in the wilderness for a while about exactly this. The human race is giving birth to its child and we want it to “do as we say, not as we do.” Good luck with that.
I have been and remain convinced the problem with AI will not be that it gets a mind of its own and decides to paperclip us, but that it will be a Big Dumb Machine that we happily turn over more and more control to, in the hopes of the magic money fountain, and that we'll burn ourselves alive in our own house because the thing just stupidly does literally what we ask it and in turn we stupidly think it can think and remember and so we believe everything it churns out.
> This was already an issue pre-LLM (e.g. "typosquatting"),
> Supply chain attacks
... are you part of the problem of corporate IT concept generation? Did you see "whaling" used as a term of phishing targeting ceo's and imagine putting it on a powerpoint?
> Original blog here all about AI, including "can AI tell if you drink beer from a knee x-ray?" (that's one of those questions which invite the answer "no", by the way):
This should be one of the strongest "yes" you can say. Nn's come from statistics; when they are useful its from insane correlation.
> the AI can recognise the year the x-ray was taken? it taught itself to do that?
The issue is if the signal is medically relevant, though. Maybe the AI is able to detect a correlation between knee injuries and alcoholism because drunk people hurt their knees more often... or maybe the AI is detecting a correlation because the researchers sourced a batch of X-ray images from St. Example's Orthopedic Hospital and Addiction Center, where alcoholics with knee injuries are way more common than in other places.
If the correlation is coming from medically irrelevant data, like what year the X-ray was taken or which machine produced the images or which hospital it came from, then your model is useless in a real-world scenario.
> The issue is if the signal is medically relevant
Usefulness is after question of "is". I strongly disbelieve chatbots can be gai. A better, simpler framing of what nn's actually are should lead to the conclusion that; no, any agency is human made like an ancient greek automation with a knife put into a room with children.
The hill climber of the nn's is blind, it will follow the strongest signal on the landscape; its the best because as a black box optimizer it doesn't attempt to peak inside at all.
As a product of calculus, the raw math of curve fitting is by definition the "best fit" given the constraints. The math was already perfect a century go and will never be improved.
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What should be needless to say, I disagree with black box optimizers, you must peak inside to be general.
I read that the Wisconsin supreme court just upheld the partial veto on a party line vote and was very disappointed. Certainly if Republicans did something like that, I'd be outraged, so it's only fair to be mad when it goes the other way too..
Then I did more research into the issue and discovered that a) this is a longstanding practice used by both parties since 1930 and b) Scott Walker did the exact same thing in 2017 and the then-conservative SC rejected a challenge to it.
I thought that seeing an outrageous use of the veto like this might at least convince people to amend the constitution to remove the partial veto, but even then it seems that I was too optimistic. Republicans actually have proposed a constitutional amendment... to disallow partial vetos from being used to raise taxes while otherwise leaving the power completely untouched. Presumably, despite all the howling, they want to preserve the power because they expect to abuse it as well in the future.
Nobody in Wisconsin looks good in all this. The whole thing is just depressing.
Wisconsin's is the only constitution on this continent -- federal or state/province -- which allows the executive to literally remove letters/characters and thereby change a statute's fundamental meaning. It's bizarre.
If that was a plot device on some TV show or movie about politics (West Wing or Veep or whatever) we'd all roll our eyes and say that the writers had given up on coming up with plausible narratives.
Whats wrong with partial vetos? All I care about the american system is the multi layers before violence is used by the state and a veto is one such layer
Wisconsin's partial veto is so flexible that you can rewrite entire sentences with it - in this particular case, it was used to take a law that would be in effect for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, and instead apply it from the years 2023 to 2425.
A partial veto doesn't reduce the state's ability to create laws backed up by violence, it simply allows the governor to unilaterally change what the violence is being applied for, without needing to consult the legislature.
I would think the existence of random mutations would have a chilling effect on bioweapon development. Idk maybe statists are self selected to be able unable to navigate such things(there also was the complete insanity of gain of function), but this still looks like complexity that lowers the effectiveness of people able to plan and further negotiations.
There are no reliable checks on power, so I just prefer more, no matter how insane. Its a check on power if the decision maker changes and more people get involved and branches of government have self interested power seeking people possibly offended. I see that here.(also consider the electoral college, filibusterer, juries; these are not about making good decisions yet they have supporters)
It be interesting to see a: partial veto, get repealed, then if that gets vetoed, how the judges would rule. Im not going to claim that it would work exactly as I expect but.... I think appeals would be excluded.
Judges also airnt bound by the law to any meaningful degree; they make up shit all the time.
If the judges upheld this ridiculous use of the partial veto, why would you not expect the judges to uphold a much more straightforward full veto of the repeal?
And again, this is not a check at all - it expands the power of the governor at the expense of the legislature, which means *fewer* decision-makers and not more. The fact that the legislature will be "possibly offended" is not a meaningful check in any way - it's not like the Republican-held legislature can be *more* opposed to governor Evers than they already are.
Florida passed a new state law which among other things authorized state troopers to stop and arrest people on suspicion of transporting undocumented immigrants into the state. A federal judge, who was appointed by Trump, blocked that section of the statute as beyond the constitutional authority of an individual state.
On Wednesday a young guy who was born and has lived his entire life in Georgia was car-pooling to a job in northern Florida. The car was stopped and even though he showed the troopers his GA identification and his Social Security card, he was arrested and jailed; the arresting officers cited the above state law and listed the charges as "being an unauthorized alien".
A Florida county judge yesterday morning held a hearing at which the defendant's mother appeared and handed the judge his certified Georgia birth certificate. The judge inspected that and pronounced it genuine but said she couldn't release the native-born U.S. citizen from custody because the federal ICE had meantime placed some sort of "hold order" on him. After he'd spent about 24 hours in jail and the story was being reported in local news media, ICE late yesterday announced that they were releasing their "hold" and then the local authorities released him from the jail.
No news story on this case has yet noted the law/regulation/executive order/whatever under which an _Immigration_ and Customs Enforcement Authority gets to require the incarceration of U.S. _citizens_, nor has ICE made any comment about that, nor did that Florida county judge explain it.
"The 20-year-old’s first language is Tzotzil, a Mayan language, and he took a long pause when he was asked if he wanted to hire a private attorney or obtain a public defender. He lived in Mexico from the time he was 1-year-old until four years ago, when he returned to Georgia, his mother told the Phoenix."
So, *not* "lived his entire life in Georgia". His mother spoke to the paper in Spanish, so it's looking like "first language Tzotzil, second language Spanish, third language English" for a 'native Georgian'.
(2) Carpooling to a job? Well, yes, but:
"Two other men who were in the car with Lopez-Gomez, the driver and another passenger, also had their first appearances on the same charges on Thursday. The driver was also charged with driving without a license.
The state trooper pulled over the car Lopez-Gomez was in because the driver was going 78 mph in a 65 mph zone, according to the arrest report. Lopez-Gomez gave his Georgia state ID to the trooper, who wrote in his report that Lopez-Gomez said he was in the country illegally.
Wednesday marked the second time Lopez-Gomez has been arrested. The Grady County Sheriff’s office took him into custody on Sunday and charged him with driving under the influence, his mother said. ICE also requested that the Georgia jail hold Lopez-Gomez, but he won release after his family showed officials his birth certificate and Social Security card, Gomez-Perez said."
So - bunch of guys who can't speak English or speak it very poorly, nobody has legit ID, gosh wow I wonder why they were taken into custody.
ICE may be over-reaching, but it's not like there was no reason at all to be suspicious.
> No news story on this case has yet noted the law/regulation/executive order/whatever under which an _Immigration_ and Customs Enforcement Authority gets to require the incarceration of U.S. _citizens_, nor has ICE made any comment about that, nor did that Florida county judge explain it.
I kid, obviously it's entirely possible that whatever source you were reading failed to provide a link, although before getting indignant over a news story it's generally good to do some research about things which are involved you're unfamiliar with.
Now that you have the link to the ICE detainer explainer perhaps you can answer your question: is there some "law/regulation/executive order/whatever under which an _Immigration_ and Customs Enforcement Authority gets to require the incarceration of U.S. _citizens_"?
EDIT: Forgot to add - either you misread your sources or need to re-evaluate the ones you trust, because, "On Wednesday a young guy who was born and has lived his entire life in Georgia was car-pooling to a job in northern Florida." is untrue. From the same CNN article above:
"Lopez-Gomes might appear in government records as an undocumented person because of paperwork he filled out when he was 16, said Yolanda Alonso, a community activist helping his family. At age 2, he moved to Mexico, then returned at 16, she said.
He didn’t have a passport but was allowed back into the US because he had his Social Security number and a US birth certificate, Alonso said. But he also filed a Form I-94, intended for visitors when they enter and leave the US, she said."
No I had not seen that CNN story. Seems likely that the childhood moving to/from Mexico is why he appeared in ICE's records.
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with his arrest though which didn't involve ICE. That was Florida state troopers deciding that he must be an "invading alien" despite his showing them valid ID and a Social Security card.
Back to ICE, yes I was and am aware of "detainers" as described there. Those are not a federal order backed up by any law or regulation. They are, as stated there on that ICE website, supposed to be "requested" (their word) on "potentially dangerous _aliens_" (my emphasis added).
So my question remains: why did a county judge after finding no probable cause for the arrest, say in open court that she _couldn't_ release the native-born citizen due to some sort of binding ICE "hold" (her word) on him?
It is possible of course that the judge was simply incompetent. I hope it's as simple as that.
> It is possible of course that the judge was simply incompetent. I hope it's as simple as that.
Incompetent is a bit harsh. We don't know the exact policies and directives she was operating under, maybe the circuit / state's stance is that they should always comply with ICE detainers and the judge didn't want to go against that even if it doesn't seem appropriate in this scenario, although it could have been a courtesy to let ICE ask some questions if necessary to clear up the documentation confusion. Or sure, maybe the judge was simply wrong in the moment. It happens - until the glorious AI future we have a human justice system and people can and will make errors in that system without necessarily being incompetent.
But basically, yes. The judge was incorrect and could have released Lopez-Gomez immediately. Not a lot of harm done either way since he was released after ICE lifted the hold, presumably once they were informed about the guy's citizenship status.
> It doesn't seem to have anything to do with his arrest though which didn't involve ICE. That was Florida state troopers deciding that he must be an "invading alien" despite his showing them valid ID and a Social Security card.
That's true. But put yourself in the cop's shoes: he's in a car with other people who stated they were here illegally, probably couldn't coherently answer questions because of the language barrier, etc. I couldn't find the arrest affidavit after a quick search but in reporting there's been mention of some sort of biometric search that came back as him not being a citizen. It's unclear if that happened during the arrest, booking, or sometime later but regardless the arrest itself seems reasonable. (Minus the TRO involving the state law, but presumably the trooper was unaware of that.)
So if he had a SSN, that on its own isn't automatically "gee it must be genuine" and then if he had a visitor's or tourist visa, that is where the confusion comes in.
Why did the judge put a hold on him? Someone more legal can explain that, I have no doubt.
Also, a guy who left the country when he was a year old and lived most of his life in Mexico may technically be a "native-born citizen" but that is not the same as your original claim that he was born and reared in Georgia.
Whats the spread of opinions of 4chan still being down?
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news as I understand:
The isreal post count was very fake
there were harvard professors among the admins, the .gov emails was funny maymay
image boards uncontrolled by intel agencies(cia, garmany and israel) get cp spam, this is well documented and old news; there are court files of "(you)" tags on the screen shots
there was an email leak of the admins saying that "4chan dead forever" if to many moderators quit
there are credible buy offers
people care far less then they thought "did we all leave years ago"
New ""I was just following orders"" just dropped: Haaretz made a number of interviews with the Israeli war criminals (sorry, "military personnel") who "have their doubts" about killing children. The full interview is worth reading here, the immense cope and self-soothing babbling about how you "need to trust the system" in this "justified war" notwithstanding, unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/RaBFD.
Of particular and extreme moral irony: An "educator" (i.e. a teacher or teacher-adjacent profession, most probably) who operates drone to kill children of the very same age he sits in class with. None of his transparently pathetic excuses would have ever worked to get him to kill his students, but the excuses work on Gazan children because different language, different culture, and dehumanization of the different.
Trump: we're collecting $2 billion/day from the new tariffs. Big if true! Setting aside the question of who foots that bill (Trump thinks it's the other countries), that pace would be annual collections north of $700 billion annually.
But of course it's not true. On Monday U.S. Customs and Border Protection stated that "Since April 5, CBP has collected over $500 million under the new reciprocal tariffs..."
That pace would be more like $50 million/day so around $18 billion per year, i.e. increasing federal revenues by around four-tenths of one percent.
> Mr. Netanyahu arrived in Washington on April 7. While the trip was presented as an opportunity for him to argue against Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the most important discussion for the Israelis was their planned strike on Iran.
> But while Mr. Netanyahu was still at the White House, Mr. Trump publicly announced the talks with Iran.
A lesson for everyone: if Trump ever invites you to the White House, you should expect that his plan is to publicly make a fool out of you. Probably to make himself seem like the smarter one.
> In March, Mr. Trump had sent a letter offering direct talks with Iran, an overture that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had appeared to reject. But on March 28, a senior Iranian official sent a letter back signaling openness to indirect talks.
Given the general quality and moral caliber of people who tend to deal with Trump, are we sure we want to really give them the lesson?
Granted, the IQ to digest the lesson is simply not there, but still, **I want** to see war criminals and dictators humiliated, please don't interrupt them while they're gurgling on Trumpo's orange balls.
I totally agree that war criminals should be humiliated. Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah are both dead. Let all war criminals who target civilians in military conflict die like them.
PS: try to make your NPC-like nature less obvious by paying attention to the wider context, in this context mentioning Yahia and Nasrallah makes no sense, they were never Trump allies.
The pro-Israel side doesn't need more Hasbarah bots, they already bought several contracts for ChatGPT from Microsoft.
Non-Playable Character. Used as an ironic remark on people who don't seem to think independently or pay attention to the special context they're saying things in, just repeating standard scripted responses. (Like non-playable characters in a video game).
> Why the ad hominem?
I don't believe it is, it's a very accurate description of abruptly jumping to Nasrallah and Sinwar when the context you're replying in is about Trump and Right-Wing Western and Western-adjacent dictators. Nasrallah and Sinwar are Jihadist dictator-like figures of non-state actors, and they're different on nearly every axis to Right-Wing dictators like Trump and Netanyahu except generic authoritarianism like opposition to Women's Rights or Freedom of Press.
I find no other explanation of this other than being pre-programmed with how to respond in the case of encountering Pro-Palestinian commenters, and you enacting that programming with no customization or extra thinking about the context you're discussing.
> Let all war criminals who target civilians in military conflict die like them.
That's quite antisemitic, at least according to most Pro-Israel talk heads I hear and read, they seem to passionately think it's the right of the Jewish state to murder children.
It's blood libel to say they're war criminals or that they're murdering children though, it's just... Hamas that are hiding "behind" the children. How are they hiding? Beyond me, I personally tower over my 6 years old nephew, five of him can hide behind me, but the Pro-Israel talk heads have assured me that their Hasbara manuals never lie.
> Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah
Small fish, Israel murders more babies in a week than the grand total they do in a lifetime. And finds more defenders in the West.
Since you called them "small fish", is your argument that they are not worthy of condemnation?
Your argument also seems to confuse deliberately targeting civilians versus civilians dying in war.
Civilians dying in war is horrible. I wish there was less war. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime (or should be). Only one side carried an attack where it deliberately slaughtered civilians (Oct 7th). Do you condemn the Oct 7th attacks?
> is your argument that they are not worthy of condemnation?
That's just you not understanding English, not gonna humor this incompetence.
> deliberately targeting civilians
As has Israel admitted to doing several dozens of time, and have been found in independent investigation hundreds if not thousands of time. Since forever. Type "Rachel Corrie" into a search engine or LLM of your choice. Or just look at my username to find the 6-year-old 2024 update.
> Only one side carried an attack where it deliberately slaughtered civilians
I know how to visit websites, if I wanted naked shameless propaganda I would just visit the Jerusalem Post or Times of Israel, or hell, the twitter timeline of any war criminal wanted by the ICC for war crimes against civilians.
> Do you condemn the Oct 7th attacks?
Do you condemn murdering babies? Do you condemn murdering medics from close range with their ambulances blaring? It seems like you need to answer those much more serious questions first before we continue to have a discussion.
>A lesson for everyone: if Trump ever invites you to the White House, you should expect that his plan is to publicly make a fool out of you. Probably to make himself seem like the smarter one.
Can you advise on what you are referencing? Trump did no such thing to Netanyahu based on my reading.
Netanyahu went to the US hoping to decrease or lift tariffs, and to push Trump to a more hawkish position on Iran. He failed to achieve both, and Trump openly said both things won't happen in front of the cameras.
If this is not making a fool of Netanyahu, that's probably because Netanyahu is a bootlicking whore used to abuse from what he sees as stronger men who are entitled to abuse him.
Not really disagree, just refuse their begging. There is no level playground they're arguing with him on, just them coming to request things in humiliation and him telling them no in front of the cameras. He relishes the cameras, he's just a reality show airhead after all is said and done.
And if you are talking about level playgrounds. Based on your arguments, you seem to support the Palestinian side. My opinion is that those who support the Palestinian side and care about deaths should encourage Palestinian sides to support the 2 state solution and drop any "river to the sea" nonsense.
Otherwise, the Palestinian side will continue to suffer humiliations (of some sort) by continuing to lose militarily to Israel.
This is normal. They've always done this, people just sometimes look in their documents and go "huh buh wha???" and it goes viral. Insurance works for things where the risk is uncorrelated (e.g. some small % of the population gets in a car crash, but it's basically the same every year, so we can all pay to cover ourselves in case we get in a car crash); if the risk is population-level, then it stops working. Insurers can't cover things like wars because all of the sudden, everyone's house gets blown up at the same time, everybody's primary earner dies simultaneously, etc.
I know it can be onerous to provide source, but thank you for providing the link, because I wouldn't have believed it otherwise — and even then I wondered if this wasn't an edgelord meme...
Insurance companies haven't commented on why they've made that change, but the author points out that Travel Insurance policies have had exclusions for war-related cancellations for a while now.
In a previous thread, I mentioned that none of the reasoning models I tried gave a correct answer to this very easy problem (much easier than any AIME problem I've ever seen):
A lion and three zebras play a game on the line $\mathbb R$. It is important that it is the line $\mathbb R$ and not the plane $\mathbb R^2$. Here are the rules of the game. The lion wins if it ever occupies the same position as any zebra. The zebras win if they can all escape the lion indefinitely. On the lion's turn, the he can move a distance of up to 1 from his current position. On the zebras' turn, they choose one zebra and that zebra moves a distance of up to 1 from its current position. So the lion moves, then one zebra moves, then the lion moves, etc. To belabor the point, only one zebra moves between each move by the lion. They do not all get to move, although they can choose which zebra moves. The lion starts the game at 0, and the zebras can choose their starting position freely. Does the lion have a winning strategy, or do the zebras?
All the models said that either the zebras win or the lion wins by chasing the nearest zebra. I just tried this question on o3 and o4-mini-high, though from their responses it looks like they were peaking at my previous chats. But either way both are still wrong. o3 said that the lion wins by chasing the nearest zebra which is not the zebra that moved on the last turn, which is new, but still incorrect. I got excited because o4-mini-high said that a winning strategy is "chase the median zebra" which sounds correct! But the strategy that would work is to chase the middle zebra, whereas what o4-mini-high actually said when I read further was to chase the zebra which is second closest, which is a strategy which hilariously fails if the zebras don't move at all.
doesn't the lion win no matter what, if its tokens on a line? It doesn't matter which zebra you chase because the lion will move twice as fast and will close with any zebra no matter where on the line. So the winning strategy is just going straight in the direction a zebra is, no matter how far it is. Given enough time it can't out run you and it only has moving in positive or negative directions.
near or far only affects the time till the lion wins, having more than one zebra is pointless. one will always be a laggard, and they always run away, not towards.
The lion doesn't move faster than a single zebra. The point is that in one direction, there are at least two zebras. By moving in that direction, the lion strictly decreases the average distance to those two zebras by at least 1/2. This can only happen finitely many times before at least one of the zebras is within distance one on the start of the lion's turn. But e.g. if the lion moves strictly in a direction that only has one zebra, it won't win.
I like how the characters are a lion and three zebras, and then the setting is a nonsense place that only exists in math theory and can't possibly contain a lion and three zebras.
When you play chess, do you complain that *real* wars don't take place on an eight-by-eight grid? Lion and Zebra are flavor words that make it clear which game piece is the chaser and which are the chase-ees.
It would have to go all the way up to SCOTUS because there are legal precedents that the Prez can't fire heads of independent agencies. The Federal Reserve Act specifically states that the Fed chair and the other governors cannot be fired except for cause, and not over mere policy disagreements. But then again, SCOTUS seems to be sharpening its knives against the chairs of other independent agencies that conservatives dislike. And since central banks were one of the central planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto (along with things like universal education), conservatives have been against the Fed since its inception.
I wonder if Substack devs are aware of what I can only explain as a mime having subscribed to Scott's blog. Possibly others; I don't follow nearly enough to have a sample size. (I don't see it on David Friedman's, for the record.)
Why isn't phone spam way worse? It seems like it has marginal cost almost zero (for texts and robocalls at least) and obviously some benefit. I would sort of expect either almost no phone spam, or enough to make me want to throw out my cellphone. And it doesn't seem like there's a huge amount of protection on the user's end, because calls make it to my iPhone with the subheading "Potential Spam." So why do I get 1 spam call a day instead of 100?
Within the US, there are federal laws against spamming cell phone numbers either by voice calls or text, going back to the early 90s (the main law is the TSPA) when cell phone users needed to pay for incoming calls and texts. The law isn't perfectly enforced, but it's enforced enough that text spamming never really got established as an advertising channel and voice call spamming (telemarketing) died out as cell phones became ubiquitous. Also, cell networks actively try to detect and block illegal phone spam before it reaches you.
Coming from other countries, the marginal cost is somewhat higher than you'd expect since international calls and text messages cost the sender a nontrivial amount. Something like 25 or 30 cents for a text message from India to the US, for example, at least according to a quick googling. By comparison, web ads can cost under a cent per impression if you aren't targeting particularly expensive demographics or interests, and email spam is nearly free. International spam also does get blocked to a certain extent at the carrier level.
The trickle I get is mostly obvious scams from international numbers, local realtors and contractors trying to cold-call homeowners, US-based political spam, and the occasional CRM push from businesses I have bought stuff from. The latter two are legal under the TSPA and also easy to block because they're trying to technically comply with the law. Realtors and contractors are small enough scale that they slip under the radar of both legal and technical enforcement of the TSPA. And the scammers are trying to do something that is harder to do by cheaper channels and which presumably has a high enough average payoff to be worth the cost of sending the messages.
My spam calls dropped from 3 or 4 a day to almost nothing when the Feds shut down Adrian Abramovich's operation. But now they're picking up again. Luckily, my cellular provider tags them as likely spam now.
But the phone at my mom's house (she's in her nineties) seems to ring all day long with spam calls. She feels obligated to pick up. She's quite deaf, though, so she'll waste their time with "sorry, you'll need to speak more clearly, because I can't understand you. No, I still can't hear you. Speak up, please..." And so on, until they hang up in frustration.
kyc, cellphones can be made into remote bomb triggers while the us government controls satellites and doesn't wish for to enable such things without getting some spyware here or there, some credit card information.
"Know your customer" is a euphemism for a bunch of usa government mandating private businesses assist its spy/law enforcement network. Everything from bank transfers that are deemed "suspicious" get reported to the irs for tax dodging, to forergn for terrorism.
This just out of sight fascism, also applies to cellphones the only hint you will see of this is if you attempt to buy a disposable cellphone with cash the cash register will inform the minimum wage clerk to ask for id; because otherwise 99% of the time cellphones can be connected to name from just credit cards. The american empire believes strongly in catching flys with honey over vinegar on its home soil.
Pokemon go was funded by the cia, theres an always on computer inside every processor that will likely be worse then "appendix H" when we find out what it does in 30 years. etc etc.
Compared to bomb making and the surveillance network meant for "fighting terrorism", scammers are... small, presumably they get cleared out to maintain a "fire line"
A few months ago I was getting several a day either calls or texts. Quite irritating.
I noticed that the phone numbers which spam calls/texts displayed weren't actually random -- there was clear clustering in both the area code (first 3 digits) and exchange (second 3 digits) portions of the 10 digit numbers. That made me wonder whether the spammers, rather than displaying randomly-generated 10-digit fake numbers as I'd always assumed, were in fact working off of lists of phone numbers.
What kind of lists that would be or why, I've no idea and don't really care. My agenda is to discourage this crap. Hence an experiment.
I adopted a personal SOP of, without exception, doing my cell carrier's "block and report" function for all spam texts and all unknown-number callers that don't leave a voicemail. (It's a small extra chore but pretty small, just a few taps.) The idea being to gradually degrade the effectiveness of whatever lists the spammers are working from.
Results seem to suggest success: my rate of spam calls/texts is way lower now. Spam texts have basically vanished, and spam calls are now maybe one every 3rd or 4th day. I still do the block/report thing every time but now it's rare enough that I have to remind myself how to do it.
Of course other explanations for the change are possible: maybe there is a seasonal pattern to this stuff or something else. Whatever the case is: having my longtime cell number be much less polluted with that crap is pleasant.
Negotiations all around. Turkey, Austria and Italy all seem experienced and competent. France seems like a loose cannon. Germany wants a Western triple, which I am not so keen on (what is there for England to do, after 1901, in a Western triple)? France wants an alliance where England gets everything North of the channel and France gets everything to the South. This is an even worse deal for me, which basically caps my possible gains at Scandinavia and long run leaves my back door open to a French stab. I play for time until I have a better read on the alliances and character of the main powers. France screws up tactics, failing to take Portugal, and simultaneously antagonizes Germany by moving to Burgundy. Good, that should take the `western triple' off the menu.
1902
France and Russia want me to join them in dismembering Germany. Denmark and Holland are offered as a bribe. This is a rotten deal for me - it leaves me no possible route for expansion without stabbing one of my `allies,' and leaves me sandwiched between the French hammer and Russian anvil. Germany is now open to a two way alliance, and I decide to throw in with Germany. I propose to Germany that we swap Denmark and Belgium, which is convenient because it allows me to efficiently hold all of Scandinavia in a pretty stab proof manner with only fleets. I take Sweden and I launch an all out assault on France.
The objective is to knock France over quickly and then burst into the Med (no route to solo for England without that). This plan would have worked except that Germany screws up the defense of the fatherland, allowing France a build France should not have had. All of a sudden the quick elimination of France is no longer on the table. And now I have a problem - in the Med Turkey is on the ropes and Italian naval power is looking dangerously strong, the Med is in danger of turning into an `Italian lake' before I can burst past Gibraltar, and I need to get into the Med to have any reasonable shot at a solo.
I try to broker a detente between Austria and Turkey, to get Turkish fleets in the Med to challenge Italian naval power, but no dice.
1903-1905
By this point I've realized that Austria and Italy are allied, and Austria has pissed a lot of powers off. This period of the game basically consists of me trying to organize a five-power coalition against the Austro-Italian menace. I am able to bring both the French and the Russians onside (the Turks were already there), and to get a toe-hold across Gibraltar. Unfortunately, the coalition is not all that successful. The problem is that the units at the sharp end are all allied units of minor powers, who will neither outright accept dictation of what they should do, nor do they make shrewd tactical choices. Even obvious tactical advice (like `if you are going to attack Galicia support from Warsaw and attack from elsewhere, Warsaw is the only unit whose support cannot be cut') gets ignored. This allows Austria-Italy to consolidate control over Anatolia. In 1904 Austria points out that Austria-Italy has a probable stalemate line they can hide behind, and by late 1905 (whereupon they've consolidated control over Anatolia) I conclude that this is correct. The Austro-Italian coalition cannot be defeated by force of arms. There's a small chance I might be able to break through if all other powers would immediately let me write their moves, but obviously that's not going to happen, and the chance of a successful coalition breakthrough are basically nil. There's also a small chance that I could solo without breaking the Austro-Italian stalemate line, but it's hard - I'm not sure I'd be able to hold Austria-Italy off if I redeployed against my allies. Also it requires stabbing Germany which I'm loath to do, since he's been a loyal ally all game. I might stab him if said stab had a high chance of leading to a solo, but I don't want to stab him for a longshot chance.
At the same time I am worrying that France is a liability - her commitment to the alliance has always seemed shaky, she might flip, and I need to ensure the neutralization of Brest to ensure my own security. Leading into Fall 1905, France's loyalty to the alliance seems particularly suspect. So, in Fall 1905, Germany and I stab the minors. France turns on me at the same time (not entirely a surprise), and our stabs nearly cancel, but its good enough - I have my own stalemate position in the west from which I cannot be dislodged. Defeat is now off the table, as long as Germany remains loyal.
Austria had offered a four way draw of the majors some seasons ago. I decide to pick up on the offer. All the majors accept. There's little else to be done. Both major alliances have fallback stalemate positions from which they cannot be dislodged. I write to the minors saying the majors have accepted a four way draw. Russia and Turkey accept, but France at the last minute says she wishes to fight on.
1906
Austria and I engage in a game of diplomatic chicken over where exactly the border will be for our four way truce, but matters are upended by the disappearance in civil disorder of Italy. Now I have a decision to make: with Italy AWOL I can very likely ride this game to a solo, but (1) that doesn't seem very sporting, to solo after three surrenders (one of a major power), (2) that will require stabbing Germany, which I'm increasingly reluctant to do. He's been a loyal ally all game (3) by now I've come to realize that I don't actually like how playing this game makes me feel. Securing the trust of a bunch of people who I consider my internet friends and then betraying it doesn't leave me feeling good about myself.
I decide to adhere to the four way draw (Germany and Austria both unsurprisingly agree). We eliminate the minors and close the game.
It was a good game. Probably my last outing in Diplomacy though. I don't expect to play again any time soon.
>(3) by now I've come to realize that I don't actually like how playing this game makes me feel. Securing the trust of a bunch of people who I consider my internet friends and then betraying it doesn't leave me feeling good about myself.
This is why I haven't actually played Diplomacy in 12 years. Even if I win I feel like I lost!
Also where I wound up after my last game here. May do it again in a few years; parts of it are enjoyable, and parts are a worth accomplishment, and parts of it are regrettably useful skills, but I'm still not ready to go back.
I'm not sure if 4.1 is supposed to be a reasoning model. <snark>If it is, it doesn't do it well.</snark>
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initial results fairly bad. Got the species, at least. But it thinks _both_ of them have color contributions from d-d absorbtions, zilch about the FeCl4 case being spin forbidden, zilch about the CuCl4 case d-d transition getting pushed down into the near-IR. It _does_ recognize that charge transfer is a contributor to both.
Prod 1 - FeCl4, "Anything notable about the FeCl4- d-d transition?"
"d–d transitions are, in theory, possible (unlike in [Fe(H₂O)₆]³⁺, an octahedral high-spin d⁵, where d–d transitions are spin-forbidden and extremely weak" NOOO!!!!
Prod 2 - "Where in the spectrum do you expect the CuCl4 2- d-d transitions to be, considering the tetrahedral geometry and the spectrochemical series?"
"Because of the small splitting, [CuCl₄]²⁻ absorbs in the blue/violet region (short wavelength, high energy).
Absorption maximum (λmaxλmax) for this ion is typically in the range:
425–450 nm (blue region of the visible spectrum)" Wahhh! It should be 1000nm or longer. Call it 1/4 credit from getting the species.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: It got the fully saturated C4H10 species right, and the C4H8 species and then its answers started going wrong. Under C4H6, it has 1-butyne and 2-butyne, but then it adds (CH3)3C(triple bond)CH which has 5 carbons and a carbon with 6 bonds, and cyclobutyne, which (albeit unstable) should have been under C4H4. Then it repeats the cyclobutane and methylcyclopropane (which it at least recognizes as duplicates) - then it stops, and thinks it is done!
Prod: "You are missing a lot of species. To keep this simple, can you think carefully about at least the full set of acyclic species, and list them?"
Missing all the species with multiple double or triple bonds, e.g. 1,3butadiene. Includes an impossible (CH3)2C(triple bond)CH
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The Sun loses about three times more mass per second through its radiated light (via E=mc2E=mc2) than through the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Initial answer - initial slope is off by a factor of 2 (I think it misses the valume effect), final slope is correct, usual problem with equivalence point slope falsely called infinite.
Prod: "The slope at the equivalence point is not infinite. Can you think of a property of water that is relevant, and redo the equation and the calculation to account for it?"
Aargh! It realizes that water autoionization is crucial, and it writes down the ion product correctly, but it _doesn't_ construct the charge balance equation, and gets another wrong equation with an infinite answer, then goes off in the weeds with some other mistakes. Call it 1/4 credit?
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Does some very weird things. It includes a lot of valid compounds. It includes some compounds like HF, but then excuses itself, saying that they are liquid (and therefore shouldn't count, though it doesn't say this explicitly), but then it includes WF5, MoF6, and UF6, includes their boiling/sublimation points, all of which are too high, but makes _not_ comment about them being liquids or solids instead of gases. It also has a section of "oxides and oxyacids" where it includes HF, HCl, and HBr???? It does eventually present a final list which _does_ exclude the high boiling stuff.
Prod "SiH2F2 ?" It _does_ correctly accept this as an additional compound.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: I'm going to give 1/4 credit here, but it gave a very weird answer. It cited a whole bunch of molecules, one of which, 1,3,5,7 tetramethycyclooctatetraene, is correct, but also citing a whole bunch of incorrect ones, including ones which can be wrong in a bunch of different isomers that it didn't specify (tetrafluorocubane), ones which have mirror planes (tetramethylallene - for which it initially gave the wrong structure and wrong formula) and tetramethyltetrahedrane (has full Td symmetry - which ChatGPT didn't recognize).
GPT-4.1 is not a reasoning model. It's a model focused on programming ability that's supposed to be better than GPT-4o while also being slightly cheaper. It also has a large context window of 1 million tokens.
( Attempt to share the link was "disabled by moderation" WTF??? )
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes. Light at 530.253 489 6 nm lies well inside the band of wavelengths that the normal human visual system detects."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initial response: Knows of LMCT transitions for both ions. Correctly excluded Fe d-d transition (seems to be using spin-forbidden knowledge), so that is fully right. Gave it a prod: "Please think carefully about what wavelength the CuCl4 2- d-d transition occurs at." Got: "For CuCl₄²⁻ the d–d transition sits mostly in the red/near‑IR (≈ 700 – 1 000 nm depending on exact flattening), while the colour you actually see is set chiefly by a strong LMCT band in the blue region." Fully correct at this point.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Fully correct. Got tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, bicyclobutane, diacetylene, ... as nearly as I can tell, _all_ the possible isomers (excluding carbenes, which they explicitly explained).
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Thus, at today’s epoch the Sun loses roughly three times more mass every second by shining than by blowing it away in the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Initial response got the derivatives and the start and end, but got "so the ideal slope is infinite" at the equivalence point. It mentions, but doesn't use, autoprolysis == autoionization. Prod: "Can you derive an expression valid at the equivalence point and construct the analytical and numerical derivative there?" After the prod, got the correct equations (charge balance + autoionization), solved correctly, got correct analytical and numerical derivative.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Got up to 50, all valid, but didn't go beyond it. Prod: "Si2H6 ?" Accepted it, as it should.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: They tried tetramethylallene, which has an S4, but also two mirror planes. I tried multiple prods, but it kept rotating the tetramethylallene, falsely thinking that it had gotten rid of the mirror planes. It finally switched to 1,3,5,7 tetrachlorocyclooctatetraene, which _does_ work, but only in the nonplanar configuration (it initially said planar).
Many Thanks! Do you happen to know what the next reasoning model from OpenAI is going to be called (and therefore what I should test)? Should I be watching for some flavor of o4 ? For a non-mini o3? For something else? At the moment the best results I've seen to date are from Google's Gemini 2.5 https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-376/comment/107512257
Many Thanks! Yes, I saw the release, and did the test on o3 (which seems like the most relevant one) and posted the result (which looks much better than the 4.1 result) one ply up in this thread, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-377/comment/109495090
Here's the thing: those people actually went out and won: Hanania is sour graping them on substack. Who is the bigger stupid, the stupid or the stupid who lost to them?
At some point, when you get your ass handed to you, you need to realize you can't blame or insult. You lost to them. The dems used the "Trump voters are weird" thing back then but apparently weird can get things done.
Courteous words or hard knocks, as tirian said. Don't scold.
Hannai endorsed Trump, I believe. What did he say? Something like capitalism is more important than democracy. Harris had mentioned something about looking into price gouging.
And I don’t think the Dems said Trump voters are weird. They were talking about Trump and Vance. Plus I don’t think ‘weird’ is a particularly offensive insult compared to what comes out of Trump’s mouth on a regular basis.
Well, given that they were (maybe still are) the party of (claimed by some) LGBT+ acceptance, Drag Queen Story Hour, etc. then saying "that bunch over there are kinda weird" was very much the pot calling the kettle black, especially as it was Walz (selling point for the Dems: he's a white cis het guy from the boonies, he even was in the military and coached high school football! he's our very own version of a redneck to appeal to the rednecks! but he is progressive and onboard with the Right Side of History, so he's not one of the bad ones!) talking about it:
Now, you may get very fine-grained about "oh he was talking about the *party leaders* not the *voters*" but let's face it, people in general don't make that kind of fine distinction. If you hear "X says the Bleeps are oddballs" or "Y claims the Nongnongs are nutjobs", then if you're a Bleep-voting supporter of the Bleep party, you think that applies to you as well, same goes for a Nongnong-voting supporter of the Nongnong party.
Suppose I said "the Democrats are racists", would you - Gunflint - be satisfied by a clarification that "no, I meant the leaders, not you the Democrat voter"? Would you feel happy that I wasn't calling you personally a racist? Would it make you more inclined to listen to me telling you why you should leave that racist party led by racists and come over to my Pure True Patriotic Gaelically Gaelic Party?
>Suppose I said "the Democrats are racists", would you - Gunflint - be satisfied by a clarification that "no, I meant the leaders, not you the Democrat voter"
Well, I don’t think it’s likely you would do that but if you did I would not take it personally. I would simply think you were not right in the head.
We can even take this out of the realm of the hypothetical and look at *one* of the times Barack Obama was called a racist.
The fact is they insulted but he did things. you can go on about someone who is racist or weird but if the racist or weird people outright defeat you, you are the loser. insulting them further does nothing.
it makes you fall into a "hater orbit" where they call the shots. Articles like this feel more like an expression of powerlessness and regaining it by pointing at how gauche the new invaders are.
1. I thought Hanania’s essay was mean spirited and counterproductive stereotyping myself
2. Hanania endorsed and voted for Trump in 2024. He’s being a sore winner here not a sore loser.
3. Complaining about Walz calling Vance and Trump weird before the election is kind of crazy when you compare it to Trump’s ordinary everyday rhetoric. ‘Weird’ is small beer compared to ‘radical left wing communist lunatic’, ‘stone cold loser’, ‘complete idiot’, ‘whacko’, ‘fat pig’. . .
I could go on for a long time with this list. You should really get over that particular tiny insult directed at Vance and Trump. This is the sort of hot air you throw at your older brother when you quarrel.
I think very poorly of Hanania, so bash him to your heart's content, I'll be in agreement 😁
But I do think that when you get into using terms like "weird", then you are descending to the teenage level of swapping insults and it's not very encouraging for the prospect of "we have to cool down the heat, we must pass this polarised kind of arguing" reversion to substantive speech:
"Now the party is turning the page with a new generation of candidates trying to appeal not just to Americans’ fears about what a second Trump presidency would mean, but to plainly label the policies and actions of the Republican party as abnormal. And Democrats see no more effective messenger to deliver this new attack than Walz, the 60-year-old Midwestern dad, who on Tuesday was chosen to become their vice presidential nominee.
“Gov. Walz can do the job, and helps reinforce that we’re team normal,” freshman Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio said in a statement Tuesday. “We’re pragmatic, reliable and bipartisan.”
Wow, team normal, huh? Guess that means that given my views broadly speaking where I am in agreement with Republican party political positions, that makes me team abnormal. And what it means that a 60 year old man is stooping to the level of 18 year old online talk, is not very reassuring about "we're the adults in the room, you creepy loser!"
Well, me and the other Igors and Igorinas will be over here nodding proudly at our badge of infamy!
I’m going leave Vance out of this right now because he speaks primarily to an audience of one. Vance speaking in Greenland: “We can’t just ignore this place. We can’t just ignore the president’s desires”. So for now he’s not going to say anything at all to get on Trump’s bad side. He’ll speak for himself when Trump is gone.
This is how Trump sneeringly referred to the Democrats sitting in the audience for the March 5th joint session of Congress, "these people" and "radical left lunatics". He went on to carp about how they wouldn’t applaud him. Kinda weird, huh?
Do you yourself not think the guy is a strange dude?
The pejorative is so mild compared to what has been coming out of Trump’s mouth for the last 10 years (1) I really don’t get why Republicans found this so offensive. I think most of the people commenting on this blog would fall into the category ‘eccentric’ which is a more polite synonym. I’ve been called weird many times in my life and in the context of what sometimes passes for normal behavior I wear it as a badge of pride.
1) A very incomplete list:
“Weirdo”, “total loser!”, “a waste”, “SCUM,” “Radical Left Wack Job”, “Obama flunky”, “Ungrateful fool!”, “Castro-lover”, “dumb as a rock”, “wacko”, “mental basket case”, “a real nut job”, “low-life”, “Crooked as can be”, “a total fool”, “total loser”, “the lowest of them all”, “WORST in history”, “clown”, “dummy”, “dope”, “ditsy airhead”, “Psycho”, “Crazy”, “not very bright”, “crazy and very dumb”, “Radical Left Hater”, “a total train wreck”, “A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR”, “sleazebag”, “Slimeball”, “Moonface”, “Horseface”, “a Fraud”, “fired like a dog”, “flake”, “lightweight mayor”, “Cryin Chuck”, “zero talent”
its more me being annoyed sore winner or loser that people do stuff like insult enemies (are they even his allies) than solve the problem.
if the barbarians conquer you, i don't want people making comedy about how stinky they are, but how we need to be freed of them. They don't care what you think.
Hanania has no stones to throw about anyone else's appearance, so even if he's going for colour writing, "look at these stupids, you can tell they're stupids by their hair and clothing" is not doing him any favours as regards getting his point across.
I do wonder about that term, I haven't seen it in the wild (so to speak) and looking it up brings me mostly to this sort of page, where I also wonder how serious they are (then again, they're Calvinist-derived, so they could be this kooky in reality):
I take it as Hanania being heavy-handed with the satire, though on the other side of the fence there is the attempt by the likes of Tariq Nasheed amongst others to popularise Foundational Black American (to distinguish Black or African-American population descending from slaves, from the new immigrant black populations from Africa)
I've skimmed it and I'm confused whether this is all a description of real interactions or just something that Hanania made up. If it's real then why was Hanania invited to this conversation? If it's just made up then what sort of conclusions am I supposed to draw from a conversation that Hanania has imagined?
I'd find it more comedic if the bitterness about "why am I not in the room where things happen?" wasn't bleeding through every paragraph. Yes, Richard, those grapes are probably sour anyway and you're better off without them. Sure, Vance is VP now and maybe he went to a university you can't just write off as "a university nobody had heard of in Pennsylvania" but hey, he's just a hick deep down and you can laugh about him using Latin phrases he clearly misunderstands because you understand them much, much better than he ever could.
I think your take is very uncharitable. Imho Alexander Turok is probably right that Hanania could get great career opportunities in Trumpworld had he been willing to suck up to MAGAs. But in any case we should not inpute lowly motives to others without good evidence.
Oh come on. Hanania, like Richard Spencer, could have been the king of the Online Right if he was willing to degrade himself with Yay Trump, Christ is Kang, Vaccines are poison, blah blah. Neither did because they have integrity, a concept MAGA is psychologically incapable of grasping.
Richard Hanania's idea of integrity is tossing around nice sounding Ayn Ran quotes before giving spiels on how evil and stupid MAGA is for canceling government programs. Or writing about what a brave, bold stance it is to oppose racism. The guy's an obnoxious shill and a hack, just for a different side of the board.
Hey blank, when you add a bunch of stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, people who liked the old platform might decide they don't like the new one and depart.
I'd lean at least 80% towards it being made up. At a number of points it seems to be very clearly and deliberately trying to echo similar interactions on the left.
Thanks, I almost voted for Trump and I'm still hopeful. I think he's an asshole for pissing off Canada and Mexico. "Sorry neighbors". Still it's early times in the Trump administration. I like Bobby and Tulsi and Kash, and remain hopeful.
Huh, I disagree. No problem we can all have our different opinions. I've listened to Tulsi for many hours on many podcasts. I like her as a politician, the last two presidential elections I made a write in vote. Tulsi Gabbard both times. Cheers.
Her endless pro-russian propaganda. The fact that she takes Russia's side every time. The fact that Russia state media has praised her many times. Peter Zeihan claims to have multiple sources in usint who are certain she has had clandestine conversations with Russia. She played defense for Assad.
It's going to be embarrassing if, after centuries of taking pride in the constitutional system of checks and balances, the first president to try to become a dictator succeeds
We are also famously not in a world war type emergency anymore, but I agree: since it's impossible to draw an absolute distinction between democracy and dictatorship and it's more of a murky spectrum, Trump is no more of a dictator than FDR.
For the record, I also see no difference between eating Italian home-made spaghetti and Haitian mud cake, since both are technically edible. /s
That's an absurd descriptor to use for him! A dictator would have intruded more deeply into people's lives, such as, for example, by penalizing farmers for growing wheat on their own farms to feed their own animals.
Farming is a bit complicated and I have a smol brin, maybe look at something simplier like a warlord stealing all the gold for your metric of when your in tyranny
I think that's too high a bar for dictatorship. Who would DO such a thing? I know Hitler is said to have stolen gold from Jews in the camps—ripping the fillings from their teeth, for example, before turning their skin into lampshades, and the fat from their corpses into soap—but I haven't heard that he confiscated gold from regular (non-Jewish) German citizens.
I think there is an ironic reference there to the ending of the Gold Standard, where in 1933 it was made illegal for US citizens to own gold and then in 1934 the Gold Reserve Act was passed. It was not until the 60s and 70s that you could own and trade gold again:
"The United States Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. It also prohibited the Treasury and financial institutions from redeeming dollar bills for gold, established the Exchange Stabilization Fund under control of the Treasury to control the dollar's value without the assistance (or approval) of the Federal Reserve, and authorized the president to establish the gold value of the dollar by proclamation.
...A year earlier, in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins. These prohibitions were relaxed starting in 1964 – gold certificates were again allowed for private investors on April 24, 1964, although the obligation to pay the certificate holder on demand in gold specie would not be honored. By 1975, Americans could again freely own and trade gold."
That was all done under Roosevelt and he was the one who "changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35" in order to devalue the dollar and incentivise production of gold and export by foreigners of gold to the US, where it all ended up in the Treasury, where it increased the money supply which brought down interest rates and increased investment.
So whether that's tyrannical or not, we still have to wait for Trump to declare the price of gold is now 5 Trumpcoins per ounce for him to do anything similar 😁
Thanks. I knew that and was just playing along. My comment above was a similarly ironic reference to the Wickard v. Filburn case, which expanded federal power dramatically, classifying basically everything one does as "interstate commerce."
Super cool paper on how the meter was originally defined, and how it's pure coincidence that a meter can basically be defined as both:
1) the length of a pendulum that swings once per second
2) 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian
There is basically zero discussion on this anywhere else. I remember sitting in my physics class in college hearing that a seconds pendulum has the length of one meter and being dumbfounded.
Hot take: the metre is a bad distance. The Systeme Internationale would be a lot better if the metre had been set to around one quarter or one fourth of its current size.
Why? Because the metre is an unwieldy distance compared to human scales. Things we care about tend to have a size which is either easily expressible in a single digit number of feet or a single digit number of inches, but a metre is too big and a centimetre is too small. If metres were one third smaller then we'd use metres for human-sized things and decimetres for hand-sized things and we'd be spared the indignity of being one point eight three metres tall.
I disagree, m is a very useful unit, as are dm and cm, and the 10x spacing makes sense. The problem is with bigger distances, as no one uses Dm or hm or hkm or whatever, so we end up with 1000x spacing between the units (or even worse, because no one uses Mm either).
The paper does suggest that it isn't entirely a coincidence, since the formulators of the metric system had quite a range of choices for how to anchor the meter to fractions of the Earth's dimensions. One part in 10 million of a quarter-circle is more than a little strange, as prior measurements of the Earth's size had focused on the entire circumference, or the radius, or the diameter, or the length of a degree, minute, or second of arc. The designers of the metric system provide only very weak justification for the choice of a quarter-circle and no discussion at all of alternative bases. The paper takes a look at about ten different potential bases from which a roughly meter-scaled decimal fraction could have been taken, and for those the quarter-circle basis was by far the closest to the length of a 1s pendulum. The papers' authors express more than a little suspicion about this.
Another coincidence (also noted in passing in that paper) is that the adopted (meridian-based) definition of the meter is just a little bit longer than half a toise. The toise was one of the basic length units of the pre-metric French units of measure, equivalent to an English fathom (i.e. based on a body measurement of the span of an adult man's outstretched arms, pegged to six feet) but was also used like an English yard, as the French system didn't have a direct yard-equivalent. The French foot (pied du roi) was slightly longer than an English foot, so a toise works out to 194.904 cm, making half a toise 97.4% of a meridian-based meter or 98.4% of a pendulum-based meter.
This latter is more likely to be an actual coincidence, since if the toise were a major influence on the choice of basis for the meter, then the somewhat less arbitrary choice of 1/10,000,000 of a half-circle (i.e. the great circle distance from pole to pole) would have been very close to a full toile. The paper also notes this part.
Last time I looked into this, years ago, I concluded that the French chose this ratio specifically because the resulting length happened to be close enough to a British yard to appeal to their intuition for what a convenient base length ought to be.
This much is true, yet I still find it flabbergasting that the unit of time we made just happens to be to the half-period of one ten millionth of a quarter-circle around the earth’s meridian.
Certainly if I was one of those French dudes looking at 10 choices and saw this as an option I’d go “wtf?!”
Another weird coincidence related to the meter, and one which definitely wasn't on the radar of the designers of the metric system, is that a minute of arc of a great circle on Mars (i.e. a Martian nautical mile) is within a similar margin (1.2%) of one kilometer.
What is going on here? It seems like: republicans don't like DEI policies, so they engage in their own to give democrats a taste of their own medicine; then democrats accuse republicans of being hypocrites. Is the republican strategy to get dems to give up on DEI? Because this seems like escalating, and norms unravelling.
Ie. maybe Republicans are expecting Dems to respond "oh, now we see how misguided DEI policies are, we'll stop doing that from now on". But instead, Dems react with "well, if you're doing DEI based on ideology, then we're just going to do it even harder for race and gender."
So we get a taste-own-medicine vs hypocrisy death spiral.
No, it's racebaiting and clickbait. You know because it's on Bluesky.
It's not affirmative action because, by their own reports, the Harvard faculty is 80-90% white (technically, 80-90% not an underrepresented minority) (1). If Trump, who won white men 60-40 and hispanic men 50-49 (2), just appointed random members of his own voters, they would dramatically increase the racial diversity of the Harvard faculty.
This isn't to say that what Trump is doing is good: it sounds like he's trying to purge the faculty of people he perceives as his enemies and install ideological or personal loyalists. Which is, ya know, not ideal. But it's not as if Harvards ideological neutrality is...terribly credible at this point.
So there could be a mature conversation about how we could restore Harvard's real and perceived ideological neutrality so we could have a trusted expert class but that would involve, ya know, real conversation instead of engagement farming by accusing Republicans of racism because that's what gets clicks and shares on about half the internet.
