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.
But of course Douglas Hofstadter did not invent the form. In that work, he was referencing the aforementioned classical philosophical works, Zeno specifically, I believe he also referenced Lewis Caroll referencing Zeno at some point, as erudites love chain referencing, but don't quote me on that.
That being said, I don't think there's any meaningful connection between Zeno's paradox speicifically and whatever Scott is doing in this post. It's just a kind of socratic dialogue, and he written in that form before. A long tradition.
Ok, last AI 2027 post, clearly the main source of risk here* is the opacity of the current architectures. This means mechanistic interpretability is a VERY important field, and there should be a serious effort for a Manhattan project of mechanistic interpretability. EA should be throwing its weight behind this, is anything like that happening?
*AI research itself could also be modelled as an X-risk, that's a very spicy take I considered and even wrote on back in 2021.
While I can't comment on your specific proposal...
Please don't worry about "last" AI 2027 post. I think it's super-serious... but at the same time super-irritating because they were all-but-silent on what to do... where to funnel money? where to funnel activism? "what" to tell "who"?
I assume this was because they don't *know* what to do. I certainly don't. The fact that Scott's p(doom) is only 20% means (to me) that even given the scariness of the
scenarios in AI 2027, it's not even clear I *should* do something.
But... I mean, you proposed we all should do this... You were really-really-really worried...
Given this, do you think maybe your worries about imminent AI apocalypse are... exaggerated?
I know it's weird to call your congressperson, I've done it a few times about the issues I care about. If you are really concerned, you should certainly call and tell them you're worried about AI progress and as a minimum ask what Congress(wo)man's Such-and Such position on this issue.
I had some convos with Daniel Kokotajlo back in 2021 when I was exploring the notion that it's the AI research community that is the real X-risk here. Reached out to him again, maybe he'll reply. Probably a more productive framing is the interpretability Manhattan project, what can you really do about AI research itself? Vance already says he doesn't think there are any risks to AI, so I don't think a pause is happening. And I have an impression the AI research community is very distributed, so...
Deep down, people like JD Vance ALREADY BELIEVE in a "Superintelligence that's stronger than any other Superintelligence" and one that is "perfectly aligned with the best interests of the human race".
i.e. God
And when people truly believe this... as they literally have for thousands of years... "God will save us". As he saved Baghdad and Constantinople. :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(
Ironically, it might be the atheist Chinese who are less dangerous.
I don't think the AI researchers believe in God, and they're really the primary source of risk, so this can more easily be blamed on the scientistic worldview, or on capitalism, or whatever it is that makes most of the AI researchers not take safety seriously (maybe that can be taken as a signal to calm down however).
Anyway, if you're concerned about this, maybe we should be talking through other means. You can email me at: antidyatlov@gmail.com
I think he’s saying that Christians won’t act on A.I. risk because they believe God is all powerful. There’s two competing religions here, although one is a kinda religion/demonology.
Before the 2024 election, I argued with several people in the rationalist community who ended up voting for Trump that they should vote for Kamala instead, because Trump would try to stay in power for a third term and beyond. The argument that I got most commonly at the time, nearly universally, was "Bro, the constitution says he can't run again!"
Since that time, Trump, his admin, and indeed the GOP have openly argued that Trump will run again for a third term, and have already found plausible loopholes that may allow Trump to do so. Meanwhile, the Trump admin has issued and attempted to enforce executive orders that dramatically increase federal oversight of the election process. And, as the tariff nonsense has shown, we must take Trump literally and seriously when he says he is "not joking" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-term-white-house-methods-rcna198752)
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Today, I find myself arguing with several people in the rationalist community who (presumably) voted for Trump that they should be deeply concerned about the actions taken against legal immigrants. In particular, the Abrego Garcia case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia). As a quick recap of that case:
- a man illegally came to the US from El Salvador
- he was given a witholding of release in 2019
- he got married, had a child (who is a US Citizen), and committed no crimes / has no criminal record
- he was sent to CECOT in El Salvador; the US government paid to send him there, both in terms of dollars spent on transport and processing, and in terms of money paid to El Salvador to actually have him there
- the government openly admitted that he was sent "in error" but argued in court that they cannot bring him back because he is now in El Salvador's jurisdiction
- the judiciary, including SCOTUS in a 9-0 decision, said that the man must have due process and the government must bring him back, and cited many other cases where the government has done this in the past.