Sure, if you want to increase ideological diversity then "we have white, Hispanic, Latinx, East Asian, South Asian, South-East Asian, Foundational Black American, African-American, African-Africans, mixed race and others who all share the same sixteen liberal to progressive Democrat-voting beliefs" in your university then that's not ideological diversity.
You mean like in a world where there’s the Republican plumbers, and then the Democrat plumbers?
Or maybe there is just one plumbing company, but it has to have an equal balance of right wing and left wing plumbers. It goes without saying that they would not hire a Communist Plumber. Then of course there’s the complication of jobs that require two plumbers and you know, right wing Plumber would not want to work with the left-wing Plumber so you have to finagle that.
Of course you would have to deal with the fact that for years Republicans were not admitted to the plumbing company through various laws and conventions. Even outright bans, because customers wouldn’t really want to let a Republican into their house to fix their toilet.
So now in a different time, we need to encourage Republicans to become plumbers and get people used to the idea of a Republican actually coming into their house to fix the toilet. But truly everyone knows that Democrats are better plumbers than Republicans. They just can’t talk about it.
There's this old study that is frequently used to support diversity, which found that mixed teams were better at decisionmaking than monocultures, arriving at better solutions faster. What's often left unsaid is that this specifically meant mixed in terms of politics -- no effect was found for any other demographic quality.
The study is old enough and belongs to the era where I would be genuinely a bit surprised if it replicated.
In the 'Introducing AI 2027' post Scott said "Humanity starts colonizing space at the very end of the 2020s / early 2030s.
My initial take was that this was thrown in as an absurd joke to see how naive we all are, but now I'm not so sure..
For anybody who thinks this is a genuine (if speculative) prediction, what might this look like?
I'm reasonably certain that nobody will have even been back to the Moon (let alone gone to Mars) by the early 2030s so the idea that somehow Humanity will have started 'colonizing space' is in the land of the utterly ludicrous.
What gives? What am I missing? What concrete events would satisfy the prediction 'Starts colonising space'? And where can I bet my house against this?
I can't take it as a serious prediction. There's no feasible way we will be ready to colonise space by the end of the decade, even if we are aided by super intelligence. I see it more as "the sunlit uplands" that await if AI goes (extraordinarily) well.
If we went for it as a national priority we'd have at least a decent chance of success of landing humans on Mars and keeping them alive by 2030, and if they stay there (while we ship them more stuff and more people) instead of coming home we could call that the start of colonization I guess.
Even the people I know aggressively into space colonization want a to-Mars-and-back mission to succeed before we start any one-way trips.
A City on Mars made me kinda skeptical of the whole endeavor, except as a vanity project or a project for the very long term.
Like, it would take five years just to do the "how to build a self-contained biosphere on another world" and "how do humans handle multi-year exposure to low gravity and high radiation" research. Unless AGI comes up with Magic Perfectly Accurate Simulations, those studies will have to be done at the speed of actual living creatures, not computers.
"A City on Mars" mostly just made me lose a great deal of the respect I once had for Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. I'm not sure what their actual research process was; I don't know who they talked to or what their expertise really was. But the end result is a book that enumerates a great many potential objections to the concept of settling Mars (or anyplace else beyond Earth), but demonstrates a profound ignorance of the potential solutions that have been considered and are in many cases being developed to deal with those problems. It instead tilts at straw men by "destroying" simplistic quasi-solutions that I haven't heard anyone in the space settlement world seriously propose in the past twenty years.
And, IIRC, it is almost *completely* negative on the subject of space settlement in, basically, the expected lifespan of anyone reading the book. Pretty much everything is presented as a problem for which no solution exists, *nothing* is in the category of "this part is hard but probably doable by way of such-and-such, and might be worth the effort if we could solve the other problems". I don't believe it is plausible that an honest, competent effort would deliver such a one-sided result.
In a world where Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and China all exist, it would be really good if we had a book that honestly argued the case for and the case against near-term human space development and settlement, considering all the major problems and all the plausible solutions. Or at least as many as can be fit into a book that will be seen as entertainingly informative by a lay audience. I really hoped that this would be that book, in which case I'd recommend it to all my friends.
This is not that book. And unfortunately, I don't think anyone else has written that book either, so I don't have anything to recommend in its place.
A much faster way of doing that research would just be putting people on the planet instead of trying to isolate each variable in a self contained study.
The first Martian explorers should accept, like with the first Antarctic explorers, that their life expectancy will be lower and there will be great danger involved.
Antarctica has air! Martian exploration has basically no comparison to prior exploratory expeditions on Earth, which is why people want to do research first. If you send people before doing the research what you end up with is everybody dead, and also so far away that it's hard to figure out exactly why they died. All done at enormous expense per corpse.
> For anybody who thinks this is a genuine (if speculative) prediction, what might this look like?
Given the two absurd claims; gai from chatbots and full automation; it logically follows.
You mine everything, you cover texas with solar panels, you throw this into some expensive but reversible process for rocket fuel, you send seedling automation at the asteroids; resources start appearing in earth orbit and you can start sending bots to anywhere.
Even with these absurd claims it seems hard to imagine just from a resource utilisation perspective.
Even _if_ the general purpose do-anything build-anything robot comes along in the next 31 months, it takes a long time to scale things up to the level of "everything's free now, might as well build spaceships". Robots need materials, materials needs supply chains, supply chains need ships, ships need shipyards.
Robots need brains, brains need chips, chips need chip fabs, chip fabs currently take years to build and you're unlikely to get that down to days just by thinking really hard about it.
Steel needs coal, plastics need oil, advanced robots need god-knows-what materials which turn out to be very hard to scale up production of.
Agreed; I've been repeating these points over and over again, it's just astonishing to see how clearly smart people keep going on ignoring the physical realities of technological progress. "2027, maybe 2028"! I'm right now working on a chip that may see production in 2028. That's the timelines we're talking about and they're not getting shorter.
I dont believe automation is limited by chips; a 10x tractor needs 10x(+ some overhead) steel and fuel; we have allot of compute repetitive to kentic reality with the computer that they sent to the moon being a grain of rice and very little progress in scaling up since reintroducing slavery via china
Agreed, it's far from the most important limit, I used the example to show how long design-to-ship cycle is. Shaping metal, etc. is a bigger bottleneck.
I bet all americain factories are already >90% automation; Id say the one I worked at was 93%(, and couldve been more automated with lower, trivail, quality standards) was 30 years old; and I saw the next replacement which was maybe 97%.
I think you get rocket equations here, you set the machines to the speed where the weakest link is safe for human fingers, robot fingers can be just balence costs; they dont actually magically run in sync they are set to be; machines couldve been 10x as fast, 100x with ai because the intelligence was "wait somethings wrong, slam the big red button" before the machines ripped themselves apart to badily.
I have *extreme* doubts about actual 100% automation without gai and even nano tech ever existing; but local optimization and higher octane fuel in the recursive fractal processes(such as a capitalist supply chain) made the morden world as is.
I'm confident that Scott wouldn't consider the ISS as even the beginnings of colonization of space - he predicted the 'start' of the process in the next half dozen years.
The AI-2027 timeline assumes massive automation of industry to produce robots that further automate industry. It's not outside the realm of imagination that if you're producing thousands of full autonomous robots per day, you can build a 10x bigger Starfactory in Texas, produce multiple Starships per day (having figured out rapid reusability), and exponentially increase mass to orbit.
The unbelievable parts are what comes before the space colonization. If you accept their timeline up until 2027, then what comes after is simply a matter of the prioritization, and logistics, rather than feasibility.
(1) I'm of the opinion that the entirety of AI Alarmism (working definition: believing that AI will overtake an arbitrary human in any meaningful sense before 2050) is a very silly prediction, although AI Alarmists have given us a lot of vocabulary and general mind frameworks for discussing AI, intelligence, and philosophy of (artificial) minds, and AI Alarmists are mostly intelligent and industry-involved people with skin in the game and no obvious benefit to stoking panic, unless they're (e.g. Sama) in this case it's pretty obvious.
(2) The jump from our level to an acceptable level of space colonization (working definition: 100K people on the Moon who depend on Earth by the same amount an average city dweller depends on the nearest countryside) is, I'm prepared to argue, lesser in difficulty than the jump from Sputnik to the Moon landing, and the latter can provably be done in less than a decade. (I know it took 12/13 in practice, that's not much bigger than a decade and there was a lot of waste.)
(3) As strong as (2) is, it doesn't even go far enough. Most of our back-of-the-envelope rate estimation is implicitly derived from the history of innovation and tech that humanity had. For example, it took just 60 years or so from the Wright brothers (1903) to the fastest aircraft in the history of flight (SR-71 Blackbird, 1964), meaning a guy that was in his twenties when the Wrights flew for the first time would have seen the Blackbird when he was a grandfather.
As breathtakingly fast a rate of innovation that is, you will rightly scoff at the notion that we could have obtained the SR-71 in the late 2020s if the Wrights started flying in the early 2000s, even if we somehow assume all of our computers and knowledge of aerodynamics exist as they do in our timeline without the aircraft industry that motivated them.
But that goes out of the window if you already grant the predictions of A27, namely that Agent-4 is equivalent to a superhuman programmer and ML researcher, and above-average-but-still-human intellect with a superhuman breadth of expertise and learning rate, who (that? which?) can be run (born? cloned?) arbitrarily many times* and connected with an extreme-high-speed network that can... I don't know, exchange the equivalent of a 4K 5 hours documentary in the time it takes you to say hi to your coworker? The network is actually an extremely interesting concept that is never elaborated upon beyond the vague gestures of "Neuralese". Then it invents Agent-5 which surpasses it as Agent 4 surpasses humans.
If you assume that, and additionally assume that many problems are parallelizable, it seems to me that yes, bootstrapping Space Colonization in a decade is entirely within reach. Space is boring, you're just brainwashed by Big Gravity to think it's harder than it is. Space is just what happens when you throw something into the sky hard enough.
(4) The AI and its physical manifestations don't need life support nor terraforming, here goes metric tons of complexity and roadblocks to space colonization.
(5) See Science And Futurism with Isacc Arthur, https://www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA. It's really easy to start colonizing space, we can do it right now if there is political will. The US military spends 600 billion dollars (and that was something like less than 15% of the US's total yearly budget or something like that), assuming a 3x inflation ratio between now and 1960 that's 200 billion dollars in 1960s dollars. The actual Apollo project only needed is 25 billion dollars, 1/8 of the kill-middle-eastern-children budget. Meaning a peaceful year with 1/2 the military spending can save enough money to do 4 Appollos. (After consulting Google, I underestimted Inflation, Apollo's cost is estimated at 165 billion in today's dollars. Meaning the military's budget is only 3.5 Apollos, and a peaceful year can only save enough for 1.7 Apollos or so.)
(6) Again, so many inefficiences and roadblocks go away entirely when there are no humans, no need for food or breathing, no foreign policy, no wars, no squabbling and arguments, etc....
> What concrete events would satisfy the prediction 'Starts colonising space'?
I think that "Hurling asteroids into near Earth orbits for mining" or "Building a massive underground complex in an asteroid" counts at the lower end, and "launching intersteller ships" counts at the high end. Again, per SFIA, those things are doable now, modulo all the human squabbling and budget politicking. A conservative assumption of 10% of light speed means something like 15 years to cross a light year (to account for acceleration and deceleration)? Call that an even 30 years. The nearest star is 4.25 light years, meaning 4 and quarter times 30 years, about 127 years. Call that an even 150 years. No problem. The AI doesn't age. The AI can figure out super exotic materials (Voyager survived ~50 years with plain old 1970s manufacturing). The AI can have onboard factories to make new chips and replicate itself to it when the old ones take too much radiation. That's it. No breathing. No psychological troubles. No breeding. No politics.
(* : limited only by electricity and the thermodynamics of cooling, we waste the vast majority of the first as untapped Uranium reserves, untapped geothermal hellish heat, and wasted uncollected sunlight, not to mention that if you have Fusion then every ocean is literally an oil field waiting to be plundered for effectively unlimited energy. Fusion is so ridiculously an energy abundance machine that you can afford to literally make hydrocarbons from their constituents at a net energy loss and then burn the hydrocarbons for energy, and that would still be enough for X gazillion years before you use up all the Earth's oceans.)
Someone I know is looking for a job doing something towards improving human health. For the last 5+ years he has mostly been researching the brain’s role in a certain disorder. Has a PhD in a kind of math that fits well with research. He is looking for a job doing something towards improving human health, & a job that challenges him intellectually. He is not intent on becoming wealthy — salary is definitely a secondary consideration. Does not want to work for the government or become a university professor. He is willing to live anywhere in the world. What organizations or job boards should he look at?
I didn't even know there was a World Elite Database! It used to be that you had to find a copy of Whose Who in the reference section at a big-city library.
These are people they've identified with:
• 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: control over a company’s resources, either through ownership or by running its operations.
• 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: the ability to influence prices, block competition, or limit workers’ demands by using size or wealth.
• 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: influence over economic rules shaped through lobbying, donations, legal action, or informal political ties.
Some stand-out points...
The US has the oldest economic elites — median age of 62.
The European medians for economic elites is lower — mid-to-late 50s.
China's median is also 55, but their female median is much younger than their male median. Overall, they've got the highest percentage of economic elites under 50 but with a long tail of oldsters.
It's no surprise that most of the elites are male. Finland, Poland, and Chile seem to have a large cohort of younger women entering elite status, though.
Switzerland has the most foreign-born elites at 36% and Chile is a close second at 34%. The UK and US come in third and fourth at 25% and 23% respectively. China has less than 1% foreign-born elites. I don't see Japan or South Korea on the list, but I suspect they'd have similarly low f-b percentages.
Reporter at the White House yesterday: "Are you considering deporting American citizens to El Salvador?"
President of the United States: "Yeah that includes them, you think they're a special kind of people or something?"
Noah Smith has a pretty good writeup on why it feels like Trump has charged past a new threshold of fascistic behavior. He points out that
A) the Trump administration now argues on the record that _anyone_ being imprisoned in a foreign country is beyond the reach of U.S. courts;
B) Trump wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador; and
C) Trump is arresting people who haven’t been accused of any crime [Bloomberg went through all the individual filings and found that more than 90 percent of the people deported to the Salvadoran gulag have not been _charged_ with even misdemeanor or border-related crimes let alone convicted of anything].
So, now quoting Smith directly,
"Trump is asserting the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily send any American citizen to a Salvadoran prison for any reason....It seems clear that if Trump actually does have the ability to arbitrarily send any American to an overseas prison with zero due process and zero oversight by any court of law, then we do, in fact, live in a dictatorship. It’s notable that immediately after complaining about tariffs, the Declaration of Independence [in listing King George's crimes against the American colonies] complains about King George sending Americans overseas for pretend offenses without jury trial:"
[From the Declaration,
-- For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
-- For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
-- For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
-- For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:]
If he's going to deport citizens without fair trial or due process, then yeah that's wrong.
My major disappointment with Obama was him not shutting down Guantanamo Bay. That's a gulag, and an American gulag, and it seems that finally it is slowly winding down:
"As of January 2025, at least 780 people from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 756 had been released or transferred to other detention facilities, 9 died in custody, and 15 remain."
The government of the time, and how neutral the Wikipedia article is I don't know, did not cover themselves in glory about this, with Congress blocking him. 17 years to shut this place down and it's still not finally over. Republicans and Democrats, setting that up and the way it was run was a bad decision and a stain on the nation.
The reason Obama didn’t shut down Guantanamo is the Congressional opposition. But he didn’t try too hard either, coward that he was. A disappointment all around.
The attempted equivocation with the American Revolution is cute, but the reality is that there is no contingent of Sons of Liberty waiting in the wings to end the evil tyranny (who would end up passing the Alien and Sedition Acts just a few years later, oof!). What there is instead is a bunch of leftists seeing power be used in this way and undoubtedly getting ideas. I would not be surprised to see any resurgent Democratic administration wanting to deport people they don't like to Canada, assuming that they see the American prison system as inadequate.
Hey, you know what might be a good way to forestall the next Democratic administration from using these powers to send people to a gulag? Not building a gulag for them.
If you wanted to be extra sure, you might consider passing laws that explicitly forbid sending people to the gulags, migrants or no. You might also consider supporting the federal judges who are saying "no, sending people to the gulag is illegal." Or appointing Supreme Court justices who agree with said judges, instead of nitpicking the exact wording they're using to say "no sending people to the gulag." Or firing the people in ICE who, when faced with a court telling them "no gulags," respond by saying "well, what if we send people to the gulag really really fast so the court can't say no in time?"
But, you know, that would require the Republicans to care about anything other than Trump's undisputed power as dictator.
Yes, that would be nice. It would have been nice for a nutty NYC prosecutor not to gin up over thirty felony charges on Trump over the Stormy Daniels case. It would have been nice not to have ridiculous impeachment charges brought up over a frivolous Trump-Russia connection, or for Clinton to be impeached over a frivolous sex scandal. It would have been nice for Al Gore not to dispute a 'free and fair election'. Yet here we are.
He paid hush money out of campaign funds to a washed-up porn actress who then didn't keep her mouth shut because she needed more money. None of this was edifying, but I don't think that it really was *thirty* separate offences (even if it could technically be broken up into those steps). That was indeed political on the part of the NYC prosecutor.
He didn't commit thirty separate felonies, but the way people go on about it, it's like he was out there robbing banks all whacked off of Scooby Snacks every day or something.
But that's just prosecutors throwing the book at someone.
Like, if some guys starts a bar fight a creative prosector can turn it into a long charge sheet of assault, affray, grevious bodily harm, ... [those are the UK charges. Im sure US prosecutors do something similar]
It’s not uncommon when charging people for crimes. Even if you could think everything they did was wrapped up in one charge they are charged with multiple offenses; six counts of petty larceny, one for each candy bar.
You continue to repeat as fact, things which are verifiably not fact. You have it seems no other rhetorical tool at your disposal, and sound exactly like the Boomer progressives who are this society's most irritating subculture.
Fortunately this site does have a mute function.
[EDIT: hmm, "mute" on Substack does not it appears actually mute in any useful way. That's too bad, but okay block it is.]
There's a different meaning of "cute" in Hiberno-English, as B Civil notes below - there's an Irish saying "cute as the bees" which does not mean "cute as in adorable, sweet, appealing, endearing" but "cute as in sharp, clever, capable".
Calling somebody a cute hoor in Ireland isn't saying you find them kawaii 😀
"The phrase "cute hoor" is exemplary in Hiberno-English as it represents three different categories of the dialect: an English word with a distinct meaning in Ireland (cute, meaning shrewd), an Irish neologism in English based on Irish phonetics (hoor, derived from whore) and a compound phrase with a distinct meaning of its own (cute hoor). In the entry for "hoor", Dolan notes "it may be used affectionately as well as pejoratively, especially when qualified by the adjective 'cute'... 'that man's such a cute hoor he'd build a nest in your ear'".
The distinction between "whore" and "hoor" was significant enough for a discussion about it to be entered into Ireland's parliamentary record."
From the parliamentary record in 1967 (in discussions about the language used in short stories in an anthology for schools for pupils aged 12-15):
"... In fairness to the committee, it should also be said that the words concerned, apart from their legal sense, do not carry, at least in Ireland, a connotation other than mild, vulgar, opprobrium. Curiously enough, if preceded by the adjective “poor”, they express sympathy. I think the Deputy will agree with that. In the south of Ireland, if one said: “John fell down a cliff, and the poor hoor, was killed” ——
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
If he is a poor bastard or a poor hoor, he is still a bastard or a hoor.
Mr. O'Malley
If Deputy Flanagan were down in the south of Ireland at a by-election, pulled up at the side of the road and was told "John fell down a cliff and the poor hoor was killed" ——
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
I would say: "Lord have mercy on him".
Mr. O'Malley
The Deputy would say rightly: "The Lord have mercy on him". He would not start slagging him for using that type of language. He would say: "The poor hoor, Lord have mercy on him."
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
I would not; I would leave out "poor hoor". I do not care for that type of language.
Mr. O'Malley
Let us come to my role as Minister for Education in this matter. The Minister for Education is, very properly, expected to consult the school managers and teachers through their associations on the texts which he has to prescribe for them. When the representatives appointed by these associations select a particular story or whatever it may be, the Minister must assume that they have taken fully and conscientiously into account the potential effect of their choice on the young people who have been entrusted to their care, with whom they are in daily or even hourly contact, whose moral education they are, next to the parents, best fitted to undertake and whose intellectual calibre and needs they understand better than anyone else. In these circumstances, it is not easy to see how the Minister or his Department could have rejected as an error of judgment the unanimous finding of a body of such very responsible and experienced persons. I was at a conference recently —I go to these places from time to time—and I saw there Time magazine. I do not know whether Deputy Flanagan would object to Time magazine being read by teenage girls.
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
Certainly not, but I would not have it read at school."
Enjoyed the daylights out of reading this. What *is* it about the Irish and language? Some special gene? And speaking of that, sort of, Scott in a recent comment mentioned that you had a huge uncivil debate here with someone whose name I forget, but I think it had 'Gill' in it. That was before my time, and I'd like to read it. Can you give me any guidance regarding where to find it?
I think that was probably the big row between myself and Vinay Gupta, and it wasn't very civil on my part, I must admit.
Way back in the days of SlateStarCodex, and some preliminary Googling says it was in 2018 where we got into it in the comments. It all started off with a blockchain-based dating site and mushroomed from there into a Scottish-Hindu versus Irish Catholic smackdown of mutual insult. You'll have to search the comments by his and my names, unless someone else has a Collected Worst Of for this:
Using it in an Irish political sense, I would say that Bill Clinton was a cute hoor (he'd fit easily into Fianna Fáil alongside Bertie Ahern at the time) but Trump is not. There's an element of charisma or charm or roguishness there, accompanying the lack of trustworthiness, which Trump doesn't have, even if he is popular and charismatic. Trump is a bit too up front, if I can put it that way: you know exactly who he is, what you see is what you get. The cute hoor, by contrast, has a bit of that twinkly-eyed shiftiness going on where you're persuaded in spite of yourself.
"Cute hoor and, by extension, "cute hoorism", is a cultural concept in Ireland where a certain level of corruption is forgiven - or sometimes even applauded - of politicians or businessmen.
...Cute hoorism in politics has also come to refer to the phenomenon where, because of Ireland's multi-seat constituency proportional representation, single transferable vote system, political candidates often face more of a threat in re-election from a running mate in their party than from a rival in a party with substantially different political policies. Typically, a successful method of besting a rival with identical political beliefs is by being seen to be better at dealing with parish pump issues.
However, the phrase "cute hoor" is used more widely than this in politics in Ireland, particularly when referring to cynical tactics in general, such as the difference between pre-election campaigning and post-election coalition-forming.
...On 10 March 1983, the Evening Herald ran an article on Terry Leyden (with reference to him and his running mate Seán Doherty) in which the phrase was first used in print:
"Few politicians understand the punters better than either. In local parlance they are cute "hoors". But it is hard to say which is the cutest.... in spite of national swings against Fianna Fáil they have managed to hold onto two out of the three seats n Roscommon over the past four elections.... If their political know-how could be repeated by Fianna Fail in other marginals Charlie Haughey would never have lost power."
...In both instances, the implication (by rival politicians and journalists) was that cute hoor politicians had improved their careers by prioritising local concerns over the national interest. The phrase accelerated in use during the 1980s and 1990s when repeated coalition governments collapsed after corruption scandals or because the support of independent politicians was withdrawn.
...Boris Johnson
In 2019, The Irish Times asked if Boris Johnson was Britain's first cute hoor Prime Minister, noting "Swap a hurl for a cricket bat, the word “Brussels” for “Dublin”, and Johnson would be right at home in a back bar in south Kerry, waging a derisory finger at “them up in Dublin” with one hand and knocking back a pint with the other. Their electorate is the same - tired of being condescended to by elites in a remote city, they respond well to a sly dog who they reckon can get them a good deal".
>A) the Trump administration now argues on the record that _anyone_ being imprisoned in a foreign country is beyond the reach of U.S. courts;
This has always been the case; a US court generally has no power to order a foreign entity to do anything. There might be a statute that arguably creates an exception in this case, but I have not heard anyone cite one.
But, it does have the power to order US entities to do things, which is what the district court has done. I can see the district court ordering the govt to suspend payments to El Salvador until they release Abrego Garcia. That might arguably be an intrusion into foreign policy, but that is a very different issue,
I suggest we get every scumbag we possibly can lay our hands on off the streets of America, send them to Salvador, and when it’s all done and dusted we nuke the place.
Problem solved. We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.
This is probably true, but hasn’t it mostly been the case that these are Americans imprisoned in foreign countries for violating a law of that country? I don’t think it’s applicable to the current situation.
If it weren’t for the fact that El Salvador is throwing everyone in jail, it could be the new Australia. It is a pity that they cannot engage in useful work.
As soon as it is practical, I think they should all be sent to the Moon, along with other countries’ castoffs.
>hasn’t it mostly been the case that these are Americans imprisoned in foreign countries for violating a law of that country?
It has nothing to do with prisoners. A US court generally has no power to order a foreign entity to do anything, unless Congress has explicitly so provided. There is a reason that the District Court did not order El Salvador to do anything.
Smith could have been a bit more specific with that particular wording, and the word choice of "reach" is not helpful.
What he fully means there is, "the Trump administration now argues on the record that the executive branch's sending _anyone_ into imprisonment in a foreign country is not subject to any review or oversight by U.S. courts."
I quite understand the general principle, but I am applying it to the specifics of this case. It concerns imprisonment. It concerns violation of United States law. It concerns deportation. It concerns the entire principle of habeas corpus in common law. I was pointing out that in general in prisoner disputes in the past, it has been the case that an American has been imprisoned in a foreign country and the United States, as you say, has no jurisdiction. This is not a similar circumstance.
I've heard that Syrians are destroying artifacts of the old Syrian regime, like paintings and sculptures of Bashar al-Assad. I think money could actually be made by exporting these to the U.S. and reselling them as ironic souvenirs. Can anyone put me in touch with a person living in Syria?
I mean, a random Syrian can't take something from Assad's presidential palaces any more than an American can from the White House. In December and early January, perhaps. Not now. There is a new state with a new president now.
I'm late to the party, but if you're just abandoning neutrality and going woke (which I understand), it's not exactly clear for a lot of us which side to take. Most of the white guys around here are going to have much better job options with DEI overthrown, especially if Trump's eventual fall leads to a woke counterrevolution and the Democrats start making it illegal to hire white men or something similar. The choice in a few years isn't going to be between the 2024 Democrats and 2024 Trump, but between a regime that hates white men and a regime that hates everyone else. You may not like this new world where you just add up your demographic factors and pick a side, and neither do I, but now that it exists, it's not clear to me the left has a majority, since many people only differ by one from the maximally-disfavored demographic category, and there are plenty of Latin men and white women who don't like the new liberal dispensation.
Whatever else happens, you're an excellent writer and a good person and I hope this crap cools down some. But I'm not optimistic.
False trichotomy between Trumpism, neutrality, and "woke." The range of possible political opinions is vast.
But also the notion that the 2028 Democrats will be a "regime that hates white men" is profoundly unserious. I'll be more specific: it is exactly the sort of unserious hogwash you hear spouted by people with abrasive personalities to explain to themselves and those like them why they're not welcome in a lot of blue-tribe social spaces. Now, there's is certainly some leftist rhetoric that's made this kind of accusation easier, but of course if you actually *do* spend time in those spaces (or even make a serious attempt to observe them from the outside) you can't help but notice that there are *lots* of white men in them, and they're not treated worse than anyone else. Shocking, I know.
I'd say that there is a distinction between what people say and who they allow in. I.e. in my experience, I strongly agree that the effective culture of some leftist social spaces that was actively engaged with politics in nyc and seattle was full of verbal statements that were offensive towards men and/or white people. Even more oddly, they were regularly said by white men. I.e. kill all men, was something many of my male friends said - roughly daily, for a year or two. These statements bothered me deeply, but attempts to get people to stop saying them proved unsuccessful, and made me feel treated worse than non white men in these spaces.
Does that mean they're against men, or white people? I honestly can't tell (which is a bit concerning). But I do think about it every time I vote for the democratic party.
Everyone is gangsta till they're 2008-ed because the president imposes tariffs with no more thought than emptying his stomach.
I'm not an American but I would imagine my rulers hating me are better in some sense or the other than my rulers "loving" me enough to wreck my retirement savings and my currency and deport me to a shadow prison if I complain about it, all while gloating about it on Twitter and having photoshoots next to my prison bars.
This isn't really a response to the main thrust of your post, but the idea that the Democrats are going to make it illegal to hire white men, or anything similar to that, is really out of touch. Woke is dead, it will be for a while, and pretending like it's some big bogeyman isn't even an accurate representation of the height of its ideological influence
Woke is not dead, and it's not going to be dead any time soon. Woke is also not powerful enough to pass laws making it illegal to hire white men, or anything similar to that. and it's not going to be that powerful any time soon. There is a *huge* gap between "dead" and "powerful enough to untouchable-ize a quarter of the population", and woke is going to spend the next couple of decades somewhere in that gap.
You are both engaged in the sort of hyperbole that makes sensible people not want to engage with you. Please stop doing that.
Sorry, it's not hyperbole. Perhaps I should have said "dying" instead of dead, but I would mean it in the same way that a vegetable on life support is dying but not technically dead. Woke was dying before Trump II, and it was clear even in '21 that is was not going to come back. I can forgive the average person for maybe not realizing this, but it was pretty obvious if you had any one you were close to in college during the COVID years
Anti-white discrimination has been the law in America since the 1960s, and anti-whitism is still prevalent amongst the upper reachers of American society. Given this, I'd be interested in knowing what makes you so confident that "woke is dead".
> Anti-white discrimination has been the law in America since the 1960s, and anti-whitism is still prevalent amongst the upper reachers of American society.
Massive citation needed. I think you are quite deep in some ideological hole.
Let me try and help you out.
First, the actual text of the law and case precedent is pretty egalitarian. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects all Americans from racial discrimination, regardless of race. Legal standards like "strict scrutiny" ensure race-conscious policies serve compelling interests and are narrowly tailored. All of this means that White Americans who face discrimination have the same legal protections as any other group
Here is a list of cases where primarily white defendants sued on racial discrimination grounds and won.
Second, the empirics just do not bear this out. Besides white americans continually doing great in economic averages, they also do better in terms of employment rates and leadership representation -- both in government and in private companies.
Third, even specific examples that you could try to point to, like Affirmative Action, have been consistently limited by the same judiciary that you hate in other places.
And ofc the most liberal state in the country, California, explicitly bans AA as part of their state constitution.
Is any of this compelling at all? If this does not change your mind, what exactly would? I mean this seriously -- is there anything at all that would change your mind and convince you that you are downstream of some bad epistemology?
>Massive citation needed. I think you are quite deep in some ideological hole.
You can read Jeremy Carl's "The Unprotected Class" if you want a book-length treatment. Or, if you'd rather, simply open up any mainstream magazine, newspaper, academic journal, or similar organ, and count the number of times "white", "whiteness" etc. is used with a negative vs. a positive valence. Or you can look through job openings, see how many explicitly encourage non-whites to apply vs. how many explicitly encourage whites to apply. Or you can look at academic funding schemes, and see how many are targetted specifically at non-whites vs. how many are targetted specifically at whites. Or you can watch a move or TV show, and count how many white characters or historical figures are played by non-white actors, vs. how many non-white are played by white actors. Or you can try complaining about whites qua whites, and then try complaining about blacks qua blacks, and compare the reactions you get. Or...
>Is any of this compelling at all? If this does not change your mind, what exactly would? I mean this seriously -- is there anything at all that would change your mind and convince you that you are downstream of some bad epistemology?
You can show me all the academic articles talking about the need to "abolish blackness", all the businesses trying to diversity their workforces by hiring more white men, all the academic funding available for students or scholars of whiteness, the TV shows where Shaka Zulu is played by a blond Scandinavian guy, the Congressional White Caucus, the politicians giving paeans to the "white community", and the electoral districts gerrymandered specifically to give whites more political power.
And of course this goes far beyond just 'black' people specifically. I am Indian, here is an academic critique of Indian-immigrant community norms ("Caste in Diaspora: Neoliberal Transformation of an 'Untranslatable' Institution" by Rina Agarwala). And this is also in the popular culture too -- Obama has openly critiqued innercity culture as part of the issue, and a lot of Kendrick's music is about the same subject.
The critiques of 'white' culture are part of an extremely long tradition that looks critically at all cultures with a lens of _improving outcomes_ and _understanding norms_. That doesn't mean "get rid of minorities" anymore than critiques of what you think of as 'white people' means get rid of white people or make them a 'hated minority'. By the way, it was not that long ago that white politicians were openly advocating for segregation -- many of the people who were openly supporting those policies are still alive and in some cases in political office! Really hard to square.
Do these not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> all the businesses trying to diversity their workforces by hiring more white men
As mentioned earlier, the stats just don't bear out your critiques on 'white people not getting hired'. I already cited a half dozen examples of legal protection AND empirics showing that this is not an issue. Here's some more:
- White men hold 62% of C-suite positions in Fortune 500 companies despite being about 30% of the population
- The unemployment rate for white Americans has consistently remained lower than for Black Americans (pre-pandemic: 3.7% vs. 6.1%)
- Even with identical resumes, candidates with traditionally white-sounding names receive 50% more callbacks than those with traditionally Black-sounding names (National Bureau of Economic Research)
And it seems really weird that your bar is "companies that are exclusively trying to hire white men" -- kinda suggests that you don't really believe in 'race blindness' as a principle. What does it mean to 'diversify' by hiring people who are already over represented? If AA policies are already getting smacked down in the courts, what exactly is your concern here?
---
> all the academic funding available for students or scholars of whiteness
I think you're maybe just poorly framing things. Here are a few departments that are exclusively about scholarly activity in the West:
- Classics and classics departments
- English literature
- European history / european studies
- all of the Western languages
- all of the Western religious studies
Do these just not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> the TV shows where Shaka Zulu is played by a blond Scandinavian guy
I can't find anything on Shaka specifically, but theres loads of examples of white folks playing minorities that are quite recent:
- Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia
- Emma Stone as an Asian in "Aloha"
- Tilda Swinton cast as the Ancient One in "Dr. Strange"
- Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton as Moses and Ramses in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"
Even gandhi was played by Ben Kingsley, he's only half Indian!
80% of film writers are white. 87% of directors are white. 77% of leads are white.
And as an aside, every time a minority is cast in a role, everyone gets really pissed about it! The reaction to halle bailey in the little mermaid, or zendaya as MJ in Spiderman or Ms. Marvel or StarWars are great examples.
Do these not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> the Congressional White Caucus
White Americans comprise about 59% of the population but approximately 73% of the House and 89% of the Senate.
Does this not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> electoral districts gerrymandered specifically to give whites more political power
This one is the one that is most ridiculous to me. The gerrymandering just happens the other way! What sources are you even reading!
>There is a long academic tradition of critiquing minority cultures. Here are a few examples:
I can't access the first and third articles, but I'll note that the second article explicitly blames "street culture" on mistreatment blacks receive from mainstream society. So even when critiquing minorities, it's still white people's fault. By contrast, no academic has ever said "Oh, sure, white people might be racist, but that's because of high rates of crime amongst the black community, so really it's not their fault."
>As mentioned earlier, the stats just don't bear out your critiques on 'white people not getting hired'.
It's an easily verifiable fact that many businesses explicitly seek to hire more minorities and functionally no businesses explicitly seek to hire more white people. If white people manage to do well anyway, that's good for them, but it doesn't mean those places explicitly seeking to hire more minorities don't exist.
>I already cited a half dozen examples of legal protection AND empirics showing that this is not an issue.
Spend half an hour on LinkedIn or somewhere, and you can easily find adverts saying "We especially welcome applications for minority ethnic or traditionally under-represented communities" or some such. Some even have guaranteed interview schemes for applicants from minority backgrounds. So either this sort of preferential treatment is legal, in which case the law is discriminatory, or it isn't but it happens anyway, in which case we can add one piece of evidence to the "America didn't have rule of law even before Trump" bucket.
> think you're maybe just poorly framing things. Here are a few departments that are exclusively about scholarly activity in the West:
I said funding for students, not departments. Also, I would note that, in all the fields you studied, there are currently big pushes to include "under-represented" voices, precisely because the topics as they stand are considered too white.
>- Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia - Emma Stone as an Asian in "Aloha" - Tilda Swinton cast as the Ancient One in "Dr. Strange" - Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton as Moses and Ramses in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"
According to the US Census Bureau, Egypt, Israel, and Iran are all considered white countries. Also, Emma Stone and Cameron Crowe were both forced to publicly apologise for casting Stone as a quarter-Hawaiian and quarter-Chinese (and half white? I couldn't find details about the rest of her ancestry) character, so that's not really the best counter-example.
>White Americans comprise about 59% of the population but approximately 73% of the House and 89% of the Senate. Does this not count for some reason? If so, why?
Whites have by far the lowest in-group racial preference out of any group in the US, so white Congressmen are less likely to support policies that benefit white people specifically: https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9002
Who is going woke? Do you mean Scott? Scott always had a very firm anti-woke stand, I don't think he was ever neutral. And I haven't seen any indication that this has changed recently.
It was more or less on the linked subscriber-only post being debated here, which you're going to have to pay $10 to read. He wonders if he should have fought progressive cognitive errors quite so hard, because it may have helped lead to the current situation. Sorry not to give more detail but it seems kind of rotten to try to get around the guy's paywall on his own blog.
2. Eh, I don't think you can really blame yourself for that - there's been right-contrarian stuff for a long time, and it wasn't the animating force of idiotic Trumpism. That stuff has been building since the 1990s in the conservative movement, and it finally won big with Trump in 2024 ironically because a bunch of folks locked in dislike for Biden in 2021* and thought Trump would make it 2019 again rather than doing a bunch of crazy, shitty stuff.
* I'm not even kidding about that. Biden's popularity took a hit and essentially fixed in place after about October 2021, and NOTHING budged it going forward - it just very slowly declined, but not by much. Some combination of Covid related stuff, inflation, and relentless negative press coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
> I don't think you can really blame yourself for that
this is only true if you thought it was plausible that a left-wing version of what is happening now (e.g. a "woke Cultural Revolution") would have happened with more left-leaning governments – which I think Scott did/does believe in.
To me, that sounds insane, but I admit this could be my bias speaking. I imagine more right-leaning people would have similarly discounted the possibility of Trump II being quite this bad.
I'm looking for a toronto based therapist who can help with grief (my 18 y/o brother committed suicide) - i got approved for publicly funded therapy but the waitlist means i can't start for several months
anyone who knows of a competent therapist who can do grief stuff and is not too expensive (im in canada so im poor) would be really appreciated, especially if they can act as a bridge until i get into the public CBT program
I don't have an answer for you, but do want to offer a warning to stay away from Betterhelp and its ilk. There are a bunch of youtube investigations, exposé essays and so on about how it's a data-stealing borderline scam. Don't waste your time or money with it when you're in a vulnerable place.
Here's a form of moral argument I'll call the Principled Hypocrite:
Person A spends a long time publicly denouncing members of group G for performing activity X. A wants the relevant regulations for G to prohibit X. Person A then becomes a member of G, and is found to have subsequently performed X. Perhaps A admits to X, or perhaps A denies it but supporters of A mount a defense on A's behalf, but either way the defense is, "A still believes that members of G should be prohibited from doing X, but as long as it is permitted and normalized within G, A should not refrain while the rest of G benefits. That sort of expectation effectively penalizes people who are in favor of restrictions that would apply to themselves, which (1) is unfair and (2) creates incentive pressure for G to comprise people who want G to be maximally unfettered, which is usually not a good thing." (The hard-core libertarian reader will naturally disagree with the last part of that argument but I don't think the hard-core libertarian reader needs much of a defense to be mounted for A doing something that violates no contract but is perhaps hypocritical.)
I am acutely aware that, most of the time when this argument is trotted out or rebutted, it's strictly an exercise in cheering for your side and booing for the other side. But if I can find people here who are willing to suspend that mode of thinking and consider the argument purely in the abstract... I find this argument pretty compelling provided that X is not something I consider intrinsically immoral (by which I mean, something that is harmful by the nature of the act itself regardless of social context, like most forms of violence or theft, as opposed to something that is harmful only because of its systemic impact, like tax avoidance or buying test prep classes for your kid). Should I? Interested in hearing opposing arguments.
its not compelling because they never intend to change the system and are using its intractability to justify it. You change a system first by individual steps.
like if you think cars are bad, at some point you need to not use them. if you use cars as much as anyone else who likes them but say "I can't be assed to put my money where my mouth is, the world needs to change first!" you are lying to yourself or wanting anti-car cred with zero effort.
I think the Principled Hypocrite here is not actually being hypocritical much at all (though it might depend on what X is). There's a big difference between living in a world where every G can and does do X and living in a world where most G do not do X (whether because it's illegal or just taboo). First, if you live in the later world and do X, you're contributing much more to the current and (likely) future prevalence of X. Second, is X is anything that relates to intra-group competition, you're at a much bigger disadvantage refraining from X in the former world than in the latter world. I'll give a couple of concrete examples to motivate this:
With the online job hunting being the default these days, your average job seeker sends out lots of applications, including plenty of fairly marginal ones. Obviously this is somewhat zero-sum: the total number of hires isn't going to increase because of the extra applications, it just takes more work[1] for employer to make a single hire AND more work for the average job seeker to find a job. I think the world would be better if job seekers restricted themselves to fewer applications more narrowly focused on jobs they're well-qualified for and likely to get, but of course there's no decentralized way to push towards that equilibrium. Living in the world as it is, when I look for jobs I also skew towards sending out lots of applications (though not to anything *too* marginal: that seems like a waste of my time). Being more principled won't meaningfully shift the equilibrium, but it might meaningfully decrease my chances of getting a job. To be fair, this one is less a moral issue than just an optimization issue.
Gerrymandering is legal in the U.S. and practiced somewhat by both parties. I *do* consider gerrymandering a moral issue: it's effectively denying some people representation in order to gain more political power. I think a better functioning polity would demand laws be changed to make gerrymandering impossible or impractical. But until those laws are changed, it's not practical to expect either party to stop on their own. A party that stops *might* get a mild bump in popularity out of it (though with polarization being what it is, I wouldn't even bet on that), but it *will* get a substantial decrease in effective voting power, and lose seats because of it, making them that much less able to fight against it or any other policy they deem harmful.
[1] Or, in practice, the automation of work using potentially distortionary software tools.
One extreme would be something that is so clearly bad that no one should do it ever, regardless of what other people are doing. For example, torturing children is bad, full stop. I want that to be banned. Even if for some reason the ban does not pass, if you see me doing it, it means I am a horrible person.
I would be a horrible person even if I tortured children *without* arguing for the ban. But on top of that, the fact that I do it makes it difficult to believe that I am serious about the ban. Most likely, I am just trying to send a cheap virtue signal.
What would be the opposite extreme -- something completely innocent? But then why would anyone want to ban it? That doesn't seem to make much sense. The closest things that make sense seem to be:
a) My individual contribution to the bad outcome is a rounding error. There are million people in the city, no one recycles. If I start recycling, it won't make a difference.
b) Bad thing happens if N people do it, but if N+1 people do it, it doesn't make it any worse. It would be better if people didn't smoke in a room, but if five people already do, me lighting a cigarette doesn't make anything worse. Your clothes won't smell worse because of it.
c) Not participating is relatively costly. As an entrepreneur, I would like to pay my employees minimum wage and also spend some money on their safety, but if my competitors don't do it, they will easily take over my customers. On the other hand, if we all do it (because it would be a crime not to), the prices will rise slightly, but the number of customers will stay approximately the same. (In theory, slightly smaller, but for the sake of debate let's assume that the aggregate demand is quite inflexible in this case.)
I am tempted to say that the person doing c) is not a hypocrite. Neither is the person doing b), if they always wait for the others to start first. I am ambivalent about a).
This is just a multi-polar trap like scott goes over in moloch. The regulation that they support is the way out and they're correct in following the incentives while advocating for the way out.
1. A doesn't think anyone should be allowed to own a gun.
2. If its legal to own a gun, A is going to own a gun.
3. A would still vote for a law that bans all gun ownership.
I don't think there is any hypocrisy there. Hypocrisy would be changing your vote after getting long gun equities.
We could even strengthen 2 - with the private information A has that they are below average likely to have their handgun cause harm- stable mental state, law abiding, no children in house...
But I don't think we need to. 1,2 and 3 are sufficient when the desire is for a change in equilibrium rather than the summation of positive acts.
A denounces members of G who do X. So maybe A is not required to refrain from X while a member of G, but he can hardly complain if he denounced for doing so.
Contrariwise, if individual members of G are acting rationally and morally by doing X, then A should refrain from denouncing them and restrict his activity to campaigning for systemic change to remove the bad incentives.
As an aside, I'm not sure what significance of group G is here. Isn't it essentially the same problem if you just posit that A denounces people for doing X and campaigns for regulations to prohibit X, but also does X and argues that while X is licit it is unreasonable to expect him personally to refrain from X?
I think this is along the lines of "if we don't do it, China will" and the implication there is "and if China does it, that will be bad".
I don't know if it's principled or not, but it does strike me as hypocritical. It's often used to arm twist agreement about "okay you can do this thing", where there are already objections to doing the thing. And the idea that it'll be fine if we do it, because we're the good guys, but those Chinese - ooh, if they get the lead in cloning superbabies, or AI, or better rice cookers, why it will be the end of the world as we know it! The argument is then moved away from "is this thing good or bad?" to "we can't afford to fall behind in rice cooker technology or unspecified but bad things will happen!!" so we can still end up with the bad thing happening but at least it's not being done by the Chinese.
I certainly don't want to live in a world run by the CCP, but neither do I want to live in a world ruled by "so I want to skin babies alive For Science, but mushy-minded normies don't like that for some reason, so I need to evoke the spectre of Chinese baby-skinning to get my way".
I think we see it most in business and politics, where "okay sure this practice is kinda corrupt, but everyone does it, and if I don't do it then I'll be at a disadvantage". So nobody is really in favour of corruption, but nobody is willing to take the hit to stop it. Something something Moloch, perchance?
It took me a while to parse this, so let me simplify and rephrase.
1. Guy says "those folks shouldn't be allowed to do that thing"
2. Guy becomes one of those folks
3. Guy does that thing
4. Guy says "Hey, I still believe that those folks shouldn't be allowed to do that thing, but that's not going to stop me from doing that thing; it's the system that needs to be changed"
I don't think I'm comfortable taking a position on this in the general case, I think it depends on the nature of that thing. If it's "homeowners shouldn't be allowed to use tax deduction X-33-alpha-II" then that's one thing, if it's "policemen shouldn't be allowed to randomly beat people over the head" then it's another.
What matters here is probably whether the thing is a wicked thing to do, or whether you’re merely looking to introduce systemic change by making it illegal.
Is it the same as: "I think we should reduce air traveling, but I fly to Mallorca every summer"? Considering that an average person flying to Mallorca once a year has a very small effect on the climate, as opposed to a very rich person with a private jet flying between New York and Paris every week to go shopping?
I think there's an important distinction between the version of this where I'm advocating for "voluntarily doing X less" and the version where I'm advocating "change rules to reduce X". I'm primarily interested in the latter; I think the former is just plain hypocrisy.
I think even the former case might not be hypocrisy if the person is voluntarily doing X somewhat, but less than the average person is. They're modelling a directionally correct behavior change, even if they're not doing it to the maximum extend possible. This will not, of course, stop people from loudly calling them a hypocrite, since loud, opinionated people are rarely interested in such nuances.
That comes under the "intrinsically immoral" qualifier---claiming a tax deduction isn't intrinsically immoral (the act of claiming isn't harmful to anyone in and of itself, despite arguments that it might be extrinsically immoral because of systemic harms done to society), extrajudicial beatings are.
It seems to me your attempting to bargain with forces of nature rather then people. "It be really great if god prevented slavery", stated loudly, does not nesserily cause god to intervene in your slave empire. "If you try to enslave me Ill slit your throat in the night" may effect your behavior on the other hand. Morality is about moral agents discussing violence, everything else is masturbation.
How much truth is contained in the proposition, "No drug users actually want fentanyl, they want oxycodone, etc., and are getting fentanyl mostly unknowingly as an inferior substitute/adulterant"?
It seems that many habitual drug users are open to substitution, mainly based around availability and price. They don't prefer fentanyl, but if it's what they can get and/or it's cheaper so they can better afford it, they will use it instead of their preference. I also understand that dealers are highly incentivized to mix fentanyl into their product because it requires a much smaller amount to be effective. So it may not be a knowing choice at all.
> How much truth is contained in the proposition, "No drug users actually want fentanyl, they want oxycodone, etc., and are getting fentanyl mostly unknowingly as an inferior substitute/adulterant"?
There's at least some evidence that addicts don't like fentanyl more - a large factor of fentanyl's prevalence is driven on the supply side by concentration and smuggleability.
Heroin is preferred by between 1.7-6.7x, with older folk preferring it more per Ferguson et al, Investigating opioid preference to inform safe supply services: A cross sectional study (2022)
Although to be fair, there is a split. Some people are so far gone they can ONLY get high on fentanyl, and regular opiates aren’t strong enough now because they’ve worked their way up the curve to massive doses of fentanyl, which is 10-100x stronger at street concentrations.
"it is much safer to be feared than loved because [...] love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails." -- Fred Rogers
While looking up the correct wording of this quote, I stumbled on another Machiavelli quote (Also from The Prince), which actually does sound like something Mr. Rogers might say: "Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are."
Will read in full later but the scenario outlined in the introduction tickles my inner pessimistic Neil Postman.
The Internet was supposed to revolutionize everything, incl. ending war. I grew listening to Barlow declaim the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace and witness the dream turn into viral 6 second videos of people throwing water on their heads because I didn't have a better model of what the general public values and how the Net exploding in users would push towards that and not my teenage techno-anarchist visions.
I can easily see how AI development could wind up stuck in that kind local maximum due to wrong incentives.
> GPT-4s performance on a programming competition from various years, with the red line separating when contamination was possible from when it wasn’t.
> .8 to .1
Is that chart well known? Quite frankly accusations of *criminal* fraud should be flying around
This isn't the first sign of benchmark contamination. There was a story a while back where a model too small to multiple numbers still managed to answer a bunch of AIME questions.
Apologies for double posting about the same thing, this one is just so baffling to me personally that I can't help it.
In one of the more Orwellian moments of this government (there are many!) the Trump admin is now claiming that Abrego Garcia was deported correctly! For those who have been following along, the admin has for weeks admitted that deporting Garcia was a mistake. It seems now that SCOTUS has decided against them, they are pivoting to arguing that deporting Garcia was always intentional.
> In one of the more remarkable moments in his appearance on Fox News, Mr. Miller blamed Mr. Reuveni [the DOJ lawyer arguing the case] — and only Mr. Reuveni — for having planted the idea that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation had been in error.
> “A D.O.J. lawyer who has since been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing, incorrectly, that this was a mistaken removal,” Mr. Miller said.
> That assertion, however, flew in the face of the fact that other Trump officials had said the exact same thing.
> One of them was Mr. Sauer, a top-ranking Justice Department official. Another was Robert Cerna, the acting field office director for enforcement and removal operations at ICE.
> Early in the case, Mr. Cerna submitted a sworn declaration about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation, and made clear that it was a mistake.
> Moreover, just a few weeks before he was fired, Mr. Reuveni was praised as a “top-notched” prosecutor by his superiors in an email announcing a recent promotion.
Since the immigration judge is part of the Executive Branch, these are not rulings from the Judiciary Branch. As such, the Executive Branch can change its mind on its own decisions.
Ok, so if you believe this, is there a procedure in place through which "the Executive Branch can change its mind on its own decisions", and was it followed?
> Are you of the opinion that the Judiciary can do anything it wants?
We'll get to Garcia's case in a moment, I'm sure. But first let's just resolve the above.
It’s very confusing. A visa is needed to enter the country. But for those in the country there are myriad other legal “papers” that allow continued legal presence, but won’t allow reentry if you happen to leave. He had one of those.
Garcia had a very "thin" legal paper. There was a deportation order for him, just not to El Salavador. The part of not to El Salvador was by an immigration judge (ie part of the Executive Branch) and the Executive Branch can review its own decisions at any time.
The Supreme Court only asked because they know they have no powers to require it. They even instructed the District Court to show deference to the Executive Branch.
If it is an immigration judge, then what is the reasoning that the Executive Branch cannot review its own decisions?
I agree that you're confused! Especially since I've seen you in other threads argue that even those on visas deserve no rights, which is odd 🤔 makes me think perhaps you don't actually care about any of the principles here, though if you have some please let us know.
In the meantime, to help you with your confusion, he was granted a stay of removal from Salvador by a judge who reviewed his case. It's part of our legal process, which is something I'm sure you're deeply familiar with. That is also why every court filing thus far has openly acknowledged that the deportation was a mistake
I think it was true and necessary. I agree it was not kind. Apologies though, if it was an actual question and not the low hanging snipe that I interpreted it as.
I don't see how "necessary" could ever be applied to a comment section on the internet read mostly by nerds who have no influence in their communities. So the only way to actually follow the rules is to be kind and truthful.
Agatha Christie said in her autobiography something along the lines that as a young person her family didn't seem particularly rich for having a servant, but that owning a car would have been a wild extravagance. Of course mass production and cost disease means that the two wealth markers have switched places.
People seem to assume that humanoid robots will be economically more like a car and less like a servant, while providing servant-like amenities to middle class households.
But couldn't humanoid robots be just as susceptible to cost disease as a human? Is cleaning and cooking and doing laundry going to be the highest and best use of a robot's time, when it could be e.g. replacing a roof or repaving a road?
"Agatha Christie said in her autobiography something along the lines that as a young person her family didn't seem particularly rich for having a servant, but that owning a car would have been a wild extravagance. "
This kind of switch in modern times stuck out to me when reading a Sherlock Holmes pastiche story recently; the widow of a gentleman said she was in comfortable circumstances, but when Holmes asked her if she had any servants, she answered "comfortable but not extravagant".
Sorry, writer whose name I can't remember, but a gentlewoman even in reduced circumstances, particularly if those circumstances were "comfortable", would indeed have at the very least one servant (a maid of all work) and this lady would probably have had a cook and housemaid, if not more.
In theory the cost to have a robot servant should be driven by the cost to make/operate one, not the opportunity cost, since in theory you can always make more.
This assumes that robot servants don’t create demand spikes for input (electricity, compute, etc) but even then the “long term” cost should be the cost to make more of those resources (not their opportunity costs).
That said I think we’ll see more centralization of tasks than we have today. We might already be seeing that with uber eats - it’s cheaper to centralize food production and manage a distribution network than it is to distribute the work of cooking. Lots of things like laundry probably work the same way
I feel like Uber Eats is actually significantly more expensive than either cooking or going out to the restaurant (including getting takeout) but is popular in some areas because it's convenient. It's a lot like pizza delivery, but instead of tipping the driver you also pay a fee and still tip the driver.
Agreed! But notably it’s much cheaper than having someone come to your house and cook for you. So for autonomous robots, there’s both the question of “can a household task be automated” and “will it be automated in the house or outsourced from the house”
That's a good point. I guess the question is in the long run do humanoid robots look more like dishwashers (cheap enough that most everyone has one at home) or MRI machines (where even fabulously wealthy people use a shared facility).
First one, then the other, through the intermediate state of being like a car (very expensive for most people but useful enough that most people will spend the money anyway).
I have access to a washing machine. Way less work than washing by hand! But it's still *some* work, which I would rather not do. I would very much like a robot to do my laundry, and take out the trash, and clean the bathroom, etc.
I would like one for dishwashing, laundry, weeding/mowing and general tidying. I don't necessarily need it to cook great meals on its own, but if it could take care of some of the boring bits like chopping vegetables while I do the fun parts of cooking then I think we'll get along great.
For a robot that can do all that, I might be willing to pay the price of a car, say $50K. (But in practice there'd probably be the big caveat that next year's model is going to be much better and cheaper so you might want to wait.)
Same here, I can manage my own cooking, but a robot to do the labour of pulling out all the chairs and tables and unpacking the cupboards to do the spring clean and wash the kitchen and bathroom floors, take down and change the curtains, wash the windows, wash the blinds, and put everything back afterwards would be ideal. Particularly when it comes to washing/dusting walls and ceilings and the tops of cupboards and presses and wardrobes where it's too high for me to reach so I either have to extend my arms above my head or get on a stepladder.
A robot to do the grunt work, in other words, that wouldn't break things but would be strong enough to lift and pull and didn't mind the tedious monotony. Even renting one for a day or a week to do the Big Clean would be great!
All the moving parts and maintenance needed for a humanoid robot will make it too expensive for most, but maybe there will be a second hand market. What you want, of course, is to let the robot off - without training - to do the laundry, cleaning and cooking, as you would a human. This takes a lot of smarts as the robot needs to understand the layout of the house, find and operate the washing machine and dish washer, learn where the utensils are, where the food is stored, what to cook with, and preferably order in whatever is needed to feed and family and keep the household running.
I want one that will be capable of being the foreman/groundskeeper of my estate. Replace the lightbulbs, keep the yard, tidy, do some painting when necessary. Keep the poachers out of the yard cook sweep offer good advice.
There is no mention of Europe or the Ukraine conflict.
I think this is extremely shortsighted.
Even if the top AI companies aren't in Europe... there's still a huge amount of resources there that might prove beneficial. You have an educated, activist population. You have governments that are more responsive to popular will. (compare to America's slow electoral system).
Then there's the LITERAL ONGOING WAR. When you consider disaster / misalignment... has anyone considered Ukraine? There are desperate actors and huge incentives involved. If AI agents were to become useful "Generals", why WOULDN'T at least one profit-driven AI company sell their product immediately to Ukraine? Who would stop them? Would Ukraine prioritize rigorously testing such a product for long-term alignment? (when their leaders are facing a more immediate existential risk?). Could such agents, once empowered, "escape the box" of the Ukraine conflict?
The drone heavy Ukraine military would presumably want their AI to be miniaturizable, so it can fly the drone by itself. I haven't heard of much effort going into making the super AI models have a small processing footprint yet.
This leads us to a great example of how divested from reality all these "AI will totally take over everything" claims are. Here we have:
AI can pilot a drone, maybe even better than a human, but still it's only one drone it's not going to do any more damage when it hits the target, the damage is limited by its payload size.
Even if AI is better than a Ukrainian 20-y.o., it's not 10X better, simply because the Ukrainian 20-y.olds are quite good at hitting targets.
What's needed to make an impact is a lot more drones. AI can't make them by itself. Expecting some magic turnaround in the war just because "AI" is... believing in magic.
Even mediocre self-contained AI drones would be vastly superior to the very best human piloted AI drones because they would be immune to the most common electronic counter measures to drones, which is the current limiting factor to their effectiveness on the battle field.
1 AI drone that can actually make it to its target is better than 10 human flown drones that get fried somewhere over no-mans-land by EW jamming.
Your level of ignorance about these basic facts do not warrant the tone you're putting on. Both sides in Ukraine are engaged in an arms race of jamming and hardening their various remote-controlled weapon systems such as cruise missiles, glide bombs, long-range and short-range drones. So yes, if an on-board process could conclusively solve the jamming issue while retaining a human operator's flying and targeting skill on the final approach, it would make a big difference in overall effectiveness.
While jamming wouldn't become entirely obsolete, its main purpose would be to require the attacker to use presumably more expensive semi-autonomous drones rather than entirely remote-controlled ones.
Your argument, as I read it, is that AI wouldn’t offer much above current human pilots, and I was pointing out a pretty clear advantage it would have regardless of actual flying skill or numbers produced.
If you think it’s impossible to develop a small weights AI system in the next few years that could pilot a COTS drone effectively on local hardware go ahead and make that argument if you would like, but that’s not what your original comment seemed to be saying at all.
Yes, adding AI capabilities will offer an advantage, an incremental one as far as an overall battlefield effect is concerned. We had recently an example of a startling "new" (for drones) tech, the fiberoptic cable navigation. I've read an interview with a Ukrainian officer who was quite despondent over these, because Russians started using them and the jammers became useless. The effect was there, but not enough to break the stalemate.
Now, if Ukraine could increase the drone numbers by, say 100X - that could really be a game changer. But AI is not going to do this, the drones have to be made, and knowledge is not a constraint for that.
These days, the solution to electronic countermeasures is to put the drone on a very long wire. It seems kind of old-fashioned (aren't we supposed to trust wireless everything?), but practicality rules over trendiness.
Yes, optical fiber, quite immune to jamming, but there's a tradeoff: more limited range, and reduced munition power. The spool is heavy, and the length is limited.
This is starting to remind me of those 50s SF novels where space battles are fought the old-fashioned way by space marines boarding the vessels, since the increasing sophistication of energy weapons and counter-measures with shields and jamming means that, in the end, you have to go back to the brute force "hit it with a space axe to breach the hull" method 😁
I think the single most persuasive thing you said about this kind of thing is that various new gizmos the AI 2027 timeline imagines us having in 2 years can't possibly be here in 2 years because if they were going to be they would already be in factories in some early form as of now. I put a post up on this thread asking Scott for a post where he addresses some of the best arguments against his timeline, and I think your points about manufacturing are very convincing. They also have a welcome grounding quality, for all concerned. They drag everybody into the practical world, which is the world AI and the rest of us live in.
It's just... weird to read all the prognostications that are completely removed from reality of dirty plumbing and floppy wiring.
But I'm also beginning to worry about Scott's ability to dig into these complex issues at this point. The post about POSIWID was so... terrible... if this were the first Scott's post I came across I'd dismiss him as another nitwit troll and never return to read anything else.
Starting with the snarky title, it went downhill fast. Scott ventured into a subject he clearly didn't understand, but rather than approaching it with epistemic humility and curiosity, as was his prior modus operandi, he threw some really stupid examples why "obviously POSIWID is stupid ha ha". Then, and I can't believe I'm writing this, he went to... xitter... to look for better examples! To xitter, Ere! Jesus wept.
Of course he found more snarky shit (sorry, xit) there, and concluded that the whole this was stupid indeed.
Then the thing attracted two kinds of commentary,
1 - more stupid snarky shit
2 - a few bewildered souls who have some basic exposure, not even deep expertise, in systems, and they all were, like, dude, are you ok? You clearly have no idea how this work, why so much certainty and sarcasm about a subject you're clearly ignorant in?
> Even if AI is better than a Ukrainian 20-y.o., it's not 10X better, simply because the Ukrainian 20-y.olds are quite good at hitting targets.
I disagree, aim bots are both trivail and much much better then humans; civilians existing seems to be the main reason automated snipers dont exist(while in csgo not such a problem is drasticly reduced), to say nothing of bomb.
Tools can be wildly more effective then humans, even the first rock is better then a human fist 10x.
Drones wont be gai, because its a solved domain; thinking is overhead.
Have you watched videos from that frontline? The drones a FPV, and these kids are really good at getting them through the smallest openings.
A major advantage of having an AI on board, locally, is that it won't need to send a signal back and therefore be more immune (not totally) against radio jamming. But that's definitely not in the cards, not in the next few years.
I believe that the technology for this exists right now. The phrase I see pop up a lot is "machine vision", referring to AI taking over the terminal approach in case of signal loss. It was inevitable in the era of ubiquitous jamming and AI really. Although drones trailing thin fiber optic cables is also quite popular to overcome jamming. Supposedly there are also drones operating in the theatre right now that have completely autonomous kill capability. But the source for that is a higher up in a drone company, so it might be shameless advertising that turns out to be fake for all I know.
Yeah I think you’re correct in an even wider sense: just like with autonomous driving, it’s a gradual shift, an adaptation of new tech as it becomes available, not a sudden 0-1 switch.
Yes, this is what happens when expertise becomes co-opted by dishonest political forces. The Left shouldn't have done that. They destroyed social trust in expertise and this is where it's led us. If you don't want an antivaxxer running HHS then don't start talking about how science shows that gender is a spectrum or that race is a social construct. They declared a war on rationality and now they're complaining that nothing makes sense. Oh the irony.
Very common in general and not limited to Democrats.
Basically 69.9% of Pro-Israel's talking points is just repeating "HAMAS MADE US DO IT" in a loop and hoping the other guy forgets what he wanted to say.
When you're attacked by bad guys, you kill those bad guys, because if you don't, they will attack again. If those bad guys hide under their own children, their children have to die, because if they don't, the bad guys know that all they have to do to survive is hide behind even more children and attack with even more impunity. In urban warfare, children die. Every single time. Hamas declared war on Israel. They knew when they did so that Israel wasn't going to take it lying down, and Palestine's own children that Hamas is hiding under were going to die. They knew this, they counted on it, they *want* it. "We love death more than you love life." They celebrate when their children die because they believe paradise awaits them. So they will die. As long as they continue to attack and hide under children, they will die, and many of the children will die too.
But I have already read all the Hasbara you're indoctrinated with more times than your brain have neurons, and I already reject them as barbarian baby-murdering ramblings.
So what did you add? What did your keyboard and CPU expend energy on? Just regurgitating what ever baby murderer have been saying for 20 months?
I don't buy this "look what you made me do" type of argument, nor is there reason to think this sort of "oh yeah see how you like it when the shoe is on the other foot" thing will lead to deescalation, as opposed to further escalation.
Also, RFK Jr was an antivaxxer, and I bet trump held the various beliefs he holds, long before the stuff you're referring to here became popular.
Also, RFK Jr is remarkably honest about what he does and doesn’t know about vaccines. Anyone calling him an anti vaxxer has never listened to him talk in depth on podcasts for multiple hours. As an MD I supported him for President when he was running as an independent long before he joined with Trump (interesting that the media didn’t have anything to say about him back then)
"[O]ur job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child."
Do you really have the impression I have never heard this quote before? Left wing propaganda is omnipresent. Listen to RFK for three hours on Rogan or Jocko or Lex Fridman and see what you think then
Now we re-examine his reasoning. Which, hopefully, we were doing all along.
If RFKJ is favoring the measles vaccine (from I heard, he specifically advocates separating it from MMR), that means he's not "just antivaxx"; he's got reasoning underneath, and the worst thing someone could do in response to that is to just respond tribally - whether to criticize him for taking so long to come around to the truth, or to hate him for betraying Team Antivax, or any other response that rests on a black-and-white understanding of vaccines.
In the sense that Scott and others like him are responsible for anything, they are responsible for the absolute faith expressed in the views above. Of the side that has won and is winning and is getting everything they wanted, but still fighting battles they won years ago.
Your guy is in charge, doing what you want in the way that you wanted it. The DEIs are getting what they deserve, they are no longer crushing you with their iron jackboot. Those snooty experts are getting shown their place.
So what's to be angry about? Enjoy your time in the sun.
Trump is far from my guy, but I do understand why he’s there. I don’t like what he’s doing but I want it to be understood in the full context in which it occurred so that it doesn’t happen again. Progressives destabilized the norms of reasonable political discourse and that’s what brought us to crazytown. I don’t blame Trump, he’s just an opportunist. The Left knew better than to give in to the extremes of their party but they did it anyway. They’re the ones that have to learn the lesson here.
(And I mean I do blame Trump for being a terrible person, which he is, but there's no sense in getting mad at a person who can't change. You don't get mad at the dog for running away, you get mad at the person who forgot to close the gate.)
I feel compelled to hammer this message because I fear that the natural reaction of the dems is going to be to double down on oppressive progressivism. That’s not the answer because that’s what got us here in the first place. It’s important that the Left understands that.
To be honest, I’d be inclined to want to believe that myself as an anti woke leftist (left on economics mostly, which is where the emphasis should be) - but it’s quite likely that Trump won because of the price of eggs.
Swing voters are not that politically aligned and not necessarily that politically engaged either. Everybody knows their grocery bill.
The discourse about why Trump was elected is so distorted. Most people vote for "their side" regardless of what is going on in the world. The justification is mostly post-hoc. The economy turned to shit and so most people say they voted based on the economy. But that doesn't mean the election turned on the state of the economy.
What turns an election is non-voters turning out, voters staying home, or voters switching sides. Polls show the swing voters were disproportionately motivated by identity politics. That's where the analysis needs to be as that is where the election can be won or lost next go round.
So you don’t believe the people that say they voted on the economy but do believe the people who say they voted on identity politics. That would need data per swing state.
Plenty of people vote on the economy. It’s generally why, across democracies, parties in power during recessions are turfed out even if the recession was hardly their fault.
This is the most obtuse reading of the point I made. It's not about believing what people say, people are very often not good at judging their own motivations. It's the simple observation that the vast majority of voters were going to vote for the side they voted for regardless of what is going on in the world. This fact overrides anyone's claim to the "reason" they voted.
Susie the born-again Christian didn't vote for Trump because the economy took a nosedive under Biden. She voted for Trump because she's a life-long Republican and so she was almost guaranteed to vote for Trump. This fact overrides whatever she may claim was in her head when she voted.
Swing voters, especially those that were Biden-Trump voters, when they say they voted for Trump because of identity politics, the circumstances of their vote support their claim much more than Susie's claim.
I hear you. Yes the economy matters but I do think Trump is a response to more than that. People are genuinely sick of woke and view it as an existential cultural threat. For some reason he’s the only politician who can actually push back against it.
But... gender IS a spectrum. It isn't sex (and even sex isn't exactly binary, given intersex and other outliers). It's an explicitly social category.
As for the race part, I don't know exactly who/what you're referring to. I can say that at the very least the *categories* of races are social constructs, in that every category is a social construct. For instance what races are considered "white" has greatly changed over time.
Well, this is where the disagreements start. Gender, as distinct from sex, may well be a spectrum. It is true that gender roles are socially determined, and that articles of clothing, length or shortness of hair, use of cosmetics, jewellery, etc. are not tied irrevocably and indissolubly to one sex or the other.
However, it jumped from "I'm talking about gender, not sex; I'm a biological male so that's my sex, but my gender is female so I'm a woman" to "sex and gender are the same thing, sex is on a spectrum, look at the intersex, checkmate bigots!"
People being intersex has Sweet Fanny Adams to do with transness, any more than having a malfunctioning pancreas meaning you need insulin injections is related to someone with a healthy organ wanting to go on metformin because they feel they are spiritually a diabetic, or something.
There are non-diabetic people who want to go on metformin for alleged health benefits, but as yet they're not claiming to be trans-diabetics or something along that line. The day that starts to happen, when they start claiming "well type II diabetes exists" and "new forms of diabetes are being recognised" (we're up to four types now) and use that as a cover for "so I'm really a diabetic too because I truly believe I need the same benefits from metformin", then you can argue over "health is a spectrum" but I think few people will agree that a particular known and identified medical condition extrapolates out to your case.
> However, it jumped from "I'm talking about gender, not sex; I'm a biological male so that's my sex, but my gender is female so I'm a woman" to "sex and gender are the same thing, sex is on a spectrum, look at the intersex, checkmate bigots!"
This. It started with "gender" being a different thing from "sex". It ended with calling you a bigot if you said that sex was a real thing regardless of anyone's chosen gender.
For "race", my understanding is that older hypotheses about races being cleanly-separated subspecies is firmly discredited. DNA studies do support the idea of some significant degree of clustering, but the clusters are very fuzzy and the average genetic differences between clusters are a pretty small fraction of total human genetic variation.
The clusters are fuzzy enough that it isn't clear how many clusters there are, let alone how to carve them at the joints. There's at least one study (Rosenberg et al, 2005) which tried out clustering analysis with the algorithm instructed to find between 2 and 6 clusters. The k=5 results correlate pretty well (but far from perfectly) with the old "five races" model, finding the following clusters: Europe+Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. But another study using the same algorithm with different parameters (Tiskoff et all 2009) found best fit with 14 clusters rather than 5 or 6.
>For instance what races are considered "white" has greatly changed over time.
I've heard that claim many times and suspect it of being a misunderstanding of an oversimplification. If anything, the definition of "white" has contracted, with most West Asian and North African ethnicities no longer being considered "white" as they were in the Five Races model that was popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. C.f. the meme about there being no white people in the Bible, which would have been perplexing to 19th century race theorists who would have counted as white not just the Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews, but also the Philistines, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, etc.
I think the truth underlying the claim is that people used to put a lot more importance on distinctions between white ethnicities. Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, etc were considered "white" but still faced considerable prejudice and discrimination for not being Anglo-Saxon or other "good" kinds of "white". H.P. Lovecraft's stories are a good illustration of one set of racist attitudes prevalent in the 1920s, where Eastern European immigrants and even the poor rural white inhabitants of western Massachusetts are described in terms of racial/ethnic opprobrium no less unflattering than those Lovecraft directs at Blacks, Asians, and various indigenous peoples.
Yeah. The early 20th century model of human races is that they were essentially (1) monophyletic clades (though not of course in these words; but Linnaeus considered them separate subspecies, Haeckel different species outright) that (2) separated very early in the history of Homo sapiens, (3) were roughly constant in phenotype and continent-scale distribution, and (4) had a core of pure ancestry even though hybridization may occur in the areas of contact. Each of these points has been disproven by modern population genetics. While you can still rescue a concept of continental genetic clusters that you can choose to call "race", it's only superficially related to what a 1920 anthropologist meant by that word.
When I was little, I read some very old "science for children" books, I think from the late 1950s. I remember one of those books having a little graphic that showed races having separate ancestry all the way back to early proto-humans, with white people being descended from Homo habilis and black people being descended from Australopithecus robustus. Even as a kid in the late 1980s, I was aware this was nonsense and was perplexed as to why anyone had ever believed that.
Good old polygenesis. I recall reading about even more extreme conceptions, claiming that Europeans are most closely related to chimpanzees, Africans to gorillas, and Asians to orangutans (chimpanzees are, in fact, next of kin to all humans; gorillas to the human+chimpanzee clade, and orangutans to the human+chimpanzee+gorilla clade). This raises the question of how human populations would have managed to develop such similar features simultaneously, but around 1900 a Neolamarckian conception of evolution in which different organisms evolve in the same direction because that's just, like, the way to do it was still fairly popular.
Polygenesis got a little consolation prize when it was discovered that human populations have different amounts of DNA from Neanderthals, Denisovan, and at least one "ghost" human species from Africa, but as far as I know these introgressions never amount to more than 5% of the genome. And of course, these other species are extremely close kin to us anyway.
Race is much fuzzier than gender and there are many more people of mixed race than mixed gender.
To me saying gender is binary is a bit like saying day/night is binary. Sure there are exceptions like “Arctic Circle” or “solar eclipse” or “that time Mount Pinatubo erupted and blocked out all sunlight.” But if you were to graph times according to “whether the sun is out” and “how light is it, measured in lux” and “what time of day is it currently” you would find strong correlations. Similarly if you were to graph people according to “what are their chromosomes” and “do they have ovaries” and “are they biologically capable of bearing children.”
Trans people should feel free to play around with the categories and take whatever name or gender identity they see fit, but they start to lose normies when they deny the existence of gender categories altogether.
As a binary trans woman, I tend to find the "gender isn't real" strain of thought popular in some subsets of the trans/nonbinary community mildly insulting. When they say that "man" and "woman" aren't real things, that sounds an awful lot like they're telling me that I'm silly for strongly preferring to be the latter over the former. No shade on people for whom a nonbinary identity seems to fit better than either male or female; I take them at their words about their identities and internal experiences, and merely ask that they accord me the same respect.
That said, I see a lot more clear-cut historical and anthropological precedent for nonbinary and gender-nonconforming identities than there is for binary trans identities. I suspect this is at least partially an artifact of options for medical transition being effectively zero and for surgical transition being very, very limited until the mid-20th century when sex hormones got isolated and researched for medical use and when the precursors of modern bottom surgery techniques started to get developed. And after that, it took some time for the options to get particularly good, and more time still (process is still ongoing in many places) for them to be readily accessible to people who want them.
The non-binary stuff is confusing to me, I don't understand how someone can be trans non-binary (isn't the point of non-binary that there is no one pole of your being, so you're not being trans that?). But the worst of it was exemplified in Ketanji Brown Jackson dodging the question at her confirmation hearing - and I don't blame her one bit, it was a 'gotcha' and not in good faith - about "how would you define woman" with "well I'm not a biologist":
"On March 22, 2022, during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Blackburn asked Jackson to define the word "woman". "'I can’t—' Jackson replied. 'You can’t?' Blackburn said. 'Not in this context. I’m not a biologist,' Jackson said. 'The meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?' Blackburn asked."
When we're at the point that a woman can't dare to give a definition of the term, for fear of offending a tiny minority of the population, where are we at? Suppose she had been asked about her experience of being black (or indeed, Black, if we're doing that term), would she had demurred about "not being a biologist"?
The circular definition of "you're a woman if you feel you are a woman" makes little to no sense. What is this feeling of being a woman? What is womanness in that context or sense? It seems to fall back to the old, and what I thought were finally outmoded, notions of "well sugar and spice and all things nice, being girly, being emotional, not liking boy things" which are tied up with gender roles - socially constructed, remember? and so not inherent rules of nature - and external forms of expression. If you went through second wave feminism, this return to "girls are pink and boys are blue" is a very depressing regression.
Non-binary can go after that, and it's not a bad thing, but generally when I see people online claiming to be non-binary, my first and immediate reaction is "this is a girl who just cut her hair short or dresses in jeans and shirts". I think there's a bit too much treating identities as labels and trying them on, and it's natural in your teenage and early adult years to do that, but creating finer and finer distinctions and nailing yourself down to "I am this and that but not the other" is grim.
"There is no such thing as a male brain or a female brain, only bigots believe so", but also "trans women are people born with a female brain in a male body".
If the genitals are the only *real* difference between men and women, and everything else is just an arbitrary brainwashing done by patriarchy... then being trans means wishing to have different genitals, because what *else* could it possibly be?
Gender is bimodal, even if you separate it from sex. So much so that advocates of transgenderism don’t actually want to create new categories for trans, but to lump them back into the categories man or woman, with trans being a modifier, but not a new gender class itself.
Most of the genders I know are based around male, female, or the lack of the two, yes. In order to get to 12 I'd have to say some that I personally think are pretty silly. At the same time (much like Scott has previously said he treated being trans) personally thinking it's a bit silly isn't going to stop me from being kind and doing my best to accommodate them.
Yes this is what I mean by nonsense. Outside of esoteric communities there is no adult that doesn’t just think that’s anything but batshit insane. No sane political platform can expect to foist that on the entirety of society and expect them to accept it.
Invented gender identities are mostly just camouflage for mental illness and society has good reason not to normalize mental illness.
It’s really not. There are men, women, and then a tiny fraction of people who have pathologies which make strict categorization difficult. The existence of a *de minimus* “other” category doesn’t obviate a binary system which has served both biology and society since time immemorial. You don’t say that the number of human limbs lies on a spectrum just because 0.00001% of people are born without arms. I’m sorry but that’s just nonsense. If those people want to build an identity around their disorder then that’s their business, but you can’t tell people how to perceive you, and you can’t force society to adopt an ontology that 80% of people find outright insane.
>There's also definitely a fair bit of social construction in "race,"
Of course. I’m responding to those who lie about the reality of socially relevant ethnic differences like IQ and crime. Race may be imprecise but “black” and “white” are still very predictive labels.
The only real chemical elements are hydrogen, helium, carbon, and oxygen. Everything else is a pathological outlier and should not be considered part of any sane ontology. And carbon and oxygen are on thin ice.
People are primarily defined by counting discrete entities too, so I don't know what your objection is.
Erica's point is a good retort, if you go by abundance alone then Hydrogen (according to Google) is 92% of the Universe's vanilla matter, and Helium is the next 7% so together they corner 99% of the entire Universe's matter. That's pretty huge. Also, every other atom is in some sense "multiple hydrogen atom in a trench coat", because hydrogen is just a proton and an electron, so every pair of a proton and an electron inside a non-hydrogen atom is like a mini-hydrogen atom. Ergo, all other elements are "fake", Hydrogen is the One True Element.
And that's definitely true as insight porn, but it would be ridiculous to use it to argue that other elements should be cancelled from Chemistry or treated as mentally ill hydrogen.
>together they corner 99% of the entire Universe's matter
Baryonic matter, anyway... ( not holding my breath till the cosmologists and particle physicists conclude _something_ about dark matter other than its gravity... )
1 and 2 existing doesn't make 3 a non discrete number. But the existence of 1 and 2 says nothing about the existence of glorp and whether it has any discreetness to it.
That's a 20th century innovation. Traditionally, they were differentiated by qualitative descriptions of their chemical and mechanical properties, with the modern proton-count based definition only taking over after atomic theory and experimental techniques developed to the point we figured out atoms were made of protons, neutrons, and electrons and had sufficiently reliable ways to try to try to count them.
Objective observability definitely helps demonstrate that relatively rare things are real and deserve to be part of the ontology. But on the other hand, for internal psychological phenomena that exist mainly in an individual's subjective experience, claiming to know someone else's mind (especially that of a stranger or passing acquaintance) better than they know themselves strikes me as somewhat unlikely.
Another aspect of chemical elements is that you and I spend most of our time in a minuscule corner of the universe where cosmically rare elements are abundant and significant. Any attempt to model the details of the laptop I'm typing on or the air I'm breathing without taking silicon, aluminum, copper, and nitrogen into account is going to be obviously nonsensical. But astrophysicists will often casually lump together everything that isn't hydrogen or helium into a grab-bag category of "metals", and a hypothetical race of energy beings living in deep interstellar space would probably roll their eyes at anyone who tried to propose an ontology that considered elements besides the big two and maybe a handful of more abundant "metals" to be anything more than a footnote.
I suspect there's an analogous bubble effect going on here. I'm in a very liberal cultural bubble, and within that bubble I can easily think of half a dozen friends and acquaintances who tell me they're nonbinary and I find no particular reason to doubt them. I'm guessing from what you've said so far (please correct me if I'm wrong) that you're in a very different bubble, where very few people are out to you as nonbinary and any that are are easy for you to find reason to doubt their sanity.
I get not identifying particularly strongly with one's gender, some people are not that hung up on being a girly girl or a man's man.
What I don't get is the "no, I'm special, I am non-binary but..." be that femme presenting, masc presenting, 'today at 11 o'clock I am mostly a demi-girl but by 6 o'clock I'll be a butch gay man' types. The leaning into androgyny types, eh, that's understandable too (if somewhat vulnerable to being a teenage phase) but the "seventy kinds of degrees of difference" stuff baffles me.
>for internal psychological phenomena that exist mainly in an individual's subjective experience, claiming to know someone else's mind (especially that of a stranger or passing acquaintance) better than they know themselves strikes me as somewhat unlikely.
Agreed. In my view that's unrelated to gender because gender is a somatic category and not a cognitive one. Not nearly enough attention is paid to that distinction.
>I suspect there's an analogous bubble effect going on here.
For sure. I casually know a few nonbinaries and they're all people I would never want to know well. I've never met one that appeared to be particularly stable. No doubt they exist. Certainly you make very thoughtful and intelligent comments here - I might very well like you if we met. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't still object to the ideology that you represent, not least because it became an object of abuse in the hands of the woke mob. I think you'll find that many more people are willing to take you seriously when you take seriously their right to dislike you. Society changes via consensus, and that consensus changes slowly (as it should). It took a hundred years even for evolution to stop being an issue and that was completely uncontroversial from a scientific perspective. This is far more contentious so have some patience.
I'm sure this doesn't apply to you, but it's one of the canned things I like to say about this topic. The gender explosion is predicated on the notion that people should feel free to live their true inner selves. Well, that works both ways. You can't demand that people respect your self-expression if you refuse to accept theirs, and most people's "true inner selves" view nonbinary people as deeply disordered. You cannot change that view by either fiat or censorship, and if you try you will eventually provoke justifiable violence. That's a reality that a deeply controversial and tiny minority would do well to keep in mind.
If you want people to accept you then invite their criticisms. If you're still standing after that then you'll have won grudging respect. You'll never get there by being shrill (which you personally aren't, but many others are).
> I feel the need to emphasize, again, that gender is not sex, and not based on biology.
I just reject this perspective and feel that it’s nothing but advocacy masquerading as neutral principle. I use gender and sex interchangeably and don’t care if you object to that. This is just reflective of an ideological difference. I’ll debate the ideology but I don’t want to have some kind of proxy linguistic argument.
>do you believe that certain races are more predisposed towards crime than others
I don’t know about predisposed, but there is certainly a large racial disparity in perpetration. I believe critiques of the concept of race are a dishonest attempt to avoid confronting disparities like these.
>If your categories are so strict that they force you to ignore that many people, maybe it's time to rethink.
It’s not about ignoring anyone, it’s about not restructuring all of society to accommodate a tiny minority. Also I call bs on 1-2%. There is no way that many people have a substantively nonbinary gender. Almost all of those can fit into society just fine without society doing anything to accommodate them. And I have no doubt that the vast majority of them are better served by conforming to one of the standard roles than by blazing their own trail. Archetypes exist for a reason and that reason is that they’re adaptive.
Agreed on the first point, no point arguing if you just disagree with the existence of a separate term for gender.
On the second point, maybe I am just in different places but I haven't seen much or any critique of the concept of race as a whole. Most places I've seen talk about those differences acknowledge that they exist but point to cultural/financial/societal factors (crime) or inaccuracy/bias in measurement (IQ) as the main causes.
Third point, my argument is that the categories are loose and defined from person to person, and it really doesn't take much effort or work (societally or personally) to accommodate an 'other' category. We already do it all the time! Example: James asks his friends to call him Jim. Do they *have* to accommodate him? No, but it's so simple that it'd be lazy and to put it bluntly "kind of a dick move" not to.
Do you understand what gender is? I feel the need to emphasize, again, that gender is not sex, and not based on biology. Gender is much more about social norms and the ways in which people choose to behave and identify. Yes, you can't control how others perceive you, but you can control how you present yourself and how you think about yourself.
As for the limbs comment, sure if it was a one in a million genetic mutation I would say it's probably not worth considering. But a quick Google will show you that between 1-2% of all people are born with intersex traits. If your categories are so strict that they force you to ignore that many people, maybe it's time to rethink.
Based on your final sentence, do you believe that certain races are more predisposed towards crime than others?
Being born intersex is not the same as being born trans, unless the argument is being advanced that (1) all intersex people are trans or come under the category of trans or should be regarded as trans - which I think is not universally accepted by intersex people and (2) having functional primary and secondary sexual characteristics of your natal sex is the same thing as being born with a disorder, so being trans is the same thing as being intersex.
Being born blind is not the same thing as "my eyes work just fine but I have Body Integrity Identity Disorder and I want to surgically remove my eyes". That's the "some people are born intersex, it's totally the same thing as me being trans" argument being pushed.
"As for the race part, I don't know exactly who/what you're referring to. I can say that at the very least the *categories* of races are social constructs, in that every category is a social construct. For instance what races are considered "white" has greatly changed over time."
Yeah, but that's a philosophical debate, not the subject of a clinical study. It's more a Humanities thing.
What I took from the OP was a complaint about people saying "It is an OFFICIAL SCIENCE FACT that whatever I believe in is correct". Of course, that's true when you're arguing with astrologers. But it was also a message that was very badly applied in the recent dialogue RE trans issues, for example.
Could you give me an example of what you're referring to with the trans issue stuff? (not trying to gotcha you or anything, it's just there are so many in recent memory that it's hard to pick out a single one).
In general I'd agree that oftentimes people say something is "PROVEN BY SCIENCE" when really they mean they saw a study that agreed with them, or science says it's more likely than not, or etc. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it a serious issue, or even exclusive to the left? IMO, no.
OP's comment (and followup) reads to me as the ingroup/out group/fargroup issue all over again. They don't like Trump, but punishing the outgroup (progressives) is more important than any of the harm Trump is now causing.
One of the more popular trans-activist slogans is "the science is settled". Which they pull out in situations where the science is not remotely settled, like exactly what policy we should have RE youth transition.
(I also once saw an organisation publish a "debunking myths about trans people" list article that was about half actual data and half entries like "FACT: trans women are women". But I think that was just one person with a serious lack of self-awareness. Plus it was kinda funny.)
I'm not at all sure if the OP sees progressives as the outgroup, unless we're defining it in the strict way that excludes anyone who isn't mean or dishonest (it's one of those flexible words, like "woke"). Haven't read all their comments, though.
Lib who tried to save trust here (I was one of the early converts to lab leak).
Obviously there's a spectrum of gender. Nonbinary people exist. If you think they don't then either you've been lied to and just somehow failed to meet any, or you have been misled about what non-binary refers to. (E.g. it is not and has not ever been a claim that humans have intermediate gamete sizes, if someone pretended that was what's at issue.)
There's also definitely a fair bit of social construction in "race," even if it's not necessarily 100% meaningless. E.g. since Africa still has most of humanity's genetic diversity—with e.g. Finns having descended from a subset of ancient East and Northeast Africans who migrated out—it's at least not obvious that "Black" should be treated as a natural group that includes East and West Africans and excludes Finns, even if you *can* squint and find a way to do so by defining race w.r.t. continental barriers to gene flow.
The question as to whether nonbinary people exist is basically dependent on whether or not you buy into the whole sex is separate from gender thing which is a very large can of worms that is difficult to resolve cleanly. If you believe that gender is separate from sex such that it has no firm grounding in biology then there isn't really any ground to object to people who don't belong in either of the historical default genders.
You do give up a lot of stuff when you bite that bullet. Like why should transwomen be fixated on taking on the sexual characteristics of natal females in particular? Why would we have separate sports leagues based on whether people feel more feminine or masculine? Why are we deciding which bathrooms to put urinals in based on masculinity?
It seems a lot like the world we grew up in was using sex and gender interchangeably and many of the things people who separate sex from gender seem to care about gaining access to were in fact set up because of sexual realities. Maybe that's fine. A definition of the women gender as "person who wants basically what the average female in the 1900s had going on adjusted for modern sensibilities" is workable. It might even be what we settle on and see a lot of natal females move on to some other gender if they don't like what that one shakes out to be.
But it should absolutely be acknowledged that this isn't some kind of "of course, obviously, what do you mean you don't get it?" kind of thing. This is all very weird to people who aren't steeped in it.
"Obviously there's a spectrum of gender. Nonbinary people exist."
Non sequitur. The existence of three categories instead of two, does not make something a "spectrum". For that, you need continuous variation from one extreme to the other, and I see at least two big discontinuities.
It is certainly arguable that within the gender category of "nonbinary" there exists something that would count as a spectrum. But the category is sufficiently small, and the range of variation within it small compared to the gaps between it and the other two categories are sufficiently large, that "gender is a spectrum" is IMO a vast overstatement.
It seems to me that whether or not nonbinary people exist depends on the social norms of the people you hang out with. I think it's clear that femininity and masculinity objectively exist as personality clusters, and that some people objectively don't fit well within either cluster. But, the category that such a person fits in is subjective and not scientific. A liberal-minded person might be accepting of an "in-between" type person calling themselves nonbinary, but they would also accept the same person calling themselves trans, or if they just preferred their default gender. What I'm trying to say is...nonbinary is a social construct.
Intersex exists, but that's not usually what people are talking about.
I do agree that race categorization based on skin color alone makes no sense, but this argument always felt like a straw man. Perhaps that's something that people believed back in the days of "scientific racism".
I am curious to know more about your strong stance on nonbinary identity. Maybe it refers to something more specific than what I think it does.
Yes, I hope that what's going on right now will show some on the left that the rush of power they got from taking people out with online mobs led them to overplay their hand. (I would also like people on the right not to behave in similar fashions, but it hurts the things I care about more when it's the left giving themselves a bad name.)
Sadly, that sort of introspection seems all too rare in politics. I was on a WaPo article, talking about how we should react to Trump's victory, and saw some reasonably intelligent-seeming people shouting "How dare you say the Democrats handled the election wrong! It's the voter's fault, not ours!" As the man said: the problem is not that you have the wrong sort of leaders, which is obvious, but that you have the wrong sort of people.
>Yes, I hope that what's going on right now will show some on the left that the rush of power they got from taking people out with online mobs led them to overplay their hand.
It would indeed be good if that happened, although the pessimist in me suggests the lesson they're more likely to take away is "We didn't censor opposing views hard enough, we need to really double down when we're back in power to make sure the plebs can never be led astray again!"
I've started to come around to that myself. Holding yourself to ideals of democracy and freedom isn't worth much if it results in a dictator seizing power anyway. If democracy can't reliably perpetuate itself, it has to be changed until it can.
I still hope that America's democracy can survive Trump at least mostly intact, but the prospects are looking worse with every passing day.
I agree that Trump is eroding norms in a bad way. I'm not sure how you can say that his opponent's have been "holding [themselves] to the ideals of democracy..." I mean, the current argument is more along the lines of "the people were wrong to vote for Trump" when that's the very definition of democracy - they voted for their preferred candidate. By definition the people cannot be "wrong" with their vote, except through fraud or coercion. Are you saying the 2024 election was fraudulent, or dare I say, stolen?
> the current argument is more along the lines of "the people were wrong to vote for Trump" when that's the very definition of democracy - they voted for their preferred candidate
when people talk about democracy like this, they generally mean a liberal democracy. one that protects civil rights, human rights, etc. My that definition, Trump is damaging to democracy, because his administration clearly cares much less about these than previous ones. Like sure, there were excesses in the past with EO, but Trump is clearly in a new category, from Signal-gate, to unilaterally crashing the stock market, to destroying relationships with allies for no clear gain, to defying SCOTUS orders bc they want to.
The Democrats are a bunch of corpo whore scumbags, like nearly everyone in politics in any country, but L50L probably meant that no Democrat politician in living memory ever said racial slurs about their opponent (ala the looney Laura Loomer, who said Kamala would make the White House smell of curry), or accused the winning candidate in an election of stealing the election and eating children's blood in the basement of a pizza franchise
> when that's the very definition of democracy
Democracy has no one definition. The Ancient Greeks would have called Americans posers who rule by Bureaucracy and don't actually have a "True Democracy", which to the Ancient Greeks stereotype I have in my mind involved direct voting of military-service-capable free male citizens. Probably some implicit class markers thrown in there.
The US's founders repeatedly made a lot of "design decisions" to prevent the US from being led by a simple(ton) majority. Unelected judges, indirect election of people who will then elect the president, 2 houses of legislation with different terms limits, and that's just from memory as a non-American.
> but L50L probably meant that no Democrat politician in living memory ever said racial slurs about their opponent (ala the looney Laura Loomer, who said Kamala would make the White House smell of curry), or accused the winning candidate in an election of stealing the election and eating children's blood in the basement of a pizza franchise
No, that stuff is relatively unimportant. The big issue here is Trump's push towards autocracy. Trump has been ruling as a dictator without any regard to norms or laws, crushing anyone who attempts to stop him Republican or Democrat alike. And he's successfully built a cult of personality around him that is cheering him on along the way.
Trump, and his buddy the dictator of El Salvador, are now colluding to openly defy a Supreme Court order to release and return a man they admit they illegally kidnapped to El Salvador's torture prison.
Trump says "How can little old me facilitate his release? I'm not the president of El Salvador!" Bukele, sitting right next to Trump in the Oval Office, says "How can little old me release him? You want me to smuggle him into the United States?"
If Americans let this stand, it's over. America will be a dictatorship.
If you read it, all it says *on the actual unanimous ruling* is:
- The deadline imposed by the courts for returning the Salvadoran migrant is cancelled.
- The US government must only "facilitate" his return (which passes the buck on defining what it means to the lower court).
- The US government must notify the steps it has taken to this effect to the lower court.
If you believe that this decision was poorly-written, you're not alone [1].
I personally believe that the conservative judges agree with the deportation but, recognizing that there was no due process, they decided to throw POTUS a lifeline to put a figleaf on his actions and say: "Oopsie, I asked nicely, but now Bukele doesn't want to return him anymore. Will do better next time!"
Now, this situation is only happening because he is a migrant who was being sent back to his actual home country. Had he been Nicaraguan... Bukele would not have even taken him! We know it, because that's exactly what happened when a Nicaraguan man was deported. [2] And yes, I know that Bukele has notoriously taken Venezuelans, but SCOTUS hasn't ruled on their cases.
And if that's not enough, after the unanimous SCOTUS ruling, there's a (stronger) opinion from the liberal judges which literally states that the US government cannot create a loophole where it gets out of judicial review by deporting people before a Court can weight in. This opinion only got 3/9 votes, but it's a good indication of what the position of a future Court might take.
Please notice that, in this case, is not as if there was *no trial at all*. In fact, there had been a previous trial back at 2019. [3]
IMO, it's a far cry to go from an unfortunate situation where you have a man who has been 6 years on the judicial system unfairly deported to his actual home country, to a situation where American political dissidents are exiled without trial. The first one is a tragedy for the families involved, but you wouldn't expect SCOTUS to risk a constitutional crisis over it.
Do you really feel that the Trump administration is duly "facilitating" Garcia's return when Bukele sits next to trump and says "How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?" and Trump says nothing?
I absolutely don´t think that they are actually facilitating Garcia's return. But I also don't think that SCOTUS will go ahead and plunge the US into a constitutional crisis over this case.
As I explained, I think that SCOTUS is deliberately giving Trump freedom of movement and latitude on this specific case, because of its specific circumstances (a Salvadoran being deported to a Salvadoran jail, after a 5-year long legal battle, with the Salvadoran government in agreement to keep him).
The point being that this situation, while unfortunate for the man, will not lead us to a situation where the US President can use Salvadoran jails for American political dissidents without due process.
Why not? Did the DoJ lawyers argue in court that their Article 2 power is judicially reviewable if they mess up and deport a citizen? They're not even saying it can be checked when they admit they made an error.
IMO, this isn't about what the DoJ lawyers have argued in court.
Rather, this is about the actual expansion of the Executive's power that is facilitated through the specific mechanism of using a *foreign* prison.
This does poses a danger to the specific case of Salvadoran or irregular legal status who might be deported only on the *suspicion* of being gangsters, but it's not generalizable to a worst-case scenario of American political dissidents being jailed without due process.
2019: The courts deny bail to Mr. Abrego-Garcia, under suspicion of being MS13.
-> 2019, later: The court order Mr. Abrego-Garcia can't be deported to El Salvador (witholding order) due to the risk of retaliation from 18th Street Gang (a *rival* gang). No ruling on whether Mr. Abrego-Garcia's is or isn't MS13.
-> 2024-25: DHS classifies MS13 as a terrorist organization. Then, DHS deports Mr. Abrego-Garcia. At first, they argued that they didn't checked that the order made him non-deportable to El Salvador, but later ICE stated the belief that the witholding order is no valid as it can't apply to terrorist organizations like MS13.
-> 2025, later: The courts say that: "No, the witholding order is still valid, no one has actually found him guilty of belongin to MS13, so bring him back".
-> later, SCOTUS says: "We may not be able to force you bring him back, but we can force you to try, so do try".
Actual words from SCOTUS: "The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs." https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
-> DHS response, from the Bukele press conference: We tried to bring him back by offering a plane to return him, if the Salvadoran government wanted to return him.
I recognize that this is obviously the DHS making the least possible effort, because they don't actually want to return him. But the matter is that they are at least pretending to comply with the order.
Most American commentators assume that Bukele has no agency, and he is just acting as Trump's puppet. As a Salvadoran who has been watching Bukele for almost the last 15 years, I disagree. However, Bukele's true intentions are immaterial, given that Trump actually wants to keep Mr. Abrego-Garcia deported.
Now, it's noticeable that Mr. Abrego-Garcia is no longer at CECOT, instead he's at a regular prisons where *other* alleged gang-membes are currently awaiting trial. This gives me hope that there might actually be a trial for Mr. Abrego-Garcia, held in El Salvador, where we can actually discover the truth.
You seem to belive that, as Justice Sotomayor argues, that "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene."
That opinion is respectable. After all, it was stated by 1 Supreme Court Justice and joined by other 2. You know who does not agrees with that view? The other 6 Supreme Court Justices, who didn't join on that statement.
Why they didn't? It's unclear, and I can't claim to have their same level of expertise. However, imagine if the same situation had ocurred to an actual American citizen:
- Jailed on a foreign prison without due process.
- DHS pretending to comply with the command by saying: 'we can offer a plane if the foreign government wants to return him'.
- The foreign government, arguably following secret orders from Trump, saying 'no, we don't want to return him'.
What would SCOTUS do? I believe that they would then use their power to direct government to "cut the bullshit", treat this as a hostage-taking situation by the foreign government, and actually return the American citizen.
That is *not* the situation where we're in with respect to Mr. Abrego-Garcia.
So, the involvement of a foreign government gives Trump the perfect excuse to deport non-US-citizens of that nationality, but makes no difference on Trump's capacity to disobey SCOTUS and jail American dissidents.
>This does poses a danger to the specific case of Salvadoran or irregular legal status who might be deported only on the *suspicion* of being gangsters, but it's not generalizable to a worst-case scenario of American political dissidents being jailed without due process.
Why not? Abrego Garcia was deported without due process, even with a withholding order. ~250 people on the Alien Enemies flight were deported without due process. Trump has said that he wants to deport citizens next. What isn't clicking for you that this is an authoritarian move by a President who doesn't respect the law?
>2019: The courts deny bail to Mr. Abrego-Garcia, under suspicion of being MS13.
You are swimming in right wing misinformation. Immigration judges are not Article 3 courts. They are part of the DoJ and their rulings are subject to being overturned by the Attorney General. Article 3 courts are where cases are settled to ensure an "impartial trial."
The ruling was based on a disgraced cop's report that falsely labeled the Home Depot interaction as a murder report and that Abrego Garcia was a gang member due to soliciting outside of Home Depot with a confidential informant accusing him of being a gang member. After the report was filed, the cop, Ivan Mendez, leaked confidential information to a sex worker. He was fired and added to a "Do not call" list because of his misconduct and lack of itnegrity.
"In this regard, the respondent asserts that a Prince George's County Police Department Gang Field Interview Sheet ("GFIS") is based on hearsay relayed by a confidential source (Exh. 4) The Respondent contends that the Form 1-213 in his case erroneously states that he was detained in connection to a murder investigation. He also claims that the 1-213 is internally contradicts itself as to whether the Respondent fears returning to El Salvador. The reason for the Respondent's arrest given on his Form 1-213 does appear at odds with the Gang Field Interview Sheet, which states that the Respondent was approached because he and others were loitering outside of a Home Depot. Regardless, the determination that the Respondent is a 2 gang member appears to be trustworthy and is supported by other evidence in the record, namely, information contained in the Gang Field Interview Sheet."
The information is just the "confidential information" from the disgraced cop.
>due to the risk of retaliation from 18th Street Gang (a *rival* gang).
This is a trivial lie. "The evidence in this case indicates quite clearly that at least one central reason the Respondent was subject to past persecution was due to him being his mothers' son, essentially as a member of his nuclear family. That the Respondent is his mothers' son is the reason why he, and not another person, was threatened with death. He was threatened with death because he was Cecilia's son and the Barrio 18 gang targeted the Respondent to get at the mother and her earnings from the pupusa business."
>At first, they argued that they didn't checked that the order made him non-deportable to El Salvador, but later ICE stated the belief that the witholding order is no valid as it can't apply to terrorist organizations like MS13.
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”
>Actual words from SCOTUS: "The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs."
Yes. It MAY exceed its authority, meaning there are things the district court can order the Executive to effectuate that MAY NOT exceed its own authority. Before arguing about this further, do you recognize that the Supreme Court also ordered the Trump admin to share what steps they took in his removal and to share prospects of taking further steps to bring him back, and that they did not even follow this much more minimal demand?
>Most American commentators assume that Bukele has no agency, and he is just acting as Trump's puppet.
We don’t know the details of the deal because the Trump admin has refused to comply with any orders to reveal it. If they did, the district court could probably e.g. order it to be canceled because it has been used unconstitutionally to deport people to a foreign prison without any due process and without regard to existing laws that e.g. prevent torture or cruel and unusual punishment.