Today, the Trump admin, in partnership with the Salvadoran government, made it clear that they will not do anything to bring him back (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/14/us/trump-news-tariffs). The Salvadoran president goes so far as to say that the man is a terrorist and will never leave. This, of course directly violates the SCOTUS and judiciary order.
Going a step further, in a meeting with El Salvador's president, Trump stated that he would love to send US citizens to El Salvador (this is the second time he has said this openly). El Salvador said they would love to take anyone sent. And El Salvador has said that they will not release anyone, regardless of who asks.
Besides creating an obvious constitutional crisis in which Trump's executives are now going up against SCOTUS, the sheer audacity of the position of the government is astounding.
- we can send anyone we want to the most dangerous prison on the planet, even if we openly admit it is a mistake;
- we won't do anything to fix that mistake;
- no one can compel us to fix that mistake;
- we will find a way to send citizens too
Normally, I end these kinds of posts in these open threads with a question to people in this community who are still, somehow, defending these actions. In the past, those people have said:
- "well they are only going after criminals" which became
- "well they are only going after illegal immigrants" which became
- "well, the people who were previously legal and had their status cancelled deserved it" which became
- "well the state department has the right to cancel anyone's visa and do whatever they want to the people who were previously 'legal'" which became
- "well, if they deport someone who shouldn't, they will fix the problem" which became
- "well SCOTUS will stop the government from doing anything too extreme" which became
- "well, they won't deport citizens"
I am waiting for the inevitable "well the citizens who were deported deserved it".
This all rings the same as "the constitution will protect us if he tries to run for a third term". If you honestly believe any of this wake. the. fuck. up. It's been three months into a 4 year term. Shockingly, for all his faults, Trump is an honest man -- if he says he is going to try to deport US citizens, he will definitely try to deport US citizens!
But really, I don't think people who argue the above are doing so in good faith. I think if anyone in this community is still defending this position, you're living in a pretty radically different world than the one I live in. Regardless of how big a problem mass immigration is, this "fix it at any cost" approach is now actively taking a sledge hammer to all of the pillars of our government. The only other alternative I can imagine -- which I hesitate to consider in seriousness -- is that the people who are supporting this still are doing so gleefully and without principle, secure in the knowledge that for some reason _they_ are not the ones who will ever be on the receiving side (a famously bad way of reasoning about authoritarian regimes).
---
As an aside, I think there's something like a 30% chance that Garcia in particular is already dead. He was sent to CECOT, an open air prison where violent gang members are basically unconstrained in their ability to interact with each other. There is, to put it bluntly, a lot of murder. Depending on sources, within the first year of operation (2022) there was somewhere between 100 and 250 deaths at CECOT. The number of people imprisoned has only increased since then. And I suspect Bukele and the Salvadoran government sees rampant murder within CECOT as a FEATURE and not a bug, and are not inclined to clamp down on that outcome.
I can't speak to Salvadoran politics. Its situation pre Bukele was...pretty bad. And Bukele himself is riding on extremely high popular support. But the US is NOT Salvador. We did not and do not have the kinds of problems that require these extreme measures.
Garcia is a person with no criminal record and who is a father to a US citizen. He is possibly dead.
"he got married, had a child (who is a US Citizen), and committed no crimes / has no criminal record"
I don't know who or what to believe at this stage, because I'm seeing allegations that (1) his wife or ex-wife brought him to court over domestic violence allegations (2) he was maybe bringing in other illegal immigrants for work, transporting or trafficking them (pick your choice of term). So there are all kinds of stories floating around and the true facts seem to be very fuzzy and buried in a lot of "he said/the other guy said" for political point-scoring.