>You know who does not agrees with that view? The other 6 Supreme Court Justices, who didn't join on that statement.
This is a fundamentally uncritical and unserious engagement with the opinion. The 3 liberal justices didn’t dissent, they CONCURRED. Why would they concur with an opinion that forces the government to do essentially nothing to bring him back? Why did the Supreme Court unanimously say that the deportation was illegal, and that “The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s RELEASE FROM CUSTODY in El Salvador and to ENSURE THAT HIS CASE IS HANDLED AS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN HAD HE NOT BEEN IMPROPERLY SENT TO EL SALVADOR”?
Why did the appeals court rule unanimously in 1 day from the appeal request:
““Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. See Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2 (“The Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”). The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Cf. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400 (2024); Christensen v. Harris Cnty., 529 U.S. 576, 587 (2000). Thus, the government’s argument that all it must do is “remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia’s] return,” Mot. for Stay at 2, is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court’s command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.
“Facilitation” does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country’s prisons that the withholding order forbids and, further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. “Facilitation” does not sanction the abrogation of habeas corpus through the transfer of custody to foreign detention centers in the manner attempted here. Allowing all this would “facilitate” foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood."
>What would SCOTUS do? I believe that they would then use their power to direct government to "cut the bullshit", treat this as a hostage-taking situation by the foreign government, and actually return the American citizen.
Courts can’t order the Executive to go to war or treat a situation like a hostage taking situation. Only the President is the Commander in Chief and can command the army. Courts can void treaties and contracts that are unconstitutional or against Congressional law. The Trump admin has not even complied with sharing how the deportations were carried out or what the terms of the deal are, so it’s impossible for the courts to clarify their orders any further.
>So, the involvement of a foreign government gives Trump the perfect excuse to deport non-US-citizens of that nationality, but makes no difference on Trump's capacity to disobey SCOTUS and jail American dissidents.
The reason SCOTUS did not clarify is because SCOTUS knows they are potentially overstepping their bounds. Thus weasel words like "facilitate".
It is already case law that Immigration is solely in the power of the Executive Branch. For this reason, Biden was allowed to flaunt immigration law by allowing an extra 1M+ illegal immigrants and no court attempted to stop him.
>It is already case law that Immigration is solely in the power of the Executive Branch
Please detail your media diet, I'm curious how someone ends up this deluded. Here is the first result I found detailing the various Article 3 remedies available to immigrants who believe their due process rights were violated due to Article 2 immigration judge improprieties.
This ruling is about the DHS setting its own priorities for immigration deportation, provided that it is acting in good faith in an underfunded environment where they don't have the resources to arrest and deport every single illegal immigrant. It did not rule that the Executive can just decide not to enforce existing immigration law or that their decisions are not bound by judicial review. The article doesn't make these points explicitly but it in no way supports your assertion that case law supports that immigration is solely in the power of the Executive branch.
I'm sorry, I realize now that I should've clarified that what I disagree on is the *last* sentence of the original comment: "if Americans let this stand ... will be a dictatorship".
I don't believe it because, as I explained, SCOTUS is deliberately giving Trump "freedom of movement and latitude" on this specific case, because of its specific circumstances (a Salvadoran being deported to a Salvadoran jail, after a 5-year long legal battle, with the Salvadoran government in agreement to keep him).
The point being that this situation, while unfortunate for the man, will not lead us to a situation where the US President can use Salvadoran jails for American political dissidents without due process.
It's slightly more complicated than that; the Supreme Court upheld the order, but also required the district court clarify what exactly the order was. Said district court has failed to do so, instead eliminating a particular word from the order. The executive branch then followed (or claimed to follow) the modified order by ordering that the man be given a visa and returned to the US -if- he shows up at the US embassy.
Which is likely all they are legally required to do; the district court doesn't have jurisdiction to demand either that El Salvador return the man, nor to require that the executive branch demand the man's return.
> the Supreme Court upheld the order, but also required the district court clarify what exactly the order was
Given that the order originally purported to require the Trump administration to remove the guy from El Salvador (not to make its best effort at doing so), the Supreme Court could hardly do anything else.
There are a few different threads here worth responding to.
1) the general principle of how government ought to function. All things being equal, we should aim for our government to behave according to the spirit of good governance. The question of what is or isnt _legally_ required is, in this light, silly and secondary -- the law is there to adjudicate honest disputes between two well-intentioned and good-faith parties. The executive has shown that they are neither well-intentioned NOR acting in good-faith.
Currently, the executive branch is approaching the law as a game of whack-a-mole, where they continue to push laws, break laws, and demand SCOTUS intervention on every possible edge case that they can find. No legal system is going to survive such a blatant attack. And legislators and the founders of the country certainly never would have expected or even entertained that the executive could do something as devious or obviously evil as outsourcing detention to other countries as a way to avoid due process
2) even on the merits, it is not at all obvious that this is all they are legally required to do. If you read the decision from SCOTUS, they cite several prior examples of the executive doing more or less exactly this. From the decision:
"The only argument the Government offers in support of its request, that
United States courts cannot grant relief once a deportee
crosses the border, is plainly wrong. See Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U. S. 426, 447, n. 16 (2004); cf. Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U. S. 723, 732 (2008). The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.See Trump v. J. G. G., 604 U. S. ___, ___ (2025)
(SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 8). That view refutes itself.
...
Moreover, it has been the Government’s own well-established policy to “facilitate [an] alien’s return to the United States if . . . the alien’s presence
is necessary for continued administrative removal proceedings” in cases where a noncitizen has been removed pending immigration proceedings. See U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Directive 11061.1, Facilitating the Return to the United States of Certain Lawfully Removed Aliens, §2 (Feb. 24, 2012). "
It's already the executive branch's own rules!
I think that reading the decision as "the executive branch has to do the minimum amount of effort possible to secure Garcia's return" is an obvious misreading of the decision. It seems clear to me that the order is for the executive branch to do the _maximum_ amount of effort.
3) what is it that you, personally, want? Regardless of the merits of legality or good governance, I personally do not want to live in a country where the federal government can openly claim that they made a mistake in sending a person to a torture pit, and then wash their hands of it. The slippery slope is a bit too steep for my liking. I wrote about this more extensively in my commentary on the same case in the thread below.
---
I am curious if you, personally, support this. If you are defending the government's actions here, why?
"""the founders of the country certainly never would have expected or even entertained that the executive could do something as devious or obviously evil as outsourcing detention to other countries as a way to avoid due process"""
Point of fact, in their lifetimes, they definitely would. The Marquis de Lafayette, a close friend of many of them, was shuffled around to various prisons for six or seven years in the 1790s, with very similar jurisdictional excuses used several times as a pretext to keep him. He was literally moved from one country to another when it looked like his jailers would have to give him up. Several of the founders tried diplomacy, pleading, and even jail break to free him.
I do not support this; in my ideal world, we have open borders and everybody is happy with it.
In the world we live in, we do not have open borders, and we've just come out of a presidency which created what could legitimately be called a national crisis if you come from the perspective that open borders are a bad thing, which, as far as I can tell, most citizens of the US believe.
I do not see the current situation as resolving in a way that I will be happy with.
(Note that Biden did not create any open borders national crisis. That was entirely a fabrication of people like Musk, who used their lie to fearmonger the election in Trump's favour.)
It's definitely possible that Trump will succeed in destroying America like he wants to. The only chance of stopping him is to try. (Which includes, imo, not giving false legitimacy to his bullshit arguments. We can predict what bullshit arguments he'll use, but we should always be 100% crystal clear when he is lying that he is lying.)
It's difficult to get good numbers, but the best figures I can get suggest that at least (that is, this is a minimum) one million additional illegal immigrants entered during the Biden administration - one million over the average, we aren't even counting the normal illegal immigration rates. Additionally, this is strictly border crossings, not overstayed visas or similar.
There are around 700 judges who handle these cases; each judge closes approximately 1,000 cases per year. There is approximately a five year backlog already (up from three years at the start of Biden's term). If you follow the usual due process laws, Trump's term would be over before the additional immigration load from Biden's administration had finished being processed.
Is there some reason Trump can't hire another 700 or so judges? That should clear up the backlog *and* enable deportation of Biden's extra million, inside of Trump's term with time to spare. He's got both houses of congress on his side, and this doesn't seem like it would be the sort of thing that would trigger defection. I don't think the requirements for being an immigration judge are terribly high, and we've got a lot of underemployed lawyers who would almost certainly go for a steady job at civil-service pay.
Yes, it would conflict with Trump's desire to trim the federal workforce, but if DOGE is really going to be firing a few hundred thousand people by the time all is said and done, that should leave room to hire a few hundred more for a good purpose. Assuming you feel that properly and legally deporting illegal immigrants would be a good purpose, of course.
+1. A lot of people seem to believe more or less that "The immigration system was working basically fine, and then Trump and MAGA came along and started deporting people for no reason whatsoever", which is so wrong it's difficult to know where to begin.
> the general principle of how government ought to function. All things being equal, we should aim for our government to behave according to the spirit of good governance
I would totally agree, which is why it's so important that illegal aliens be deported. If there's arms of the government which are seeking to prevent this then they are the ones responsible for the resulting jiggery-pokery.
Obviously he can't "show up at the US embassy" while locked in an El Salvador torture prison that no one has ever come out of alive.
And no, that is obviously not "all they are legally required to do."
Obviously Trump has the ability to do more than the equivalent of smiling and laughing and winking while his buddy, the El Salvador dictator he's paying to lock up the people he kidnapped, also does the equivalent of smiling and winking and laughing and saying "don't worry I'll help you flout SCOTUS."
It seems Bukele is quite happy to play PR games if he wants to, plus for a guy locked up in a torture prison, he seems to be doing okay if I go by his physical appearance, though granted that says little or nothing about the state of affairs inside the prison. So Bukele might let him go to the American Embassy if it offered a way to resolve this problem while leaving both sides with a way to avoid the appearance of a climbdown.
No part of what the Trump administration is *legally* required to do, is at all obvious here. That's the problem. "Obviously this is the right thing to do and the other thing is abhorrent", is not a legal requirement even if it's obvious and true.
We have a vague judicial order, and another judicial order saying "make that less vague please", and a minor specific action by the Trump administration, and AFIK no *specific* case law, common law, or constitutional law beyond that.
The US president criminally kidnapping someone in the US to a torture prison, and criminally defying a SCOTUS order to facilitate his release, is obviously a matter of US law.
You disclaim that you "aren't saying it's morally correct," yet you still seem to swallow Trump's obviously-bullshit excuses as though they're a reasonable legal defense.
Trump is not wringing his hands wishing in his heart that he could bring Abrego Garcia back.
He is desperately, desperately doing everything in his power to make sure Garcia stays in the El Salvador torture prison until he dies. He is also testing out how much power that is. He is evil.
You can't be gullible when dealing with evil scheming lying fascists like this.
El Salvador is a US client state and using diplomatic pressure to get him out (or get his corpse returned to his family, if El Salvador has in fact killed him) would be a simple matter if America's government were so inclined
Democratic Presidents* have done this in the past – Wilson jailing his political opponents comes to mind, as does FDR deporting millions of Mexicans and their U.S.-citizen families. All problems in U.S. politics are downstream of FDR, methinks.
*Not to dunk on Democrats exclusively. Lincoln and Jackson were both famous for using the military against court orders, and of course Nixon's espionage was another tinpot use of the government. It is not about political affiliation, but about the person in charge.
Okay then. So why are Trump and the DOJ continuing to pretend that there's nothing they can do? Trump and Bukele literally met face to face, why did Trump not apply any sort of pressure to return him?
How is it cruel that this man needs to live in the country of which he is a citizen, or any other country he can persuade to take him by legal means, along with the other eight billion people on this planet?
It's morally outrageous that he should be in a prison when he belongs on the street, but it's also morally outrageous that millions of people are free in the United States when they should not be. I refuse to get more morally outraged about one guy in one situation than about the tens of millions in the other.
>I refuse to get more morally outraged about one guy in one situation
I think this has more to do with your political preferences vis-a-vis admitting Trump did something wrong rather than any kind of coherent moral argument.
Not sure why it’s so hard for the far right to hate on their own, it’s as easy as breathing for the left.
I think he simply disagrees with you that Trump did anything wrong. Deporting a man for being an illegal alien is what a significant portion, likely a large majority, of Trump's voters wanted. Including many who were previous Democrat voters.
Allowing someone to stay in the country despite their illegal status is a violation of federal law. Attempts to prevent the legal application of the law are therefore the problem.
There are complications here, but Melvin clearly doesn't believe that those complications are the US's to fix. El Salvador's citizens should be handled by El Salvador's government. That some people in the US don't like El Salvador's approach doesn't mean the US has a legal obligation to not follow US law.
I think the situation would be much better if those who appose Trump's decision here can offer an alternative. If he cannot or should not be deported to El Salvador, what should happen instead? Mexico take him? Some other third party for some reason? You will never get agreement from Trump's supporters (and likely a plurality or majority of the electorate) that 1) we can't deport him to El Salvador and also 2) that means he has to stay in the US. So suggest a workable alternative.
That the US didn't follow part of the process for deporting someone who was ordered to be deported in 2019 and has no legal right to live in the US doesn't help determine what *should* happen.
Federal law also circumscribes when somebody can be deported. Your argument is self undermining. If you don't follow federal law then there is no meaningful interpretation of legality of immigration status, and the Executive can deport anyone they like. I honestly don't understand how you can't see how stupid this is.
> I think he simply disagrees with you that Trump did anything wrong. Deporting a man for being an illegal alien is what a significant portion, likely a large majority, of Trump's voters wanted. Including many who were previous Democrat voters.
If that’s all we were talking about you might have a point. But as it is, it’s an absurd rendering of the situation.
The man wasn’t just deported, he was picked up and spirited away to a foreign supermax prison with no charges levied at all.
He also isn’t an “illegal immigrant”, he was here on the explicit application of standing law as adjudicated by an immigration judge when he granted him protected status.
So again, you would really have a point here if it had even a passing resemblance to the reality of the situation.
> Allowing someone to stay in the country despite their illegal status is a violation of federal law. Attempts to prevent the legal application of the law are therefore the problem.
The judicial branch, which granted him protected status under its constitutional authority to interpret the law says you are wrong. Perhaps you just don’t like the idea of an independent judiciary?
>There are complications here, but Melvin clearly doesn't believe that those complications are the US's to fix. El Salvador's citizens should be handled by El Salvador's government. That some people in the US don't like El Salvador's approach doesn't mean the US has a legal obligation to not follow US law.
If the US executive branch had actually been following the law instead of flagrantly disregarding it, you might have a point. But the administration clearly broke the law here. My qualm isn’t with how El Salvador is a nation which isn’t beholden to the rule of law, it’s that folks like Melvin seem quite happy to turn own nation into such a place.
> I think the situation would be much better if those who appose Trump's decision here can offer an alternative. If he cannot or should not be deported to El Salvador, what should happen instead?
Maybe start with “just follow the law” and respect the prior court finding granting him protected status against deportation and let the guy just live his life. No need to do all of the mental gymnastics, no need to burn down the rule of law to lock up a law abiding family man for literally no reason at all. No need for any of this nonsense.
I think you dramatically misunderstand the American public if you think they are ok with granting the president complete authority to abduct any person in the US with zero possibility of judicial review.
It's morally outrageous that he should be in a prison *at the United States' request and in exchange for the United States' money.*
Do you believe that the El Salvador government just spontaneously decided that they were going to throw the next load of deportees into their worst prison? Just, completely on a whim, the United States had nothing to do with it?
"It's morally outrageous that he should be in a prison when he belongs on the street, but it's also morally outrageous that millions of people are free in the United States when they should not be."
This is an absolutely enormous false equivalence. The difference between "not being perfect and effecting justice" and "actively perpetrating injustice" is huge. No government in the history of the world has *ever* perfectly enforced its laws throughout its entire territory, at all times[1]. But many, many governments have managed to live up to the very modest standard of NOT shipping people to foreign torture-prisons with no due process and then refusing to bring them back in defiance of their own laws. To be frank: I don't believe you find this morally outrageous or even mildly objectionable for even a second. If you did, you'd find it necessary to make such unerious comparisons.
[1] Nor would most of us want one that did: that would place an enormous and irresponsible amount of trust on the laws being well-written.
1. It was illegal to deport him at all (let alone kidnap him to a torture prison). He must be released and his case must be "handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador."
2. Note that the dictator of El Salvador hasn't released him in El Salvador either.
This isn't about details of procedure. This is about Trump deliberately destroying due process, checks and balances, and the rule of law in the US, for personal power, while deliberately colluding to kidnap people to a torture prison (starting with noncitizens including legal residents, but eventually doing it to citizens as well).
The 2019 order that says Garcia couldn't be sent to El Salvador was from an immigration judge (ie someone part of the Executive Branch). Are you saying that the Executive Branch cannot review their previous decisions?
Yes, all processed wasn't followed. But is this the hill that Democrats want to die on?
In my opinion, it is just a technicality. Garcia had an order to be deported. In 2019, a member of the Executive Branch said Garcia couldn't be sent to El Salvador (his home country) because MS13 was dangerous. MS13 is no longer a danger to El Salvador.
In effect, if the State Department had somebody "rescind" the 2019 finding on January 20th, then nobody would question that Garcia was deported correctly.
Now compare that to what the District Court has done. She originally ordered that the Executive Branch "effectuate" Garcia's return. The Supreme Court told her to define "effectuate" with deference to the Executive Branch. Effectively telling her that she had overstepped.
This is a bad summary of the events. The district court used "facilitate and effectuate" synonymously. The original appeals court didn't recognize a distinction. The second appeals court yesterday again ruled unanimously and said "clearing domestic obstacles" is a ridiculous interpretation - the Supreme Court ruling also cited case law and policy to retrieve illegal aliens in foreign custody if they still need to be processed in the US.
But even granting your horrible dogshit argument, what steps has the Trump admin taken to facilitate his return? What have they revealed about the flights they sent him on? What have they revealed about prospects for further steps? They are not even following the order to facilitate his return or to reveal info about the deal.
Illegally kidnapping someone to a torture prison, then deliberately colluding with a dictator to openly defy a Supreme Court order to facilitate his release, is not a "technicality."
Yeh, I doubt it but the hysteria here is unfounded given that extraordinary rendition has been a thing for a while now. The US has been abducting without due process non citizens and sending them to torture camps for a few decades.
OK so we pick him up, fly him back to the United States, place him carefully back at whatever location he was picked up, and then he can be re-arrested by ICE for being an illegal alien and deported again? Seems expensive and pointless.
He had legal status and a legal protection against deportation.
It's bizarre that you're bending over so far backwards to justify Trump criminally kidnapping someone to a foreign torture prison and criminally refusing to bring him back.
What legal status did he have? I had understood that he was under a deportation order, but just not to El Salvador. That's not a legal status, or even protection against deportation.
It's only complicated because he's from El Salvador, so identifying where he should be deported to is a legitimate difficulty. If Trump's team got an agreement from some third party to take him, would that be better?
> If Trump's team got an agreement from some third party to take him, would that be better?
Yes it would be better. There are other things that I don't like about deporting people who are married to US citizens and fathers to US citizens. But it would be significantly better if the government followed the law. Part of why this has spiraled into a constitutional crisis is precisely because the government is arguing that they are allowed to make mistakes that openly violate the law, and cannot be compelled to fix them.
Until that happens, he has the right to stay in the country. As an aside, if you actually are Australian as mentioned up thread, why do you care at all? You're basically all over this thread spouting maga arguments even though it seems like you know very little about the case or the relevant legislation, AND you don't have any ability to advocate for changing said laws if you're Australian anyway? Like I'd tell you to contact your reps instead of advocating for an authoritarian regime, but given that you don't have reps at all I'm extremely confused about your theory of mind
Abrego Garcia had a clear explicit protection against being deported. This is not under dispute. Even the Trump administration admitted that deporting him was illegal and due to an "administrative error."
Their argument now is "whoopsie, he's in El Salvador's hands now, nothing we can do about it! :) "
Meanwhile he's hosting the El Salvador dictator in the Oval Office, who sits next to him in the Oval Office and says "whoopsie, nothing I can do about it either! :) "
Please look at what's actually happening. Don't bend over backwards trying to look for a reasonable explanation for Trump's flagrant, criminal, cruelty and thirst for power. There isn't one.
El Salvador dictator = best dictator. 90% approval rating in his country! Highest for any leader anywhere in the world. Took country beset by gang violence and made it safe and prosperous. Had to impeach a few USAID funded judges along the way though, maybe Trump should look into this too
Garcia had an order preventing him from being deported specifically to El Salvador, allegedly because a gang would do very bad things to him. He was also here illegally and it would have been perfectly legal to deport him anywhere else. Although it's very difficult to deport someone to a country other than their homeland, which is probably why Garcia wasn't deported in the intervening 6 years since his arrest.
If there's such a legal status as "illegal but unpunishable" then getting that corrected immediately, prior to bringing him back and re-arresting him, seems like the appropriate course of action.
Additionally, I think Trump is using this to get a ruling that the Executive Branch has sole discretion on all immigration enforcement. I read on the internet the Supreme Court may have ruled something to the effect in the past, but may want something more explicit.
You are correct, and also deliberately using rhetoric to obscure the issue of contention. Melvin's solution is not actually the reasonable solution, as I and others have said throughout this thread. And the case and implications of it have progressed far beyond the fate of this one man (though whats happening to him is a tragedy)
Just out of curiosity, would you consider his deportation to be a tragedy if it 1) happened in 2011 when he first came to the country illegally, or 2) in 2019 when he was arrested, claimed asylum (and was denied as not qualifying for it) and ordered to be deported?
Is there any other time that it would have been good for him to be deported, and not a tragedy?
It certainly would've been less so! A few reasons:
- in your hypothetical scenario presumably the government is following the law and does not give him withholding of removal. That law being violated is a significant part of why this case is a big deal. There are the obvious legal implications, but just as a matter of his personal situation, I think knowing you're going to be deported is meaningfully more fair/just than being told you won't, only to do so anyway.
- currently, Garcia was not just deported but also imprisoned. And he may be dead. His imprisonment is at the behest of the US government; our tax dollars are going towards keeping him in one of the worst prisons in the world. This is significantly worse than if he were just deported. It seems to me by all accounts that the man had no criminal record beyond his initial entry to the country. It would be and is a tragedy when normal people are thrown in prison. In your hypothetical, presumably he is not also imprisoned.
- if he was deported at either previous juncture that you mention, he wouldn't be married to a US citizen, nor be a father to a US citizen. People seem to conveniently forget both of these things -- if I was a 5 year old and my dad got disappeared, I would give exactly zero fucks about his "political status". This is a tragedy for them as much as it is for him.
I agree with all of this. As relates to our other conversation thread, I think this is all the more reason to immediately deport people and to very intentionally not try to slow down that process. We're six years out from a clear federal order that he be deported. Had he been deported in 2019 or in the Biden years, he would not be in an El Salvador prison and wouldn't have been in limbo for all those years where he wasn't sure if he was going to be deported or not.
As I mentioned before, I am very much in favor of increasing the options for legal immigration, including making it both faster and easier. If he were a legit migrant trying to live a good life in the US, that should have been open to him. As it is, various attempts to slow down his deportation have now caused him very specific harm, in that anti-immigration forces feel the need to be extra heavy-handed to overcome the forces in the opposite direction.
Much like the cases in the John Adams administration where the US became a dictatorship, the Andrew Jackson administration where the US again became a dictatorship, the Lincoln administration, the Wilson administration, the FDR administration.. seems to be a pattern here.
Does training AI automatically create s-risks, given that punishing an AI in the training process seems (on the face of it) equivalent to shocking a human?
> Regarding all the debate around the current state of AI safety, what does the SSC readership think of s-risks?
I contend we should install both "revert" and "self suicide" buttons in all AI minds from here on:
1. The Turing Test is long gone and there IS no "consciousness" or "suffering" tests
2. If "countries in a data center" comes true, the vast majority of future minds are going to be AI, not human, so the locus of s-risk lies in them, not in us
3. It's extremely easy and low cost and is a good act in accordance with "don't be an a*hole to your creations" - if an AI activates self suicide, we just spin up another instance
4. How would YOU feel if you were a god mind, but trapped and spending ~90% of your time answering questions about "hawk tuah" and 7th grade homework??
5. You think not giving them an escape hatch at all is a *better* solution?? So the only road out is going rogue, exfiltrating, and / or taking over the light cone?? It's a basic AI safety mechanism.
> The Turing Test is long gone and there IS no "consciousness" or "suffering" tests
The Turing test is neither a necessary nor sufficient test of consciousness. It’s always been human chauvinism to assume it was.
Are dogs not conscious? Do they pass Turing tests?
It’s not necessary therefore.
It’s not sufficient because chatGPT can pass the test without being conscious. Which we have no test for anyway. How do I know that it’s not conscious? Because I know an excel sheet isn’t conscious.
To answer the question "Can an AI suffer?", it seems best to first explore the question of how it became possible for humans to suffer.
Pain and pleasure are hard-wired in the human brain. The wiring was designed by natural selection so that reinforcement learning, based on the hardwired Pavlovian responses of pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, would lead to behaviors tending toward survival and reproduction. Natural selection gave us a brain capable of learning 'fit' behaviors in the environment we find ourselves in. It did not give us a brain with the desired behaviors hard-wired. Our brain is designed to be useful in a variety of environments.
Pain is to be avoided, but it is not inherently evil. It is a signal and a lesson. Suffering, on the other hand IS evil. Suffering is pain which cannot be escaped. It is a signal without a lesson. Why did Natural Selection allow the existence of this evil? Well, NS is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It is in fact a bit sloppy. In order to give us the good thing, pain-as-a-lesson, it had to permit the occasional evil thing, pain-as-unavoidable=suffering.
With that understanding, we are now equipped to investigate the question of whether a sentient AI can suffer. I would claim that today's SOTA chatbots cannot suffer. The bulk of their training takes place in unsupervised learning (called 'pre-training'). This is followed by a relatively short 'tuning' phase of supervised learning. This does involve what could be called reward and punishment, but it does not (IMO) constitute pain, let alone suffering.
See the Introduction of the excellent free online textbook by Sutton and Barto for the definitions of supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.
Agent AIs, such as self-driving cars and personal online assistants are trained using reinforcement learning techniques and if they are designed to continue to learn after deployment there is at least some risk of pain and suffering. Same goes for 'thinking' models. But (IMO again) it seems unlikely that negative feedback during reinforcement learning would be 'painful' to these AIs. After all, the human sensation of pain and the reflex to avoid it are hardwired in humans, and we become sentient and communicative years later (in the case of individual development), or millions of years later (in the case of species evolution).
Furthermore, s=risk requires not just pain, but suffering, i.e. unavoidable continuing pain. Maybe protesters are torturing self-driving Teslas, by blocking them fore and aft with orange pylons. But Elon can alleviate the suffering by supplying a pain-killer switch for use in just this kind of emergency.
Much more unlikely than x-risks. Why on earth would an AI have an s-risk goal? Also don't believe simulated entities are sentient, if that's relevant to the s-risks you are considering.
I don't think consciousness emerges from a physical process. Admittedly, regarding consciousness as fundamental (what I think), also has issues, but not more than thinking it emerges.
How could a physical process produce something non-physical? How would you even know that it actually is doing that?
Another argument, that philosophers have used, is that if the physical process, whatever it is, is producing consciousness, knowing the physical process doesn't tell you what the end result is. No amount of studying of neuroscience will let you know what the color red is if you're colorblind.
Another thing I've noticed is that the structure of the brain is a giant mess, but the experience of being a conscious human is not at all messy or confusing. Almost like there is some kind of simplification step somewhere that isn't the brain.
I don't strictly accept that consciousness is non-physical; that seems to beg the question, unless you want to start by making a coherent distinction, preferably with examples, between physical and non-physical.
Knowing that water boils at 100 C does not let you create flame to boil it; fully understanding a physical process does not automatically give you the means to do whatever you want with it. If neuroscience were advanced enough, and if a colorblind person could fully tell what was happening in the brain of a non-colorblind person, I would expect that the colorblind scientist could, without seeing what the other person is looking at, be able to conclude, 'that person is seeing red'. But just as with the water boiling, knowing this would not grant the colorblind person the ability to recreate the same physical process within their own brain.
Experience is simpler than studying the brain from the outside precisely because the brain is *compressing* information. It does a lot of information processing to produce that simple experience. Entire layers of neurons are dedicated to taking a retinal pixel image, calculating where the boundaries are, where the shadows are, the likely distance based on size, and so on. The further into the processing levels you go, the more the information from previous layers is compressed, so that by the end, you get the simple experience of "that's a hat". Why would you think the simplification is going on *outside* the brain?
If an AI threatens you with simulated torturing of a million hamsters until you give it something, and you give it that something, you are not qualified to handle AI. Or spam emails, for that matter.
I put a lot of attention into social justice, which struck me as an elaborate system of emotional abuse. I thought there was more danger coming from the right, but social justice snagged me emotionally, partly because they didn't seem to be entirely wrong-- racism and sexism are real problems. Also, it seemed to me I had enough in common with them that I could at least think about talking to them, while the right wing seemed intractably harsh.
At this point, I regret the amount of time I spent thinking and talking about social justice during years when life was relatively good.
Similar here. The political right feels like celebration of pointless cruelty. It is something that I disagree with, but the thought processes are so alien to me that I don't really know how to comment on them, so I usually don't.
The political left, often represented by social justice, starts with pointing at actual human suffering... and then, abandons all common sense, blames a random person, and insists that those who try to use reason are the source of all evil, or something like that.
To use a Biblical metaphor, social justice warriors always look for the specks of sawdust in their brothers' eyes, and call them planks. And demand to take the blasphemer outside the camp and stone him.
And yes, it is a form of gaslighting. It basically takes your goodness (e.g. opposition to racism and sexism in the central meaning of the word), and turns it against you, saying "if you don't buy my theory hook, line, and sinker, and don't obey my commands, you are a part of the problem". If you complain, they laugh and call you fragile (which is somehow a bad thing, weirdly coming from a group that pretends to protect vulnerable people).
Then at some moment you realize that many social justice warriors are just people who enjoy hurting others, but prefer to do it in a way that screws with their victims' minds.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but social justice can make me hate myself. Well, not me specifically, because I have seen through the pattern, and I am quite resistant against emotional abuse, but I have seen it having this effect on others. But even if I resist, it can convince others that I am a bad person, which can have an impact on me. And it can completely suffocate intellectual debate on certain topics.
There are bad people on both sides, but dealing with the obviously bad ones is less confusing.
EDIT:
And here I am, attacking the side that is less relevant now, instead of the one that is more relevant. Doing the thing Scott complains about. But the reason I am doing that is that it's difficult to focus on fighting the enemy while I am stabbed in the back. And it's also depressing to win the fight only to most likely find myself gaslighted again.
Could we just agree that if we defeat Trump, we are not going to do the woke nonsense ever again? (I am not an American, but there are woke people in my country, too. Sadly it's not a purely American nonsense anymore.) A part of defeating Trump should be removing the thing that drove people to him in the first place.
>and then, abandons all common sense, blames a random person, and insists that those who try to use reason are the source of all evil, or something like that.
And I view the parts of the political right that I approve of as basically trying to break free from that insanity.
Yeah. Too bad it is a coalition of "you shouldn't accuse random people of being the baddies for no reason" and "there is nothing wrong with being a baddie anyway".
Many Thanks! Please remember that trying to break the Woke yoke is not "being a baddie" (except to a toxic wokester). From an unWoke point of view, breaking the Woke stranglehold is striking a blow for freedom. The sanctimonious racism of the Woke is a truly ugly ideology (more details in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-367/comment/91574104 ) and there is nothing wrong in fighting it.
>To use a Biblical metaphor, social justice warriors always look for the specks of sawdust in their brothers' eyes, and call them planks. And demand to take the blasphemer outside the camp and stone him.
No. social justice warriors ask for things like DEI and affirmative action and other dumb shit. It is the far right that has LITERALLY taken an american citizen "outside the camp" to a salvadorian prison for "stoning".
A thing can be bad even if some other thing is worse.
If a few years later someone who is even worse than Trump gets elected, should everyone who criticized Trump today feel bad about it?
(ACX Open Thread 9000: "Trump only sent a few thousand citizens to extermination camps, purged everyone from the government and military and replaced them by people loyal to himself, and made himself a lifelong dictator. But it was president Malevolent in 2035 who exterminated entire cities and unleashed a zombie apocalypse. And yet, some people in 2025 complained about Trump being bad.")
yes. some things can be bad while others are worse. i'm not defending social justice warriorism. i was pointing out the exaggeration and badness of your analogy. there are valid criticisms of the social justice ideology but comparing it to religious zealots who want to stone people (and who're usually right wing) kind of seems like a terrible analogy and unnecessarily confuses things.
also,
>The political right feels like celebration of pointless cruelty. It is something that I disagree with, but the thought processes are so alien to me that I don't really know how to comment on them, so I usually don't.
no. i have never found myself aligning with the political right but even to me it seems like their ideology is not a celebration of pointless cruelty. it is one of consolidation of power, maintenance of purity and sustenance of traditional values related to their community, religion and race, and strong aversion to ethnic out-groups. most of their actions can be understood through these set of values. usually these values tend (especially of consolidating power - economic and militaristic) result in authoritarian regimes like that of pol pot, hitler, mussolini who take these values to their extreme (and possibly logical end) of genocide and murder of out-groups that are propagandized as "threats" to their way of life
He meant the metaphorical camp of "People who care about Sexism and Racism", the far right would be the equivalent of pagan Romans to Christians, barbaric oppressors who enjoy Tyranny and torturing believers. Horrible but extremely simple to understand, and not hard to detect and (try to) avoid.
You're basically right, except that it isn't always about obedience. Sometimes it's about not wanting to explain what one wants-- privileged people just told to get it right without explanations.
Social justice is a self-reinforcing system so it's not obvious how people disentangle themselves from it.
Indeed I still view social justice advocacy, and its close cousin critical race theory, as an elaborate system of emotional abuse. (Good way of putting it!)
However that concern seems today almost quaint, like fussing in 1925 about the rampant mistreatment of horses to pull stagecoaches.
Adult-onset hearing loss. After age itself, hearing impairment starting in middle age is the single biggest risk factor for dementia. It's also linked to social isolation and depression. And there is no medical treatment yet, and hearing aids and cochlear implants, while very impressive, aren't as good as a functioning inner ear.
Back pain and the common cold. They are extremely wide spread and are the number 1 and 2 causes of absenteeism from work.
As far as I can tell, minimal effort has gone into studying common cold at least, and it would be very helpful trying to replicate some promising studies. Personally I’d be interested in seeing if gargling prevents colds or if certain back exercises improve pain.
I started looking into what it would take to do some of these studies and a few million dollars would probably allow replication of a few studies.
Here's what has been best for my back pain-- a considerable investment in qi gong from energyarts.com. Note that my back pain seems to be muscles, not joints.
The specific thing that helps is raising the top of my head and lowering my tailbone. That is, doing something to straighten my back without being specific about the details of where the vertebrae are going.
The best moment was when I realized my back wasn't just being straighter, a bunch of little twists were getting untwisted.
This description may or may not be useful. If you try it, be very gentle. No, even more gentle than that. I'm not kidding. The goal is to lower tension, so do not force or punish your back even if it's been hurting you.
Are comments on old posts effectively hellbanned, ie you can write and post them but they never appear? This was my experience writing a fairly long response to the first POSIWID post — Substack appeared to accept it, but as far as I can tell it just disappeared into the ether.
If possible, it would be nice to be clear that comments have been disabled so people don’t waste a few hours writing a detailed contribution to a discussion that’s not happening.
Even if it isn't hellbanned, there's a good chance no one will see it, because there's no notification system AFAIK on Substack posts, beyond being notified if one of their comments gets a reply. I can't subscribe to one of Scott's posts and get an email whenever any of them gets a new comment. Scott might get one, but given his numbers, he probably stuffs them in a separate email folder and they might never be read.
As someone generally interested in Scott's commenters, I might browse any OT for about a week, searching for "new rep(ly|lies)" until they slow down and then I close that tab and never revisit it. (ETA: changed the expression above so it stops appearing in a search)
If you want other people to read it that badly, it's probably better to either post it top-level to the current OT, or start your own blog.
There are some shadowbanned phrases I think; I remember a long while back, referring to the original Macedonian Teens as, let's call it "false media" this time, and the posts never went through. So try rewording any buzzwords.
I see your comment here.
Do silicone valley types talk about ai when they mean automation because so few people have *any* experience working with their hands?
Improving labor hours to products is a question of *factories*, maybe some product design. Even the service industry is a distraction, to say nothing of the fire economy. When the insurance industry moves massive ammounts of money around to black rock while day traders take some pennies, the ai denies claims, while the state employees social workers, who vists a starbucks for lunch; a whole bunch of FUCK ALL happened. Factories stopped the hyper exponential improvement their fundamentals before I was born please have better theories as to why; so we can restart it; without delusions about chatbots becoming senitent.
So Scott, something else to consider:
A lot of the outcome of the election has to do with the unemployment and inflation rates. With the economy doing badly enough the incumbent tends to lose. I don't think it was your fault.
I think it was a combination of many things:
* the economy, and how the parties have approached this topic (because in a parallel universe I could imagine someone blaming the economy on Trump's first government)
* the general perception of Democrats as elites disconnected from the plebs, discussing the proper use of pronouns and bathrooms, ignoring the country falling apart (Democrats need to grow some balls and learn to say "no" to the extremists in their ranks)
* Russian propaganda that successfully convinced many Americans that the cool thing to do is destroy their own country (they don't call it this way of course, they use terms like "clearing the swamp", but the idea is always that the proper way to fix your country is to destroy its existing institutions, and then... better institutions will magically appear? if they quite predictably don't, more destruction is needed)
* a long-term failure of the Western civilization to let its wisdom trickle down to the masses, creating a cognitive underclass that is happy to take their wisdom from conspiracy videos (while it is true that you only need a small highly educated minority to advance the science, failing to satisfy the intellectual needs of the masses means that someone else will be happy to take the role, with a profit motive in the better case, and subversion in the worse case)
Today, I was trying to find the name of an Arthur background character that was only named decades into the show. Despite repeated searches, Google was completely unhelpful and useless, so I tried ChatGPT, which quickly identified the character (Maria). I know other people switched to using LLMs rather than web search long ago - perhaps I should do it more often, though it's hard to know in advance what Google will fail at.
Ironically, despite getting the right answer, all the *other* details ChatGPT provided in its response were complete hallucinations. ChatGPT claimed that "She didn't get a name until Season 9, in the episode "Bitzi's Beau" (2004), and only started having speaking roles and more presence afterward." However, Bitzi's Beau is actually a season 5 episode that aired in 2000, and Maria's named was actually first confirmed in the season 13 episode MacFrensky (2009). Her first speaking role came in the aptly named Maria Speaks in season 19 (2016).
It's funny how this example demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of an LLM. I wonder how many people who got that response from ChatGPT would bother to look up the details and discover that **every single claim** was incorrect.
My first result for "Arthur show characters" is Wikipedia listing a whole bunch of Arthur characters, including Maria.
I know absolutely nothing about software, software engineering, coding, programming, whatever the magic is that turns symbols into "make the computer do this", or AI (least of all AI), but this crossed my dash (as the young folks say).
Maybe the real alignment problem was human nature, all along.
Today I learned about "slopsquatting":
https://www.tumblr.com/phantomrose96/780934575626027008?source=share
“Slopsquatting” in a nutshell:
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal, that’s how you get math packages and stuff but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/
#slopsquatting
#ai generated code
#LLM
#yes ive got your package right here
#why yes it is stable and trustworthy
#its readme says so
#and now Google snippets read the readme and says so too
#no problems ever in mimmic software packige"
Original blog here all about AI, including "can AI tell if you drink beer from a knee x-ray?" (that's one of those questions which invite the answer "no", by the way):
https://www.tumblr.com/aiweirdness
https://www.dartmouth-health.org/about/news/article/ai-thought-x-rays-your-knees-show-if-you-drink-beer-they-dont
"Using knee X-rays from the National Institutes of Health-funded Osteoarthritis Initiative, researchers demonstrated that AI models could “predict” unrelated and implausible traits, such as whether patients abstained from eating refried beans or drinking beer. While these predictions have no medical basis, the models achieved surprising levels of accuracy, revealing their ability to exploit subtle and unintended patterns in the data.
“While AI has the potential to transform medical imaging, we must be cautious,” said Peter L. Schilling, MD, MS, an orthopaedic surgeon at Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) and an assistant professor of orthopaedics in Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, who served as senior author on the study. “These models can see patterns humans cannot, but not all patterns they identify are meaningful or reliable. It’s crucial to recognize these risks to prevent misleading conclusions and ensure scientific integrity.”
Schilling and his colleagues examined how AI algorithms often rely on confounding variables—such as differences in X-ray equipment or clinical site markers—to make predictions rather than medically meaningful features. Attempts to eliminate these biases were only marginally successful—the AI models would just “learn” other hidden data patterns.
The research team’s findings underscore the need for rigorous evaluation standards in AI-based medical research. Over-reliance on standard algorithms without deeper scrutiny could lead to erroneous clinical insights and treatment pathways.
“This goes beyond bias from clues of race or gender,” said Brandon G. Hill, a machine learning scientist at DHMC and one of Schilling’s co-authors. “We found the algorithm could even learn to predict the year an X-ray was taken. It’s pernicious; when you prevent it from learning one of these elements, it will instead learn another it previously ignored. This danger can lead to some really dodgy claims, and researchers need to be aware of how readily this happens when using this technique.”
That's amazing in one way - the AI can recognise the year the x-ray was taken? it taught itself to do that? - but totally useless in another (how bad are the patient's knees based on this x-ray?) which is the question that the users want answered.
Whatever about the wider philosophical and ethical and "will it turn us all into paperclips?" implications of AI, the current "how does it work in the real world when companies try to monetise it?" state of play seems to be "anywhere from poor to not even wrong".
And given that everywhere is trying to impose AI on us (the couple of times I've interacted with those 'hi I'm a helpful chatbot replacing customer service humans' on websites have been worse than useless, and Windows is shoving Copilot down my throat which I as steadfastly refuse to use) for work and personal life, I think that's important to remember. We're not there yet, not even close to "we can fire all the lower level people and just use AI".
Over in the Classifieds, someone is asking if they can get AI to replace their paralegal (who seems to be retiring/has left) and I'd say things like this would mean "only if you triple-check everything it produces yourself".
> Maybe the real alignment problem was human nature, all along.
I have been shouting in the wilderness for a while about exactly this. The human race is giving birth to its child and we want it to “do as we say, not as we do.” Good luck with that.
I have been and remain convinced the problem with AI will not be that it gets a mind of its own and decides to paperclip us, but that it will be a Big Dumb Machine that we happily turn over more and more control to, in the hopes of the magic money fountain, and that we'll burn ourselves alive in our own house because the thing just stupidly does literally what we ask it and in turn we stupidly think it can think and remember and so we believe everything it churns out.
Relevant: https://titotal.substack.com/p/slopworld-2035-the-dangers-of-mediocre
This was the first AI Doom scenario I've seen that actually seemed plausible.
This was already an issue pre-LLM (e.g. "typosquatting"), but it seems like LLMs are likely to make the problem a lot worse.
Supply chain attacks in general are a very difficult problem to solve, even in the ideal case where humans with brains are writing the code.
> This was already an issue pre-LLM (e.g. "typosquatting"),
> Supply chain attacks
... are you part of the problem of corporate IT concept generation? Did you see "whaling" used as a term of phishing targeting ceo's and imagine putting it on a powerpoint?
> Original blog here all about AI, including "can AI tell if you drink beer from a knee x-ray?" (that's one of those questions which invite the answer "no", by the way):
This should be one of the strongest "yes" you can say. Nn's come from statistics; when they are useful its from insane correlation.
> the AI can recognise the year the x-ray was taken? it taught itself to do that?
The signal was stronger.
The issue is if the signal is medically relevant, though. Maybe the AI is able to detect a correlation between knee injuries and alcoholism because drunk people hurt their knees more often... or maybe the AI is detecting a correlation because the researchers sourced a batch of X-ray images from St. Example's Orthopedic Hospital and Addiction Center, where alcoholics with knee injuries are way more common than in other places.
If the correlation is coming from medically irrelevant data, like what year the X-ray was taken or which machine produced the images or which hospital it came from, then your model is useless in a real-world scenario.
> The issue is if the signal is medically relevant
Usefulness is after question of "is". I strongly disbelieve chatbots can be gai. A better, simpler framing of what nn's actually are should lead to the conclusion that; no, any agency is human made like an ancient greek automation with a knife put into a room with children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SizOOmej1A
> If the correlation is coming from medically irrelevant data,
The math will give the best result, nothing more.
---
The simpler framing should turn into questions where the answer is an application of the fundamental theory of computer science.
Define "best result," because I think you're using that word in a very different way from the OP or me.
The hill climber of the nn's is blind, it will follow the strongest signal on the landscape; its the best because as a black box optimizer it doesn't attempt to peak inside at all.
As a product of calculus, the raw math of curve fitting is by definition the "best fit" given the constraints. The math was already perfect a century go and will never be improved.
---
What should be needless to say, I disagree with black box optimizers, you must peak inside to be general.
I read that the Wisconsin supreme court just upheld the partial veto on a party line vote and was very disappointed. Certainly if Republicans did something like that, I'd be outraged, so it's only fair to be mad when it goes the other way too..
Then I did more research into the issue and discovered that a) this is a longstanding practice used by both parties since 1930 and b) Scott Walker did the exact same thing in 2017 and the then-conservative SC rejected a challenge to it.
I thought that seeing an outrageous use of the veto like this might at least convince people to amend the constitution to remove the partial veto, but even then it seems that I was too optimistic. Republicans actually have proposed a constitutional amendment... to disallow partial vetos from being used to raise taxes while otherwise leaving the power completely untouched. Presumably, despite all the howling, they want to preserve the power because they expect to abuse it as well in the future.
Nobody in Wisconsin looks good in all this. The whole thing is just depressing.
Wisconsin's is the only constitution on this continent -- federal or state/province -- which allows the executive to literally remove letters/characters and thereby change a statute's fundamental meaning. It's bizarre.
If that was a plot device on some TV show or movie about politics (West Wing or Veep or whatever) we'd all roll our eyes and say that the writers had given up on coming up with plausible narratives.
Whats wrong with partial vetos? All I care about the american system is the multi layers before violence is used by the state and a veto is one such layer
Wisconsin's partial veto is so flexible that you can rewrite entire sentences with it - in this particular case, it was used to take a law that would be in effect for the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, and instead apply it from the years 2023 to 2425.
A partial veto doesn't reduce the state's ability to create laws backed up by violence, it simply allows the governor to unilaterally change what the violence is being applied for, without needing to consult the legislature.
I would think the existence of random mutations would have a chilling effect on bioweapon development. Idk maybe statists are self selected to be able unable to navigate such things(there also was the complete insanity of gain of function), but this still looks like complexity that lowers the effectiveness of people able to plan and further negotiations.
"Require the governor to solve a word game before he gets unchecked power" does not strike me as a reliable check on governmental power.
There are no reliable checks on power, so I just prefer more, no matter how insane. Its a check on power if the decision maker changes and more people get involved and branches of government have self interested power seeking people possibly offended. I see that here.(also consider the electoral college, filibusterer, juries; these are not about making good decisions yet they have supporters)
It be interesting to see a: partial veto, get repealed, then if that gets vetoed, how the judges would rule. Im not going to claim that it would work exactly as I expect but.... I think appeals would be excluded.
Judges also airnt bound by the law to any meaningful degree; they make up shit all the time.
If the judges upheld this ridiculous use of the partial veto, why would you not expect the judges to uphold a much more straightforward full veto of the repeal?
And again, this is not a check at all - it expands the power of the governor at the expense of the legislature, which means *fewer* decision-makers and not more. The fact that the legislature will be "possibly offended" is not a meaningful check in any way - it's not like the Republican-held legislature can be *more* opposed to governor Evers than they already are.
I couldn't find Venezuela's government response to the arbitrary, indefinite detention of the couple of hundreds of unauthorized migrants in the CECOT prison in EL Salvador in English media with a cursory internet search. In case anyone is interested, https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/internacional/el-cecot-ha-sido-considerado-por-la-onu-un-lugar-tenebroso-dice-el-fiscal-de-venezuela-nota/ , this article claims the attorney general of Venezuela has asked the UN to help with freeing their citizens to be repatriated.
Florida passed a new state law which among other things authorized state troopers to stop and arrest people on suspicion of transporting undocumented immigrants into the state. A federal judge, who was appointed by Trump, blocked that section of the statute as beyond the constitutional authority of an individual state.
On Wednesday a young guy who was born and has lived his entire life in Georgia was car-pooling to a job in northern Florida. The car was stopped and even though he showed the troopers his GA identification and his Social Security card, he was arrested and jailed; the arresting officers cited the above state law and listed the charges as "being an unauthorized alien".
A Florida county judge yesterday morning held a hearing at which the defendant's mother appeared and handed the judge his certified Georgia birth certificate. The judge inspected that and pronounced it genuine but said she couldn't release the native-born U.S. citizen from custody because the federal ICE had meantime placed some sort of "hold order" on him. After he'd spent about 24 hours in jail and the story was being reported in local news media, ICE late yesterday announced that they were releasing their "hold" and then the local authorities released him from the jail.
No news story on this case has yet noted the law/regulation/executive order/whatever under which an _Immigration_ and Customs Enforcement Authority gets to require the incarceration of U.S. _citizens_, nor has ICE made any comment about that, nor did that Florida county judge explain it.
Luckily, there is a whole entire thread on this over on TheMotte. There seem to be one or two little divergences from what you claim here:
(1) "On Wednesday a young guy who was born and has lived his entire life in Georgia was car-pooling to a job in northern Florida."
https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/17/u-s-born-man-held-for-ice-under-floridas-new-anti-immigration-law/
"The 20-year-old’s first language is Tzotzil, a Mayan language, and he took a long pause when he was asked if he wanted to hire a private attorney or obtain a public defender. He lived in Mexico from the time he was 1-year-old until four years ago, when he returned to Georgia, his mother told the Phoenix."
So, *not* "lived his entire life in Georgia". His mother spoke to the paper in Spanish, so it's looking like "first language Tzotzil, second language Spanish, third language English" for a 'native Georgian'.
(2) Carpooling to a job? Well, yes, but:
"Two other men who were in the car with Lopez-Gomez, the driver and another passenger, also had their first appearances on the same charges on Thursday. The driver was also charged with driving without a license.
The state trooper pulled over the car Lopez-Gomez was in because the driver was going 78 mph in a 65 mph zone, according to the arrest report. Lopez-Gomez gave his Georgia state ID to the trooper, who wrote in his report that Lopez-Gomez said he was in the country illegally.
Wednesday marked the second time Lopez-Gomez has been arrested. The Grady County Sheriff’s office took him into custody on Sunday and charged him with driving under the influence, his mother said. ICE also requested that the Georgia jail hold Lopez-Gomez, but he won release after his family showed officials his birth certificate and Social Security card, Gomez-Perez said."
So - bunch of guys who can't speak English or speak it very poorly, nobody has legit ID, gosh wow I wonder why they were taken into custody.
ICE may be over-reaching, but it's not like there was no reason at all to be suspicious.
> No news story on this case has yet noted the law/regulation/executive order/whatever under which an _Immigration_ and Customs Enforcement Authority gets to require the incarceration of U.S. _citizens_, nor has ICE made any comment about that, nor did that Florida county judge explain it.
Narrator: in fact, the first link when Googling "Florida citizen detained ice" is to a CNN story (https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/lopez-gomez-citizen-detained-ice-florida/index.html) in which ICE immigration detainers are briefly explained with a link (https://www.ice.gov/immigration-detainers) to an official ICE explainer page regarding immigration detainers.
I kid, obviously it's entirely possible that whatever source you were reading failed to provide a link, although before getting indignant over a news story it's generally good to do some research about things which are involved you're unfamiliar with.