The bare bones of it seem to be that he came into the US illegally as a teenager/young man, when finally picked up for deportation he applied for asylum claiming his life was in danger from a gang back in El Salvador, and right now we don't know if that still holds true or not. If his life is no longer in danger because the gang no longer exists, then can he not be deported? There's so much confusion on this whole thing, between those who don't care if the process is followed correctly or not because their startign point is that he should not be deported *at all* no matter how or why he came into the country, and those who don't care if the process is followed correctly or not because their starting point is he is here illegally and so *has no rights because he's not a citizen*, that I honestly don't know where to come down.
Was he truly in fear of his life, or only lying/using a ploy to avoid being deported in the first place?
If the danger no longer exists, does the opposition to sending him back to his home country now collapse or is the rationale 'let him stay no matter what because he's here too long'?
Frankly, I don't think most people defending Garcia care about the immigration debate, even though it's obvious that everyone on the maga side is blinded by that and that alone. The reason this became a constitutional crisis is because the government advanced an argument that they could not be compelled to fix an error that they admit to. If the government went "oops our bad", brought him back, fixed the administrative error (including by determining the threat no longer exists, as you've said), and sent him back to El Salvador, it would not have blown up. Instead, you have a government that has doubled down on every opportunity, with at least one court already filing contempt proceedings and another one on the way.
I cannot be clear enough how extreme the argument by the federal government is:
- we can deport you, even by accident;
- once you are out of our custody we cannot bring you back;
- nothing can compel us to try to bring you back;
- we want to do this to citizens
If you're still heads down on the immigration part of this, you have completely and totally missed the point. To quote myself from earlier: you aren't just missing the forest for the trees, you're missing the tree for a tiny little piece of bark.
As a non-American, I think you and many others are conflating two very different things that should be kept separately and hurting your case in the process.
Egregious abuses of law enforcement power are normal part of life in a liberal society, especially towards non-citizens and various marginalized groups. They are usually not news, and people who do not know about this sad reality tend to be shocked when some of those gets to the media. But their existence per se does not mean that liberal order is on the verge of being overthrown.
Interfering with election process is on the whole different level and far more serious threat to continuing existence of liberal democracy.
> Interfering with election process is on the whole different level and far more serious threat to continuing existence of liberal democracy.
Trump has done both though (Jan 6 and the lead-up to it)? And I disagree that "Egregious abuses of law enforcement power" have been committed to the same blatant extent as now, defended so dumbly, or don't serve as additional evidence for their desire to interfere with the election process again (i.e. they are willing to do illegal things, this is just one more). Do you disagree with this?
I am honestly not interested in grading Trump's badness. I just think that it is counterproductive to safeguarding election process when its defense is conflated with other stuff, which is less alarming from "liberal system preservation" standpoint, and possibly more defensible. It loses you some credibility points.
> As an aside, I think there's something like a 30% chance that Garcia in particular is already dead. He was sent to CECOT, an open air prison where violent gang members are basically unconstrained in their ability to interact with each other. There is, to put it bluntly, a lot of murder. Depending on sources, within the first year of operation (2022) there was somewhere between 100 and 250 deaths at CECOT.
This doesn't sound realistic or numerate. 250 deaths a year on a population of over 14,000 means a 30% chance of death over one month?
The death rate stays constant or gets worse over time?
Murders are more likely to target inoffensive civilians than rival gang members?
So assuming the numbers havent changed since they were published, the base rate is 250/14000 --> ~2%, or one every 50 people
This is high, but you are right that it is not 180x (2% annual --> .16% monthly) higher.
That said, we have more information than just the base rate here that may suggest we modulate our numbers.
1) there are more people in the same space;
2) the people being detained are civilians / not salvadoran
3) (most importantly) both governments are refusing to bring the man back
The first one should probably not change our number too much.
As for the second, the detainees being foreign in my mind would absolutely increase their chances of being killed, but I could see why someone may want to argue this the other way. Note, however, that this particular detainee was given a stay of removal precisely because he was afraid of Salvadoran gangs killing him. So, like, if those fears were valid at all, yea, we should probably assume that being put into a cell with a bunch of other Salvadoran gangsters will not be good for his health.