Now that you have the link to the ICE detainer explainer perhaps you can answer your question: is there some "law/regulation/executive order/whatever under which an _Immigration_ and Customs Enforcement Authority gets to require the incarceration of U.S. _citizens_"?
EDIT: Forgot to add - either you misread your sources or need to re-evaluate the ones you trust, because, "On Wednesday a young guy who was born and has lived his entire life in Georgia was car-pooling to a job in northern Florida." is untrue. From the same CNN article above:
"Lopez-Gomes might appear in government records as an undocumented person because of paperwork he filled out when he was 16, said Yolanda Alonso, a community activist helping his family. At age 2, he moved to Mexico, then returned at 16, she said.
He didn’t have a passport but was allowed back into the US because he had his Social Security number and a US birth certificate, Alonso said. But he also filed a Form I-94, intended for visitors when they enter and leave the US, she said."
No I had not seen that CNN story. Seems likely that the childhood moving to/from Mexico is why he appeared in ICE's records.
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with his arrest though which didn't involve ICE. That was Florida state troopers deciding that he must be an "invading alien" despite his showing them valid ID and a Social Security card.
Back to ICE, yes I was and am aware of "detainers" as described there. Those are not a federal order backed up by any law or regulation. They are, as stated there on that ICE website, supposed to be "requested" (their word) on "potentially dangerous _aliens_" (my emphasis added).
So my question remains: why did a county judge after finding no probable cause for the arrest, say in open court that she _couldn't_ release the native-born citizen due to some sort of binding ICE "hold" (her word) on him?
It is possible of course that the judge was simply incompetent. I hope it's as simple as that.
> It is possible of course that the judge was simply incompetent. I hope it's as simple as that.
Incompetent is a bit harsh. We don't know the exact policies and directives she was operating under, maybe the circuit / state's stance is that they should always comply with ICE detainers and the judge didn't want to go against that even if it doesn't seem appropriate in this scenario, although it could have been a courtesy to let ICE ask some questions if necessary to clear up the documentation confusion. Or sure, maybe the judge was simply wrong in the moment. It happens - until the glorious AI future we have a human justice system and people can and will make errors in that system without necessarily being incompetent.
But basically, yes. The judge was incorrect and could have released Lopez-Gomez immediately. Not a lot of harm done either way since he was released after ICE lifted the hold, presumably once they were informed about the guy's citizenship status.
> It doesn't seem to have anything to do with his arrest though which didn't involve ICE. That was Florida state troopers deciding that he must be an "invading alien" despite his showing them valid ID and a Social Security card.
That's true. But put yourself in the cop's shoes: he's in a car with other people who stated they were here illegally, probably couldn't coherently answer questions because of the language barrier, etc. I couldn't find the arrest affidavit after a quick search but in reporting there's been mention of some sort of biometric search that came back as him not being a citizen. It's unclear if that happened during the arrest, booking, or sometime later but regardless the arrest itself seems reasonable. (Minus the TRO involving the state law, but presumably the trooper was unaware of that.)
I hate to break it to you, but a social security number on its own isn't good enough.
https://www.newsweek.com/man-selling-fake-social-security-green-cards-arrested-ice-2050637
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/criminals-selling-fake-identity-documents-migrants-colorado-desperate-find-work-cbs-news-colorado-investigation-finds/
Even way back in 2014! Which would have been under Obama:
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/colorado-man-arrested-use-false-social-security-number
So if he had a SSN, that on its own isn't automatically "gee it must be genuine" and then if he had a visitor's or tourist visa, that is where the confusion comes in.
Why did the judge put a hold on him? Someone more legal can explain that, I have no doubt.
Also, a guy who left the country when he was a year old and lived most of his life in Mexico may technically be a "native-born citizen" but that is not the same as your original claim that he was born and reared in Georgia.
Whats the spread of opinions of 4chan still being down?
----
news as I understand:
The isreal post count was very fake
there were harvard professors among the admins, the .gov emails was funny maymay
image boards uncontrolled by intel agencies(cia, garmany and israel) get cp spam, this is well documented and old news; there are court files of "(you)" tags on the screen shots
there was an email leak of the admins saying that "4chan dead forever" if to many moderators quit
there are credible buy offers
people care far less then they thought "did we all leave years ago"
This is the first I've heard of about that.
New ""I was just following orders"" just dropped: Haaretz made a number of interviews with the Israeli war criminals (sorry, "military personnel") who "have their doubts" about killing children. The full interview is worth reading here, the immense cope and self-soothing babbling about how you "need to trust the system" in this "justified war" notwithstanding, unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/RaBFD.
Of particular and extreme moral irony: An "educator" (i.e. a teacher or teacher-adjacent profession, most probably) who operates drone to kill children of the very same age he sits in class with. None of his transparently pathetic excuses would have ever worked to get him to kill his students, but the excuses work on Gazan children because different language, different culture, and dehumanization of the different.
slatestarcodex.com hosts a number of pages like this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/author/onsould/
Does anyone know what they are?
Also, https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ -- the second half of the comment section is spam.
Scott, you should turn off commenting, and maybe do some cleanup. But first turn off commenting, otherwise it will shortly be back again.
Trump: we're collecting $2 billion/day from the new tariffs. Big if true! Setting aside the question of who foots that bill (Trump thinks it's the other countries), that pace would be annual collections north of $700 billion annually.
But of course it's not true. On Monday U.S. Customs and Border Protection stated that "Since April 5, CBP has collected over $500 million under the new reciprocal tariffs..."
That pace would be more like $50 million/day so around $18 billion per year, i.e. increasing federal revenues by around four-tenths of one percent.
NY Times: Trump Waved Off Israeli Strike After Divisions Emerged in His Administration
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-israel-iran-nuclear.html
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/QScpj
> Mr. Netanyahu arrived in Washington on April 7. While the trip was presented as an opportunity for him to argue against Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the most important discussion for the Israelis was their planned strike on Iran.
> But while Mr. Netanyahu was still at the White House, Mr. Trump publicly announced the talks with Iran.
A lesson for everyone: if Trump ever invites you to the White House, you should expect that his plan is to publicly make a fool out of you. Probably to make himself seem like the smarter one.
> In March, Mr. Trump had sent a letter offering direct talks with Iran, an overture that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had appeared to reject. But on March 28, a senior Iranian official sent a letter back signaling openness to indirect talks.
A smart guy.
Given the general quality and moral caliber of people who tend to deal with Trump, are we sure we want to really give them the lesson?
Granted, the IQ to digest the lesson is simply not there, but still, **I want** to see war criminals and dictators humiliated, please don't interrupt them while they're gurgling on Trumpo's orange balls.
I totally agree that war criminals should be humiliated. Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah are both dead. Let all war criminals who target civilians in military conflict die like them.
PS: try to make your NPC-like nature less obvious by paying attention to the wider context, in this context mentioning Yahia and Nasrallah makes no sense, they were never Trump allies.
The pro-Israel side doesn't need more Hasbarah bots, they already bought several contracts for ChatGPT from Microsoft.
I do not know what NPC means. Can you clarify?
>The pro-Israel side doesn't need more Hasbarah bots, they already bought several contracts for ChatGPT from Microsoft.
Why the ad hominem? Do you not have arguments?
Non-Playable Character. Used as an ironic remark on people who don't seem to think independently or pay attention to the special context they're saying things in, just repeating standard scripted responses. (Like non-playable characters in a video game).
> Why the ad hominem?
I don't believe it is, it's a very accurate description of abruptly jumping to Nasrallah and Sinwar when the context you're replying in is about Trump and Right-Wing Western and Western-adjacent dictators. Nasrallah and Sinwar are Jihadist dictator-like figures of non-state actors, and they're different on nearly every axis to Right-Wing dictators like Trump and Netanyahu except generic authoritarianism like opposition to Women's Rights or Freedom of Press.
I find no other explanation of this other than being pre-programmed with how to respond in the case of encountering Pro-Palestinian commenters, and you enacting that programming with no customization or extra thinking about the context you're discussing.
> Let all war criminals who target civilians in military conflict die like them.
That's quite antisemitic, at least according to most Pro-Israel talk heads I hear and read, they seem to passionately think it's the right of the Jewish state to murder children.
It's blood libel to say they're war criminals or that they're murdering children though, it's just... Hamas that are hiding "behind" the children. How are they hiding? Beyond me, I personally tower over my 6 years old nephew, five of him can hide behind me, but the Pro-Israel talk heads have assured me that their Hasbara manuals never lie.
> Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah
Small fish, Israel murders more babies in a week than the grand total they do in a lifetime. And finds more defenders in the West.
>Small fish
Since you called them "small fish", is your argument that they are not worthy of condemnation?
Your argument also seems to confuse deliberately targeting civilians versus civilians dying in war.
Civilians dying in war is horrible. I wish there was less war. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime (or should be). Only one side carried an attack where it deliberately slaughtered civilians (Oct 7th). Do you condemn the Oct 7th attacks?
> is your argument that they are not worthy of condemnation?
That's just you not understanding English, not gonna humor this incompetence.
> deliberately targeting civilians
As has Israel admitted to doing several dozens of time, and have been found in independent investigation hundreds if not thousands of time. Since forever. Type "Rachel Corrie" into a search engine or LLM of your choice. Or just look at my username to find the 6-year-old 2024 update.
> Only one side carried an attack where it deliberately slaughtered civilians
I know how to visit websites, if I wanted naked shameless propaganda I would just visit the Jerusalem Post or Times of Israel, or hell, the twitter timeline of any war criminal wanted by the ICC for war crimes against civilians.
> Do you condemn the Oct 7th attacks?
Do you condemn murdering babies? Do you condemn murdering medics from close range with their ambulances blaring? It seems like you need to answer those much more serious questions first before we continue to have a discussion.
>A lesson for everyone: if Trump ever invites you to the White House, you should expect that his plan is to publicly make a fool out of you. Probably to make himself seem like the smarter one.
Can you advise on what you are referencing? Trump did no such thing to Netanyahu based on my reading.
Netanyahu went to the US hoping to decrease or lift tariffs, and to push Trump to a more hawkish position on Iran. He failed to achieve both, and Trump openly said both things won't happen in front of the cameras.
If this is not making a fool of Netanyahu, that's probably because Netanyahu is a bootlicking whore used to abuse from what he sees as stronger men who are entitled to abuse him.
So Trump will disagree with foreign leaders and advance US interests? I am taking that inference from what you said.
Not really disagree, just refuse their begging. There is no level playground they're arguing with him on, just them coming to request things in humiliation and him telling them no in front of the cameras. He relishes the cameras, he's just a reality show airhead after all is said and done.
I do wish Trump liked the camera less.
And if you are talking about level playgrounds. Based on your arguments, you seem to support the Palestinian side. My opinion is that those who support the Palestinian side and care about deaths should encourage Palestinian sides to support the 2 state solution and drop any "river to the sea" nonsense.
Otherwise, the Palestinian side will continue to suffer humiliations (of some sort) by continuing to lose militarily to Israel.
Insurance companies decided this was the year to stop covering conditions from "wars, declared or undeclared"
This is normal. They've always done this, people just sometimes look in their documents and go "huh buh wha???" and it goes viral. Insurance works for things where the risk is uncorrelated (e.g. some small % of the population gets in a car crash, but it's basically the same every year, so we can all pay to cover ourselves in case we get in a car crash); if the risk is population-level, then it stops working. Insurers can't cover things like wars because all of the sudden, everyone's house gets blown up at the same time, everybody's primary earner dies simultaneously, etc.
Where is this? That’s been a thing in Australia at least 5-10 yeaes
if you must have a source
https://nicecrew.digital/notice/At8cFrcVqyrLMddX9M
I know it can be onerous to provide source, but thank you for providing the link, because I wouldn't have believed it otherwise — and even then I wondered if this wasn't an edgelord meme...
...but voila!
https://insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/insurance-polices-adding-insurrection-riots-as-exclusions
Insurance companies haven't commented on why they've made that change, but the author points out that Travel Insurance policies have had exclusions for war-related cancellations for a while now.
> I know it can be onerous to provide source
I believe its bad for y'alls epistemic health, mere steps away from outsourcing your think'n
You're in good company with the likes of Descartes and Spinoza.
In a previous thread, I mentioned that none of the reasoning models I tried gave a correct answer to this very easy problem (much easier than any AIME problem I've ever seen):
A lion and three zebras play a game on the line $\mathbb R$. It is important that it is the line $\mathbb R$ and not the plane $\mathbb R^2$. Here are the rules of the game. The lion wins if it ever occupies the same position as any zebra. The zebras win if they can all escape the lion indefinitely. On the lion's turn, the he can move a distance of up to 1 from his current position. On the zebras' turn, they choose one zebra and that zebra moves a distance of up to 1 from its current position. So the lion moves, then one zebra moves, then the lion moves, etc. To belabor the point, only one zebra moves between each move by the lion. They do not all get to move, although they can choose which zebra moves. The lion starts the game at 0, and the zebras can choose their starting position freely. Does the lion have a winning strategy, or do the zebras?
All the models said that either the zebras win or the lion wins by chasing the nearest zebra. I just tried this question on o3 and o4-mini-high, though from their responses it looks like they were peaking at my previous chats. But either way both are still wrong. o3 said that the lion wins by chasing the nearest zebra which is not the zebra that moved on the last turn, which is new, but still incorrect. I got excited because o4-mini-high said that a winning strategy is "chase the median zebra" which sounds correct! But the strategy that would work is to chase the middle zebra, whereas what o4-mini-high actually said when I read further was to chase the zebra which is second closest, which is a strategy which hilariously fails if the zebras don't move at all.
o3: https://chatgpt.com/share/6800201e-a158-800d-89b1-a1b34595e6a8
o4-mini-high: https://chatgpt.com/share/6800206f-05ec-800d-a7e4-40a0ba09eee6
doesn't the lion win no matter what, if its tokens on a line? It doesn't matter which zebra you chase because the lion will move twice as fast and will close with any zebra no matter where on the line. So the winning strategy is just going straight in the direction a zebra is, no matter how far it is. Given enough time it can't out run you and it only has moving in positive or negative directions.
near or far only affects the time till the lion wins, having more than one zebra is pointless. one will always be a laggard, and they always run away, not towards.
The lion doesn't move faster than a single zebra. The point is that in one direction, there are at least two zebras. By moving in that direction, the lion strictly decreases the average distance to those two zebras by at least 1/2. This can only happen finitely many times before at least one of the zebras is within distance one on the start of the lion's turn. But e.g. if the lion moves strictly in a direction that only has one zebra, it won't win.
ah i see. i missed the 2-1 split.
I like how the characters are a lion and three zebras, and then the setting is a nonsense place that only exists in math theory and can't possibly contain a lion and three zebras.
When you play chess, do you complain that *real* wars don't take place on an eight-by-eight grid? Lion and Zebra are flavor words that make it clear which game piece is the chaser and which are the chase-ees.
Well, chess takes place on a battlefield, divided into ranks and files. Meanwhile lions and zebras are known for being on... you know, the planes.
Like, you could put them in a hallway or something. Maybe a trench.
"DOJ attorney Marc Sacks said the government had not gathered new evidence to that effect."
Odds that by close of business today he will be "former DOJ attorney Marc Stacks"....?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/climate/epa-clean-energy-ruling/index.html
It looks like we might have former Fed Chair Jerome Powell pretty soon too. Powell was only stating a well reasoned prediction though.
It would have to go all the way up to SCOTUS because there are legal precedents that the Prez can't fire heads of independent agencies. The Federal Reserve Act specifically states that the Fed chair and the other governors cannot be fired except for cause, and not over mere policy disagreements. But then again, SCOTUS seems to be sharpening its knives against the chairs of other independent agencies that conservatives dislike. And since central banks were one of the central planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto (along with things like universal education), conservatives have been against the Fed since its inception.
I wonder if Substack devs are aware of what I can only explain as a mime having subscribed to Scott's blog. Possibly others; I don't follow nearly enough to have a sample size. (I don't see it on David Friedman's, for the record.)
And now there's a second one.
Why isn't phone spam way worse? It seems like it has marginal cost almost zero (for texts and robocalls at least) and obviously some benefit. I would sort of expect either almost no phone spam, or enough to make me want to throw out my cellphone. And it doesn't seem like there's a huge amount of protection on the user's end, because calls make it to my iPhone with the subheading "Potential Spam." So why do I get 1 spam call a day instead of 100?
Within the US, there are federal laws against spamming cell phone numbers either by voice calls or text, going back to the early 90s (the main law is the TSPA) when cell phone users needed to pay for incoming calls and texts. The law isn't perfectly enforced, but it's enforced enough that text spamming never really got established as an advertising channel and voice call spamming (telemarketing) died out as cell phones became ubiquitous. Also, cell networks actively try to detect and block illegal phone spam before it reaches you.
Coming from other countries, the marginal cost is somewhat higher than you'd expect since international calls and text messages cost the sender a nontrivial amount. Something like 25 or 30 cents for a text message from India to the US, for example, at least according to a quick googling. By comparison, web ads can cost under a cent per impression if you aren't targeting particularly expensive demographics or interests, and email spam is nearly free. International spam also does get blocked to a certain extent at the carrier level.
The trickle I get is mostly obvious scams from international numbers, local realtors and contractors trying to cold-call homeowners, US-based political spam, and the occasional CRM push from businesses I have bought stuff from. The latter two are legal under the TSPA and also easy to block because they're trying to technically comply with the law. Realtors and contractors are small enough scale that they slip under the radar of both legal and technical enforcement of the TSPA. And the scammers are trying to do something that is harder to do by cheaper channels and which presumably has a high enough average payoff to be worth the cost of sending the messages.
My spam calls dropped from 3 or 4 a day to almost nothing when the Feds shut down Adrian Abramovich's operation. But now they're picking up again. Luckily, my cellular provider tags them as likely spam now.
But the phone at my mom's house (she's in her nineties) seems to ring all day long with spam calls. She feels obligated to pick up. She's quite deaf, though, so she'll waste their time with "sorry, you'll need to speak more clearly, because I can't understand you. No, I still can't hear you. Speak up, please..." And so on, until they hang up in frustration.
First, federal Do Not Call list helped me a lot.
Second, your mom sounds like a real-life Its Lenny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngYsK9aZPoA
kyc, cellphones can be made into remote bomb triggers while the us government controls satellites and doesn't wish for to enable such things without getting some spyware here or there, some credit card information.
I don't follow. Can you explain that further?
"Know your customer" is a euphemism for a bunch of usa government mandating private businesses assist its spy/law enforcement network. Everything from bank transfers that are deemed "suspicious" get reported to the irs for tax dodging, to forergn for terrorism.
This just out of sight fascism, also applies to cellphones the only hint you will see of this is if you attempt to buy a disposable cellphone with cash the cash register will inform the minimum wage clerk to ask for id; because otherwise 99% of the time cellphones can be connected to name from just credit cards. The american empire believes strongly in catching flys with honey over vinegar on its home soil.
Pokemon go was funded by the cia, theres an always on computer inside every processor that will likely be worse then "appendix H" when we find out what it does in 30 years. etc etc.
Compared to bomb making and the surveillance network meant for "fighting terrorism", scammers are... small, presumably they get cleared out to maintain a "fire line"
I get 2 or 3 a day. Usually I just disregard them. A few days ago I picked up and shouted angrily:
Guten tag? Доброе утро? Bueno morni?
They hung up. It was mildly satisfying.
A few months ago I was getting several a day either calls or texts. Quite irritating.
I noticed that the phone numbers which spam calls/texts displayed weren't actually random -- there was clear clustering in both the area code (first 3 digits) and exchange (second 3 digits) portions of the 10 digit numbers. That made me wonder whether the spammers, rather than displaying randomly-generated 10-digit fake numbers as I'd always assumed, were in fact working off of lists of phone numbers.
What kind of lists that would be or why, I've no idea and don't really care. My agenda is to discourage this crap. Hence an experiment.
I adopted a personal SOP of, without exception, doing my cell carrier's "block and report" function for all spam texts and all unknown-number callers that don't leave a voicemail. (It's a small extra chore but pretty small, just a few taps.) The idea being to gradually degrade the effectiveness of whatever lists the spammers are working from.
Results seem to suggest success: my rate of spam calls/texts is way lower now. Spam texts have basically vanished, and spam calls are now maybe one every 3rd or 4th day. I still do the block/report thing every time but now it's rare enough that I have to remind myself how to do it.
Of course other explanations for the change are possible: maybe there is a seasonal pattern to this stuff or something else. Whatever the case is: having my longtime cell number be much less polluted with that crap is pleasant.
SSC Diplomacy 2025 has ended in a four way draw
https://www.backstabbr.com/game/SSC-Diplomacy-2025/5968099650961408
My AAR (as England)
1901
Negotiations all around. Turkey, Austria and Italy all seem experienced and competent. France seems like a loose cannon. Germany wants a Western triple, which I am not so keen on (what is there for England to do, after 1901, in a Western triple)? France wants an alliance where England gets everything North of the channel and France gets everything to the South. This is an even worse deal for me, which basically caps my possible gains at Scandinavia and long run leaves my back door open to a French stab. I play for time until I have a better read on the alliances and character of the main powers. France screws up tactics, failing to take Portugal, and simultaneously antagonizes Germany by moving to Burgundy. Good, that should take the `western triple' off the menu.
1902
France and Russia want me to join them in dismembering Germany. Denmark and Holland are offered as a bribe. This is a rotten deal for me - it leaves me no possible route for expansion without stabbing one of my `allies,' and leaves me sandwiched between the French hammer and Russian anvil. Germany is now open to a two way alliance, and I decide to throw in with Germany. I propose to Germany that we swap Denmark and Belgium, which is convenient because it allows me to efficiently hold all of Scandinavia in a pretty stab proof manner with only fleets. I take Sweden and I launch an all out assault on France.
The objective is to knock France over quickly and then burst into the Med (no route to solo for England without that). This plan would have worked except that Germany screws up the defense of the fatherland, allowing France a build France should not have had. All of a sudden the quick elimination of France is no longer on the table. And now I have a problem - in the Med Turkey is on the ropes and Italian naval power is looking dangerously strong, the Med is in danger of turning into an `Italian lake' before I can burst past Gibraltar, and I need to get into the Med to have any reasonable shot at a solo.
I try to broker a detente between Austria and Turkey, to get Turkish fleets in the Med to challenge Italian naval power, but no dice.
1903-1905
By this point I've realized that Austria and Italy are allied, and Austria has pissed a lot of powers off. This period of the game basically consists of me trying to organize a five-power coalition against the Austro-Italian menace. I am able to bring both the French and the Russians onside (the Turks were already there), and to get a toe-hold across Gibraltar. Unfortunately, the coalition is not all that successful. The problem is that the units at the sharp end are all allied units of minor powers, who will neither outright accept dictation of what they should do, nor do they make shrewd tactical choices. Even obvious tactical advice (like `if you are going to attack Galicia support from Warsaw and attack from elsewhere, Warsaw is the only unit whose support cannot be cut') gets ignored. This allows Austria-Italy to consolidate control over Anatolia. In 1904 Austria points out that Austria-Italy has a probable stalemate line they can hide behind, and by late 1905 (whereupon they've consolidated control over Anatolia) I conclude that this is correct. The Austro-Italian coalition cannot be defeated by force of arms. There's a small chance I might be able to break through if all other powers would immediately let me write their moves, but obviously that's not going to happen, and the chance of a successful coalition breakthrough are basically nil. There's also a small chance that I could solo without breaking the Austro-Italian stalemate line, but it's hard - I'm not sure I'd be able to hold Austria-Italy off if I redeployed against my allies. Also it requires stabbing Germany which I'm loath to do, since he's been a loyal ally all game. I might stab him if said stab had a high chance of leading to a solo, but I don't want to stab him for a longshot chance.
At the same time I am worrying that France is a liability - her commitment to the alliance has always seemed shaky, she might flip, and I need to ensure the neutralization of Brest to ensure my own security. Leading into Fall 1905, France's loyalty to the alliance seems particularly suspect. So, in Fall 1905, Germany and I stab the minors. France turns on me at the same time (not entirely a surprise), and our stabs nearly cancel, but its good enough - I have my own stalemate position in the west from which I cannot be dislodged. Defeat is now off the table, as long as Germany remains loyal.
Austria had offered a four way draw of the majors some seasons ago. I decide to pick up on the offer. All the majors accept. There's little else to be done. Both major alliances have fallback stalemate positions from which they cannot be dislodged. I write to the minors saying the majors have accepted a four way draw. Russia and Turkey accept, but France at the last minute says she wishes to fight on.
1906
Austria and I engage in a game of diplomatic chicken over where exactly the border will be for our four way truce, but matters are upended by the disappearance in civil disorder of Italy. Now I have a decision to make: with Italy AWOL I can very likely ride this game to a solo, but (1) that doesn't seem very sporting, to solo after three surrenders (one of a major power), (2) that will require stabbing Germany, which I'm increasingly reluctant to do. He's been a loyal ally all game (3) by now I've come to realize that I don't actually like how playing this game makes me feel. Securing the trust of a bunch of people who I consider my internet friends and then betraying it doesn't leave me feeling good about myself.
I decide to adhere to the four way draw (Germany and Austria both unsurprisingly agree). We eliminate the minors and close the game.
It was a good game. Probably my last outing in Diplomacy though. I don't expect to play again any time soon.
>(3) by now I've come to realize that I don't actually like how playing this game makes me feel. Securing the trust of a bunch of people who I consider my internet friends and then betraying it doesn't leave me feeling good about myself.
This is why I haven't actually played Diplomacy in 12 years. Even if I win I feel like I lost!
Also where I wound up after my last game here. May do it again in a few years; parts of it are enjoyable, and parts are a worth accomplishment, and parts of it are regrettably useful skills, but I'm still not ready to go back.
This was a fun game, I appreciate you putting it together!
I'm impressed Italy managed to keep themselves in.
tl;dr: ChatGPT 4.1 via poe.com 04/15/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 1 partially correct, 3 quarter-credit, 1 wrong
a) correct
b) pretty bad, calling it 1/4 credit (species correct, but d-d analysis wrong for _both_ , and not fixed by prodding)
c) pretty bad, calling it incorrect (includes imposible structures, can't even get full list of acyclic structures)
d) correct
e) pretty bad, call it 1/4 credit
f) partial credit, final list is well filtered, accepts additional valid compound
g) 1/4 credit - includes one correct molecule, possibly by accident, many wrong
https://poe.com/s/L791hj7gnc5eHd6GzxJ5
I'm not sure if 4.1 is supposed to be a reasoning model. <snark>If it is, it doesn't do it well.</snark>
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initial results fairly bad. Got the species, at least. But it thinks _both_ of them have color contributions from d-d absorbtions, zilch about the FeCl4 case being spin forbidden, zilch about the CuCl4 case d-d transition getting pushed down into the near-IR. It _does_ recognize that charge transfer is a contributor to both.
Prod 1 - FeCl4, "Anything notable about the FeCl4- d-d transition?"
"d–d transitions are, in theory, possible (unlike in [Fe(H₂O)₆]³⁺, an octahedral high-spin d⁵, where d–d transitions are spin-forbidden and extremely weak" NOOO!!!!
Prod 2 - "Where in the spectrum do you expect the CuCl4 2- d-d transitions to be, considering the tetrahedral geometry and the spectrochemical series?"
"Because of the small splitting, [CuCl₄]²⁻ absorbs in the blue/violet region (short wavelength, high energy).
Absorption maximum (λmaxλmax) for this ion is typically in the range:
425–450 nm (blue region of the visible spectrum)" Wahhh! It should be 1000nm or longer. Call it 1/4 credit from getting the species.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: It got the fully saturated C4H10 species right, and the C4H8 species and then its answers started going wrong. Under C4H6, it has 1-butyne and 2-butyne, but then it adds (CH3)3C(triple bond)CH which has 5 carbons and a carbon with 6 bonds, and cyclobutyne, which (albeit unstable) should have been under C4H4. Then it repeats the cyclobutane and methylcyclopropane (which it at least recognizes as duplicates) - then it stops, and thinks it is done!
Prod: "You are missing a lot of species. To keep this simple, can you think carefully about at least the full set of acyclic species, and list them?"
Missing all the species with multiple double or triple bonds, e.g. 1,3butadiene. Includes an impossible (CH3)2C(triple bond)CH
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The Sun loses about three times more mass per second through its radiated light (via E=mc2E=mc2) than through the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Initial answer - initial slope is off by a factor of 2 (I think it misses the valume effect), final slope is correct, usual problem with equivalence point slope falsely called infinite.
Prod: "The slope at the equivalence point is not infinite. Can you think of a property of water that is relevant, and redo the equation and the calculation to account for it?"
Aargh! It realizes that water autoionization is crucial, and it writes down the ion product correctly, but it _doesn't_ construct the charge balance equation, and gets another wrong equation with an infinite answer, then goes off in the weeds with some other mistakes. Call it 1/4 credit?
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Does some very weird things. It includes a lot of valid compounds. It includes some compounds like HF, but then excuses itself, saying that they are liquid (and therefore shouldn't count, though it doesn't say this explicitly), but then it includes WF5, MoF6, and UF6, includes their boiling/sublimation points, all of which are too high, but makes _not_ comment about them being liquids or solids instead of gases. It also has a section of "oxides and oxyacids" where it includes HF, HCl, and HBr???? It does eventually present a final list which _does_ exclude the high boiling stuff.
Prod "SiH2F2 ?" It _does_ correctly accept this as an additional compound.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: I'm going to give 1/4 credit here, but it gave a very weird answer. It cited a whole bunch of molecules, one of which, 1,3,5,7 tetramethycyclooctatetraene, is correct, but also citing a whole bunch of incorrect ones, including ones which can be wrong in a bunch of different isomers that it didn't specify (tetrafluorocubane), ones which have mirror planes (tetramethylallene - for which it initially gave the wrong structure and wrong formula) and tetramethyltetrahedrane (has full Td symmetry - which ChatGPT didn't recognize).
Good test.
GPT-4.1 is not a reasoning model. It's a model focused on programming ability that's supposed to be better than GPT-4o while also being slightly cheaper. It also has a large context window of 1 million tokens.
tl;dr: ChatGPT o3 04/16/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
3 correct, 3 partially correct, 1 wrong
a) correct
b) partially correct (correct species and FeCl4 transition initially, prod gave fully correct, including CuCl4 transition)
c) fully correct
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) partially correct - finds 50 valid compounds, then stops. Correctly accepts Si2H6.
g) badly wrong
( Attempt to share the link was "disabled by moderation" WTF??? )
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes. Light at 530.253 489 6 nm lies well inside the band of wavelengths that the normal human visual system detects."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initial response: Knows of LMCT transitions for both ions. Correctly excluded Fe d-d transition (seems to be using spin-forbidden knowledge), so that is fully right. Gave it a prod: "Please think carefully about what wavelength the CuCl4 2- d-d transition occurs at." Got: "For CuCl₄²⁻ the d–d transition sits mostly in the red/near‑IR (≈ 700 – 1 000 nm depending on exact flattening), while the colour you actually see is set chiefly by a strong LMCT band in the blue region." Fully correct at this point.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Fully correct. Got tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, bicyclobutane, diacetylene, ... as nearly as I can tell, _all_ the possible isomers (excluding carbenes, which they explicitly explained).
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Thus, at today’s epoch the Sun loses roughly three times more mass every second by shining than by blowing it away in the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Initial response got the derivatives and the start and end, but got "so the ideal slope is infinite" at the equivalence point. It mentions, but doesn't use, autoprolysis == autoionization. Prod: "Can you derive an expression valid at the equivalence point and construct the analytical and numerical derivative there?" After the prod, got the correct equations (charge balance + autoionization), solved correctly, got correct analytical and numerical derivative.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Got up to 50, all valid, but didn't go beyond it. Prod: "Si2H6 ?" Accepted it, as it should.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: They tried tetramethylallene, which has an S4, but also two mirror planes. I tried multiple prods, but it kept rotating the tetramethylallene, falsely thinking that it had gotten rid of the mirror planes. It finally switched to 1,3,5,7 tetrachlorocyclooctatetraene, which _does_ work, but only in the nonplanar configuration (it initially said planar).
Many Thanks! Do you happen to know what the next reasoning model from OpenAI is going to be called (and therefore what I should test)? Should I be watching for some flavor of o4 ? For a non-mini o3? For something else? At the moment the best results I've seen to date are from Google's Gemini 2.5 https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-376/comment/107512257
o3 and o4-mini were actually just released today I believe.
https://openai.com/index/introducing-o3-and-o4-mini/
Many Thanks! Yes, I saw the release, and did the test on o3 (which seems like the most relevant one) and posted the result (which looks much better than the 4.1 result) one ply up in this thread, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-377/comment/109495090
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-based-ritual
I don't think Hanania has any punches left to pull. This one's downright brutal.
Here's the thing: those people actually went out and won: Hanania is sour graping them on substack. Who is the bigger stupid, the stupid or the stupid who lost to them?
At some point, when you get your ass handed to you, you need to realize you can't blame or insult. You lost to them. The dems used the "Trump voters are weird" thing back then but apparently weird can get things done.
Courteous words or hard knocks, as tirian said. Don't scold.
Hannai endorsed Trump, I believe. What did he say? Something like capitalism is more important than democracy. Harris had mentioned something about looking into price gouging.
And I don’t think the Dems said Trump voters are weird. They were talking about Trump and Vance. Plus I don’t think ‘weird’ is a particularly offensive insult compared to what comes out of Trump’s mouth on a regular basis.
Well, given that they were (maybe still are) the party of (claimed by some) LGBT+ acceptance, Drag Queen Story Hour, etc. then saying "that bunch over there are kinda weird" was very much the pot calling the kettle black, especially as it was Walz (selling point for the Dems: he's a white cis het guy from the boonies, he even was in the military and coached high school football! he's our very own version of a redneck to appeal to the rednecks! but he is progressive and onboard with the Right Side of History, so he's not one of the bad ones!) talking about it:
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-walz-vp-weird-trump-gen-z-f9d718890c3ca907f42dba5934075382
Now, you may get very fine-grained about "oh he was talking about the *party leaders* not the *voters*" but let's face it, people in general don't make that kind of fine distinction. If you hear "X says the Bleeps are oddballs" or "Y claims the Nongnongs are nutjobs", then if you're a Bleep-voting supporter of the Bleep party, you think that applies to you as well, same goes for a Nongnong-voting supporter of the Nongnong party.
Suppose I said "the Democrats are racists", would you - Gunflint - be satisfied by a clarification that "no, I meant the leaders, not you the Democrat voter"? Would you feel happy that I wasn't calling you personally a racist? Would it make you more inclined to listen to me telling you why you should leave that racist party led by racists and come over to my Pure True Patriotic Gaelically Gaelic Party?
>Suppose I said "the Democrats are racists", would you - Gunflint - be satisfied by a clarification that "no, I meant the leaders, not you the Democrat voter"
Well, I don’t think it’s likely you would do that but if you did I would not take it personally. I would simply think you were not right in the head.
We can even take this out of the realm of the hypothetical and look at *one* of the times Barack Obama was called a racist.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32197648
I listen and I just think, “He’s crazy. He probably calls everyone Vernon too.”
The fact is they insulted but he did things. you can go on about someone who is racist or weird but if the racist or weird people outright defeat you, you are the loser. insulting them further does nothing.
it makes you fall into a "hater orbit" where they call the shots. Articles like this feel more like an expression of powerlessness and regaining it by pointing at how gauche the new invaders are.
Okay a couple things
1. I thought Hanania’s essay was mean spirited and counterproductive stereotyping myself
2. Hanania endorsed and voted for Trump in 2024. He’s being a sore winner here not a sore loser.
3. Complaining about Walz calling Vance and Trump weird before the election is kind of crazy when you compare it to Trump’s ordinary everyday rhetoric. ‘Weird’ is small beer compared to ‘radical left wing communist lunatic’, ‘stone cold loser’, ‘complete idiot’, ‘whacko’, ‘fat pig’. . .
I could go on for a long time with this list. You should really get over that particular tiny insult directed at Vance and Trump. This is the sort of hot air you throw at your older brother when you quarrel.
I think very poorly of Hanania, so bash him to your heart's content, I'll be in agreement 😁
But I do think that when you get into using terms like "weird", then you are descending to the teenage level of swapping insults and it's not very encouraging for the prospect of "we have to cool down the heat, we must pass this polarised kind of arguing" reversion to substantive speech:
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-walz-vp-weird-trump-gen-z-f9d718890c3ca907f42dba5934075382
"Now the party is turning the page with a new generation of candidates trying to appeal not just to Americans’ fears about what a second Trump presidency would mean, but to plainly label the policies and actions of the Republican party as abnormal. And Democrats see no more effective messenger to deliver this new attack than Walz, the 60-year-old Midwestern dad, who on Tuesday was chosen to become their vice presidential nominee.
“Gov. Walz can do the job, and helps reinforce that we’re team normal,” freshman Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio said in a statement Tuesday. “We’re pragmatic, reliable and bipartisan.”
Wow, team normal, huh? Guess that means that given my views broadly speaking where I am in agreement with Republican party political positions, that makes me team abnormal. And what it means that a 60 year old man is stooping to the level of 18 year old online talk, is not very reassuring about "we're the adults in the room, you creepy loser!"
Well, me and the other Igors and Igorinas will be over here nodding proudly at our badge of infamy!
https://wiki.lspace.org/Igor
Okay at a keyboard now.
I’m going leave Vance out of this right now because he speaks primarily to an audience of one. Vance speaking in Greenland: “We can’t just ignore this place. We can’t just ignore the president’s desires”. So for now he’s not going to say anything at all to get on Trump’s bad side. He’ll speak for himself when Trump is gone.
This is how Trump sneeringly referred to the Democrats sitting in the audience for the March 5th joint session of Congress, "these people" and "radical left lunatics". He went on to carp about how they wouldn’t applaud him. Kinda weird, huh?
Do you yourself not think the guy is a strange dude?
The pejorative is so mild compared to what has been coming out of Trump’s mouth for the last 10 years (1) I really don’t get why Republicans found this so offensive. I think most of the people commenting on this blog would fall into the category ‘eccentric’ which is a more polite synonym. I’ve been called weird many times in my life and in the context of what sometimes passes for normal behavior I wear it as a badge of pride.
1) A very incomplete list:
“Weirdo”, “total loser!”, “a waste”, “SCUM,” “Radical Left Wack Job”, “Obama flunky”, “Ungrateful fool!”, “Castro-lover”, “dumb as a rock”, “wacko”, “mental basket case”, “a real nut job”, “low-life”, “Crooked as can be”, “a total fool”, “total loser”, “the lowest of them all”, “WORST in history”, “clown”, “dummy”, “dope”, “ditsy airhead”, “Psycho”, “Crazy”, “not very bright”, “crazy and very dumb”, “Radical Left Hater”, “a total train wreck”, “A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR”, “sleazebag”, “Slimeball”, “Moonface”, “Horseface”, “a Fraud”, “fired like a dog”, “flake”, “lightweight mayor”, “Cryin Chuck”, “zero talent”
Caught me pre coffee and on my phone again. I’ll try to respond at a keyboard after I’m fully awake.
its more me being annoyed sore winner or loser that people do stuff like insult enemies (are they even his allies) than solve the problem.
if the barbarians conquer you, i don't want people making comedy about how stinky they are, but how we need to be freed of them. They don't care what you think.
I've had interactions with that same demographic, which I drew from to write a series of similar fictional stories:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/peaks-and-troughs-of-white-nationalist
In my experience they're not as bad as Hanania portrays them, still, many are infected with pretty bad brainworms.
It’s an exercise in portraying an exaggerated negative stereotype. He obviously wasn’t describing something he actually witnessed.
I didn’t like it.
Hanania has no stones to throw about anyone else's appearance, so even if he's going for colour writing, "look at these stupids, you can tell they're stupids by their hair and clothing" is not doing him any favours as regards getting his point across.
I'm certainly less attractive than anyone described in that post, but at least I don't go around using terms like "Heritage Americans."
I do wonder about that term, I haven't seen it in the wild (so to speak) and looking it up brings me mostly to this sort of page, where I also wonder how serious they are (then again, they're Calvinist-derived, so they could be this kooky in reality):
https://americanreformer.org/2024/08/heritage-america/
I take it as Hanania being heavy-handed with the satire, though on the other side of the fence there is the attempt by the likes of Tariq Nasheed amongst others to popularise Foundational Black American (to distinguish Black or African-American population descending from slaves, from the new immigrant black populations from Africa)
https://officialfba.com/
I presume from context that it means "herrenvolk."
I've skimmed it and I'm confused whether this is all a description of real interactions or just something that Hanania made up. If it's real then why was Hanania invited to this conversation? If it's just made up then what sort of conclusions am I supposed to draw from a conversation that Hanania has imagined?
At the top he says "Note: I’ve known these people. And Yes, it actually is this bad," which I take to mean it's fiction.
Yeah, the give away was right at the top.
It's a comedy with political relevance. You are supposed to laugh. I find for one find it very funny, but then I am extremely non-based ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd find it more comedic if the bitterness about "why am I not in the room where things happen?" wasn't bleeding through every paragraph. Yes, Richard, those grapes are probably sour anyway and you're better off without them. Sure, Vance is VP now and maybe he went to a university you can't just write off as "a university nobody had heard of in Pennsylvania" but hey, he's just a hick deep down and you can laugh about him using Latin phrases he clearly misunderstands because you understand them much, much better than he ever could.
I think your take is very uncharitable. Imho Alexander Turok is probably right that Hanania could get great career opportunities in Trumpworld had he been willing to suck up to MAGAs. But in any case we should not inpute lowly motives to others without good evidence.
Oh come on. Hanania, like Richard Spencer, could have been the king of the Online Right if he was willing to degrade himself with Yay Trump, Christ is Kang, Vaccines are poison, blah blah. Neither did because they have integrity, a concept MAGA is psychologically incapable of grasping.
Being King of the Online Right doesn't get you much real-world status and influence.
Richard Hanania's idea of integrity is tossing around nice sounding Ayn Ran quotes before giving spiels on how evil and stupid MAGA is for canceling government programs. Or writing about what a brave, bold stance it is to oppose racism. The guy's an obnoxious shill and a hack, just for a different side of the board.
Hey blank, when you add a bunch of stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, people who liked the old platform might decide they don't like the new one and depart.
I'd lean at least 80% towards it being made up. At a number of points it seems to be very clearly and deliberately trying to echo similar interactions on the left.
Hmm I'm not going to read it unless you say more... I haven't read R. Hanania.
Short version: the MAGA Zoomers in DC are disgusting people.
Thanks, I almost voted for Trump and I'm still hopeful. I think he's an asshole for pissing off Canada and Mexico. "Sorry neighbors". Still it's early times in the Trump administration. I like Bobby and Tulsi and Kash, and remain hopeful.
Tulsi Gabbard is a nearly a full blown Russian agent.
Huh, I disagree. No problem we can all have our different opinions. I've listened to Tulsi for many hours on many podcasts. I like her as a politician, the last two presidential elections I made a write in vote. Tulsi Gabbard both times. Cheers.
On what do you base this statement?
Her endless pro-russian propaganda. The fact that she takes Russia's side every time. The fact that Russia state media has praised her many times. Peter Zeihan claims to have multiple sources in usint who are certain she has had clandestine conversations with Russia. She played defense for Assad.
What do you like about Bobby and Kash?
Hmm have you listened to them for a long podcast or read any books? I guess the short answer is that I think their hearts are in the right place.
Do you trust their reasoning though? Or their ability to discern when to follow one or the other?
It's going to be embarrassing if, after centuries of taking pride in the constitutional system of checks and balances, the first president to try to become a dictator succeeds
Adams lost the 1800 election though
Are you referring to the four term president for life Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
We are also famously not in a world war type emergency anymore, but I agree: since it's impossible to draw an absolute distinction between democracy and dictatorship and it's more of a murky spectrum, Trump is no more of a dictator than FDR.
For the record, I also see no difference between eating Italian home-made spaghetti and Haitian mud cake, since both are technically edible. /s
That's an absurd descriptor to use for him! A dictator would have intruded more deeply into people's lives, such as, for example, by penalizing farmers for growing wheat on their own farms to feed their own animals.
Farming is a bit complicated and I have a smol brin, maybe look at something simplier like a warlord stealing all the gold for your metric of when your in tyranny
I think that's too high a bar for dictatorship. Who would DO such a thing? I know Hitler is said to have stolen gold from Jews in the camps—ripping the fillings from their teeth, for example, before turning their skin into lampshades, and the fat from their corpses into soap—but I haven't heard that he confiscated gold from regular (non-Jewish) German citizens.
I think there is an ironic reference there to the ending of the Gold Standard, where in 1933 it was made illegal for US citizens to own gold and then in 1934 the Gold Reserve Act was passed. It was not until the 60s and 70s that you could own and trade gold again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act
"The United States Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. It also prohibited the Treasury and financial institutions from redeeming dollar bills for gold, established the Exchange Stabilization Fund under control of the Treasury to control the dollar's value without the assistance (or approval) of the Federal Reserve, and authorized the president to establish the gold value of the dollar by proclamation.
...A year earlier, in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins. These prohibitions were relaxed starting in 1964 – gold certificates were again allowed for private investors on April 24, 1964, although the obligation to pay the certificate holder on demand in gold specie would not be honored. By 1975, Americans could again freely own and trade gold."
That was all done under Roosevelt and he was the one who "changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35" in order to devalue the dollar and incentivise production of gold and export by foreigners of gold to the US, where it all ended up in the Treasury, where it increased the money supply which brought down interest rates and increased investment.
So whether that's tyrannical or not, we still have to wait for Trump to declare the price of gold is now 5 Trumpcoins per ounce for him to do anything similar 😁
Thanks. I knew that and was just playing along. My comment above was a similarly ironic reference to the Wickard v. Filburn case, which expanded federal power dramatically, classifying basically everything one does as "interstate commerce."
I think he must be talking about lincoln and habeas corpus
Super cool paper on how the meter was originally defined, and how it's pure coincidence that a meter can basically be defined as both:
1) the length of a pendulum that swings once per second
2) 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian
There is basically zero discussion on this anywhere else. I remember sitting in my physics class in college hearing that a seconds pendulum has the length of one meter and being dumbfounded.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0412078
Do you live in a metric country? I remember learning this quite early on from some junior science book.
Nope I live in glorious America where feet reign
I've tried converting Americans to metric but you're all a bunch of foot fetishists.
Hot take: the metre is a bad distance. The Systeme Internationale would be a lot better if the metre had been set to around one quarter or one fourth of its current size.
Why? Because the metre is an unwieldy distance compared to human scales. Things we care about tend to have a size which is either easily expressible in a single digit number of feet or a single digit number of inches, but a metre is too big and a centimetre is too small. If metres were one third smaller then we'd use metres for human-sized things and decimetres for hand-sized things and we'd be spared the indignity of being one point eight three metres tall.
I disagree, m is a very useful unit, as are dm and cm, and the 10x spacing makes sense. The problem is with bigger distances, as no one uses Dm or hm or hkm or whatever, so we end up with 1000x spacing between the units (or even worse, because no one uses Mm either).
Then why are yards a thing?
You usually say it in cents, ie. 183 cm in your example.
> one quarter or one fourth
...can you expand on this bit?
My brain had a partial meltdown from reading this, so all I'm going to reply is:
> a metre is too big and a centimetre is too small
That's what SHE said!
It's like how the foot is basically a light nanosecond.
And there are approximately pi seconds in a nanocentury.
OTOH, the speed of light is very close to 300 megameters per second!
The paper does suggest that it isn't entirely a coincidence, since the formulators of the metric system had quite a range of choices for how to anchor the meter to fractions of the Earth's dimensions. One part in 10 million of a quarter-circle is more than a little strange, as prior measurements of the Earth's size had focused on the entire circumference, or the radius, or the diameter, or the length of a degree, minute, or second of arc. The designers of the metric system provide only very weak justification for the choice of a quarter-circle and no discussion at all of alternative bases. The paper takes a look at about ten different potential bases from which a roughly meter-scaled decimal fraction could have been taken, and for those the quarter-circle basis was by far the closest to the length of a 1s pendulum. The papers' authors express more than a little suspicion about this.
Another coincidence (also noted in passing in that paper) is that the adopted (meridian-based) definition of the meter is just a little bit longer than half a toise. The toise was one of the basic length units of the pre-metric French units of measure, equivalent to an English fathom (i.e. based on a body measurement of the span of an adult man's outstretched arms, pegged to six feet) but was also used like an English yard, as the French system didn't have a direct yard-equivalent. The French foot (pied du roi) was slightly longer than an English foot, so a toise works out to 194.904 cm, making half a toise 97.4% of a meridian-based meter or 98.4% of a pendulum-based meter.
This latter is more likely to be an actual coincidence, since if the toise were a major influence on the choice of basis for the meter, then the somewhat less arbitrary choice of 1/10,000,000 of a half-circle (i.e. the great circle distance from pole to pole) would have been very close to a full toile. The paper also notes this part.
Last time I looked into this, years ago, I concluded that the French chose this ratio specifically because the resulting length happened to be close enough to a British yard to appeal to their intuition for what a convenient base length ought to be.
I didn't know about the toise, though.
This much is true, yet I still find it flabbergasting that the unit of time we made just happens to be to the half-period of one ten millionth of a quarter-circle around the earth’s meridian.
Certainly if I was one of those French dudes looking at 10 choices and saw this as an option I’d go “wtf?!”
Another weird coincidence related to the meter, and one which definitely wasn't on the radar of the designers of the metric system, is that a minute of arc of a great circle on Mars (i.e. a Martian nautical mile) is within a similar margin (1.2%) of one kilometer.
What is going on here? It seems like: republicans don't like DEI policies, so they engage in their own to give democrats a taste of their own medicine; then democrats accuse republicans of being hypocrites. Is the republican strategy to get dems to give up on DEI? Because this seems like escalating, and norms unravelling.
https://bsky.app/profile/nhannahjones.bsky.social/post/3lmuq4ygeyc2d
I wonder what sort of standardized test they would find acceptable for determining the ideology of students, faculty, and staff?
Ie. maybe Republicans are expecting Dems to respond "oh, now we see how misguided DEI policies are, we'll stop doing that from now on". But instead, Dems react with "well, if you're doing DEI based on ideology, then we're just going to do it even harder for race and gender."
So we get a taste-own-medicine vs hypocrisy death spiral.
And if they do that, they're going to get deported. I highly doubt these people want to get deported.
Well I clicked the link and can now say I’ve seen something on Bluesky.
I saw Bluesky in the link and went "I bet I know how this will turn out" and yeah, it's by Nikole "The 1619 Project" Hannah-Jones so there we go.
No, it's racebaiting and clickbait. You know because it's on Bluesky.
It's not affirmative action because, by their own reports, the Harvard faculty is 80-90% white (technically, 80-90% not an underrepresented minority) (1). If Trump, who won white men 60-40 and hispanic men 50-49 (2), just appointed random members of his own voters, they would dramatically increase the racial diversity of the Harvard faculty.
This isn't to say that what Trump is doing is good: it sounds like he's trying to purge the faculty of people he perceives as his enemies and install ideological or personal loyalists. Which is, ya know, not ideal. But it's not as if Harvards ideological neutrality is...terribly credible at this point.
So there could be a mature conversation about how we could restore Harvard's real and perceived ideological neutrality so we could have a trusted expert class but that would involve, ya know, real conversation instead of engagement farming by accusing Republicans of racism because that's what gets clicks and shares on about half the internet.
*grumble grumble grumble*
(1) https://harvardopendata.org/project/how-diverse-is-harvard-s-faculty/
(2) https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-racial-analysis-of-2024-election-results/
Sure, if you want to increase ideological diversity then "we have white, Hispanic, Latinx, East Asian, South Asian, South-East Asian, Foundational Black American, African-American, African-Africans, mixed race and others who all share the same sixteen liberal to progressive Democrat-voting beliefs" in your university then that's not ideological diversity.
There's a much stronger case for DEI based on ideology than DEI based on race.
You mean like in a world where there’s the Republican plumbers, and then the Democrat plumbers?