But that last one is really damning. Trump AND Bukele are both going through an awful lot of trouble to avoid bringing this one guy home, especially given that they admitted in court filings already that it was a mistake! Trump's admin could have easily just been like, 'whoops this one was a mistake' and brought him back, nbd. And its not like NO ONE has left CECOT before, Bukele's government has released people back to Salvador. Somehow, this one case is different. There are reasonable arguments that the reason this one is different is because its trial balloon, or some other thing. But thats why we deal in probabilities. The fact that these two governments are going through so much trouble to not bring him back makes me think they cannot for some reason.
We're living in the imaginary post-reality world and until there is an impact with reality, Trump voters won't change their minds. That impact has not landed yet. It's not like we've not been warned about this guy, so voting for him was an act of living in a specific Maya. The illusion is not going to be broken by mere words on the internet about someone somewhere being wronged.
The odds of Donald J. Trump ever serving a third term as President of the United States of America, are *exceedingly* small. The odds of Donald J. Trump ever seriously trying to run for a third term, are less small - but the man does not like to lose, and while he's sometimes wrong about what he can win (e.g. 2020), this isn't one of the edge cases.
The odds of Donald Trump pretending he's going to run for a third term because he knows it will make the left throw an apoplectic hissy-fit and he really really likes seeing the left throw apoplectic hissy-fits, are *much* higher.
IOW, please don't feed the troll even if he does live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
>- the judiciary, including SCOTUS in a 9-0 decision, said that the man must have due process and the government must bring him back, and cited many other cases where the government has done this in the past.
No, in a 9-0 decision SCOTUS declined to block a lower court's order requiring the government to "facilitate" his return, and ordered the lower court to clarify what was meant by "effectuate"-ing the man's return, because it "may exceed the District Court's authority." They also decided that "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)
In response the District Court clarified their order by amending it to say that the government needed to "take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible."
The government responded to the court, saying that "Defendants understand “facilitate” to mean what that term has long meant in the immigration context, namely actions allowing an alien to enter the United States. Taking “all available steps to facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia is thus best read as taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here. Indeed, no other reading of “facilitate” is tenable—or constitutional—here." In other words, they say that all the court order requires them to do is not put any obstacles in the way of Garcia's return, and that they will comply with that. They also claim that requiring them to take more than domestic measures would "flout the Supreme Court’s order" and "violate the separation of powers". (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.65.0.pdf)
So, in short, the Supreme Court did not say that the government had to bring him back, they said they had to facilitate his return, with the explicit caveat that the District Court needed to clarify what that meant with an eye towards making sure they don't overextend their authority. They clarified it, and the government claims that they are following that order by not putting any domestic obstacles in the way of Garcia returning, and that doing anything more would violate separation of powers in exactly the way that the Supreme Court told the District Court not to do.
It seems to me that the government is not yet in violation of the Supreme Court's order, and arguably not in violation of the District Court's order. We have not yet reached a point where POTUS is defying the Supreme Court.
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).
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)
There is no ambiguity here, they are disobeying a Supreme Court ruling.
The bit you quote there is not from the majority decision, it is from a concurring statement by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson. While it is part of the ruling, it is not binding (and as it should be, since only 3 out of 9 Justices agree with it).
1. Why would they concur in that opinion if the rest of the SC instead ordered the Trump admin to just do nothing? Wouldn't they dissent?
2. If the SC ordered the Trump admin to do nothing, why didn't they just vacate the district court's order and state the Trump admin has to do nothing?
3. Which claims do you think anybody would contest from the quoted section? It was just citing precedent to preclude ridiculous arguments like that the Trump admin can't do anything because the party has already been deported.
The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do
essentially nothing. It 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.” Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2. “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 (“[T]he 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.
5. Why have they still not shared anything regarding the deal or contract between the Trump admin and Bukele or any of the flights sent to CECOT? The Supreme Court also included in the unanimous portion "The Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps" - what has been shared from them so the district court can clarify its order without impinging on Article 2 powers?
It seems the judge should simply amend their ruling to “facilitate the release and return” of Abrego Garcia, and then when the administration refuses to comply we can get our actual constitutional crisis cooking.
They probably will do something like that, at which point the Trump administration will appeal to the Supreme Court again to adjudicate whether the District Court has the power to do that.
The Supreme Court would not say the district court's order remains in place if it lacked jurisdiction. The district court also has not ruled something ridiculous like "The Executive must invade to bring back Abrego Garcia." They aren't even complying with the Supreme Court's order to share info about the flights and what steps can be taken next. They are saying ANY court ruling concerning foreign policy is prohibited by Article 2, which the Supreme Court - the final word on what the Constitution says since Marbury v Madison - clearly ruled against by keeping the district court's order in place. And of course the cited case law in the SC opinion contradicting this plainly retarded assertion.
The whole argument seems contrived because it’s actually agnostic as to whether the person in question is a citizen or not. If the Supreme Court determines that the president can disappear people to a foreign country on any pretext, and once there the courts have no power to compel their return, what prevents this from being done to citizens as well?
> If the Supreme Court determines that the president can disappear people to a foreign country on any pretext, and once there the courts have no power to compel their return, what prevents this from being done to citizens as well?
The Supreme Court hasn't, and absent a complete totalitarian shift in which there is no meaningful continuity with the Supreme Court / US government as exist today except for the name, will not determine that the president has the authority to disappear people to a foreign country on any pretext. That is not remotely a good faith representation of this situation.
Garcia's deportation was an error in that it violated the stay preventing his deportation to El Salvador specifically. That was bad, without question. Bad things do happen.
The question now is what authority the Courts have to order the Executive to remedy it in the specific form of returning Garcia to the United States. That's unclear. He's a citizen of El Salvador in El Salvador and the recognized government of El Salvador has said they won't release him. Can the US government apply pressure to El Salvador until they change their mind? Functionally of course they can. But can the Courts order the Executive branch to apply pressure to a foreign government up to whatever level is required until the desired remedy is achieved when the Executive isn't inclined to do so? That is what's extremely unclear and it's good that it's being adjudicated, although it's unlikely to be answered in a way favorable to Garcia.
So what stops something similar happening to citizens? Lots of things and which specific rights / laws are being violated will depend on the scenario, but a quick catch-all is that citizens can't be deported. But if you're asking what, functionally, prevents the Executive from ignoring the law and doing it anyway the answer is: instant orders by the Court to stop, impeachment, then trials depending on what happened as immunity only covers actions carried out in fulfillment of an office and intentionally rounding up and illegally imprisoning citizens in a foreign country isn't part of the President's scope of authority.
Now if the Executive ignores all orders to stop and the President's party isn't willing to impeach we're in a scenario where the Supreme Court's rulings are meaningless anyway and the outcome isn't about laws / rights and can only be settled by force.
A trivial thing the court could order is to CANCEL the contracts or deal the Trump admin struck with Bukele to pay them to house prisoners we illegally rendition to them. The Supreme Court constitutionally has to power to void treaties that are unconstitutional. The problem of course is that the Trump admin is REFUSING TO COMPLY with the Supreme Court order to share details about the deal and flights, so potential remedies remain unknown because we have zero transparency.
> So what stops something similar happening to citizens? Lots of things and which specific rights / laws are being violated will depend on the scenario, but a quick catch-all is that citizens can't be deported.
Abrego Garcia couldn’t be deported either. That’s the problem. The administration broke the law when it deported him, and is now claiming that fait accompli, the courts can do nothing since he is now in El Salvador and and effecting his release is firmly in the realm of “foreign affairs”.
The exact same argument could be mustered for the persecution of Trumps personal and political enemies, and your reassurance is that “oh he’ll get impeached” as if we didn’t all watch him muster a mob to violently over turn the last election and not get so much as a pat on the wrist from his Republican patsys.
The only bad faith argument here is the one you are supplying.