Or maybe there is just one plumbing company, but it has to have an equal balance of right wing and left wing plumbers. It goes without saying that they would not hire a Communist Plumber. Then of course there’s the complication of jobs that require two plumbers and you know, right wing Plumber would not want to work with the left-wing Plumber so you have to finagle that.
Of course you would have to deal with the fact that for years Republicans were not admitted to the plumbing company through various laws and conventions. Even outright bans, because customers wouldn’t really want to let a Republican into their house to fix their toilet.
So now in a different time, we need to encourage Republicans to become plumbers and get people used to the idea of a Republican actually coming into their house to fix the toilet. But truly everyone knows that Democrats are better plumbers than Republicans. They just can’t talk about it.
There's this old study that is frequently used to support diversity, which found that mixed teams were better at decisionmaking than monocultures, arriving at better solutions faster. What's often left unsaid is that this specifically meant mixed in terms of politics -- no effect was found for any other demographic quality.
The study is old enough and belongs to the era where I would be genuinely a bit surprised if it replicated.
In the 'Introducing AI 2027' post Scott said "Humanity starts colonizing space at the very end of the 2020s / early 2030s.
My initial take was that this was thrown in as an absurd joke to see how naive we all are, but now I'm not so sure..
For anybody who thinks this is a genuine (if speculative) prediction, what might this look like?
I'm reasonably certain that nobody will have even been back to the Moon (let alone gone to Mars) by the early 2030s so the idea that somehow Humanity will have started 'colonizing space' is in the land of the utterly ludicrous.
What gives? What am I missing? What concrete events would satisfy the prediction 'Starts colonising space'? And where can I bet my house against this?
I can't take it as a serious prediction. There's no feasible way we will be ready to colonise space by the end of the decade, even if we are aided by super intelligence. I see it more as "the sunlit uplands" that await if AI goes (extraordinarily) well.
If we went for it as a national priority we'd have at least a decent chance of success of landing humans on Mars and keeping them alive by 2030, and if they stay there (while we ship them more stuff and more people) instead of coming home we could call that the start of colonization I guess.
Even the people I know aggressively into space colonization want a to-Mars-and-back mission to succeed before we start any one-way trips.
A City on Mars made me kinda skeptical of the whole endeavor, except as a vanity project or a project for the very long term.
Like, it would take five years just to do the "how to build a self-contained biosphere on another world" and "how do humans handle multi-year exposure to low gravity and high radiation" research. Unless AGI comes up with Magic Perfectly Accurate Simulations, those studies will have to be done at the speed of actual living creatures, not computers.
"A City on Mars" mostly just made me lose a great deal of the respect I once had for Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. I'm not sure what their actual research process was; I don't know who they talked to or what their expertise really was. But the end result is a book that enumerates a great many potential objections to the concept of settling Mars (or anyplace else beyond Earth), but demonstrates a profound ignorance of the potential solutions that have been considered and are in many cases being developed to deal with those problems. It instead tilts at straw men by "destroying" simplistic quasi-solutions that I haven't heard anyone in the space settlement world seriously propose in the past twenty years.
And, IIRC, it is almost *completely* negative on the subject of space settlement in, basically, the expected lifespan of anyone reading the book. Pretty much everything is presented as a problem for which no solution exists, *nothing* is in the category of "this part is hard but probably doable by way of such-and-such, and might be worth the effort if we could solve the other problems". I don't believe it is plausible that an honest, competent effort would deliver such a one-sided result.
In a world where Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and China all exist, it would be really good if we had a book that honestly argued the case for and the case against near-term human space development and settlement, considering all the major problems and all the plausible solutions. Or at least as many as can be fit into a book that will be seen as entertainingly informative by a lay audience. I really hoped that this would be that book, in which case I'd recommend it to all my friends.
This is not that book. And unfortunately, I don't think anyone else has written that book either, so I don't have anything to recommend in its place.
A much faster way of doing that research would just be putting people on the planet instead of trying to isolate each variable in a self contained study.
Yes, inasmuch as it would be faster to do research on how long it takes people to drown if you just put them underwater and wait.
The first Martian explorers should accept, like with the first Antarctic explorers, that their life expectancy will be lower and there will be great danger involved.
Antarctica has air! Martian exploration has basically no comparison to prior exploratory expeditions on Earth, which is why people want to do research first. If you send people before doing the research what you end up with is everybody dead, and also so far away that it's hard to figure out exactly why they died. All done at enormous expense per corpse.
We do already know how to build airtight environments, including ones with long term occupancy.
> For anybody who thinks this is a genuine (if speculative) prediction, what might this look like?
Given the two absurd claims; gai from chatbots and full automation; it logically follows.
You mine everything, you cover texas with solar panels, you throw this into some expensive but reversible process for rocket fuel, you send seedling automation at the asteroids; resources start appearing in earth orbit and you can start sending bots to anywhere.
Even with these absurd claims it seems hard to imagine just from a resource utilisation perspective.
Even _if_ the general purpose do-anything build-anything robot comes along in the next 31 months, it takes a long time to scale things up to the level of "everything's free now, might as well build spaceships". Robots need materials, materials needs supply chains, supply chains need ships, ships need shipyards.
Robots need brains, brains need chips, chips need chip fabs, chip fabs currently take years to build and you're unlikely to get that down to days just by thinking really hard about it.
Steel needs coal, plastics need oil, advanced robots need god-knows-what materials which turn out to be very hard to scale up production of.
Agreed; I've been repeating these points over and over again, it's just astonishing to see how clearly smart people keep going on ignoring the physical realities of technological progress. "2027, maybe 2028"! I'm right now working on a chip that may see production in 2028. That's the timelines we're talking about and they're not getting shorter.
I dont believe automation is limited by chips; a 10x tractor needs 10x(+ some overhead) steel and fuel; we have allot of compute repetitive to kentic reality with the computer that they sent to the moon being a grain of rice and very little progress in scaling up since reintroducing slavery via china
Agreed, it's far from the most important limit, I used the example to show how long design-to-ship cycle is. Shaping metal, etc. is a bigger bottleneck.
I bet all americain factories are already >90% automation; Id say the one I worked at was 93%(, and couldve been more automated with lower, trivail, quality standards) was 30 years old; and I saw the next replacement which was maybe 97%.
I think you get rocket equations here, you set the machines to the speed where the weakest link is safe for human fingers, robot fingers can be just balence costs; they dont actually magically run in sync they are set to be; machines couldve been 10x as fast, 100x with ai because the intelligence was "wait somethings wrong, slam the big red button" before the machines ripped themselves apart to badily.
I have *extreme* doubts about actual 100% automation without gai and even nano tech ever existing; but local optimization and higher octane fuel in the recursive fractal processes(such as a capitalist supply chain) made the morden world as is.
I think it all depends on what you define as colonization. One could consider the space station a rudimentary form of colonization.
If you define colonization as some people moving to the moon permanently, then yes I agree with you. It seems a little off the charts.
I'm confident that Scott wouldn't consider the ISS as even the beginnings of colonization of space - he predicted the 'start' of the process in the next half dozen years.
The AI-2027 timeline assumes massive automation of industry to produce robots that further automate industry. It's not outside the realm of imagination that if you're producing thousands of full autonomous robots per day, you can build a 10x bigger Starfactory in Texas, produce multiple Starships per day (having figured out rapid reusability), and exponentially increase mass to orbit.
The unbelievable parts are what comes before the space colonization. If you accept their timeline up until 2027, then what comes after is simply a matter of the prioritization, and logistics, rather than feasibility.
(1) I'm of the opinion that the entirety of AI Alarmism (working definition: believing that AI will overtake an arbitrary human in any meaningful sense before 2050) is a very silly prediction, although AI Alarmists have given us a lot of vocabulary and general mind frameworks for discussing AI, intelligence, and philosophy of (artificial) minds, and AI Alarmists are mostly intelligent and industry-involved people with skin in the game and no obvious benefit to stoking panic, unless they're (e.g. Sama) in this case it's pretty obvious.
(2) The jump from our level to an acceptable level of space colonization (working definition: 100K people on the Moon who depend on Earth by the same amount an average city dweller depends on the nearest countryside) is, I'm prepared to argue, lesser in difficulty than the jump from Sputnik to the Moon landing, and the latter can provably be done in less than a decade. (I know it took 12/13 in practice, that's not much bigger than a decade and there was a lot of waste.)
(3) As strong as (2) is, it doesn't even go far enough. Most of our back-of-the-envelope rate estimation is implicitly derived from the history of innovation and tech that humanity had. For example, it took just 60 years or so from the Wright brothers (1903) to the fastest aircraft in the history of flight (SR-71 Blackbird, 1964), meaning a guy that was in his twenties when the Wrights flew for the first time would have seen the Blackbird when he was a grandfather.
As breathtakingly fast a rate of innovation that is, you will rightly scoff at the notion that we could have obtained the SR-71 in the late 2020s if the Wrights started flying in the early 2000s, even if we somehow assume all of our computers and knowledge of aerodynamics exist as they do in our timeline without the aircraft industry that motivated them.
But that goes out of the window if you already grant the predictions of A27, namely that Agent-4 is equivalent to a superhuman programmer and ML researcher, and above-average-but-still-human intellect with a superhuman breadth of expertise and learning rate, who (that? which?) can be run (born? cloned?) arbitrarily many times* and connected with an extreme-high-speed network that can... I don't know, exchange the equivalent of a 4K 5 hours documentary in the time it takes you to say hi to your coworker? The network is actually an extremely interesting concept that is never elaborated upon beyond the vague gestures of "Neuralese". Then it invents Agent-5 which surpasses it as Agent 4 surpasses humans.
If you assume that, and additionally assume that many problems are parallelizable, it seems to me that yes, bootstrapping Space Colonization in a decade is entirely within reach. Space is boring, you're just brainwashed by Big Gravity to think it's harder than it is. Space is just what happens when you throw something into the sky hard enough.
(4) The AI and its physical manifestations don't need life support nor terraforming, here goes metric tons of complexity and roadblocks to space colonization.
(5) See Science And Futurism with Isacc Arthur, https://www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA. It's really easy to start colonizing space, we can do it right now if there is political will. The US military spends 600 billion dollars (and that was something like less than 15% of the US's total yearly budget or something like that), assuming a 3x inflation ratio between now and 1960 that's 200 billion dollars in 1960s dollars. The actual Apollo project only needed is 25 billion dollars, 1/8 of the kill-middle-eastern-children budget. Meaning a peaceful year with 1/2 the military spending can save enough money to do 4 Appollos. (After consulting Google, I underestimted Inflation, Apollo's cost is estimated at 165 billion in today's dollars. Meaning the military's budget is only 3.5 Apollos, and a peaceful year can only save enough for 1.7 Apollos or so.)
(6) Again, so many inefficiences and roadblocks go away entirely when there are no humans, no need for food or breathing, no foreign policy, no wars, no squabbling and arguments, etc....
> What concrete events would satisfy the prediction 'Starts colonising space'?
I think that "Hurling asteroids into near Earth orbits for mining" or "Building a massive underground complex in an asteroid" counts at the lower end, and "launching intersteller ships" counts at the high end. Again, per SFIA, those things are doable now, modulo all the human squabbling and budget politicking. A conservative assumption of 10% of light speed means something like 15 years to cross a light year (to account for acceleration and deceleration)? Call that an even 30 years. The nearest star is 4.25 light years, meaning 4 and quarter times 30 years, about 127 years. Call that an even 150 years. No problem. The AI doesn't age. The AI can figure out super exotic materials (Voyager survived ~50 years with plain old 1970s manufacturing). The AI can have onboard factories to make new chips and replicate itself to it when the old ones take too much radiation. That's it. No breathing. No psychological troubles. No breeding. No politics.
(* : limited only by electricity and the thermodynamics of cooling, we waste the vast majority of the first as untapped Uranium reserves, untapped geothermal hellish heat, and wasted uncollected sunlight, not to mention that if you have Fusion then every ocean is literally an oil field waiting to be plundered for effectively unlimited energy. Fusion is so ridiculously an energy abundance machine that you can afford to literally make hydrocarbons from their constituents at a net energy loss and then burn the hydrocarbons for energy, and that would still be enough for X gazillion years before you use up all the Earth's oceans.)
Im spending all of August in SF and I’d love pointers for events where I can find like minded people.
Research local ACX meetups + rat meetups. Go to one of the many rationalist group houses, I recommend Azkaban.
Someone I know is looking for a job doing something towards improving human health. For the last 5+ years he has mostly been researching the brain’s role in a certain disorder. Has a PhD in a kind of math that fits well with research. He is looking for a job doing something towards improving human health, & a job that challenges him intellectually. He is not intent on becoming wealthy — salary is definitely a secondary consideration. Does not want to work for the government or become a university professor. He is willing to live anywhere in the world. What organizations or job boards should he look at?
Now that we have a greater understanding of our edgelords, perhaps we should dig into who are our elites and why they are elites? Here you go!
"Varieties of Economic Elites? Preliminary Results From the World Elite Database (WED)" by Felix Bühlmann, et al.
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127763/1/1468-4446.13203.pdf
I didn't even know there was a World Elite Database! It used to be that you had to find a copy of Whose Who in the reference section at a big-city library.
These are people they've identified with:
• 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: control over a company’s resources, either through ownership or by running its operations.
• 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: the ability to influence prices, block competition, or limit workers’ demands by using size or wealth.
• 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿: influence over economic rules shaped through lobbying, donations, legal action, or informal political ties.
Some stand-out points...
The US has the oldest economic elites — median age of 62.
The European medians for economic elites is lower — mid-to-late 50s.
China's median is also 55, but their female median is much younger than their male median. Overall, they've got the highest percentage of economic elites under 50 but with a long tail of oldsters.
It's no surprise that most of the elites are male. Finland, Poland, and Chile seem to have a large cohort of younger women entering elite status, though.
Switzerland has the most foreign-born elites at 36% and Chile is a close second at 34%. The UK and US come in third and fourth at 25% and 23% respectively. China has less than 1% foreign-born elites. I don't see Japan or South Korea on the list, but I suspect they'd have similarly low f-b percentages.
Reporter at the White House yesterday: "Are you considering deporting American citizens to El Salvador?"
President of the United States: "Yeah that includes them, you think they're a special kind of people or something?"
Noah Smith has a pretty good writeup on why it feels like Trump has charged past a new threshold of fascistic behavior. He points out that
A) the Trump administration now argues on the record that _anyone_ being imprisoned in a foreign country is beyond the reach of U.S. courts;
B) Trump wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador; and
C) Trump is arresting people who haven’t been accused of any crime [Bloomberg went through all the individual filings and found that more than 90 percent of the people deported to the Salvadoran gulag have not been _charged_ with even misdemeanor or border-related crimes let alone convicted of anything].
So, now quoting Smith directly,
"Trump is asserting the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily send any American citizen to a Salvadoran prison for any reason....It seems clear that if Trump actually does have the ability to arbitrarily send any American to an overseas prison with zero due process and zero oversight by any court of law, then we do, in fact, live in a dictatorship. It’s notable that immediately after complaining about tariffs, the Declaration of Independence [in listing King George's crimes against the American colonies] complains about King George sending Americans overseas for pretend offenses without jury trial:"
[From the Declaration,
-- For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
-- For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
-- For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
-- For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:]
"I guess some things never change."
If he's going to deport citizens without fair trial or due process, then yeah that's wrong.
My major disappointment with Obama was him not shutting down Guantanamo Bay. That's a gulag, and an American gulag, and it seems that finally it is slowly winding down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#Plans_for_closing_of_camp
"As of January 2025, at least 780 people from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 756 had been released or transferred to other detention facilities, 9 died in custody, and 15 remain."
The government of the time, and how neutral the Wikipedia article is I don't know, did not cover themselves in glory about this, with Congress blocking him. 17 years to shut this place down and it's still not finally over. Republicans and Democrats, setting that up and the way it was run was a bad decision and a stain on the nation.
The reason Obama didn’t shut down Guantanamo is the Congressional opposition. But he didn’t try too hard either, coward that he was. A disappointment all around.
The attempted equivocation with the American Revolution is cute, but the reality is that there is no contingent of Sons of Liberty waiting in the wings to end the evil tyranny (who would end up passing the Alien and Sedition Acts just a few years later, oof!). What there is instead is a bunch of leftists seeing power be used in this way and undoubtedly getting ideas. I would not be surprised to see any resurgent Democratic administration wanting to deport people they don't like to Canada, assuming that they see the American prison system as inadequate.
Nope. You aren't that stupid, stop faking.
Hey, you know what might be a good way to forestall the next Democratic administration from using these powers to send people to a gulag? Not building a gulag for them.
If you wanted to be extra sure, you might consider passing laws that explicitly forbid sending people to the gulags, migrants or no. You might also consider supporting the federal judges who are saying "no, sending people to the gulag is illegal." Or appointing Supreme Court justices who agree with said judges, instead of nitpicking the exact wording they're using to say "no sending people to the gulag." Or firing the people in ICE who, when faced with a court telling them "no gulags," respond by saying "well, what if we send people to the gulag really really fast so the court can't say no in time?"
But, you know, that would require the Republicans to care about anything other than Trump's undisputed power as dictator.
> If you wanted to be extra sure, you might consider passing laws that explicitly forbid sending people to the gulags, migrants or no.
If the laws aren't stopping Trump, why would you expect it to stop anyone else?
Yes, that would be nice. It would have been nice for a nutty NYC prosecutor not to gin up over thirty felony charges on Trump over the Stormy Daniels case. It would have been nice not to have ridiculous impeachment charges brought up over a frivolous Trump-Russia connection, or for Clinton to be impeached over a frivolous sex scandal. It would have been nice for Al Gore not to dispute a 'free and fair election'. Yet here we are.
Al Gore won more votes in Florida in 2000 than George Bush and his spinelessness is a big reason we're in this mess
In Florida, Al Gore lost by 537 votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida
>It would have been nice for Al Gore not to dispute a 'free and fair election'. Yet
And that happened when, exactly?
>for a nutty NYC prosecutor not to gin up over thirty felony charges
I am fully cognizant of the political aspects of this prosecution, but the charges were not “ginned up”. He actually did it.
He paid hush money out of campaign funds to a washed-up porn actress who then didn't keep her mouth shut because she needed more money. None of this was edifying, but I don't think that it really was *thirty* separate offences (even if it could technically be broken up into those steps). That was indeed political on the part of the NYC prosecutor.
He didn't commit thirty separate felonies, but the way people go on about it, it's like he was out there robbing banks all whacked off of Scooby Snacks every day or something.
But that's just prosecutors throwing the book at someone.
Like, if some guys starts a bar fight a creative prosector can turn it into a long charge sheet of assault, affray, grevious bodily harm, ... [those are the UK charges. Im sure US prosecutors do something similar]
It’s not uncommon when charging people for crimes. Even if you could think everything they did was wrapped up in one charge they are charged with multiple offenses; six counts of petty larceny, one for each candy bar.
Yes, the problem with Trump is the liberals made him do it. Very good.
You continue to repeat as fact, things which are verifiably not fact. You have it seems no other rhetorical tool at your disposal, and sound exactly like the Boomer progressives who are this society's most irritating subculture.
Fortunately this site does have a mute function.
[EDIT: hmm, "mute" on Substack does not it appears actually mute in any useful way. That's too bad, but okay block it is.]
If you’re going to call people cute you’d better learn first what ‘equivocation’ means. Otherwise people may think you are cute.
Note to self dont use equivocation correctly
There's a different meaning of "cute" in Hiberno-English, as B Civil notes below - there's an Irish saying "cute as the bees" which does not mean "cute as in adorable, sweet, appealing, endearing" but "cute as in sharp, clever, capable".
Calling somebody a cute hoor in Ireland isn't saying you find them kawaii 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_hoor
"The phrase "cute hoor" is exemplary in Hiberno-English as it represents three different categories of the dialect: an English word with a distinct meaning in Ireland (cute, meaning shrewd), an Irish neologism in English based on Irish phonetics (hoor, derived from whore) and a compound phrase with a distinct meaning of its own (cute hoor). In the entry for "hoor", Dolan notes "it may be used affectionately as well as pejoratively, especially when qualified by the adjective 'cute'... 'that man's such a cute hoor he'd build a nest in your ear'".
The distinction between "whore" and "hoor" was significant enough for a discussion about it to be entered into Ireland's parliamentary record."
From the parliamentary record in 1967 (in discussions about the language used in short stories in an anthology for schools for pupils aged 12-15):
"... In fairness to the committee, it should also be said that the words concerned, apart from their legal sense, do not carry, at least in Ireland, a connotation other than mild, vulgar, opprobrium. Curiously enough, if preceded by the adjective “poor”, they express sympathy. I think the Deputy will agree with that. In the south of Ireland, if one said: “John fell down a cliff, and the poor hoor, was killed” ——
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
If he is a poor bastard or a poor hoor, he is still a bastard or a hoor.
Mr. O'Malley
If Deputy Flanagan were down in the south of Ireland at a by-election, pulled up at the side of the road and was told "John fell down a cliff and the poor hoor was killed" ——
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
I would say: "Lord have mercy on him".
Mr. O'Malley
The Deputy would say rightly: "The Lord have mercy on him". He would not start slagging him for using that type of language. He would say: "The poor hoor, Lord have mercy on him."
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
I would not; I would leave out "poor hoor". I do not care for that type of language.
Mr. O'Malley
Let us come to my role as Minister for Education in this matter. The Minister for Education is, very properly, expected to consult the school managers and teachers through their associations on the texts which he has to prescribe for them. When the representatives appointed by these associations select a particular story or whatever it may be, the Minister must assume that they have taken fully and conscientiously into account the potential effect of their choice on the young people who have been entrusted to their care, with whom they are in daily or even hourly contact, whose moral education they are, next to the parents, best fitted to undertake and whose intellectual calibre and needs they understand better than anyone else. In these circumstances, it is not easy to see how the Minister or his Department could have rejected as an error of judgment the unanimous finding of a body of such very responsible and experienced persons. I was at a conference recently —I go to these places from time to time—and I saw there Time magazine. I do not know whether Deputy Flanagan would object to Time magazine being read by teenage girls.
Mr. O.J. Flanagan
Certainly not, but I would not have it read at school."
Enjoyed the daylights out of reading this. What *is* it about the Irish and language? Some special gene? And speaking of that, sort of, Scott in a recent comment mentioned that you had a huge uncivil debate here with someone whose name I forget, but I think it had 'Gill' in it. That was before my time, and I'd like to read it. Can you give me any guidance regarding where to find it?
I think that was probably the big row between myself and Vinay Gupta, and it wasn't very civil on my part, I must admit.
Way back in the days of SlateStarCodex, and some preliminary Googling says it was in 2018 where we got into it in the comments. It all started off with a blockchain-based dating site and mushroomed from there into a Scottish-Hindu versus Irish Catholic smackdown of mutual insult. You'll have to search the comments by his and my names, unless someone else has a Collected Worst Of for this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/18/practically-a-book-review-luna-whitepaper/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/18/practically-a-book-review-luna-whitepaper/#comment-590359
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/
(We got into Gurkhas versus the poet's curse at one point as to which was the most biggest threat)
Scott had to intervene to put manners on us and honestly, if I had eaten a permanent ban, it would have been perfectly justified:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/19/gupta-on-enlightenment/#comment-621185
Only in Ireland….
A pack of showering c***s….
Heh
Cute is an abbreviated form of acute, meaning sharp.
Citation:
“Father Reilly has
cuteness to divide you now.”
-“ The Playboy of the Western World” -J.M. Synge
Was "cute as a button" sarcastic?
Don’t know. I suppose it depends on the context- and the country.
Using it in an Irish political sense, I would say that Bill Clinton was a cute hoor (he'd fit easily into Fianna Fáil alongside Bertie Ahern at the time) but Trump is not. There's an element of charisma or charm or roguishness there, accompanying the lack of trustworthiness, which Trump doesn't have, even if he is popular and charismatic. Trump is a bit too up front, if I can put it that way: you know exactly who he is, what you see is what you get. The cute hoor, by contrast, has a bit of that twinkly-eyed shiftiness going on where you're persuaded in spite of yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4MwblcGZbI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_hoor
"Cute hoor and, by extension, "cute hoorism", is a cultural concept in Ireland where a certain level of corruption is forgiven - or sometimes even applauded - of politicians or businessmen.
...Cute hoorism in politics has also come to refer to the phenomenon where, because of Ireland's multi-seat constituency proportional representation, single transferable vote system, political candidates often face more of a threat in re-election from a running mate in their party than from a rival in a party with substantially different political policies. Typically, a successful method of besting a rival with identical political beliefs is by being seen to be better at dealing with parish pump issues.
However, the phrase "cute hoor" is used more widely than this in politics in Ireland, particularly when referring to cynical tactics in general, such as the difference between pre-election campaigning and post-election coalition-forming.
...On 10 March 1983, the Evening Herald ran an article on Terry Leyden (with reference to him and his running mate Seán Doherty) in which the phrase was first used in print:
"Few politicians understand the punters better than either. In local parlance they are cute "hoors". But it is hard to say which is the cutest.... in spite of national swings against Fianna Fáil they have managed to hold onto two out of the three seats n Roscommon over the past four elections.... If their political know-how could be repeated by Fianna Fail in other marginals Charlie Haughey would never have lost power."
...In both instances, the implication (by rival politicians and journalists) was that cute hoor politicians had improved their careers by prioritising local concerns over the national interest. The phrase accelerated in use during the 1980s and 1990s when repeated coalition governments collapsed after corruption scandals or because the support of independent politicians was withdrawn.
...Boris Johnson
In 2019, The Irish Times asked if Boris Johnson was Britain's first cute hoor Prime Minister, noting "Swap a hurl for a cricket bat, the word “Brussels” for “Dublin”, and Johnson would be right at home in a back bar in south Kerry, waging a derisory finger at “them up in Dublin” with one hand and knocking back a pint with the other. Their electorate is the same - tired of being condescended to by elites in a remote city, they respond well to a sly dog who they reckon can get them a good deal".
Cute hoor; Put the money on the bedside table before anything comes off.
>A) the Trump administration now argues on the record that _anyone_ being imprisoned in a foreign country is beyond the reach of U.S. courts;
This has always been the case; a US court generally has no power to order a foreign entity to do anything. There might be a statute that arguably creates an exception in this case, but I have not heard anyone cite one.
But, it does have the power to order US entities to do things, which is what the district court has done. I can see the district court ordering the govt to suspend payments to El Salvador until they release Abrego Garcia. That might arguably be an intrusion into foreign policy, but that is a very different issue,
I suggest we get every scumbag we possibly can lay our hands on off the streets of America, send them to Salvador, and when it’s all done and dusted we nuke the place.
Problem solved. We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
It’s the only way to be sure.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aCbfMkh940Q&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD
There you go…
Let’s get AI zombies to eat their brains instead. No fallout.
>This has always been the case;
This is probably true, but hasn’t it mostly been the case that these are Americans imprisoned in foreign countries for violating a law of that country? I don’t think it’s applicable to the current situation.
If it weren’t for the fact that El Salvador is throwing everyone in jail, it could be the new Australia. It is a pity that they cannot engage in useful work.
As soon as it is practical, I think they should all be sent to the Moon, along with other countries’ castoffs.
Might not be a great idea. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, you know?
Might not be a great idea. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, you know?
>hasn’t it mostly been the case that these are Americans imprisoned in foreign countries for violating a law of that country?
It has nothing to do with prisoners. A US court generally has no power to order a foreign entity to do anything, unless Congress has explicitly so provided. There is a reason that the District Court did not order El Salvador to do anything.
Smith could have been a bit more specific with that particular wording, and the word choice of "reach" is not helpful.
What he fully means there is, "the Trump administration now argues on the record that the executive branch's sending _anyone_ into imprisonment in a foreign country is not subject to any review or oversight by U.S. courts."
I quite understand the general principle, but I am applying it to the specifics of this case. It concerns imprisonment. It concerns violation of United States law. It concerns deportation. It concerns the entire principle of habeas corpus in common law. I was pointing out that in general in prisoner disputes in the past, it has been the case that an American has been imprisoned in a foreign country and the United States, as you say, has no jurisdiction. This is not a similar circumstance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the latest StoneToss is a response to this post: https://stonetoss.com/comic/intellectual-dork-web/
I've heard that Syrians are destroying artifacts of the old Syrian regime, like paintings and sculptures of Bashar al-Assad. I think money could actually be made by exporting these to the U.S. and reselling them as ironic souvenirs. Can anyone put me in touch with a person living in Syria?
I mean, a random Syrian can't take something from Assad's presidential palaces any more than an American can from the White House. In December and early January, perhaps. Not now. There is a new state with a new president now.
Alternatively, one could forge them.
Maine's Portland meetup is actually next week! On the 21st! Excited to see anyone who attends.
I'm late to the party, but if you're just abandoning neutrality and going woke (which I understand), it's not exactly clear for a lot of us which side to take. Most of the white guys around here are going to have much better job options with DEI overthrown, especially if Trump's eventual fall leads to a woke counterrevolution and the Democrats start making it illegal to hire white men or something similar. The choice in a few years isn't going to be between the 2024 Democrats and 2024 Trump, but between a regime that hates white men and a regime that hates everyone else. You may not like this new world where you just add up your demographic factors and pick a side, and neither do I, but now that it exists, it's not clear to me the left has a majority, since many people only differ by one from the maximally-disfavored demographic category, and there are plenty of Latin men and white women who don't like the new liberal dispensation.
Whatever else happens, you're an excellent writer and a good person and I hope this crap cools down some. But I'm not optimistic.
False trichotomy between Trumpism, neutrality, and "woke." The range of possible political opinions is vast.
But also the notion that the 2028 Democrats will be a "regime that hates white men" is profoundly unserious. I'll be more specific: it is exactly the sort of unserious hogwash you hear spouted by people with abrasive personalities to explain to themselves and those like them why they're not welcome in a lot of blue-tribe social spaces. Now, there's is certainly some leftist rhetoric that's made this kind of accusation easier, but of course if you actually *do* spend time in those spaces (or even make a serious attempt to observe them from the outside) you can't help but notice that there are *lots* of white men in them, and they're not treated worse than anyone else. Shocking, I know.
What would you consider leftist social spaces?
I'd say that there is a distinction between what people say and who they allow in. I.e. in my experience, I strongly agree that the effective culture of some leftist social spaces that was actively engaged with politics in nyc and seattle was full of verbal statements that were offensive towards men and/or white people. Even more oddly, they were regularly said by white men. I.e. kill all men, was something many of my male friends said - roughly daily, for a year or two. These statements bothered me deeply, but attempts to get people to stop saying them proved unsuccessful, and made me feel treated worse than non white men in these spaces.
Does that mean they're against men, or white people? I honestly can't tell (which is a bit concerning). But I do think about it every time I vote for the democratic party.
Everyone is gangsta till they're 2008-ed because the president imposes tariffs with no more thought than emptying his stomach.
I'm not an American but I would imagine my rulers hating me are better in some sense or the other than my rulers "loving" me enough to wreck my retirement savings and my currency and deport me to a shadow prison if I complain about it, all while gloating about it on Twitter and having photoshoots next to my prison bars.
This isn't really a response to the main thrust of your post, but the idea that the Democrats are going to make it illegal to hire white men, or anything similar to that, is really out of touch. Woke is dead, it will be for a while, and pretending like it's some big bogeyman isn't even an accurate representation of the height of its ideological influence
Woke is not dead, and it's not going to be dead any time soon. Woke is also not powerful enough to pass laws making it illegal to hire white men, or anything similar to that. and it's not going to be that powerful any time soon. There is a *huge* gap between "dead" and "powerful enough to untouchable-ize a quarter of the population", and woke is going to spend the next couple of decades somewhere in that gap.
You are both engaged in the sort of hyperbole that makes sensible people not want to engage with you. Please stop doing that.
Sorry, it's not hyperbole. Perhaps I should have said "dying" instead of dead, but I would mean it in the same way that a vegetable on life support is dying but not technically dead. Woke was dying before Trump II, and it was clear even in '21 that is was not going to come back. I can forgive the average person for maybe not realizing this, but it was pretty obvious if you had any one you were close to in college during the COVID years
Anti-white discrimination has been the law in America since the 1960s, and anti-whitism is still prevalent amongst the upper reachers of American society. Given this, I'd be interested in knowing what makes you so confident that "woke is dead".
No it's not, and you don't have an inkling of an idea what "Discrimination" means.
> Anti-white discrimination has been the law in America since the 1960s, and anti-whitism is still prevalent amongst the upper reachers of American society.
Massive citation needed. I think you are quite deep in some ideological hole.
Let me try and help you out.
First, the actual text of the law and case precedent is pretty egalitarian. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects all Americans from racial discrimination, regardless of race. Legal standards like "strict scrutiny" ensure race-conscious policies serve compelling interests and are narrowly tailored. All of this means that White Americans who face discrimination have the same legal protections as any other group
Here is a list of cases where primarily white defendants sued on racial discrimination grounds and won.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wygant_v._Jackson_Board_of_Education
- https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/427/273/
- https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-3rd-circuit/1432423.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adarand_Constructors,_Inc._v._Pe%C3%B1a
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Involved_in_Community_Schools_v._Seattle_School_District_No._1
Second, the empirics just do not bear this out. Besides white americans continually doing great in economic averages, they also do better in terms of employment rates and leadership representation -- both in government and in private companies.
Third, even specific examples that you could try to point to, like Affirmative Action, have been consistently limited by the same judiciary that you hate in other places.
See:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_(2016)
And ofc the most liberal state in the country, California, explicitly bans AA as part of their state constitution.
Is any of this compelling at all? If this does not change your mind, what exactly would? I mean this seriously -- is there anything at all that would change your mind and convince you that you are downstream of some bad epistemology?
>Massive citation needed. I think you are quite deep in some ideological hole.
You can read Jeremy Carl's "The Unprotected Class" if you want a book-length treatment. Or, if you'd rather, simply open up any mainstream magazine, newspaper, academic journal, or similar organ, and count the number of times "white", "whiteness" etc. is used with a negative vs. a positive valence. Or you can look through job openings, see how many explicitly encourage non-whites to apply vs. how many explicitly encourage whites to apply. Or you can look at academic funding schemes, and see how many are targetted specifically at non-whites vs. how many are targetted specifically at whites. Or you can watch a move or TV show, and count how many white characters or historical figures are played by non-white actors, vs. how many non-white are played by white actors. Or you can try complaining about whites qua whites, and then try complaining about blacks qua blacks, and compare the reactions you get. Or...
>Is any of this compelling at all? If this does not change your mind, what exactly would? I mean this seriously -- is there anything at all that would change your mind and convince you that you are downstream of some bad epistemology?
You can show me all the academic articles talking about the need to "abolish blackness", all the businesses trying to diversity their workforces by hiring more white men, all the academic funding available for students or scholars of whiteness, the TV shows where Shaka Zulu is played by a blond Scandinavian guy, the Congressional White Caucus, the politicians giving paeans to the "white community", and the electoral districts gerrymandered specifically to give whites more political power.
So, like, again, I think you are extremely misguided. I'm happy to try and meet you on your own terms.
> all the academic articles talking about the need to "abolish blackness"
There is a long academic tradition of critiquing minority cultures. Here are a few examples:
"'Acting White': The Social Price Paid by the Best and Brightest Minority Students" (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ763316)
"The Code of the Streets" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/05/the-code-of-the-streets/306601/
"Black Picket Fences" https://archive.org/details/blackpicketfence00mary
And of course this goes far beyond just 'black' people specifically. I am Indian, here is an academic critique of Indian-immigrant community norms ("Caste in Diaspora: Neoliberal Transformation of an 'Untranslatable' Institution" by Rina Agarwala). And this is also in the popular culture too -- Obama has openly critiqued innercity culture as part of the issue, and a lot of Kendrick's music is about the same subject.
The critiques of 'white' culture are part of an extremely long tradition that looks critically at all cultures with a lens of _improving outcomes_ and _understanding norms_. That doesn't mean "get rid of minorities" anymore than critiques of what you think of as 'white people' means get rid of white people or make them a 'hated minority'. By the way, it was not that long ago that white politicians were openly advocating for segregation -- many of the people who were openly supporting those policies are still alive and in some cases in political office! Really hard to square.
Do these not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> all the businesses trying to diversity their workforces by hiring more white men
As mentioned earlier, the stats just don't bear out your critiques on 'white people not getting hired'. I already cited a half dozen examples of legal protection AND empirics showing that this is not an issue. Here's some more:
- White men hold 62% of C-suite positions in Fortune 500 companies despite being about 30% of the population
- The unemployment rate for white Americans has consistently remained lower than for Black Americans (pre-pandemic: 3.7% vs. 6.1%)
- Even with identical resumes, candidates with traditionally white-sounding names receive 50% more callbacks than those with traditionally Black-sounding names (National Bureau of Economic Research)
And it seems really weird that your bar is "companies that are exclusively trying to hire white men" -- kinda suggests that you don't really believe in 'race blindness' as a principle. What does it mean to 'diversify' by hiring people who are already over represented? If AA policies are already getting smacked down in the courts, what exactly is your concern here?
---
> all the academic funding available for students or scholars of whiteness
I think you're maybe just poorly framing things. Here are a few departments that are exclusively about scholarly activity in the West:
- Classics and classics departments
- English literature
- European history / european studies
- all of the Western languages
- all of the Western religious studies
Do these just not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> the TV shows where Shaka Zulu is played by a blond Scandinavian guy
I can't find anything on Shaka specifically, but theres loads of examples of white folks playing minorities that are quite recent:
- Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia
- Emma Stone as an Asian in "Aloha"
- Tilda Swinton cast as the Ancient One in "Dr. Strange"
- Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton as Moses and Ramses in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"
Even gandhi was played by Ben Kingsley, he's only half Indian!
80% of film writers are white. 87% of directors are white. 77% of leads are white.
And as an aside, every time a minority is cast in a role, everyone gets really pissed about it! The reaction to halle bailey in the little mermaid, or zendaya as MJ in Spiderman or Ms. Marvel or StarWars are great examples.
Do these not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> the Congressional White Caucus
White Americans comprise about 59% of the population but approximately 73% of the House and 89% of the Senate.
Does this not count for some reason? If so, why?
---
> electoral districts gerrymandered specifically to give whites more political power
This one is the one that is most ridiculous to me. The gerrymandering just happens the other way! What sources are you even reading!
This has even showed up in court cases -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_v._Harris or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_United_Latin_American_Citizens_v._Perry
Citation massively fucking needed!
There's a lot of great tools that lets you just dig into the weeds on this -- checkout https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/
Does this not count for some reason? If so, why?
>There is a long academic tradition of critiquing minority cultures. Here are a few examples:
I can't access the first and third articles, but I'll note that the second article explicitly blames "street culture" on mistreatment blacks receive from mainstream society. So even when critiquing minorities, it's still white people's fault. By contrast, no academic has ever said "Oh, sure, white people might be racist, but that's because of high rates of crime amongst the black community, so really it's not their fault."
>As mentioned earlier, the stats just don't bear out your critiques on 'white people not getting hired'.
It's an easily verifiable fact that many businesses explicitly seek to hire more minorities and functionally no businesses explicitly seek to hire more white people. If white people manage to do well anyway, that's good for them, but it doesn't mean those places explicitly seeking to hire more minorities don't exist.
>I already cited a half dozen examples of legal protection AND empirics showing that this is not an issue.
Spend half an hour on LinkedIn or somewhere, and you can easily find adverts saying "We especially welcome applications for minority ethnic or traditionally under-represented communities" or some such. Some even have guaranteed interview schemes for applicants from minority backgrounds. So either this sort of preferential treatment is legal, in which case the law is discriminatory, or it isn't but it happens anyway, in which case we can add one piece of evidence to the "America didn't have rule of law even before Trump" bucket.
> think you're maybe just poorly framing things. Here are a few departments that are exclusively about scholarly activity in the West:
I said funding for students, not departments. Also, I would note that, in all the fields you studied, there are currently big pushes to include "under-represented" voices, precisely because the topics as they stand are considered too white.
>- Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia - Emma Stone as an Asian in "Aloha" - Tilda Swinton cast as the Ancient One in "Dr. Strange" - Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton as Moses and Ramses in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"
According to the US Census Bureau, Egypt, Israel, and Iran are all considered white countries. Also, Emma Stone and Cameron Crowe were both forced to publicly apologise for casting Stone as a quarter-Hawaiian and quarter-Chinese (and half white? I couldn't find details about the rest of her ancestry) character, so that's not really the best counter-example.
>White Americans comprise about 59% of the population but approximately 73% of the House and 89% of the Senate. Does this not count for some reason? If so, why?
Whites have by far the lowest in-group racial preference out of any group in the US, so white Congressmen are less likely to support policies that benefit white people specifically: https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9002
Who is going woke? Do you mean Scott? Scott always had a very firm anti-woke stand, I don't think he was ever neutral. And I haven't seen any indication that this has changed recently.
It was more or less on the linked subscriber-only post being debated here, which you're going to have to pay $10 to read. He wonders if he should have fought progressive cognitive errors quite so hard, because it may have helped lead to the current situation. Sorry not to give more detail but it seems kind of rotten to try to get around the guy's paywall on his own blog.
Yes, I have read it. Then we just took away different conclusions from that post.
Fair. I'm kind of moving away from ACX but wanted to say something.
2. Eh, I don't think you can really blame yourself for that - there's been right-contrarian stuff for a long time, and it wasn't the animating force of idiotic Trumpism. That stuff has been building since the 1990s in the conservative movement, and it finally won big with Trump in 2024 ironically because a bunch of folks locked in dislike for Biden in 2021* and thought Trump would make it 2019 again rather than doing a bunch of crazy, shitty stuff.
* I'm not even kidding about that. Biden's popularity took a hit and essentially fixed in place after about October 2021, and NOTHING budged it going forward - it just very slowly declined, but not by much. Some combination of Covid related stuff, inflation, and relentless negative press coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
> I don't think you can really blame yourself for that
this is only true if you thought it was plausible that a left-wing version of what is happening now (e.g. a "woke Cultural Revolution") would have happened with more left-leaning governments – which I think Scott did/does believe in.
To me, that sounds insane, but I admit this could be my bias speaking. I imagine more right-leaning people would have similarly discounted the possibility of Trump II being quite this bad.
I'm looking for a toronto based therapist who can help with grief (my 18 y/o brother committed suicide) - i got approved for publicly funded therapy but the waitlist means i can't start for several months
anyone who knows of a competent therapist who can do grief stuff and is not too expensive (im in canada so im poor) would be really appreciated, especially if they can act as a bridge until i get into the public CBT program
thanks
I'm so sorry about your brother.
I don't have an answer for you, but do want to offer a warning to stay away from Betterhelp and its ilk. There are a bunch of youtube investigations, exposé essays and so on about how it's a data-stealing borderline scam. Don't waste your time or money with it when you're in a vulnerable place.
Here's a form of moral argument I'll call the Principled Hypocrite:
Person A spends a long time publicly denouncing members of group G for performing activity X. A wants the relevant regulations for G to prohibit X. Person A then becomes a member of G, and is found to have subsequently performed X. Perhaps A admits to X, or perhaps A denies it but supporters of A mount a defense on A's behalf, but either way the defense is, "A still believes that members of G should be prohibited from doing X, but as long as it is permitted and normalized within G, A should not refrain while the rest of G benefits. That sort of expectation effectively penalizes people who are in favor of restrictions that would apply to themselves, which (1) is unfair and (2) creates incentive pressure for G to comprise people who want G to be maximally unfettered, which is usually not a good thing." (The hard-core libertarian reader will naturally disagree with the last part of that argument but I don't think the hard-core libertarian reader needs much of a defense to be mounted for A doing something that violates no contract but is perhaps hypocritical.)
I am acutely aware that, most of the time when this argument is trotted out or rebutted, it's strictly an exercise in cheering for your side and booing for the other side. But if I can find people here who are willing to suspend that mode of thinking and consider the argument purely in the abstract... I find this argument pretty compelling provided that X is not something I consider intrinsically immoral (by which I mean, something that is harmful by the nature of the act itself regardless of social context, like most forms of violence or theft, as opposed to something that is harmful only because of its systemic impact, like tax avoidance or buying test prep classes for your kid). Should I? Interested in hearing opposing arguments.
its not compelling because they never intend to change the system and are using its intractability to justify it. You change a system first by individual steps.
like if you think cars are bad, at some point you need to not use them. if you use cars as much as anyone else who likes them but say "I can't be assed to put my money where my mouth is, the world needs to change first!" you are lying to yourself or wanting anti-car cred with zero effort.
I think the Principled Hypocrite here is not actually being hypocritical much at all (though it might depend on what X is). There's a big difference between living in a world where every G can and does do X and living in a world where most G do not do X (whether because it's illegal or just taboo). First, if you live in the later world and do X, you're contributing much more to the current and (likely) future prevalence of X. Second, is X is anything that relates to intra-group competition, you're at a much bigger disadvantage refraining from X in the former world than in the latter world. I'll give a couple of concrete examples to motivate this:
With the online job hunting being the default these days, your average job seeker sends out lots of applications, including plenty of fairly marginal ones. Obviously this is somewhat zero-sum: the total number of hires isn't going to increase because of the extra applications, it just takes more work[1] for employer to make a single hire AND more work for the average job seeker to find a job. I think the world would be better if job seekers restricted themselves to fewer applications more narrowly focused on jobs they're well-qualified for and likely to get, but of course there's no decentralized way to push towards that equilibrium. Living in the world as it is, when I look for jobs I also skew towards sending out lots of applications (though not to anything *too* marginal: that seems like a waste of my time). Being more principled won't meaningfully shift the equilibrium, but it might meaningfully decrease my chances of getting a job. To be fair, this one is less a moral issue than just an optimization issue.
Gerrymandering is legal in the U.S. and practiced somewhat by both parties. I *do* consider gerrymandering a moral issue: it's effectively denying some people representation in order to gain more political power. I think a better functioning polity would demand laws be changed to make gerrymandering impossible or impractical. But until those laws are changed, it's not practical to expect either party to stop on their own. A party that stops *might* get a mild bump in popularity out of it (though with polarization being what it is, I wouldn't even bet on that), but it *will* get a substantial decrease in effective voting power, and lose seats because of it, making them that much less able to fight against it or any other policy they deem harmful.
[1] Or, in practice, the automation of work using potentially distortionary software tools.
I am trying to imagine specific scenarios.
One extreme would be something that is so clearly bad that no one should do it ever, regardless of what other people are doing. For example, torturing children is bad, full stop. I want that to be banned. Even if for some reason the ban does not pass, if you see me doing it, it means I am a horrible person.
I would be a horrible person even if I tortured children *without* arguing for the ban. But on top of that, the fact that I do it makes it difficult to believe that I am serious about the ban. Most likely, I am just trying to send a cheap virtue signal.
What would be the opposite extreme -- something completely innocent? But then why would anyone want to ban it? That doesn't seem to make much sense. The closest things that make sense seem to be:
a) My individual contribution to the bad outcome is a rounding error. There are million people in the city, no one recycles. If I start recycling, it won't make a difference.
b) Bad thing happens if N people do it, but if N+1 people do it, it doesn't make it any worse. It would be better if people didn't smoke in a room, but if five people already do, me lighting a cigarette doesn't make anything worse. Your clothes won't smell worse because of it.
c) Not participating is relatively costly. As an entrepreneur, I would like to pay my employees minimum wage and also spend some money on their safety, but if my competitors don't do it, they will easily take over my customers. On the other hand, if we all do it (because it would be a crime not to), the prices will rise slightly, but the number of customers will stay approximately the same. (In theory, slightly smaller, but for the sake of debate let's assume that the aggregate demand is quite inflexible in this case.)
I am tempted to say that the person doing c) is not a hypocrite. Neither is the person doing b), if they always wait for the others to start first. I am ambivalent about a).
This is just a multi-polar trap like scott goes over in moloch. The regulation that they support is the way out and they're correct in following the incentives while advocating for the way out.
1. A doesn't think anyone should be allowed to own a gun.
2. If its legal to own a gun, A is going to own a gun.
3. A would still vote for a law that bans all gun ownership.
I don't think there is any hypocrisy there. Hypocrisy would be changing your vote after getting long gun equities.
We could even strengthen 2 - with the private information A has that they are below average likely to have their handgun cause harm- stable mental state, law abiding, no children in house...
But I don't think we need to. 1,2 and 3 are sufficient when the desire is for a change in equilibrium rather than the summation of positive acts.
The same reasoning means you can be in favor of higher taxes while still only paying as much in taxes as legally required.
Correct.
You are a hypocrite if you claim - we should all do our bit.
You are not a hypocrite if you claim -
Higher taxation would be better for society.
A denounces members of G who do X. So maybe A is not required to refrain from X while a member of G, but he can hardly complain if he denounced for doing so.
Contrariwise, if individual members of G are acting rationally and morally by doing X, then A should refrain from denouncing them and restrict his activity to campaigning for systemic change to remove the bad incentives.
As an aside, I'm not sure what significance of group G is here. Isn't it essentially the same problem if you just posit that A denounces people for doing X and campaigns for regulations to prohibit X, but also does X and argues that while X is licit it is unreasonable to expect him personally to refrain from X?
I think this is along the lines of "if we don't do it, China will" and the implication there is "and if China does it, that will be bad".
I don't know if it's principled or not, but it does strike me as hypocritical. It's often used to arm twist agreement about "okay you can do this thing", where there are already objections to doing the thing. And the idea that it'll be fine if we do it, because we're the good guys, but those Chinese - ooh, if they get the lead in cloning superbabies, or AI, or better rice cookers, why it will be the end of the world as we know it! The argument is then moved away from "is this thing good or bad?" to "we can't afford to fall behind in rice cooker technology or unspecified but bad things will happen!!" so we can still end up with the bad thing happening but at least it's not being done by the Chinese.
I certainly don't want to live in a world run by the CCP, but neither do I want to live in a world ruled by "so I want to skin babies alive For Science, but mushy-minded normies don't like that for some reason, so I need to evoke the spectre of Chinese baby-skinning to get my way".
I think we see it most in business and politics, where "okay sure this practice is kinda corrupt, but everyone does it, and if I don't do it then I'll be at a disadvantage". So nobody is really in favour of corruption, but nobody is willing to take the hit to stop it. Something something Moloch, perchance?
It took me a while to parse this, so let me simplify and rephrase.
1. Guy says "those folks shouldn't be allowed to do that thing"
2. Guy becomes one of those folks
3. Guy does that thing
4. Guy says "Hey, I still believe that those folks shouldn't be allowed to do that thing, but that's not going to stop me from doing that thing; it's the system that needs to be changed"
I don't think I'm comfortable taking a position on this in the general case, I think it depends on the nature of that thing. If it's "homeowners shouldn't be allowed to use tax deduction X-33-alpha-II" then that's one thing, if it's "policemen shouldn't be allowed to randomly beat people over the head" then it's another.
I think this is fair.
What matters here is probably whether the thing is a wicked thing to do, or whether you’re merely looking to introduce systemic change by making it illegal.
Thank you for this rephrasing.
Is it the same as: "I think we should reduce air traveling, but I fly to Mallorca every summer"? Considering that an average person flying to Mallorca once a year has a very small effect on the climate, as opposed to a very rich person with a private jet flying between New York and Paris every week to go shopping?
I think there's an important distinction between the version of this where I'm advocating for "voluntarily doing X less" and the version where I'm advocating "change rules to reduce X". I'm primarily interested in the latter; I think the former is just plain hypocrisy.
I think even the former case might not be hypocrisy if the person is voluntarily doing X somewhat, but less than the average person is. They're modelling a directionally correct behavior change, even if they're not doing it to the maximum extend possible. This will not, of course, stop people from loudly calling them a hypocrite, since loud, opinionated people are rarely interested in such nuances.
(Sorry, I am a too-many-words person!)
That comes under the "intrinsically immoral" qualifier---claiming a tax deduction isn't intrinsically immoral (the act of claiming isn't harmful to anyone in and of itself, despite arguments that it might be extrinsically immoral because of systemic harms done to society), extrajudicial beatings are.