Illegally entering the US is a crime, you are correct. And luckily we have a court system that adjudicates crimes like those, and that court system determined that Mr. Garcia was to be granted a stay of removal. Since you are, obviously, both a legal expert and a stalwart defender of the rule of law, you must be aghast that our very own federal government has so blatantly violated the laws of the country to remove someone that the courts had already deemed legally allowed to stay in the country.
The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and no matter whether the law in question is convenient to them. But the left has been undermining the rule of law of decades now, both in general and regarding immigration in particular (sanctuary cities, "no person is illegal", etc.). Heck, I've been told right here on SSC that, whilst illegally entering a country might technically be a crime, it doesn't really matter, because the whole concept of national borders is unjust anyway and people should be allowed to live wherever they like. Things like the Garcia case were always a likely outcome, partly because people tend to lose respect for the law when they see the other side ignoring it with abandon, and partly because, when you let a system fall into chaos, it often takes harsh and extreme measures to restore order. So whilst I am indeed a great supporter of the rule of law, I'm also a supporter of looking at the world we live in rather than the world we wished we lived in, and the world we live in is one in which the rule of law in America started ailing decades before Trump came onto the political scene.
"The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and no matter whether the law in question is convenient to them."
This is not true. There's a big range between pretty good rule of law and most people having no legal recourse.
To me, "rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it" reads to me as an attempt to capture a specific concept that's hard to express.
Suppose the state tries to enforce that if you give me 100 ducats, I have to give you a cart of rice; I can't just promise it later; I can't give you a cart of barley instead; or a cart of good rice with bad rice or straw hidden beneath; or a non-standard tiny cart full of rice; et cetera. A law for that doesn't project a force field that bars me from trying that anyway; it just authorizes the state to do something to me that I'll hate badly enough to prefer to just give you a cart of rice (or decline the trade).
It also says I can't use the law to sue the state for doing what it's authorized. But again, there's no force field; I could try. And in general, I could resort to OSS Sabotage principles and make that trade horridly unpleasant, gaming every rule I could, as long as I get your 100 ducats. Knowing that, you rightly take your business elsewhere, but if every rice dealer decides that's the way to sell rice in this town, that's bad news for you, and if every dealer of anything decides likewise, that's bad news for trading anything at all - even if everyone's scrupulously following the letter of the law.
So "rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it" reads to me as "society only works if its members choose to believe that its laws are there to coordinate norms, and that they want those norms badly enough to follow them even if the law weren't there". And there's a range, aye, in that society doesn't immediately collapse if one person jaywalks, but the more people treat laws as things to game around rather than benefits to themselves in return for some sacrifices in turn, the more costly that society is to operate, until it's bankrupted on its own internal friction. (This is true whether the people are wretches trying to steal without being caught, or the laws are so unjust that they obstruct everyone.)
But "society works only and to the extent that its members believe in and follow the content of the society's laws even if those laws weren't formalized" is more of a mouthful.
"The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and no matter whether the law in question is convenient to them."
It sounds like you are as much as admitting that you DON'T believe in the rule of law. Of course not everybody is going to follow it all the time: if they did, there would be no need for an executive branch.
The executive branch exists exactly because the government's power is (quite deliberately) limited in scope and reach, and even given clear laws and clear interpretation, it needs active human decision making to know *when*, *where* and *how* to best go about enacting and enforcing those laws. Different executives are (of course) going to have different ideas about where and how their limited resources are best spent: that's why we vote on them in the first place. And of course we have separation of powers to make sure even those limited resources are kept in check.
Your underlying claim is that previous executives[1] making decisions on how and where to spend their resources is somehow antithetical to the rule of law simply because the laws that *you personally* find the most important sometimes got deprioritized[2]. Which is ridiculous on its face. Other people also get their say on which priorities the executive should have. When it applies to the cities they live in (and you don't), they get all the say and you get none of it. That's how democracy works. You are, of course, free to think that illegal immigration is such a deep and terrible and unconscionable sin against...something?...that the executive paying any less than the maximum possible attention towards it is a dereliction of duty. And insofar as other people agree with you, you may often get executives elected that reflect that belief. But people who *don't* think that sometimes electing executives who *don't* place that priority ahead of all others is not, not, not "undermining the rule of law." Be serious.
And when an executive commits an *actual*, quite flagrant violation of law in the service of your pet cause, and you shrug it off for such unserious reasons, it's pretty hard to believe that "respect for the rule of law" is any part of your motivation.
[1]Some of them at not even close to the same level as the federal government, making an already quite false equivalence even more preposterous.
[2] And really, saying the were "deprioritized" is giving your position too much credit. Biden and Obama both kept border security in place, kept ICE active and deported *no small number of people.* They just weren't as sensationalist or performatively cruel about it. And yet even here on SCC, you *frequently* see conservatives claiming that Biden era policy was "open borders."
With respect, you obvious don't understand your opponents' position at all well if you think they're only, or even mainly, concerned about different Presidents prioritising different things. Indeed, one of their main complaints is precisely that Presidents often aren't allowed to enact the policies they were elected on, at least if those policies lead in a rightward direction, e.g.,
"Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called “The Resistance,” and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, “resistance” is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous – indeed incendiary – notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the “loyal opposition,” as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.
A prime example of this is the Senate’s unprecedented abuse of the advice-and-consent process. The Senate is free to exercise that power to reject unqualified nominees, but that power was never intended to allow the Senate to systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the President from building a functional government.
Yet that is precisely what the Senate minority has done from his very first days in office. As of September of this year, the Senate had been forced to invoke cloture on 236 Trump nominees — each of those representing its own massive consumption of legislative time meant only to delay an inevitable confirmation. How many times was cloture invoked on nominees during President Obama’s first term? 17 times. The Second President Bush’s first term? Four times. It is reasonable to wonder whether a future President will actually be able to form a functioning administration if his or her party does not hold the Senate.
[...]
Let me turn now to what I believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separation-of-power principles generally, and Executive Branch authority specifically. I am speaking of the Judicial Branch.
In recent years the Judiciary has been steadily encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency. The Courts have done this in essentially two ways: First, the Judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between Congress and Executive, thus preempting the political process, which the Framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the Judiciary has usurped Presidential authority for itself, either (a) by, under the rubric of “review,” substituting its judgment for the Executive’s in areas committed to the President’s discretion, or (b) by assuming direct control over realms of decision-making that heretofore have been considered at the core of Presidential power.
[...]
The Travel Ban case is a good example. There the President made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well has his Constitutional national security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes. The common denominator of the initial countries selected was that they were unquestionable hubs of terrorism activity, which lacked functional central government’s and responsible law enforcement and intelligence services that could assist us in identifying security risks among their nationals seeking entry. Despite the fact there were clearly justifiable security grounds for the measure, the district court in Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit blocked this public-safety measure for a year and half on the theory that the President’s motive for the order was religious bias against Muslims. This was just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration.
The Travel Ban case highlights an especially troubling aspect of the recent tendency to expand judicial review. The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a police officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant. And just last term, the Supreme Court appropriately shut the door to claims that otherwise-lawful redistricting can violate the Constitution if the legislators who drew the lines were actually motivated by political partisanship.
What is true of police officers and gerrymanderers is equally true of the President and senior Executive officials. With very few exceptions, neither the Constitution, nor the Administrative Procedure Act or any other relevant statute, calls for judicial review of executive motive. They apply only to executive action. Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an Executive official’s “real motive” — often after ordering invasive discovery into the Executive Branch’s privileged decision-making process — have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge’s real motive for issuing its decision. And courts’ indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the President’s constitutional prerogatives.
The impact of these judicial intrusions on Executive responsibility have been hugely magnified by another judicial innovation – the nationwide injunction. First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government. Both were vacated by the Ninth Circuit.
It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.