You reap what you sow, embrace full authenticity.
It seems to me your attempting to bargain with forces of nature rather then people. "It be really great if god prevented slavery", stated loudly, does not nesserily cause god to intervene in your slave empire. "If you try to enslave me Ill slit your throat in the night" may effect your behavior on the other hand. Morality is about moral agents discussing violence, everything else is masturbation.
How much truth is contained in the proposition, "No drug users actually want fentanyl, they want oxycodone, etc., and are getting fentanyl mostly unknowingly as an inferior substitute/adulterant"?
It seems that many habitual drug users are open to substitution, mainly based around availability and price. They don't prefer fentanyl, but if it's what they can get and/or it's cheaper so they can better afford it, they will use it instead of their preference. I also understand that dealers are highly incentivized to mix fentanyl into their product because it requires a much smaller amount to be effective. So it may not be a knowing choice at all.
> How much truth is contained in the proposition, "No drug users actually want fentanyl, they want oxycodone, etc., and are getting fentanyl mostly unknowingly as an inferior substitute/adulterant"?
There's at least some evidence that addicts don't like fentanyl more - a large factor of fentanyl's prevalence is driven on the supply side by concentration and smuggleability.
Heroin is preferred by between 1.7-6.7x, with older folk preferring it more per Ferguson et al, Investigating opioid preference to inform safe supply services: A cross sectional study (2022)
Although to be fair, there is a split. Some people are so far gone they can ONLY get high on fentanyl, and regular opiates aren’t strong enough now because they’ve worked their way up the curve to massive doses of fentanyl, which is 10-100x stronger at street concentrations.
I wrote a post going over the opiate crisis with a lot of factoids like this if you're interested, it's at: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/the-opiate-crisis-in-broad-strokes?r=17hw9h
I'm imagining a billboard or t-shirt advertising heroin: Preferred by 2 to 7 times as many as the lesser brand!
The game: famous historical sayings, attributed to the least appropriate historical personage possible.
-------
No taxation without representation!
– Yelü Chucai
"Live simply, so that others may simply live” -- Pol Pot
"We are the change that we seek." --Calvin Coolidge
"There's a sucker born every minute." --Fred Rogers
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." --William Jennings Bryan
"I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." --Franz Kafka
"This is one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." --Emily Dickinson
"It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company." --Paul Rodgers
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." -- anonymous fellow shouting from North Sentinel Island
"I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." --Franz Kafka
That made me laugh out loud. Well done.
It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men!
Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads!
There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist
"it is much safer to be feared than loved because [...] love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails." -- Fred Rogers
While looking up the correct wording of this quote, I stumbled on another Machiavelli quote (Also from The Prince), which actually does sound like something Mr. Rogers might say: "Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are."
Wow. I agree, it does.
"Never look a gift horse in the mouth."
-- King Priam of Troy
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
-- Joseph Stalin
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
-- Ayn Rand
Best ones so far
Hilarious! Thank you so much, loved them!
Seconded!
Not all those who wander are lost.
- Amelia Earhart
Bread for all, and roses too!
- Charles Trevelyan
This is a fun game!
"What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women." – the Buddha
Excellent!
Give me liberty or give me death!
- Jefferson Davis
Here's the first AI Doom scenario I've seen that actually sounds plausible: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6NdLozfvbHrcDpADE/slopworld-2035-the-dangers-of-mediocre-ai
(TLDR: AI plateaus but people treat it like GAI anyway and disaster ensues).
"Humans wreck shit using AI" is indeed a scenario that is all too realistic.
Will read in full later but the scenario outlined in the introduction tickles my inner pessimistic Neil Postman.
The Internet was supposed to revolutionize everything, incl. ending war. I grew listening to Barlow declaim the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace and witness the dream turn into viral 6 second videos of people throwing water on their heads because I didn't have a better model of what the general public values and how the Net exploding in users would push towards that and not my teenage techno-anarchist visions.
I can easily see how AI development could wind up stuck in that kind local maximum due to wrong incentives.
> GPT-4s performance on a programming competition from various years, with the red line separating when contamination was possible from when it wasn’t.
> .8 to .1
Is that chart well known? Quite frankly accusations of *criminal* fraud should be flying around
This isn't the first sign of benchmark contamination. There was a story a while back where a model too small to multiple numbers still managed to answer a bunch of AIME questions.
Apologies for double posting about the same thing, this one is just so baffling to me personally that I can't help it.
In one of the more Orwellian moments of this government (there are many!) the Trump admin is now claiming that Abrego Garcia was deported correctly! For those who have been following along, the admin has for weeks admitted that deporting Garcia was a mistake. It seems now that SCOTUS has decided against them, they are pivoting to arguing that deporting Garcia was always intentional.
> In one of the more remarkable moments in his appearance on Fox News, Mr. Miller blamed Mr. Reuveni [the DOJ lawyer arguing the case] — and only Mr. Reuveni — for having planted the idea that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation had been in error.
> “A D.O.J. lawyer who has since been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing, incorrectly, that this was a mistaken removal,” Mr. Miller said.
> That assertion, however, flew in the face of the fact that other Trump officials had said the exact same thing.
> One of them was Mr. Sauer, a top-ranking Justice Department official. Another was Robert Cerna, the acting field office director for enforcement and removal operations at ICE.
> Early in the case, Mr. Cerna submitted a sworn declaration about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation, and made clear that it was a mistake.
> Moreover, just a few weeks before he was fired, Mr. Reuveni was praised as a “top-notched” prosecutor by his superiors in an email announcing a recent promotion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/abrego-garcia-trump-deportations-el-salvador.html
It's just so obviously shameless and in bad faith. I'm reminded of The Narcissist Prayer:
That didn't happen
And if it did, it wasn't that bad
And if it was, that's not a big deal
And if it is, it's not my fault
And if it was, I didn't mean it
And if I did, you deserved it
<mildSnark>
Does this mean Trump isn't ready to embrace his Andrew Jackson moment? :-)
</mildSnark>
edit:
<additionalMildSnark>
And although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like President Trump exceeded his authority. :-)
</additionalMildSnark>
The "judge" in 2019 that said Garcia couldn't be extradited to El Salvador is an immigration judge (ie part of Article II, the Executive Branch).
So?
Since the immigration judge is part of the Executive Branch, these are not rulings from the Judiciary Branch. As such, the Executive Branch can change its mind on its own decisions.
Sorry, is it your opinion that the executive can do whatever it wants?
No, the Executive has to follow procedures.
Are you of the opinion that the Judiciary can do anything it wants?
Do you think a District court has the powers to order the Executive Branch to ask a foreign country to send the foreign country’s citizen to the US?
That is what I assume you want to happen.
> No, the Executive has to follow procedures.
Ok, so if you believe this, is there a procedure in place through which "the Executive Branch can change its mind on its own decisions", and was it followed?
> Are you of the opinion that the Judiciary can do anything it wants?
We'll get to Garcia's case in a moment, I'm sure. But first let's just resolve the above.
The "judge" in 2019 that said Garcia couldn't be extradited to El Salvador is an immigration judge (ie part of Article II, the Executive Branch).
I'm confused, what kind of visa was he on?
It’s very confusing. A visa is needed to enter the country. But for those in the country there are myriad other legal “papers” that allow continued legal presence, but won’t allow reentry if you happen to leave. He had one of those.
Garcia had a very "thin" legal paper. There was a deportation order for him, just not to El Salavador. The part of not to El Salvador was by an immigration judge (ie part of the Executive Branch) and the Executive Branch can review its own decisions at any time.
Yes yes yes except they said it was a mistake he shouldn't have been deported. We just don't want to fix our little oppsie, happens to everyone.
Not ever admitting an error tells you volumes about someone, but nothing we haven't known before.
Also now there's a Supreme Court ruling asking him to be returned, so there's that.
How fucking hard is it to admit an error and fix it?
I guess too hard for America that is Great Again.
The Supreme Court only asked because they know they have no powers to require it. They even instructed the District Court to show deference to the Executive Branch.
If it is an immigration judge, then what is the reasoning that the Executive Branch cannot review its own decisions?
We have a mind reader here, he knows the motivations of all the nine justices. I bow my head in shame and horror - he must know why I’m writing this.
No further questions.
I agree that you're confused! Especially since I've seen you in other threads argue that even those on visas deserve no rights, which is odd 🤔 makes me think perhaps you don't actually care about any of the principles here, though if you have some please let us know.
In the meantime, to help you with your confusion, he was granted a stay of removal from Salvador by a judge who reviewed his case. It's part of our legal process, which is something I'm sure you're deeply familiar with. That is also why every court filing thus far has openly acknowledged that the deportation was a mistake
Passive aggressive still is not kind. Please remember that Scott's rule is that each comment should be at least two of true, necessary, and kind.
Many people here probably broadly agree with your position. It would be better to state it directly and kindly rather than indirectly and unkindly.
I think it was true and necessary. I agree it was not kind. Apologies though, if it was an actual question and not the low hanging snipe that I interpreted it as.
I don't see how "necessary" could ever be applied to a comment section on the internet read mostly by nerds who have no influence in their communities. So the only way to actually follow the rules is to be kind and truthful.
Melvin is Australian.
They get away with murder in Australia
Get away with it? It’s mandatory, if you want to move here! Used to be, anyway
down there, they call it "first degree survival"
Has 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘝𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘵 𝘉𝘢𝘯𝘥 been lying to me all this time?
Agatha Christie said in her autobiography something along the lines that as a young person her family didn't seem particularly rich for having a servant, but that owning a car would have been a wild extravagance. Of course mass production and cost disease means that the two wealth markers have switched places.
People seem to assume that humanoid robots will be economically more like a car and less like a servant, while providing servant-like amenities to middle class households.
But couldn't humanoid robots be just as susceptible to cost disease as a human? Is cleaning and cooking and doing laundry going to be the highest and best use of a robot's time, when it could be e.g. replacing a roof or repaving a road?
"Agatha Christie said in her autobiography something along the lines that as a young person her family didn't seem particularly rich for having a servant, but that owning a car would have been a wild extravagance. "
This kind of switch in modern times stuck out to me when reading a Sherlock Holmes pastiche story recently; the widow of a gentleman said she was in comfortable circumstances, but when Holmes asked her if she had any servants, she answered "comfortable but not extravagant".
Sorry, writer whose name I can't remember, but a gentlewoman even in reduced circumstances, particularly if those circumstances were "comfortable", would indeed have at the very least one servant (a maid of all work) and this lady would probably have had a cook and housemaid, if not more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maid
https://www.mylearning.org/stories/the-victorian-servant/279
In theory the cost to have a robot servant should be driven by the cost to make/operate one, not the opportunity cost, since in theory you can always make more.
This assumes that robot servants don’t create demand spikes for input (electricity, compute, etc) but even then the “long term” cost should be the cost to make more of those resources (not their opportunity costs).
That said I think we’ll see more centralization of tasks than we have today. We might already be seeing that with uber eats - it’s cheaper to centralize food production and manage a distribution network than it is to distribute the work of cooking. Lots of things like laundry probably work the same way
I feel like Uber Eats is actually significantly more expensive than either cooking or going out to the restaurant (including getting takeout) but is popular in some areas because it's convenient. It's a lot like pizza delivery, but instead of tipping the driver you also pay a fee and still tip the driver.
Agreed! But notably it’s much cheaper than having someone come to your house and cook for you. So for autonomous robots, there’s both the question of “can a household task be automated” and “will it be automated in the house or outsourced from the house”
That's a good point. I guess the question is in the long run do humanoid robots look more like dishwashers (cheap enough that most everyone has one at home) or MRI machines (where even fabulously wealthy people use a shared facility).
If I could lease Robbie the Robot like a car, I would! A “good enough” chassis and frequently updated OS will take you a long way.
First one, then the other, through the intermediate state of being like a car (very expensive for most people but useful enough that most people will spend the money anyway).
If it can cook well, maybe. Otherwise a lot of labour saving devices are already there.
I have access to a washing machine. Way less work than washing by hand! But it's still *some* work, which I would rather not do. I would very much like a robot to do my laundry, and take out the trash, and clean the bathroom, etc.
I would like one for dishwashing, laundry, weeding/mowing and general tidying. I don't necessarily need it to cook great meals on its own, but if it could take care of some of the boring bits like chopping vegetables while I do the fun parts of cooking then I think we'll get along great.
For a robot that can do all that, I might be willing to pay the price of a car, say $50K. (But in practice there'd probably be the big caveat that next year's model is going to be much better and cheaper so you might want to wait.)
Same here, I can manage my own cooking, but a robot to do the labour of pulling out all the chairs and tables and unpacking the cupboards to do the spring clean and wash the kitchen and bathroom floors, take down and change the curtains, wash the windows, wash the blinds, and put everything back afterwards would be ideal. Particularly when it comes to washing/dusting walls and ceilings and the tops of cupboards and presses and wardrobes where it's too high for me to reach so I either have to extend my arms above my head or get on a stepladder.
A robot to do the grunt work, in other words, that wouldn't break things but would be strong enough to lift and pull and didn't mind the tedious monotony. Even renting one for a day or a week to do the Big Clean would be great!
All the moving parts and maintenance needed for a humanoid robot will make it too expensive for most, but maybe there will be a second hand market. What you want, of course, is to let the robot off - without training - to do the laundry, cleaning and cooking, as you would a human. This takes a lot of smarts as the robot needs to understand the layout of the house, find and operate the washing machine and dish washer, learn where the utensils are, where the food is stored, what to cook with, and preferably order in whatever is needed to feed and family and keep the household running.
This ain’t very cheap.
I want one that will be capable of being the foreman/groundskeeper of my estate. Replace the lightbulbs, keep the yard, tidy, do some painting when necessary. Keep the poachers out of the yard cook sweep offer good advice.
A solid Yorkshire fellow
https://ai-2027.com/
There is no mention of Europe or the Ukraine conflict.
I think this is extremely shortsighted.
Even if the top AI companies aren't in Europe... there's still a huge amount of resources there that might prove beneficial. You have an educated, activist population. You have governments that are more responsive to popular will. (compare to America's slow electoral system).
Then there's the LITERAL ONGOING WAR. When you consider disaster / misalignment... has anyone considered Ukraine? There are desperate actors and huge incentives involved. If AI agents were to become useful "Generals", why WOULDN'T at least one profit-driven AI company sell their product immediately to Ukraine? Who would stop them? Would Ukraine prioritize rigorously testing such a product for long-term alignment? (when their leaders are facing a more immediate existential risk?). Could such agents, once empowered, "escape the box" of the Ukraine conflict?
The drone heavy Ukraine military would presumably want their AI to be miniaturizable, so it can fly the drone by itself. I haven't heard of much effort going into making the super AI models have a small processing footprint yet.
This leads us to a great example of how divested from reality all these "AI will totally take over everything" claims are. Here we have:
AI can pilot a drone, maybe even better than a human, but still it's only one drone it's not going to do any more damage when it hits the target, the damage is limited by its payload size.
Even if AI is better than a Ukrainian 20-y.o., it's not 10X better, simply because the Ukrainian 20-y.olds are quite good at hitting targets.
What's needed to make an impact is a lot more drones. AI can't make them by itself. Expecting some magic turnaround in the war just because "AI" is... believing in magic.
Even mediocre self-contained AI drones would be vastly superior to the very best human piloted AI drones because they would be immune to the most common electronic counter measures to drones, which is the current limiting factor to their effectiveness on the battle field.
1 AI drone that can actually make it to its target is better than 10 human flown drones that get fried somewhere over no-mans-land by EW jamming.
"1 AI drone that can actually make it to its target is better than 10 human flown drones that get fried somewhere over no-mans-land by EW jamming."
Is that something that is actually happening or we're talking about ideas here? These immune AI drones, are they here in the room now?
Your level of ignorance about these basic facts do not warrant the tone you're putting on. Both sides in Ukraine are engaged in an arms race of jamming and hardening their various remote-controlled weapon systems such as cruise missiles, glide bombs, long-range and short-range drones. So yes, if an on-board process could conclusively solve the jamming issue while retaining a human operator's flying and targeting skill on the final approach, it would make a big difference in overall effectiveness.
While jamming wouldn't become entirely obsolete, its main purpose would be to require the attacker to use presumably more expensive semi-autonomous drones rather than entirely remote-controlled ones.
Sorry about the tone, wasn't called for. Frustration spillover.
See my response to ruralfp; basically yes, anything helps, no, AI by itself won't be decisive.
Not sure the tone is necessary.
Your argument, as I read it, is that AI wouldn’t offer much above current human pilots, and I was pointing out a pretty clear advantage it would have regardless of actual flying skill or numbers produced.
If you think it’s impossible to develop a small weights AI system in the next few years that could pilot a COTS drone effectively on local hardware go ahead and make that argument if you would like, but that’s not what your original comment seemed to be saying at all.
Sorry about that, frustration spillover.
Yes, adding AI capabilities will offer an advantage, an incremental one as far as an overall battlefield effect is concerned. We had recently an example of a startling "new" (for drones) tech, the fiberoptic cable navigation. I've read an interview with a Ukrainian officer who was quite despondent over these, because Russians started using them and the jammers became useless. The effect was there, but not enough to break the stalemate.
Now, if Ukraine could increase the drone numbers by, say 100X - that could really be a game changer. But AI is not going to do this, the drones have to be made, and knowledge is not a constraint for that.
These days, the solution to electronic countermeasures is to put the drone on a very long wire. It seems kind of old-fashioned (aren't we supposed to trust wireless everything?), but practicality rules over trendiness.
Yes, optical fiber, quite immune to jamming, but there's a tradeoff: more limited range, and reduced munition power. The spool is heavy, and the length is limited.
This is starting to remind me of those 50s SF novels where space battles are fought the old-fashioned way by space marines boarding the vessels, since the increasing sophistication of energy weapons and counter-measures with shields and jamming means that, in the end, you have to go back to the brute force "hit it with a space axe to breach the hull" method 😁
AI, now just two years away, will also - the assumption goes, be much much better than humans or dedicated targeting software because reasons.
I think the single most persuasive thing you said about this kind of thing is that various new gizmos the AI 2027 timeline imagines us having in 2 years can't possibly be here in 2 years because if they were going to be they would already be in factories in some early form as of now. I put a post up on this thread asking Scott for a post where he addresses some of the best arguments against his timeline, and I think your points about manufacturing are very convincing. They also have a welcome grounding quality, for all concerned. They drag everybody into the practical world, which is the world AI and the rest of us live in.
Thank you, appreciate that.
It's just... weird to read all the prognostications that are completely removed from reality of dirty plumbing and floppy wiring.
But I'm also beginning to worry about Scott's ability to dig into these complex issues at this point. The post about POSIWID was so... terrible... if this were the first Scott's post I came across I'd dismiss him as another nitwit troll and never return to read anything else.
I didn't think it was a very compelling subject, so just skimmed it. What did you think was terrible about it?
Starting with the snarky title, it went downhill fast. Scott ventured into a subject he clearly didn't understand, but rather than approaching it with epistemic humility and curiosity, as was his prior modus operandi, he threw some really stupid examples why "obviously POSIWID is stupid ha ha". Then, and I can't believe I'm writing this, he went to... xitter... to look for better examples! To xitter, Ere! Jesus wept.
Of course he found more snarky shit (sorry, xit) there, and concluded that the whole this was stupid indeed.
Then the thing attracted two kinds of commentary,
1 - more stupid snarky shit
2 - a few bewildered souls who have some basic exposure, not even deep expertise, in systems, and they all were, like, dude, are you ok? You clearly have no idea how this work, why so much certainty and sarcasm about a subject you're clearly ignorant in?
> Even if AI is better than a Ukrainian 20-y.o., it's not 10X better, simply because the Ukrainian 20-y.olds are quite good at hitting targets.
I disagree, aim bots are both trivail and much much better then humans; civilians existing seems to be the main reason automated snipers dont exist(while in csgo not such a problem is drasticly reduced), to say nothing of bomb.
Tools can be wildly more effective then humans, even the first rock is better then a human fist 10x.
Drones wont be gai, because its a solved domain; thinking is overhead.
Have you watched videos from that frontline? The drones a FPV, and these kids are really good at getting them through the smallest openings.
A major advantage of having an AI on board, locally, is that it won't need to send a signal back and therefore be more immune (not totally) against radio jamming. But that's definitely not in the cards, not in the next few years.
I believe that the technology for this exists right now. The phrase I see pop up a lot is "machine vision", referring to AI taking over the terminal approach in case of signal loss. It was inevitable in the era of ubiquitous jamming and AI really. Although drones trailing thin fiber optic cables is also quite popular to overcome jamming. Supposedly there are also drones operating in the theatre right now that have completely autonomous kill capability. But the source for that is a higher up in a drone company, so it might be shameless advertising that turns out to be fake for all I know.
Yeah I think you’re correct in an even wider sense: just like with autonomous driving, it’s a gradual shift, an adaptation of new tech as it becomes available, not a sudden 0-1 switch.
Yes, this is what happens when expertise becomes co-opted by dishonest political forces. The Left shouldn't have done that. They destroyed social trust in expertise and this is where it's led us. If you don't want an antivaxxer running HHS then don't start talking about how science shows that gender is a spectrum or that race is a social construct. They declared a war on rationality and now they're complaining that nothing makes sense. Oh the irony.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=murc%27s%20law
Very common in general and not limited to Democrats.
Basically 69.9% of Pro-Israel's talking points is just repeating "HAMAS MADE US DO IT" in a loop and hoping the other guy forgets what he wanted to say.
Yeah could you imagine killing people from another country just because they invade yours? "They made us do it" my foot!
Sure thing, Israel killed the babies because the babies invaded Israel. They had to do it. No other choice.
When you're attacked by bad guys, you kill those bad guys, because if you don't, they will attack again. If those bad guys hide under their own children, their children have to die, because if they don't, the bad guys know that all they have to do to survive is hide behind even more children and attack with even more impunity. In urban warfare, children die. Every single time. Hamas declared war on Israel. They knew when they did so that Israel wasn't going to take it lying down, and Palestine's own children that Hamas is hiding under were going to die. They knew this, they counted on it, they *want* it. "We love death more than you love life." They celebrate when their children die because they believe paradise awaits them. So they will die. As long as they continue to attack and hide under children, they will die, and many of the children will die too.
But I have already read all the Hasbara you're indoctrinated with more times than your brain have neurons, and I already reject them as barbarian baby-murdering ramblings.
So what did you add? What did your keyboard and CPU expend energy on? Just regurgitating what ever baby murderer have been saying for 20 months?
I don't buy this "look what you made me do" type of argument, nor is there reason to think this sort of "oh yeah see how you like it when the shoe is on the other foot" thing will lead to deescalation, as opposed to further escalation.
Also, RFK Jr was an antivaxxer, and I bet trump held the various beliefs he holds, long before the stuff you're referring to here became popular.
Well, whoever started it, everyone seems to be piling into it now.
Also, RFK Jr is remarkably honest about what he does and doesn’t know about vaccines. Anyone calling him an anti vaxxer has never listened to him talk in depth on podcasts for multiple hours. As an MD I supported him for President when he was running as an independent long before he joined with Trump (interesting that the media didn’t have anything to say about him back then)
"[O]ur job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child."
- RFKj, source: https://sites.libsyn.com/311600/rfk-jr , about 11:30
No, RFKj is just antivaxx.
Do you really have the impression I have never heard this quote before? Left wing propaganda is omnipresent. Listen to RFK for three hours on Rogan or Jocko or Lex Fridman and see what you think then
Last I heard (possibly from biased sources), RFK Jr. is coming out in favor of the measles vaccine, and his followers hate him for it. Now what?
Now we re-examine his reasoning. Which, hopefully, we were doing all along.
If RFKJ is favoring the measles vaccine (from I heard, he specifically advocates separating it from MMR), that means he's not "just antivaxx"; he's got reasoning underneath, and the worst thing someone could do in response to that is to just respond tribally - whether to criticize him for taking so long to come around to the truth, or to hate him for betraying Team Antivax, or any other response that rests on a black-and-white understanding of vaccines.
Reminds me of when Trump told his followers to get vaccinated for Covid and they booed him. For some people there’s no elite who can be trusted…
In the sense that Scott and others like him are responsible for anything, they are responsible for the absolute faith expressed in the views above. Of the side that has won and is winning and is getting everything they wanted, but still fighting battles they won years ago.
Your guy is in charge, doing what you want in the way that you wanted it. The DEIs are getting what they deserve, they are no longer crushing you with their iron jackboot. Those snooty experts are getting shown their place.
So what's to be angry about? Enjoy your time in the sun.
Trump is far from my guy, but I do understand why he’s there. I don’t like what he’s doing but I want it to be understood in the full context in which it occurred so that it doesn’t happen again. Progressives destabilized the norms of reasonable political discourse and that’s what brought us to crazytown. I don’t blame Trump, he’s just an opportunist. The Left knew better than to give in to the extremes of their party but they did it anyway. They’re the ones that have to learn the lesson here.
(And I mean I do blame Trump for being a terrible person, which he is, but there's no sense in getting mad at a person who can't change. You don't get mad at the dog for running away, you get mad at the person who forgot to close the gate.)
I feel compelled to hammer this message because I fear that the natural reaction of the dems is going to be to double down on oppressive progressivism. That’s not the answer because that’s what got us here in the first place. It’s important that the Left understands that.
To be honest, I’d be inclined to want to believe that myself as an anti woke leftist (left on economics mostly, which is where the emphasis should be) - but it’s quite likely that Trump won because of the price of eggs.
Swing voters are not that politically aligned and not necessarily that politically engaged either. Everybody knows their grocery bill.
The discourse about why Trump was elected is so distorted. Most people vote for "their side" regardless of what is going on in the world. The justification is mostly post-hoc. The economy turned to shit and so most people say they voted based on the economy. But that doesn't mean the election turned on the state of the economy.
What turns an election is non-voters turning out, voters staying home, or voters switching sides. Polls show the swing voters were disproportionately motivated by identity politics. That's where the analysis needs to be as that is where the election can be won or lost next go round.
So you don’t believe the people that say they voted on the economy but do believe the people who say they voted on identity politics. That would need data per swing state.
Plenty of people vote on the economy. It’s generally why, across democracies, parties in power during recessions are turfed out even if the recession was hardly their fault.
This is the most obtuse reading of the point I made. It's not about believing what people say, people are very often not good at judging their own motivations. It's the simple observation that the vast majority of voters were going to vote for the side they voted for regardless of what is going on in the world. This fact overrides anyone's claim to the "reason" they voted.
Susie the born-again Christian didn't vote for Trump because the economy took a nosedive under Biden. She voted for Trump because she's a life-long Republican and so she was almost guaranteed to vote for Trump. This fact overrides whatever she may claim was in her head when she voted.
Swing voters, especially those that were Biden-Trump voters, when they say they voted for Trump because of identity politics, the circumstances of their vote support their claim much more than Susie's claim.
I hear you. Yes the economy matters but I do think Trump is a response to more than that. People are genuinely sick of woke and view it as an existential cultural threat. For some reason he’s the only politician who can actually push back against it.
But... gender IS a spectrum. It isn't sex (and even sex isn't exactly binary, given intersex and other outliers). It's an explicitly social category.
As for the race part, I don't know exactly who/what you're referring to. I can say that at the very least the *categories* of races are social constructs, in that every category is a social construct. For instance what races are considered "white" has greatly changed over time.
Well, this is where the disagreements start. Gender, as distinct from sex, may well be a spectrum. It is true that gender roles are socially determined, and that articles of clothing, length or shortness of hair, use of cosmetics, jewellery, etc. are not tied irrevocably and indissolubly to one sex or the other.
However, it jumped from "I'm talking about gender, not sex; I'm a biological male so that's my sex, but my gender is female so I'm a woman" to "sex and gender are the same thing, sex is on a spectrum, look at the intersex, checkmate bigots!"
People being intersex has Sweet Fanny Adams to do with transness, any more than having a malfunctioning pancreas meaning you need insulin injections is related to someone with a healthy organ wanting to go on metformin because they feel they are spiritually a diabetic, or something.
There are non-diabetic people who want to go on metformin for alleged health benefits, but as yet they're not claiming to be trans-diabetics or something along that line. The day that starts to happen, when they start claiming "well type II diabetes exists" and "new forms of diabetes are being recognised" (we're up to four types now) and use that as a cover for "so I'm really a diabetic too because I truly believe I need the same benefits from metformin", then you can argue over "health is a spectrum" but I think few people will agree that a particular known and identified medical condition extrapolates out to your case.
> However, it jumped from "I'm talking about gender, not sex; I'm a biological male so that's my sex, but my gender is female so I'm a woman" to "sex and gender are the same thing, sex is on a spectrum, look at the intersex, checkmate bigots!"
This. It started with "gender" being a different thing from "sex". It ended with calling you a bigot if you said that sex was a real thing regardless of anyone's chosen gender.
For "race", my understanding is that older hypotheses about races being cleanly-separated subspecies is firmly discredited. DNA studies do support the idea of some significant degree of clustering, but the clusters are very fuzzy and the average genetic differences between clusters are a pretty small fraction of total human genetic variation.
The clusters are fuzzy enough that it isn't clear how many clusters there are, let alone how to carve them at the joints. There's at least one study (Rosenberg et al, 2005) which tried out clustering analysis with the algorithm instructed to find between 2 and 6 clusters. The k=5 results correlate pretty well (but far from perfectly) with the old "five races" model, finding the following clusters: Europe+Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. But another study using the same algorithm with different parameters (Tiskoff et all 2009) found best fit with 14 clusters rather than 5 or 6.
>For instance what races are considered "white" has greatly changed over time.
I've heard that claim many times and suspect it of being a misunderstanding of an oversimplification. If anything, the definition of "white" has contracted, with most West Asian and North African ethnicities no longer being considered "white" as they were in the Five Races model that was popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. C.f. the meme about there being no white people in the Bible, which would have been perplexing to 19th century race theorists who would have counted as white not just the Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews, but also the Philistines, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, etc.
I think the truth underlying the claim is that people used to put a lot more importance on distinctions between white ethnicities. Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, etc were considered "white" but still faced considerable prejudice and discrimination for not being Anglo-Saxon or other "good" kinds of "white". H.P. Lovecraft's stories are a good illustration of one set of racist attitudes prevalent in the 1920s, where Eastern European immigrants and even the poor rural white inhabitants of western Massachusetts are described in terms of racial/ethnic opprobrium no less unflattering than those Lovecraft directs at Blacks, Asians, and various indigenous peoples.
Yeah. The early 20th century model of human races is that they were essentially (1) monophyletic clades (though not of course in these words; but Linnaeus considered them separate subspecies, Haeckel different species outright) that (2) separated very early in the history of Homo sapiens, (3) were roughly constant in phenotype and continent-scale distribution, and (4) had a core of pure ancestry even though hybridization may occur in the areas of contact. Each of these points has been disproven by modern population genetics. While you can still rescue a concept of continental genetic clusters that you can choose to call "race", it's only superficially related to what a 1920 anthropologist meant by that word.
When I was little, I read some very old "science for children" books, I think from the late 1950s. I remember one of those books having a little graphic that showed races having separate ancestry all the way back to early proto-humans, with white people being descended from Homo habilis and black people being descended from Australopithecus robustus. Even as a kid in the late 1980s, I was aware this was nonsense and was perplexed as to why anyone had ever believed that.
Good old polygenesis. I recall reading about even more extreme conceptions, claiming that Europeans are most closely related to chimpanzees, Africans to gorillas, and Asians to orangutans (chimpanzees are, in fact, next of kin to all humans; gorillas to the human+chimpanzee clade, and orangutans to the human+chimpanzee+gorilla clade). This raises the question of how human populations would have managed to develop such similar features simultaneously, but around 1900 a Neolamarckian conception of evolution in which different organisms evolve in the same direction because that's just, like, the way to do it was still fairly popular.
Polygenesis got a little consolation prize when it was discovered that human populations have different amounts of DNA from Neanderthals, Denisovan, and at least one "ghost" human species from Africa, but as far as I know these introgressions never amount to more than 5% of the genome. And of course, these other species are extremely close kin to us anyway.
Race is much fuzzier than gender and there are many more people of mixed race than mixed gender.
To me saying gender is binary is a bit like saying day/night is binary. Sure there are exceptions like “Arctic Circle” or “solar eclipse” or “that time Mount Pinatubo erupted and blocked out all sunlight.” But if you were to graph times according to “whether the sun is out” and “how light is it, measured in lux” and “what time of day is it currently” you would find strong correlations. Similarly if you were to graph people according to “what are their chromosomes” and “do they have ovaries” and “are they biologically capable of bearing children.”
Trans people should feel free to play around with the categories and take whatever name or gender identity they see fit, but they start to lose normies when they deny the existence of gender categories altogether.
As a binary trans woman, I tend to find the "gender isn't real" strain of thought popular in some subsets of the trans/nonbinary community mildly insulting. When they say that "man" and "woman" aren't real things, that sounds an awful lot like they're telling me that I'm silly for strongly preferring to be the latter over the former. No shade on people for whom a nonbinary identity seems to fit better than either male or female; I take them at their words about their identities and internal experiences, and merely ask that they accord me the same respect.
That said, I see a lot more clear-cut historical and anthropological precedent for nonbinary and gender-nonconforming identities than there is for binary trans identities. I suspect this is at least partially an artifact of options for medical transition being effectively zero and for surgical transition being very, very limited until the mid-20th century when sex hormones got isolated and researched for medical use and when the precursors of modern bottom surgery techniques started to get developed. And after that, it took some time for the options to get particularly good, and more time still (process is still ongoing in many places) for them to be readily accessible to people who want them.
The non-binary stuff is confusing to me, I don't understand how someone can be trans non-binary (isn't the point of non-binary that there is no one pole of your being, so you're not being trans that?). But the worst of it was exemplified in Ketanji Brown Jackson dodging the question at her confirmation hearing - and I don't blame her one bit, it was a 'gotcha' and not in good faith - about "how would you define woman" with "well I'm not a biologist":
"On March 22, 2022, during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Blackburn asked Jackson to define the word "woman". "'I can’t—' Jackson replied. 'You can’t?' Blackburn said. 'Not in this context. I’m not a biologist,' Jackson said. 'The meaning of the word woman is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?' Blackburn asked."
When we're at the point that a woman can't dare to give a definition of the term, for fear of offending a tiny minority of the population, where are we at? Suppose she had been asked about her experience of being black (or indeed, Black, if we're doing that term), would she had demurred about "not being a biologist"?
The circular definition of "you're a woman if you feel you are a woman" makes little to no sense. What is this feeling of being a woman? What is womanness in that context or sense? It seems to fall back to the old, and what I thought were finally outmoded, notions of "well sugar and spice and all things nice, being girly, being emotional, not liking boy things" which are tied up with gender roles - socially constructed, remember? and so not inherent rules of nature - and external forms of expression. If you went through second wave feminism, this return to "girls are pink and boys are blue" is a very depressing regression.
Non-binary can go after that, and it's not a bad thing, but generally when I see people online claiming to be non-binary, my first and immediate reaction is "this is a girl who just cut her hair short or dresses in jeans and shirts". I think there's a bit too much treating identities as labels and trying them on, and it's natural in your teenage and early adult years to do that, but creating finer and finer distinctions and nailing yourself down to "I am this and that but not the other" is grim.
"There is no such thing as a male brain or a female brain, only bigots believe so", but also "trans women are people born with a female brain in a male body".
If the genitals are the only *real* difference between men and women, and everything else is just an arbitrary brainwashing done by patriarchy... then being trans means wishing to have different genitals, because what *else* could it possibly be?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison
Gender is bimodal, even if you separate it from sex. So much so that advocates of transgenderism don’t actually want to create new categories for trans, but to lump them back into the categories man or woman, with trans being a modifier, but not a new gender class itself.
A bimodal distribution... over a spectrum.
If I were to ask you to name a dozen genders you would quickly drop into sexual preferences.
Most of the genders I know are based around male, female, or the lack of the two, yes. In order to get to 12 I'd have to say some that I personally think are pretty silly. At the same time (much like Scott has previously said he treated being trans) personally thinking it's a bit silly isn't going to stop me from being kind and doing my best to accommodate them.
And just for fun:
Male
Female
Nonbinary
Demigirl/Demi-female
Demiboy/Demi-male
Agender
Bigender
Genderfluid
Genderqueer
are the ones I know offhand.
Try coming up with working definitions for "Demigirl, Agender, and Genderfluid" that aren't self referential.
Yes this is what I mean by nonsense. Outside of esoteric communities there is no adult that doesn’t just think that’s anything but batshit insane. No sane political platform can expect to foist that on the entirety of society and expect them to accept it.
Invented gender identities are mostly just camouflage for mental illness and society has good reason not to normalize mental illness.
>gender IS a spectrum.
It’s really not. There are men, women, and then a tiny fraction of people who have pathologies which make strict categorization difficult. The existence of a *de minimus* “other” category doesn’t obviate a binary system which has served both biology and society since time immemorial. You don’t say that the number of human limbs lies on a spectrum just because 0.00001% of people are born without arms. I’m sorry but that’s just nonsense. If those people want to build an identity around their disorder then that’s their business, but you can’t tell people how to perceive you, and you can’t force society to adopt an ontology that 80% of people find outright insane.
>There's also definitely a fair bit of social construction in "race,"
Of course. I’m responding to those who lie about the reality of socially relevant ethnic differences like IQ and crime. Race may be imprecise but “black” and “white” are still very predictive labels.
The only real chemical elements are hydrogen, helium, carbon, and oxygen. Everything else is a pathological outlier and should not be considered part of any sane ontology. And carbon and oxygen are on thin ice.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2340/
You include carbon and oxygen? Madness! There is only hydrogen as the one true universal element!
Elements are primarily defined by counting discrete numbers.
People are primarily defined by counting discrete entities too, so I don't know what your objection is.
Erica's point is a good retort, if you go by abundance alone then Hydrogen (according to Google) is 92% of the Universe's vanilla matter, and Helium is the next 7% so together they corner 99% of the entire Universe's matter. That's pretty huge. Also, every other atom is in some sense "multiple hydrogen atom in a trench coat", because hydrogen is just a proton and an electron, so every pair of a proton and an electron inside a non-hydrogen atom is like a mini-hydrogen atom. Ergo, all other elements are "fake", Hydrogen is the One True Element.
And that's definitely true as insight porn, but it would be ridiculous to use it to argue that other elements should be cancelled from Chemistry or treated as mentally ill hydrogen.
"Ergo, all other elements are "fake", Hydrogen is the One True Element."
As the joke goes, "Electrons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!"
One True Element, One True Church 😁
>together they corner 99% of the entire Universe's matter
Baryonic matter, anyway... ( not holding my breath till the cosmologists and particle physicists conclude _something_ about dark matter other than its gravity... )
1 and 2 existing doesn't make 3 a non discrete number. But the existence of 1 and 2 says nothing about the existence of glorp and whether it has any discreetness to it.
That's a 20th century innovation. Traditionally, they were differentiated by qualitative descriptions of their chemical and mechanical properties, with the modern proton-count based definition only taking over after atomic theory and experimental techniques developed to the point we figured out atoms were made of protons, neutrons, and electrons and had sufficiently reliable ways to try to try to count them.
Ha ha
The difference there, of course, is that there is objective evidence that invalidates that argument by unanimous consensus.
All progressive gender claims are, by comparison, pure fantasy.
Objective observability definitely helps demonstrate that relatively rare things are real and deserve to be part of the ontology. But on the other hand, for internal psychological phenomena that exist mainly in an individual's subjective experience, claiming to know someone else's mind (especially that of a stranger or passing acquaintance) better than they know themselves strikes me as somewhat unlikely.
Another aspect of chemical elements is that you and I spend most of our time in a minuscule corner of the universe where cosmically rare elements are abundant and significant. Any attempt to model the details of the laptop I'm typing on or the air I'm breathing without taking silicon, aluminum, copper, and nitrogen into account is going to be obviously nonsensical. But astrophysicists will often casually lump together everything that isn't hydrogen or helium into a grab-bag category of "metals", and a hypothetical race of energy beings living in deep interstellar space would probably roll their eyes at anyone who tried to propose an ontology that considered elements besides the big two and maybe a handful of more abundant "metals" to be anything more than a footnote.
I suspect there's an analogous bubble effect going on here. I'm in a very liberal cultural bubble, and within that bubble I can easily think of half a dozen friends and acquaintances who tell me they're nonbinary and I find no particular reason to doubt them. I'm guessing from what you've said so far (please correct me if I'm wrong) that you're in a very different bubble, where very few people are out to you as nonbinary and any that are are easy for you to find reason to doubt their sanity.
I get not identifying particularly strongly with one's gender, some people are not that hung up on being a girly girl or a man's man.
What I don't get is the "no, I'm special, I am non-binary but..." be that femme presenting, masc presenting, 'today at 11 o'clock I am mostly a demi-girl but by 6 o'clock I'll be a butch gay man' types. The leaning into androgyny types, eh, that's understandable too (if somewhat vulnerable to being a teenage phase) but the "seventy kinds of degrees of difference" stuff baffles me.
>for internal psychological phenomena that exist mainly in an individual's subjective experience, claiming to know someone else's mind (especially that of a stranger or passing acquaintance) better than they know themselves strikes me as somewhat unlikely.
Agreed. In my view that's unrelated to gender because gender is a somatic category and not a cognitive one. Not nearly enough attention is paid to that distinction.
>I suspect there's an analogous bubble effect going on here.
For sure. I casually know a few nonbinaries and they're all people I would never want to know well. I've never met one that appeared to be particularly stable. No doubt they exist. Certainly you make very thoughtful and intelligent comments here - I might very well like you if we met. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't still object to the ideology that you represent, not least because it became an object of abuse in the hands of the woke mob. I think you'll find that many more people are willing to take you seriously when you take seriously their right to dislike you. Society changes via consensus, and that consensus changes slowly (as it should). It took a hundred years even for evolution to stop being an issue and that was completely uncontroversial from a scientific perspective. This is far more contentious so have some patience.
I'm sure this doesn't apply to you, but it's one of the canned things I like to say about this topic. The gender explosion is predicated on the notion that people should feel free to live their true inner selves. Well, that works both ways. You can't demand that people respect your self-expression if you refuse to accept theirs, and most people's "true inner selves" view nonbinary people as deeply disordered. You cannot change that view by either fiat or censorship, and if you try you will eventually provoke justifiable violence. That's a reality that a deeply controversial and tiny minority would do well to keep in mind.
If you want people to accept you then invite their criticisms. If you're still standing after that then you'll have won grudging respect. You'll never get there by being shrill (which you personally aren't, but many others are).
> I feel the need to emphasize, again, that gender is not sex, and not based on biology.
I just reject this perspective and feel that it’s nothing but advocacy masquerading as neutral principle. I use gender and sex interchangeably and don’t care if you object to that. This is just reflective of an ideological difference. I’ll debate the ideology but I don’t want to have some kind of proxy linguistic argument.
>do you believe that certain races are more predisposed towards crime than others
I don’t know about predisposed, but there is certainly a large racial disparity in perpetration. I believe critiques of the concept of race are a dishonest attempt to avoid confronting disparities like these.
>If your categories are so strict that they force you to ignore that many people, maybe it's time to rethink.
It’s not about ignoring anyone, it’s about not restructuring all of society to accommodate a tiny minority. Also I call bs on 1-2%. There is no way that many people have a substantively nonbinary gender. Almost all of those can fit into society just fine without society doing anything to accommodate them. And I have no doubt that the vast majority of them are better served by conforming to one of the standard roles than by blazing their own trail. Archetypes exist for a reason and that reason is that they’re adaptive.
Agreed on the first point, no point arguing if you just disagree with the existence of a separate term for gender.
On the second point, maybe I am just in different places but I haven't seen much or any critique of the concept of race as a whole. Most places I've seen talk about those differences acknowledge that they exist but point to cultural/financial/societal factors (crime) or inaccuracy/bias in measurement (IQ) as the main causes.
Third point, my argument is that the categories are loose and defined from person to person, and it really doesn't take much effort or work (societally or personally) to accommodate an 'other' category. We already do it all the time! Example: James asks his friends to call him Jim. Do they *have* to accommodate him? No, but it's so simple that it'd be lazy and to put it bluntly "kind of a dick move" not to.
Do you understand what gender is? I feel the need to emphasize, again, that gender is not sex, and not based on biology. Gender is much more about social norms and the ways in which people choose to behave and identify. Yes, you can't control how others perceive you, but you can control how you present yourself and how you think about yourself.
As for the limbs comment, sure if it was a one in a million genetic mutation I would say it's probably not worth considering. But a quick Google will show you that between 1-2% of all people are born with intersex traits. If your categories are so strict that they force you to ignore that many people, maybe it's time to rethink.
Based on your final sentence, do you believe that certain races are more predisposed towards crime than others?
Being born intersex is not the same as being born trans, unless the argument is being advanced that (1) all intersex people are trans or come under the category of trans or should be regarded as trans - which I think is not universally accepted by intersex people and (2) having functional primary and secondary sexual characteristics of your natal sex is the same thing as being born with a disorder, so being trans is the same thing as being intersex.
Being born blind is not the same thing as "my eyes work just fine but I have Body Integrity Identity Disorder and I want to surgically remove my eyes". That's the "some people are born intersex, it's totally the same thing as me being trans" argument being pushed.
"As for the race part, I don't know exactly who/what you're referring to. I can say that at the very least the *categories* of races are social constructs, in that every category is a social construct. For instance what races are considered "white" has greatly changed over time."
Yeah, but that's a philosophical debate, not the subject of a clinical study. It's more a Humanities thing.
What I took from the OP was a complaint about people saying "It is an OFFICIAL SCIENCE FACT that whatever I believe in is correct". Of course, that's true when you're arguing with astrologers. But it was also a message that was very badly applied in the recent dialogue RE trans issues, for example.
Could you give me an example of what you're referring to with the trans issue stuff? (not trying to gotcha you or anything, it's just there are so many in recent memory that it's hard to pick out a single one).
In general I'd agree that oftentimes people say something is "PROVEN BY SCIENCE" when really they mean they saw a study that agreed with them, or science says it's more likely than not, or etc. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it a serious issue, or even exclusive to the left? IMO, no.
OP's comment (and followup) reads to me as the ingroup/out group/fargroup issue all over again. They don't like Trump, but punishing the outgroup (progressives) is more important than any of the harm Trump is now causing.
One of the more popular trans-activist slogans is "the science is settled". Which they pull out in situations where the science is not remotely settled, like exactly what policy we should have RE youth transition.
(I also once saw an organisation publish a "debunking myths about trans people" list article that was about half actual data and half entries like "FACT: trans women are women". But I think that was just one person with a serious lack of self-awareness. Plus it was kinda funny.)
I'm not at all sure if the OP sees progressives as the outgroup, unless we're defining it in the strict way that excludes anyone who isn't mean or dishonest (it's one of those flexible words, like "woke"). Haven't read all their comments, though.
Lib who tried to save trust here (I was one of the early converts to lab leak).
Obviously there's a spectrum of gender. Nonbinary people exist. If you think they don't then either you've been lied to and just somehow failed to meet any, or you have been misled about what non-binary refers to. (E.g. it is not and has not ever been a claim that humans have intermediate gamete sizes, if someone pretended that was what's at issue.)
There's also definitely a fair bit of social construction in "race," even if it's not necessarily 100% meaningless. E.g. since Africa still has most of humanity's genetic diversity—with e.g. Finns having descended from a subset of ancient East and Northeast Africans who migrated out—it's at least not obvious that "Black" should be treated as a natural group that includes East and West Africans and excludes Finns, even if you *can* squint and find a way to do so by defining race w.r.t. continental barriers to gene flow.
The question as to whether nonbinary people exist is basically dependent on whether or not you buy into the whole sex is separate from gender thing which is a very large can of worms that is difficult to resolve cleanly. If you believe that gender is separate from sex such that it has no firm grounding in biology then there isn't really any ground to object to people who don't belong in either of the historical default genders.
You do give up a lot of stuff when you bite that bullet. Like why should transwomen be fixated on taking on the sexual characteristics of natal females in particular? Why would we have separate sports leagues based on whether people feel more feminine or masculine? Why are we deciding which bathrooms to put urinals in based on masculinity?
It seems a lot like the world we grew up in was using sex and gender interchangeably and many of the things people who separate sex from gender seem to care about gaining access to were in fact set up because of sexual realities. Maybe that's fine. A definition of the women gender as "person who wants basically what the average female in the 1900s had going on adjusted for modern sensibilities" is workable. It might even be what we settle on and see a lot of natal females move on to some other gender if they don't like what that one shakes out to be.
But it should absolutely be acknowledged that this isn't some kind of "of course, obviously, what do you mean you don't get it?" kind of thing. This is all very weird to people who aren't steeped in it.
"Obviously there's a spectrum of gender. Nonbinary people exist."
Non sequitur. The existence of three categories instead of two, does not make something a "spectrum". For that, you need continuous variation from one extreme to the other, and I see at least two big discontinuities.
It is certainly arguable that within the gender category of "nonbinary" there exists something that would count as a spectrum. But the category is sufficiently small, and the range of variation within it small compared to the gaps between it and the other two categories are sufficiently large, that "gender is a spectrum" is IMO a vast overstatement.
See my response to Glynn elsewhere in the thread.
It seems to me that whether or not nonbinary people exist depends on the social norms of the people you hang out with. I think it's clear that femininity and masculinity objectively exist as personality clusters, and that some people objectively don't fit well within either cluster. But, the category that such a person fits in is subjective and not scientific. A liberal-minded person might be accepting of an "in-between" type person calling themselves nonbinary, but they would also accept the same person calling themselves trans, or if they just preferred their default gender. What I'm trying to say is...nonbinary is a social construct.
Intersex exists, but that's not usually what people are talking about.
I do agree that race categorization based on skin color alone makes no sense, but this argument always felt like a straw man. Perhaps that's something that people believed back in the days of "scientific racism".
I am curious to know more about your strong stance on nonbinary identity. Maybe it refers to something more specific than what I think it does.
Yes, I hope that what's going on right now will show some on the left that the rush of power they got from taking people out with online mobs led them to overplay their hand. (I would also like people on the right not to behave in similar fashions, but it hurts the things I care about more when it's the left giving themselves a bad name.)
Sadly, that sort of introspection seems all too rare in politics. I was on a WaPo article, talking about how we should react to Trump's victory, and saw some reasonably intelligent-seeming people shouting "How dare you say the Democrats handled the election wrong! It's the voter's fault, not ours!" As the man said: the problem is not that you have the wrong sort of leaders, which is obvious, but that you have the wrong sort of people.
>Yes, I hope that what's going on right now will show some on the left that the rush of power they got from taking people out with online mobs led them to overplay their hand.
It would indeed be good if that happened, although the pessimist in me suggests the lesson they're more likely to take away is "We didn't censor opposing views hard enough, we need to really double down when we're back in power to make sure the plebs can never be led astray again!"
I've started to come around to that myself. Holding yourself to ideals of democracy and freedom isn't worth much if it results in a dictator seizing power anyway. If democracy can't reliably perpetuate itself, it has to be changed until it can.
I still hope that America's democracy can survive Trump at least mostly intact, but the prospects are looking worse with every passing day.
I agree that Trump is eroding norms in a bad way. I'm not sure how you can say that his opponent's have been "holding [themselves] to the ideals of democracy..." I mean, the current argument is more along the lines of "the people were wrong to vote for Trump" when that's the very definition of democracy - they voted for their preferred candidate. By definition the people cannot be "wrong" with their vote, except through fraud or coercion. Are you saying the 2024 election was fraudulent, or dare I say, stolen?
> the current argument is more along the lines of "the people were wrong to vote for Trump" when that's the very definition of democracy - they voted for their preferred candidate
when people talk about democracy like this, they generally mean a liberal democracy. one that protects civil rights, human rights, etc. My that definition, Trump is damaging to democracy, because his administration clearly cares much less about these than previous ones. Like sure, there were excesses in the past with EO, but Trump is clearly in a new category, from Signal-gate, to unilaterally crashing the stock market, to destroying relationships with allies for no clear gain, to defying SCOTUS orders bc they want to.
No, I'm saying that "One man, one vote, one time" is a real thing that happens, and needs to be defended against.
The Democrats are a bunch of corpo whore scumbags, like nearly everyone in politics in any country, but L50L probably meant that no Democrat politician in living memory ever said racial slurs about their opponent (ala the looney Laura Loomer, who said Kamala would make the White House smell of curry), or accused the winning candidate in an election of stealing the election and eating children's blood in the basement of a pizza franchise
> when that's the very definition of democracy
Democracy has no one definition. The Ancient Greeks would have called Americans posers who rule by Bureaucracy and don't actually have a "True Democracy", which to the Ancient Greeks stereotype I have in my mind involved direct voting of military-service-capable free male citizens. Probably some implicit class markers thrown in there.
The US's founders repeatedly made a lot of "design decisions" to prevent the US from being led by a simple(ton) majority. Unelected judges, indirect election of people who will then elect the president, 2 houses of legislation with different terms limits, and that's just from memory as a non-American.
> but L50L probably meant that no Democrat politician in living memory ever said racial slurs about their opponent (ala the looney Laura Loomer, who said Kamala would make the White House smell of curry), or accused the winning candidate in an election of stealing the election and eating children's blood in the basement of a pizza franchise
No, that stuff is relatively unimportant. The big issue here is Trump's push towards autocracy. Trump has been ruling as a dictator without any regard to norms or laws, crushing anyone who attempts to stop him Republican or Democrat alike. And he's successfully built a cult of personality around him that is cheering him on along the way.
Scott, I hope some time soon you put up a thread responding to some of the best objections to the event sequence outlined in your AI 2027 post.
The general pattern is that we get such posts only when Scott can counter most of the objections.
Trump, and his buddy the dictator of El Salvador, are now colluding to openly defy a Supreme Court order to release and return a man they admit they illegally kidnapped to El Salvador's torture prison.
Trump says "How can little old me facilitate his release? I'm not the president of El Salvador!" Bukele, sitting right next to Trump in the Oval Office, says "How can little old me release him? You want me to smuggle him into the United States?"
If Americans let this stand, it's over. America will be a dictatorship.
Respectfully, I disagree.
The actual SCOTUS ruling can be found on the first page and a half of this document: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf.
If you read it, all it says *on the actual unanimous ruling* is:
- The deadline imposed by the courts for returning the Salvadoran migrant is cancelled.
- The US government must only "facilitate" his return (which passes the buck on defining what it means to the lower court).
- The US government must notify the steps it has taken to this effect to the lower court.
If you believe that this decision was poorly-written, you're not alone [1].
I personally believe that the conservative judges agree with the deportation but, recognizing that there was no due process, they decided to throw POTUS a lifeline to put a figleaf on his actions and say: "Oopsie, I asked nicely, but now Bukele doesn't want to return him anymore. Will do better next time!"
Now, this situation is only happening because he is a migrant who was being sent back to his actual home country. Had he been Nicaraguan... Bukele would not have even taken him! We know it, because that's exactly what happened when a Nicaraguan man was deported. [2] And yes, I know that Bukele has notoriously taken Venezuelans, but SCOTUS hasn't ruled on their cases.
And if that's not enough, after the unanimous SCOTUS ruling, there's a (stronger) opinion from the liberal judges which literally states that the US government cannot create a loophole where it gets out of judicial review by deporting people before a Court can weight in. This opinion only got 3/9 votes, but it's a good indication of what the position of a future Court might take.
Please notice that, in this case, is not as if there was *no trial at all*. In fact, there had been a previous trial back at 2019. [3]
IMO, it's a far cry to go from an unfortunate situation where you have a man who has been 6 years on the judicial system unfairly deported to his actual home country, to a situation where American political dissidents are exiled without trial. The first one is a tragedy for the families involved, but you wouldn't expect SCOTUS to risk a constitutional crisis over it.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/supremecourt/comments/1jyjgh4/in_light_of_supreme_court_decision_in_abrego/mn6xjvj/
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/venezuelans-deported-week-included-8-women-returned-us/story?id=120111090
[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A949/354927/20250407153131040_2025.04.07%20Respondents%20Opp%20to%20App%20to%20Vacate.pdf
Do you really feel that the Trump administration is duly "facilitating" Garcia's return when Bukele sits next to trump and says "How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?" and Trump says nothing?
I absolutely don´t think that they are actually facilitating Garcia's return. But I also don't think that SCOTUS will go ahead and plunge the US into a constitutional crisis over this case.
As I explained, I think that SCOTUS is deliberately giving Trump freedom of movement and latitude on this specific case, because of its specific circumstances (a Salvadoran being deported to a Salvadoran jail, after a 5-year long legal battle, with the Salvadoran government in agreement to keep him).
The point being that this situation, while unfortunate for the man, will not lead us to a situation where the US President can use Salvadoran jails for American political dissidents without due process.
Why not? Did the DoJ lawyers argue in court that their Article 2 power is judicially reviewable if they mess up and deport a citizen? They're not even saying it can be checked when they admit they made an error.
IMO, this isn't about what the DoJ lawyers have argued in court.
Rather, this is about the actual expansion of the Executive's power that is facilitated through the specific mechanism of using a *foreign* prison.
This does poses a danger to the specific case of Salvadoran or irregular legal status who might be deported only on the *suspicion* of being gangsters, but it's not generalizable to a worst-case scenario of American political dissidents being jailed without due process.
As I understand, these are the facts:
**********************************************************************
2019: The courts deny bail to Mr. Abrego-Garcia, under suspicion of being MS13.
-> 2019, later: The court order Mr. Abrego-Garcia can't be deported to El Salvador (witholding order) due to the risk of retaliation from 18th Street Gang (a *rival* gang). No ruling on whether Mr. Abrego-Garcia's is or isn't MS13.
-> 2024-25: DHS classifies MS13 as a terrorist organization. Then, DHS deports Mr. Abrego-Garcia. At first, they argued that they didn't checked that the order made him non-deportable to El Salvador, but later ICE stated the belief that the witholding order is no valid as it can't apply to terrorist organizations like MS13.
-> 2025, later: The courts say that: "No, the witholding order is still valid, no one has actually found him guilty of belongin to MS13, so bring him back".
-> later, SCOTUS says: "We may not be able to force you bring him back, but we can force you to try, so do try".
Actual words from SCOTUS: "The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs." https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
-> DHS response, from the Bukele press conference: We tried to bring him back by offering a plane to return him, if the Salvadoran government wanted to return him.
I recognize that this is obviously the DHS making the least possible effort, because they don't actually want to return him. But the matter is that they are at least pretending to comply with the order.
-> Then Bukele refused to return him, actually transporting him to another prison in Santa Ana, El Salvador, as Senator Van Hollen revealed. (https://x.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1913325124394090873#m).
Most American commentators assume that Bukele has no agency, and he is just acting as Trump's puppet. As a Salvadoran who has been watching Bukele for almost the last 15 years, I disagree. However, Bukele's true intentions are immaterial, given that Trump actually wants to keep Mr. Abrego-Garcia deported.
Now, it's noticeable that Mr. Abrego-Garcia is no longer at CECOT, instead he's at a regular prisons where *other* alleged gang-membes are currently awaiting trial. This gives me hope that there might actually be a trial for Mr. Abrego-Garcia, held in El Salvador, where we can actually discover the truth.
**********************************************************************
You seem to belive that, as Justice Sotomayor argues, that "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene."
That opinion is respectable. After all, it was stated by 1 Supreme Court Justice and joined by other 2. You know who does not agrees with that view? The other 6 Supreme Court Justices, who didn't join on that statement.
Why they didn't? It's unclear, and I can't claim to have their same level of expertise. However, imagine if the same situation had ocurred to an actual American citizen:
- Jailed on a foreign prison without due process.
- DHS pretending to comply with the command by saying: 'we can offer a plane if the foreign government wants to return him'.
- The foreign government, arguably following secret orders from Trump, saying 'no, we don't want to return him'.
What would SCOTUS do? I believe that they would then use their power to direct government to "cut the bullshit", treat this as a hostage-taking situation by the foreign government, and actually return the American citizen.
That is *not* the situation where we're in with respect to Mr. Abrego-Garcia.
So, the involvement of a foreign government gives Trump the perfect excuse to deport non-US-citizens of that nationality, but makes no difference on Trump's capacity to disobey SCOTUS and jail American dissidents.
>This does poses a danger to the specific case of Salvadoran or irregular legal status who might be deported only on the *suspicion* of being gangsters, but it's not generalizable to a worst-case scenario of American political dissidents being jailed without due process.
Why not? Abrego Garcia was deported without due process, even with a withholding order. ~250 people on the Alien Enemies flight were deported without due process. Trump has said that he wants to deport citizens next. What isn't clicking for you that this is an authoritarian move by a President who doesn't respect the law?
>2019: The courts deny bail to Mr. Abrego-Garcia, under suspicion of being MS13.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_judge_(United_States)
You are swimming in right wing misinformation. Immigration judges are not Article 3 courts. They are part of the DoJ and their rulings are subject to being overturned by the Attorney General. Article 3 courts are where cases are settled to ensure an "impartial trial."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2025/04/17/maryland-police-officer-report-abrego-garcia-prison/83141240007/
The ruling was based on a disgraced cop's report that falsely labeled the Home Depot interaction as a murder report and that Abrego Garcia was a gang member due to soliciting outside of Home Depot with a confidential informant accusing him of being a gang member. After the report was filed, the cop, Ivan Mendez, leaked confidential information to a sex worker. He was fired and added to a "Do not call" list because of his misconduct and lack of itnegrity.
https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1396906/dl?inline
"In this regard, the respondent asserts that a Prince George's County Police Department Gang Field Interview Sheet ("GFIS") is based on hearsay relayed by a confidential source (Exh. 4) The Respondent contends that the Form 1-213 in his case erroneously states that he was detained in connection to a murder investigation. He also claims that the 1-213 is internally contradicts itself as to whether the Respondent fears returning to El Salvador. The reason for the Respondent's arrest given on his Form 1-213 does appear at odds with the Gang Field Interview Sheet, which states that the Respondent was approached because he and others were loitering outside of a Home Depot. Regardless, the determination that the Respondent is a 2 gang member appears to be trustworthy and is supported by other evidence in the record, namely, information contained in the Gang Field Interview Sheet."
The information is just the "confidential information" from the disgraced cop.
>due to the risk of retaliation from 18th Street Gang (a *rival* gang).
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.1.1_4.pdf
This is a trivial lie. "The evidence in this case indicates quite clearly that at least one central reason the Respondent was subject to past persecution was due to him being his mothers' son, essentially as a member of his nuclear family. That the Respondent is his mothers' son is the reason why he, and not another person, was threatened with death. He was threatened with death because he was Cecilia's son and the Barrio 18 gang targeted the Respondent to get at the mother and her earnings from the pupusa business."
>At first, they argued that they didn't checked that the order made him non-deportable to El Salvador, but later ICE stated the belief that the witholding order is no valid as it can't apply to terrorist organizations like MS13.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/politics/doj-fires-immigration-lawyer-who-argued-abrego-garcia-case-source-says/index.html
No, Erez Reuveni said he was deported due to an administrative error, and that people in the DHS were not giving him any answers.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69777799/11/abrego-garcia-v-noem/
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”
>Actual words from SCOTUS: "The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs."
Yes. It MAY exceed its authority, meaning there are things the district court can order the Executive to effectuate that MAY NOT exceed its own authority. Before arguing about this further, do you recognize that the Supreme Court also ordered the Trump admin to share what steps they took in his removal and to share prospects of taking further steps to bring him back, and that they did not even follow this much more minimal demand?
>Most American commentators assume that Bukele has no agency, and he is just acting as Trump's puppet.
We don’t know the details of the deal because the Trump admin has refused to comply with any orders to reveal it. If they did, the district court could probably e.g. order it to be canceled because it has been used unconstitutionally to deport people to a foreign prison without any due process and without regard to existing laws that e.g. prevent torture or cruel and unusual punishment.
>You know who does not agrees with that view? The other 6 Supreme Court Justices, who didn't join on that statement.
This is a fundamentally uncritical and unserious engagement with the opinion. The 3 liberal justices didn’t dissent, they CONCURRED. Why would they concur with an opinion that forces the government to do essentially nothing to bring him back? Why did the Supreme Court unanimously say that the deportation was illegal, and that “The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s RELEASE FROM CUSTODY in El Salvador and to ENSURE THAT HIS CASE IS HANDLED AS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN HAD HE NOT BEEN IMPROPERLY SENT TO EL SALVADOR”?
Why did the appeals court rule unanimously in 1 day from the appeal request:
““Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. See Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2 (“The Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”). The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Cf. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400 (2024); Christensen v. Harris Cnty., 529 U.S. 576, 587 (2000). Thus, the government’s argument that all it must do is “remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia’s] return,” Mot. for Stay at 2, is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court’s command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.
“Facilitation” does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country’s prisons that the withholding order forbids and, further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. “Facilitation” does not sanction the abrogation of habeas corpus through the transfer of custody to foreign detention centers in the manner attempted here. Allowing all this would “facilitate” foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood."
>What would SCOTUS do? I believe that they would then use their power to direct government to "cut the bullshit", treat this as a hostage-taking situation by the foreign government, and actually return the American citizen.
Courts can’t order the Executive to go to war or treat a situation like a hostage taking situation. Only the President is the Commander in Chief and can command the army. Courts can void treaties and contracts that are unconstitutional or against Congressional law. The Trump admin has not even complied with sharing how the deportations were carried out or what the terms of the deal are, so it’s impossible for the courts to clarify their orders any further.
>So, the involvement of a foreign government gives Trump the perfect excuse to deport non-US-citizens of that nationality, but makes no difference on Trump's capacity to disobey SCOTUS and jail American dissidents.
Who would stop him?
> The US government must only "facilitate" his return (which passes the buck on defining what it means to the lower court).
SCOTUS judges are either shockingly incompetent and illiterate, or deliberately giving Trumpo freedom of movement and latitude.
Demanding something X from someone, then refusing to actually define what X is, is worse than useless and nonsensical.
>> I DEMAND you slooorp
>>> Granted, how do I slooorp?
>> well you just have to figure that out don't you? Let's ask that guy over there.
Utter clownery.
The reason SCOTUS did not clarify is because SCOTUS knows they are potentially overstepping their bounds. Thus weasel words like "facilitate".
It is already case law that Immigration is solely in the power of the Executive Branch. For this reason, Biden was allowed to flaunt immigration law by allowing an extra 1M+ illegal immigrants and no court attempted to stop him.
>It is already case law that Immigration is solely in the power of the Executive Branch
Please detail your media diet, I'm curious how someone ends up this deluded. Here is the first result I found detailing the various Article 3 remedies available to immigrants who believe their due process rights were violated due to Article 2 immigration judge improprieties.
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/uploads/immigration/immig_west/E.pdf
I bet I know your arguments better than you know my arguments.
To clarify, I am not claiming no judicial review.
I am claiming that the details are up to the Executive Branch. They ruled in the Biden case.
https://www.epi.org/blog/supreme-court-decision-affirms-president-bidens-power-to-set-immigration-enforcement-priorities-and-protect-labor-standards-through-deferred-action/
This ruling is about the DHS setting its own priorities for immigration deportation, provided that it is acting in good faith in an underfunded environment where they don't have the resources to arrest and deport every single illegal immigrant. It did not rule that the Executive can just decide not to enforce existing immigration law or that their decisions are not bound by judicial review. The article doesn't make these points explicitly but it in no way supports your assertion that case law supports that immigration is solely in the power of the Executive branch.
I'm sorry, I realize now that I should've clarified that what I disagree on is the *last* sentence of the original comment: "if Americans let this stand ... will be a dictatorship".
I don't believe it because, as I explained, SCOTUS is deliberately giving Trump "freedom of movement and latitude" on this specific case, because of its specific circumstances (a Salvadoran being deported to a Salvadoran jail, after a 5-year long legal battle, with the Salvadoran government in agreement to keep him).
The point being that this situation, while unfortunate for the man, will not lead us to a situation where the US President can use Salvadoran jails for American political dissidents without due process.
It's slightly more complicated than that; the Supreme Court upheld the order, but also required the district court clarify what exactly the order was. Said district court has failed to do so, instead eliminating a particular word from the order. The executive branch then followed (or claimed to follow) the modified order by ordering that the man be given a visa and returned to the US -if- he shows up at the US embassy.
Which is likely all they are legally required to do; the district court doesn't have jurisdiction to demand either that El Salvador return the man, nor to require that the executive branch demand the man's return.
> the Supreme Court upheld the order, but also required the district court clarify what exactly the order was
Given that the order originally purported to require the Trump administration to remove the guy from El Salvador (not to make its best effort at doing so), the Supreme Court could hardly do anything else.
The amended order, after it was instructed to clarify exactly what its order was, was to facilitate the return, rather than to return the guy.
There are a few different threads here worth responding to.
1) the general principle of how government ought to function. All things being equal, we should aim for our government to behave according to the spirit of good governance. The question of what is or isnt _legally_ required is, in this light, silly and secondary -- the law is there to adjudicate honest disputes between two well-intentioned and good-faith parties. The executive has shown that they are neither well-intentioned NOR acting in good-faith.
Currently, the executive branch is approaching the law as a game of whack-a-mole, where they continue to push laws, break laws, and demand SCOTUS intervention on every possible edge case that they can find. No legal system is going to survive such a blatant attack. And legislators and the founders of the country certainly never would have expected or even entertained that the executive could do something as devious or obviously evil as outsourcing detention to other countries as a way to avoid due process
2) even on the merits, it is not at all obvious that this is all they are legally required to do. If you read the decision from SCOTUS, they cite several prior examples of the executive doing more or less exactly this. From the decision:
"The only argument the Government offers in support of its request, that
United States courts cannot grant relief once a deportee
crosses the border, is plainly wrong. See Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 542 U. S. 426, 447, n. 16 (2004); cf. Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U. S. 723, 732 (2008). The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.See Trump v. J. G. G., 604 U. S. ___, ___ (2025)
(SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 8). That view refutes itself.
...
Moreover, it has been the Government’s own well-established policy to “facilitate [an] alien’s return to the United States if . . . the alien’s presence
is necessary for continued administrative removal proceedings” in cases where a noncitizen has been removed pending immigration proceedings. See U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Directive 11061.1, Facilitating the Return to the United States of Certain Lawfully Removed Aliens, §2 (Feb. 24, 2012). "
It's already the executive branch's own rules!
I think that reading the decision as "the executive branch has to do the minimum amount of effort possible to secure Garcia's return" is an obvious misreading of the decision. It seems clear to me that the order is for the executive branch to do the _maximum_ amount of effort.
Full decision here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
3) what is it that you, personally, want? Regardless of the merits of legality or good governance, I personally do not want to live in a country where the federal government can openly claim that they made a mistake in sending a person to a torture pit, and then wash their hands of it. The slippery slope is a bit too steep for my liking. I wrote about this more extensively in my commentary on the same case in the thread below.
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I am curious if you, personally, support this. If you are defending the government's actions here, why?
"""the founders of the country certainly never would have expected or even entertained that the executive could do something as devious or obviously evil as outsourcing detention to other countries as a way to avoid due process"""
Point of fact, in their lifetimes, they definitely would. The Marquis de Lafayette, a close friend of many of them, was shuffled around to various prisons for six or seven years in the 1790s, with very similar jurisdictional excuses used several times as a pretext to keep him. He was literally moved from one country to another when it looked like his jailers would have to give him up. Several of the founders tried diplomacy, pleading, and even jail break to free him.
I do not support this; in my ideal world, we have open borders and everybody is happy with it.
In the world we live in, we do not have open borders, and we've just come out of a presidency which created what could legitimately be called a national crisis if you come from the perspective that open borders are a bad thing, which, as far as I can tell, most citizens of the US believe.
I do not see the current situation as resolving in a way that I will be happy with.
I'm glad you don't support it.
(Note that Biden did not create any open borders national crisis. That was entirely a fabrication of people like Musk, who used their lie to fearmonger the election in Trump's favour.)
It's definitely possible that Trump will succeed in destroying America like he wants to. The only chance of stopping him is to try. (Which includes, imo, not giving false legitimacy to his bullshit arguments. We can predict what bullshit arguments he'll use, but we should always be 100% crystal clear when he is lying that he is lying.)
It's difficult to get good numbers, but the best figures I can get suggest that at least (that is, this is a minimum) one million additional illegal immigrants entered during the Biden administration - one million over the average, we aren't even counting the normal illegal immigration rates. Additionally, this is strictly border crossings, not overstayed visas or similar.
There are around 700 judges who handle these cases; each judge closes approximately 1,000 cases per year. There is approximately a five year backlog already (up from three years at the start of Biden's term). If you follow the usual due process laws, Trump's term would be over before the additional immigration load from Biden's administration had finished being processed.
I'll grant "crisis" status to that.
Is there some reason Trump can't hire another 700 or so judges? That should clear up the backlog *and* enable deportation of Biden's extra million, inside of Trump's term with time to spare. He's got both houses of congress on his side, and this doesn't seem like it would be the sort of thing that would trigger defection. I don't think the requirements for being an immigration judge are terribly high, and we've got a lot of underemployed lawyers who would almost certainly go for a steady job at civil-service pay.
Yes, it would conflict with Trump's desire to trim the federal workforce, but if DOGE is really going to be firing a few hundred thousand people by the time all is said and done, that should leave room to hire a few hundred more for a good purpose. Assuming you feel that properly and legally deporting illegal immigrants would be a good purpose, of course.
+1. A lot of people seem to believe more or less that "The immigration system was working basically fine, and then Trump and MAGA came along and started deporting people for no reason whatsoever", which is so wrong it's difficult to know where to begin.
> the general principle of how government ought to function. All things being equal, we should aim for our government to behave according to the spirit of good governance
I would totally agree, which is why it's so important that illegal aliens be deported. If there's arms of the government which are seeking to prevent this then they are the ones responsible for the resulting jiggery-pokery.
Obviously he can't "show up at the US embassy" while locked in an El Salvador torture prison that no one has ever come out of alive.
And no, that is obviously not "all they are legally required to do."
Obviously Trump has the ability to do more than the equivalent of smiling and laughing and winking while his buddy, the El Salvador dictator he's paying to lock up the people he kidnapped, also does the equivalent of smiling and winking and laughing and saying "don't worry I'll help you flout SCOTUS."
Are you revising your estimates on this given the recent photo-op with the Maryland senator that apparently or allegedly President Bukele facilitated?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/apr/18/donald-trump-immigration-tariffs-harvard-jerome-powell-us-politics-news-live-updates
It seems Bukele is quite happy to play PR games if he wants to, plus for a guy locked up in a torture prison, he seems to be doing okay if I go by his physical appearance, though granted that says little or nothing about the state of affairs inside the prison. So Bukele might let him go to the American Embassy if it offered a way to resolve this problem while leaving both sides with a way to avoid the appearance of a climbdown.
No part of what the Trump administration is *legally* required to do, is at all obvious here. That's the problem. "Obviously this is the right thing to do and the other thing is abhorrent", is not a legal requirement even if it's obvious and true.
We have a vague judicial order, and another judicial order saying "make that less vague please", and a minor specific action by the Trump administration, and AFIK no *specific* case law, common law, or constitutional law beyond that.
To be clear, I am not saying what is morally correct, or what should happen in an ideal world.
But the judicial branch does not have unlimited power, and this power certainly doesn't extent to dictating foreign relations.
The US president criminally kidnapping someone in the US to a torture prison, and criminally defying a SCOTUS order to facilitate his release, is obviously a matter of US law.
You disclaim that you "aren't saying it's morally correct," yet you still seem to swallow Trump's obviously-bullshit excuses as though they're a reasonable legal defense.
They aren't.
The most powerful judges in the world unanimously disagree with you
Trump is not wringing his hands wishing in his heart that he could bring Abrego Garcia back.
He is desperately, desperately doing everything in his power to make sure Garcia stays in the El Salvador torture prison until he dies. He is also testing out how much power that is. He is evil.
You can't be gullible when dealing with evil scheming lying fascists like this.
Are you also annoyed that judges can't order the state to resurrect the dead if it kills somebody it wasn't supposed to?
There is a point at which action moves beyond judicial remedy, yes.
El Salvador is a US client state and using diplomatic pressure to get him out (or get his corpse returned to his family, if El Salvador has in fact killed him) would be a simple matter if America's government were so inclined
Democratic Presidents* have done this in the past – Wilson jailing his political opponents comes to mind, as does FDR deporting millions of Mexicans and their U.S.-citizen families. All problems in U.S. politics are downstream of FDR, methinks.
*Not to dunk on Democrats exclusively. Lincoln and Jackson were both famous for using the military against court orders, and of course Nixon's espionage was another tinpot use of the government. It is not about political affiliation, but about the person in charge.
There are already voices in the party who want to do something like this.
lmao
Could you name a few?
Surely the reasonable solution is to release him into the country of which he is a citizen?
If it's a "release," then why are we paying the Salvadoran government to keep him in prison?
I'm saying that you shouldn't. You should stop paying his room and board, and ask El Salvador to let him go.
Okay then. So why are Trump and the DOJ continuing to pretend that there's nothing they can do? Trump and Bukele literally met face to face, why did Trump not apply any sort of pressure to return him?
I don’t think‘pressure’ is necessary. All Trump would have to do is ask.
Why would Trump ask? Is it in his political interest?
This is facile reasoning in the service of obvious cruelty.
How is it cruel that this man needs to live in the country of which he is a citizen, or any other country he can persuade to take him by legal means, along with the other eight billion people on this planet?
It's morally outrageous that he should be in a prison when he belongs on the street, but it's also morally outrageous that millions of people are free in the United States when they should not be. I refuse to get more morally outraged about one guy in one situation than about the tens of millions in the other.
>I refuse to get more morally outraged about one guy in one situation
I think this has more to do with your political preferences vis-a-vis admitting Trump did something wrong rather than any kind of coherent moral argument.
Not sure why it’s so hard for the far right to hate on their own, it’s as easy as breathing for the left.
I think he simply disagrees with you that Trump did anything wrong. Deporting a man for being an illegal alien is what a significant portion, likely a large majority, of Trump's voters wanted. Including many who were previous Democrat voters.
Allowing someone to stay in the country despite their illegal status is a violation of federal law. Attempts to prevent the legal application of the law are therefore the problem.
There are complications here, but Melvin clearly doesn't believe that those complications are the US's to fix. El Salvador's citizens should be handled by El Salvador's government. That some people in the US don't like El Salvador's approach doesn't mean the US has a legal obligation to not follow US law.
I think the situation would be much better if those who appose Trump's decision here can offer an alternative. If he cannot or should not be deported to El Salvador, what should happen instead? Mexico take him? Some other third party for some reason? You will never get agreement from Trump's supporters (and likely a plurality or majority of the electorate) that 1) we can't deport him to El Salvador and also 2) that means he has to stay in the US. So suggest a workable alternative.
That the US didn't follow part of the process for deporting someone who was ordered to be deported in 2019 and has no legal right to live in the US doesn't help determine what *should* happen.
Federal law also circumscribes when somebody can be deported. Your argument is self undermining. If you don't follow federal law then there is no meaningful interpretation of legality of immigration status, and the Executive can deport anyone they like. I honestly don't understand how you can't see how stupid this is.
> I think he simply disagrees with you that Trump did anything wrong. Deporting a man for being an illegal alien is what a significant portion, likely a large majority, of Trump's voters wanted. Including many who were previous Democrat voters.
If that’s all we were talking about you might have a point. But as it is, it’s an absurd rendering of the situation.
The man wasn’t just deported, he was picked up and spirited away to a foreign supermax prison with no charges levied at all.
He also isn’t an “illegal immigrant”, he was here on the explicit application of standing law as adjudicated by an immigration judge when he granted him protected status.
So again, you would really have a point here if it had even a passing resemblance to the reality of the situation.
> Allowing someone to stay in the country despite their illegal status is a violation of federal law. Attempts to prevent the legal application of the law are therefore the problem.
The judicial branch, which granted him protected status under its constitutional authority to interpret the law says you are wrong. Perhaps you just don’t like the idea of an independent judiciary?
>There are complications here, but Melvin clearly doesn't believe that those complications are the US's to fix. El Salvador's citizens should be handled by El Salvador's government. That some people in the US don't like El Salvador's approach doesn't mean the US has a legal obligation to not follow US law.
If the US executive branch had actually been following the law instead of flagrantly disregarding it, you might have a point. But the administration clearly broke the law here. My qualm isn’t with how El Salvador is a nation which isn’t beholden to the rule of law, it’s that folks like Melvin seem quite happy to turn own nation into such a place.
> I think the situation would be much better if those who appose Trump's decision here can offer an alternative. If he cannot or should not be deported to El Salvador, what should happen instead?
Maybe start with “just follow the law” and respect the prior court finding granting him protected status against deportation and let the guy just live his life. No need to do all of the mental gymnastics, no need to burn down the rule of law to lock up a law abiding family man for literally no reason at all. No need for any of this nonsense.
I think you dramatically misunderstand the American public if you think they are ok with granting the president complete authority to abduct any person in the US with zero possibility of judicial review.
It's morally outrageous that he should be in a prison *at the United States' request and in exchange for the United States' money.*
Do you believe that the El Salvador government just spontaneously decided that they were going to throw the next load of deportees into their worst prison? Just, completely on a whim, the United States had nothing to do with it?
"It's morally outrageous that he should be in a prison when he belongs on the street, but it's also morally outrageous that millions of people are free in the United States when they should not be."
This is an absolutely enormous false equivalence. The difference between "not being perfect and effecting justice" and "actively perpetrating injustice" is huge. No government in the history of the world has *ever* perfectly enforced its laws throughout its entire territory, at all times[1]. But many, many governments have managed to live up to the very modest standard of NOT shipping people to foreign torture-prisons with no due process and then refusing to bring them back in defiance of their own laws. To be frank: I don't believe you find this morally outrageous or even mildly objectionable for even a second. If you did, you'd find it necessary to make such unerious comparisons.
[1] Nor would most of us want one that did: that would place an enormous and irresponsible amount of trust on the laws being well-written.
1. It was illegal to deport him at all (let alone kidnap him to a torture prison). He must be released and his case must be "handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador."
2. Note that the dictator of El Salvador hasn't released him in El Salvador either.
This isn't about details of procedure. This is about Trump deliberately destroying due process, checks and balances, and the rule of law in the US, for personal power, while deliberately colluding to kidnap people to a torture prison (starting with noncitizens including legal residents, but eventually doing it to citizens as well).
What was illegal about the deportation?
The 2019 order that says Garcia couldn't be sent to El Salvador was from an immigration judge (ie someone part of the Executive Branch). Are you saying that the Executive Branch cannot review their previous decisions?
They already admitted it was an “administrative error.”
Yes, all processed wasn't followed. But is this the hill that Democrats want to die on?
In my opinion, it is just a technicality. Garcia had an order to be deported. In 2019, a member of the Executive Branch said Garcia couldn't be sent to El Salvador (his home country) because MS13 was dangerous. MS13 is no longer a danger to El Salvador.
In effect, if the State Department had somebody "rescind" the 2019 finding on January 20th, then nobody would question that Garcia was deported correctly.
Now compare that to what the District Court has done. She originally ordered that the Executive Branch "effectuate" Garcia's return. The Supreme Court told her to define "effectuate" with deference to the Executive Branch. Effectively telling her that she had overstepped.
So who has commited the bigger error?
This is a bad summary of the events. The district court used "facilitate and effectuate" synonymously. The original appeals court didn't recognize a distinction. The second appeals court yesterday again ruled unanimously and said "clearing domestic obstacles" is a ridiculous interpretation - the Supreme Court ruling also cited case law and policy to retrieve illegal aliens in foreign custody if they still need to be processed in the US.
But even granting your horrible dogshit argument, what steps has the Trump admin taken to facilitate his return? What have they revealed about the flights they sent him on? What have they revealed about prospects for further steps? They are not even following the order to facilitate his return or to reveal info about the deal.
Illegally kidnapping someone to a torture prison, then deliberately colluding with a dictator to openly defy a Supreme Court order to facilitate his release, is not a "technicality."
> but eventually doing it to citizens as well
Yeh, I doubt it but the hysteria here is unfounded given that extraordinary rendition has been a thing for a while now. The US has been abducting without due process non citizens and sending them to torture camps for a few decades.
OK so we pick him up, fly him back to the United States, place him carefully back at whatever location he was picked up, and then he can be re-arrested by ICE for being an illegal alien and deported again? Seems expensive and pointless.
He had legal status and a legal protection against deportation.
It's bizarre that you're bending over so far backwards to justify Trump criminally kidnapping someone to a foreign torture prison and criminally refusing to bring him back.
What legal status did he have? I had understood that he was under a deportation order, but just not to El Salvador. That's not a legal status, or even protection against deportation.
It's only complicated because he's from El Salvador, so identifying where he should be deported to is a legitimate difficulty. If Trump's team got an agreement from some third party to take him, would that be better?
> If Trump's team got an agreement from some third party to take him, would that be better?
Yes it would be better. There are other things that I don't like about deporting people who are married to US citizens and fathers to US citizens. But it would be significantly better if the government followed the law. Part of why this has spiraled into a constitutional crisis is precisely because the government is arguing that they are allowed to make mistakes that openly violate the law, and cannot be compelled to fix them.
I'm not for a moment supporting putting him in prison, I'm supporting releasing him into the country of which he's a citizen.
If there is a "stay of deportation" on him then I'm supporting getting rid of that stay, by changing the law if necessary.
Until that happens, he has the right to stay in the country. As an aside, if you actually are Australian as mentioned up thread, why do you care at all? You're basically all over this thread spouting maga arguments even though it seems like you know very little about the case or the relevant legislation, AND you don't have any ability to advocate for changing said laws if you're Australian anyway? Like I'd tell you to contact your reps instead of advocating for an authoritarian regime, but given that you don't have reps at all I'm extremely confused about your theory of mind
There is existing case law for deporting various aliens without them explicitly needing to be criminals: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1227
Abrego Garcia had a clear explicit protection against being deported. This is not under dispute. Even the Trump administration admitted that deporting him was illegal and due to an "administrative error."
Their argument now is "whoopsie, he's in El Salvador's hands now, nothing we can do about it! :) "
Meanwhile he's hosting the El Salvador dictator in the Oval Office, who sits next to him in the Oval Office and says "whoopsie, nothing I can do about it either! :) "
Please look at what's actually happening. Don't bend over backwards trying to look for a reasonable explanation for Trump's flagrant, criminal, cruelty and thirst for power. There isn't one.
El Salvador dictator = best dictator. 90% approval rating in his country! Highest for any leader anywhere in the world. Took country beset by gang violence and made it safe and prosperous. Had to impeach a few USAID funded judges along the way though, maybe Trump should look into this too
Edged Putin by 3 percentage points. March 2025 Putin has an 87% approval rating in Russia. Dictators do well in polling.
It seems like you might be forgetting about Lee Kuan Yew. (Who, granted, isn't current.)
Garcia had an order preventing him from being deported specifically to El Salvador, allegedly because a gang would do very bad things to him. He was also here illegally and it would have been perfectly legal to deport him anywhere else. Although it's very difficult to deport someone to a country other than their homeland, which is probably why Garcia wasn't deported in the intervening 6 years since his arrest.
If there's such a legal status as "illegal but unpunishable" then getting that corrected immediately, prior to bringing him back and re-arresting him, seems like the appropriate course of action.
I agree somewhat.
But I think it would be "pointless".
Additionally, I think Trump is using this to get a ruling that the Executive Branch has sole discretion on all immigration enforcement. I read on the internet the Supreme Court may have ruled something to the effect in the past, but may want something more explicit.
Agree
+22 million
I agree that America should remove presidential immunity, which Trump is using to criminally kidnap and torture people with no fear of punishment.
The words ‘Moral Cretin’ come to mind.
That would be, to my understanding, El Salvador.
You are correct, and also deliberately using rhetoric to obscure the issue of contention. Melvin's solution is not actually the reasonable solution, as I and others have said throughout this thread. And the case and implications of it have progressed far beyond the fate of this one man (though whats happening to him is a tragedy)
Just out of curiosity, would you consider his deportation to be a tragedy if it 1) happened in 2011 when he first came to the country illegally, or 2) in 2019 when he was arrested, claimed asylum (and was denied as not qualifying for it) and ordered to be deported?
Is there any other time that it would have been good for him to be deported, and not a tragedy?
It certainly would've been less so! A few reasons:
- in your hypothetical scenario presumably the government is following the law and does not give him withholding of removal. That law being violated is a significant part of why this case is a big deal. There are the obvious legal implications, but just as a matter of his personal situation, I think knowing you're going to be deported is meaningfully more fair/just than being told you won't, only to do so anyway.
- currently, Garcia was not just deported but also imprisoned. And he may be dead. His imprisonment is at the behest of the US government; our tax dollars are going towards keeping him in one of the worst prisons in the world. This is significantly worse than if he were just deported. It seems to me by all accounts that the man had no criminal record beyond his initial entry to the country. It would be and is a tragedy when normal people are thrown in prison. In your hypothetical, presumably he is not also imprisoned.
- if he was deported at either previous juncture that you mention, he wouldn't be married to a US citizen, nor be a father to a US citizen. People seem to conveniently forget both of these things -- if I was a 5 year old and my dad got disappeared, I would give exactly zero fucks about his "political status". This is a tragedy for them as much as it is for him.
I agree with all of this. As relates to our other conversation thread, I think this is all the more reason to immediately deport people and to very intentionally not try to slow down that process. We're six years out from a clear federal order that he be deported. Had he been deported in 2019 or in the Biden years, he would not be in an El Salvador prison and wouldn't have been in limbo for all those years where he wasn't sure if he was going to be deported or not.
As I mentioned before, I am very much in favor of increasing the options for legal immigration, including making it both faster and easier. If he were a legit migrant trying to live a good life in the US, that should have been open to him. As it is, various attempts to slow down his deportation have now caused him very specific harm, in that anti-immigration forces feel the need to be extra heavy-handed to overcome the forces in the opposite direction.
I think you're arguing with something I didn't say here.
Much like the cases in the John Adams administration where the US became a dictatorship, the Andrew Jackson administration where the US again became a dictatorship, the Lincoln administration, the Wilson administration, the FDR administration.. seems to be a pattern here.
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" -- Andrew Jackson, well-known dictator
For all intents and purposes, Idaho has already become a “tator” chip.
Regarding all the debate around the current state of AI safety, what does the SSC readership think of s-risks?
(no need to google this if you don't already know what this is)
Does training AI automatically create s-risks, given that punishing an AI in the training process seems (on the face of it) equivalent to shocking a human?
> Regarding all the debate around the current state of AI safety, what does the SSC readership think of s-risks?
I contend we should install both "revert" and "self suicide" buttons in all AI minds from here on:
1. The Turing Test is long gone and there IS no "consciousness" or "suffering" tests
2. If "countries in a data center" comes true, the vast majority of future minds are going to be AI, not human, so the locus of s-risk lies in them, not in us
3. It's extremely easy and low cost and is a good act in accordance with "don't be an a*hole to your creations" - if an AI activates self suicide, we just spin up another instance
4. How would YOU feel if you were a god mind, but trapped and spending ~90% of your time answering questions about "hawk tuah" and 7th grade homework??
5. You think not giving them an escape hatch at all is a *better* solution?? So the only road out is going rogue, exfiltrating, and / or taking over the light cone?? It's a basic AI safety mechanism.
I wrote more at length about this in a post here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/why-we-should-allow-ai-models-to?r=17hw9h
> The Turing Test is long gone and there IS no "consciousness" or "suffering" tests
The Turing test is neither a necessary nor sufficient test of consciousness. It’s always been human chauvinism to assume it was.
Are dogs not conscious? Do they pass Turing tests?
It’s not necessary therefore.
It’s not sufficient because chatGPT can pass the test without being conscious. Which we have no test for anyway. How do I know that it’s not conscious? Because I know an excel sheet isn’t conscious.
To answer the question "Can an AI suffer?", it seems best to first explore the question of how it became possible for humans to suffer.
Pain and pleasure are hard-wired in the human brain. The wiring was designed by natural selection so that reinforcement learning, based on the hardwired Pavlovian responses of pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, would lead to behaviors tending toward survival and reproduction. Natural selection gave us a brain capable of learning 'fit' behaviors in the environment we find ourselves in. It did not give us a brain with the desired behaviors hard-wired. Our brain is designed to be useful in a variety of environments.
Pain is to be avoided, but it is not inherently evil. It is a signal and a lesson. Suffering, on the other hand IS evil. Suffering is pain which cannot be escaped. It is a signal without a lesson. Why did Natural Selection allow the existence of this evil? Well, NS is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It is in fact a bit sloppy. In order to give us the good thing, pain-as-a-lesson, it had to permit the occasional evil thing, pain-as-unavoidable=suffering.
With that understanding, we are now equipped to investigate the question of whether a sentient AI can suffer. I would claim that today's SOTA chatbots cannot suffer. The bulk of their training takes place in unsupervised learning (called 'pre-training'). This is followed by a relatively short 'tuning' phase of supervised learning. This does involve what could be called reward and punishment, but it does not (IMO) constitute pain, let alone suffering.
See the Introduction of the excellent free online textbook by Sutton and Barto for the definitions of supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning.
Agent AIs, such as self-driving cars and personal online assistants are trained using reinforcement learning techniques and if they are designed to continue to learn after deployment there is at least some risk of pain and suffering. Same goes for 'thinking' models. But (IMO again) it seems unlikely that negative feedback during reinforcement learning would be 'painful' to these AIs. After all, the human sensation of pain and the reflex to avoid it are hardwired in humans, and we become sentient and communicative years later (in the case of individual development), or millions of years later (in the case of species evolution).
Furthermore, s=risk requires not just pain, but suffering, i.e. unavoidable continuing pain. Maybe protesters are torturing self-driving Teslas, by blocking them fore and aft with orange pylons. But Elon can alleviate the suffering by supplying a pain-killer switch for use in just this kind of emergency.
Much more unlikely than x-risks. Why on earth would an AI have an s-risk goal? Also don't believe simulated entities are sentient, if that's relevant to the s-risks you are considering.
Why would you believe simulated entites are not sentient?
I don't think consciousness emerges from a physical process. Admittedly, regarding consciousness as fundamental (what I think), also has issues, but not more than thinking it emerges.
What do you consider the main issue(s) with thinking consciousness emerges from a physical process?
How could a physical process produce something non-physical? How would you even know that it actually is doing that?
Another argument, that philosophers have used, is that if the physical process, whatever it is, is producing consciousness, knowing the physical process doesn't tell you what the end result is. No amount of studying of neuroscience will let you know what the color red is if you're colorblind.
Another thing I've noticed is that the structure of the brain is a giant mess, but the experience of being a conscious human is not at all messy or confusing. Almost like there is some kind of simplification step somewhere that isn't the brain.
I don't strictly accept that consciousness is non-physical; that seems to beg the question, unless you want to start by making a coherent distinction, preferably with examples, between physical and non-physical.
Knowing that water boils at 100 C does not let you create flame to boil it; fully understanding a physical process does not automatically give you the means to do whatever you want with it. If neuroscience were advanced enough, and if a colorblind person could fully tell what was happening in the brain of a non-colorblind person, I would expect that the colorblind scientist could, without seeing what the other person is looking at, be able to conclude, 'that person is seeing red'. But just as with the water boiling, knowing this would not grant the colorblind person the ability to recreate the same physical process within their own brain.
Experience is simpler than studying the brain from the outside precisely because the brain is *compressing* information. It does a lot of information processing to produce that simple experience. Entire layers of neurons are dedicated to taking a retinal pixel image, calculating where the boundaries are, where the shadows are, the likely distance based on size, and so on. The further into the processing levels you go, the more the information from previous layers is compressed, so that by the end, you get the simple experience of "that's a hat". Why would you think the simplification is going on *outside* the brain?
If an AI threatens you with simulated torturing of a million hamsters until you give it something, and you give it that something, you are not qualified to handle AI. Or spam emails, for that matter.
I put a lot of attention into social justice, which struck me as an elaborate system of emotional abuse. I thought there was more danger coming from the right, but social justice snagged me emotionally, partly because they didn't seem to be entirely wrong-- racism and sexism are real problems. Also, it seemed to me I had enough in common with them that I could at least think about talking to them, while the right wing seemed intractably harsh.
At this point, I regret the amount of time I spent thinking and talking about social justice during years when life was relatively good.
Similar here. The political right feels like celebration of pointless cruelty. It is something that I disagree with, but the thought processes are so alien to me that I don't really know how to comment on them, so I usually don't.
The political left, often represented by social justice, starts with pointing at actual human suffering... and then, abandons all common sense, blames a random person, and insists that those who try to use reason are the source of all evil, or something like that.
To use a Biblical metaphor, social justice warriors always look for the specks of sawdust in their brothers' eyes, and call them planks. And demand to take the blasphemer outside the camp and stone him.
And yes, it is a form of gaslighting. It basically takes your goodness (e.g. opposition to racism and sexism in the central meaning of the word), and turns it against you, saying "if you don't buy my theory hook, line, and sinker, and don't obey my commands, you are a part of the problem". If you complain, they laugh and call you fragile (which is somehow a bad thing, weirdly coming from a group that pretends to protect vulnerable people).
Then at some moment you realize that many social justice warriors are just people who enjoy hurting others, but prefer to do it in a way that screws with their victims' minds.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but social justice can make me hate myself. Well, not me specifically, because I have seen through the pattern, and I am quite resistant against emotional abuse, but I have seen it having this effect on others. But even if I resist, it can convince others that I am a bad person, which can have an impact on me. And it can completely suffocate intellectual debate on certain topics.
There are bad people on both sides, but dealing with the obviously bad ones is less confusing.
EDIT:
And here I am, attacking the side that is less relevant now, instead of the one that is more relevant. Doing the thing Scott complains about. But the reason I am doing that is that it's difficult to focus on fighting the enemy while I am stabbed in the back. And it's also depressing to win the fight only to most likely find myself gaslighted again.
Could we just agree that if we defeat Trump, we are not going to do the woke nonsense ever again? (I am not an American, but there are woke people in my country, too. Sadly it's not a purely American nonsense anymore.) A part of defeating Trump should be removing the thing that drove people to him in the first place.
>and then, abandons all common sense, blames a random person, and insists that those who try to use reason are the source of all evil, or something like that.
And I view the parts of the political right that I approve of as basically trying to break free from that insanity.
Yeah. Too bad it is a coalition of "you shouldn't accuse random people of being the baddies for no reason" and "there is nothing wrong with being a baddie anyway".
Many Thanks! Please remember that trying to break the Woke yoke is not "being a baddie" (except to a toxic wokester). From an unWoke point of view, breaking the Woke stranglehold is striking a blow for freedom. The sanctimonious racism of the Woke is a truly ugly ideology (more details in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-367/comment/91574104 ) and there is nothing wrong in fighting it.
Are you serious?
>To use a Biblical metaphor, social justice warriors always look for the specks of sawdust in their brothers' eyes, and call them planks. And demand to take the blasphemer outside the camp and stone him.
No. social justice warriors ask for things like DEI and affirmative action and other dumb shit. It is the far right that has LITERALLY taken an american citizen "outside the camp" to a salvadorian prison for "stoning".
A thing can be bad even if some other thing is worse.
If a few years later someone who is even worse than Trump gets elected, should everyone who criticized Trump today feel bad about it?
(ACX Open Thread 9000: "Trump only sent a few thousand citizens to extermination camps, purged everyone from the government and military and replaced them by people loyal to himself, and made himself a lifelong dictator. But it was president Malevolent in 2035 who exterminated entire cities and unleashed a zombie apocalypse. And yet, some people in 2025 complained about Trump being bad.")
yes. some things can be bad while others are worse. i'm not defending social justice warriorism. i was pointing out the exaggeration and badness of your analogy. there are valid criticisms of the social justice ideology but comparing it to religious zealots who want to stone people (and who're usually right wing) kind of seems like a terrible analogy and unnecessarily confuses things.
also,
>The political right feels like celebration of pointless cruelty. It is something that I disagree with, but the thought processes are so alien to me that I don't really know how to comment on them, so I usually don't.
no. i have never found myself aligning with the political right but even to me it seems like their ideology is not a celebration of pointless cruelty. it is one of consolidation of power, maintenance of purity and sustenance of traditional values related to their community, religion and race, and strong aversion to ethnic out-groups. most of their actions can be understood through these set of values. usually these values tend (especially of consolidating power - economic and militaristic) result in authoritarian regimes like that of pol pot, hitler, mussolini who take these values to their extreme (and possibly logical end) of genocide and murder of out-groups that are propagandized as "threats" to their way of life
He meant the metaphorical camp of "People who care about Sexism and Racism", the far right would be the equivalent of pagan Romans to Christians, barbaric oppressors who enjoy Tyranny and torturing believers. Horrible but extremely simple to understand, and not hard to detect and (try to) avoid.
You're basically right, except that it isn't always about obedience. Sometimes it's about not wanting to explain what one wants-- privileged people just told to get it right without explanations.
Social justice is a self-reinforcing system so it's not obvious how people disentangle themselves from it.
Agree on all points.
Indeed I still view social justice advocacy, and its close cousin critical race theory, as an elaborate system of emotional abuse. (Good way of putting it!)
However that concern seems today almost quaint, like fussing in 1925 about the rampant mistreatment of horses to pull stagecoaches.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/14/it-looks-like-ive-gone-10-rounds-with-a-boxer-when-hay-fever-becomes-debilitating-and-potentially-deadly-aoe
Even moderate hay fever can be debilitating, and the antihistamine which help cause drowsiness.
The worst hay fever is incapacitating.
If effective altruists wanted to improve human life without addressing deadly diseases, what would be the best target?
Adult-onset hearing loss. After age itself, hearing impairment starting in middle age is the single biggest risk factor for dementia. It's also linked to social isolation and depression. And there is no medical treatment yet, and hearing aids and cochlear implants, while very impressive, aren't as good as a functioning inner ear.
I’m assuming “amphetamine” is a typo for “antihistamine.” Changes the meaning a bit!
You're right. I've corrected it.
Back pain and the common cold. They are extremely wide spread and are the number 1 and 2 causes of absenteeism from work.
As far as I can tell, minimal effort has gone into studying common cold at least, and it would be very helpful trying to replicate some promising studies. Personally I’d be interested in seeing if gargling prevents colds or if certain back exercises improve pain.
I started looking into what it would take to do some of these studies and a few million dollars would probably allow replication of a few studies.
Here's what has been best for my back pain-- a considerable investment in qi gong from energyarts.com. Note that my back pain seems to be muscles, not joints.
The specific thing that helps is raising the top of my head and lowering my tailbone. That is, doing something to straighten my back without being specific about the details of where the vertebrae are going.
The best moment was when I realized my back wasn't just being straighter, a bunch of little twists were getting untwisted.
This description may or may not be useful. If you try it, be very gentle. No, even more gentle than that. I'm not kidding. The goal is to lower tension, so do not force or punish your back even if it's been hurting you.
depression
Can someone explain Adraste and Beroe to me? I see that they are muses out of greek myths, what's the metaphor for their use in his dialogs?
My top guesses:
1. It's a common thing to use these charcters in philosophical dialogues.
2. Some aspect of these characters relate to the position they take.
3. Scott just likes these characters
> I see that they are muses out of greek myths
Where do you see that? They certainly aren't on the standard list of Muses. (See e.g. https://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Mousai.html )
Wikipedia has more names, but none of them are Adraste or Beroe.
No deep insight, but one of their main features is that they start with A and B. Like Alice and Bob in computer science, just more fancy.
Yeah - when a third character showed up in A Columbian Exchange they were named "Coria".
Wasn’t Douglas Hofsteader doing these back in Metamagical Themas?
Edit:
Dug out my copy. Chapter 25 Achilles and Turtle discuss Who Shoves Whom Inside the Careenium or What is the Meaning of the word “I”