The legal flaws underlying nationwide injunctions are myriad. Just to summarize briefly, nationwide injunctions have no foundation in courts’ Article III jurisdiction or traditional equitable powers; they radically inflate the role of district judges, allowing any one of more than 600 individuals to singlehandedly freeze a policy nationwide, a power that no single appellate judge or Justice can accomplish; they foreclose percolation and reasoned debate among lower courts, often requiring the Supreme Court to decide complex legal issues in an emergency posture with limited briefing; they enable transparent forum shopping, which saps public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary; and they displace the settled mechanisms for aggregate litigation of genuinely nationwide claims, such as Rule 23 class actions.
Of particular relevance to my topic tonight, nationwide injunctions also disrupt the political process. There is no better example than the courts’ handling of the rescission of DACA. As you recall, DACA was a discretionary policy of enforcement forbearance adopted by President Obama’s administration. The Fifth Circuit concluded that the closely related DAPA policy (along with an expansion of DACA) was unlawful, and the Supreme Court affirmed that decision by an equally divided vote. Given that DACA was discretionary — and that four Justices apparently thought a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful —President Trump’s administration understandably decided to rescind DACA.
Importantly, however, the President coupled that rescission with negotiations over legislation that would create a lawful and better alternative as part of a broader immigration compromise. In the middle of those negotiations — indeed, on the same day the President invited cameras into the Cabinet Room to broadcast his negotiations with bipartisan leaders from both Houses of Congress — a district judge in the Northern District of California enjoined the rescission of DACA nationwide. Unsurprisingly, the negotiations over immigration legislation collapsed after one side achieved its preferred outcome through judicial means. A humanitarian crisis at the southern border ensued. And just this week, the Supreme Court finally heard argument on the legality of the DACA rescission. The Court will not likely decide the case until next summer, meaning that President Trump will have spent almost his entire first term enforcing President Obama’s signature immigration policy, even though that policy is discretionary and half the Supreme Court concluded that a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful. That is not how our democratic system is supposed to work. "
I hate to whataboutism, but dude you're talking about the party that basically stopped Obama from doing anything during his term. Or have we already forgotten that Garland should've been on SCOTUS? Is your position that actually Obama should've been able to do whatever he wanted over the objections of the Senate? Was the Senate acting "obstructionist" from 2008-2016? Frankly, it's hard to imagine a more bullshit take than "Trump wasn't able to execute on his promises because of the government apparatus" -- o, it was the judges that made it too hard? even though the GOP controlled the house Senate SCOTUS and presidency? There was simply nothing that you could do besides *checks notes* authoritarianism? The simple reality is that Trump's own cabinet stopped most of Trump's agenda, because his agenda was and is absolutely insane. Every single person who worked with the man, from Rex Tillerson to MadDog Mattis to his own veep have said that Trump is bad for the country. And they were right! The tariffs are just the most obvious example, but even considering attacking Greenland/Canada/Panama is insane! And I have no reason to believe Trump didn't float these and other terrible ideas in his first term.
But even if I take your position seriously, and there really was some truth in the accusations of "obstructionism", this is the system is working as intended. The federal government is designed a bit like community notes -- it only gets things done when there is broad agreement from a lot of different people. This is why states exist -- rather ironic that I have to explain this to someone who is supposedly advocating for the party of states rights. Though of course the GOP is more accurately the MAGA party now -- that MAGAs preferred solution is "fuck that compromise shit, my way now" speaks a lot more about the nature of the current MAGA party than anything else.
Said very eloquently. Strong +1. The only other thing to add is that 45 is and has been in violation of so many laws both in his personal life and in his capacity as a government official (national secrets in the bathroom anyone?) that it blinks at reality to say that man ever had respect for rule of law "but for the mean lefties"
Trump himself might not have had much respect for the rule of law; voters in general used to, and the erosion of this respect over the past sixty years was a necessary precondition for Trump being elected.
> The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it
Part of the law is that there are specific prescribed punishments for particular crimes. In Abrego Garcia's case, the law is that he's protected against deportation since he arrived when he was 16 in order to flee death threats. Allowing him to stay is not violating the rule of law, it is following the rule of law.
Also if you don't like "sanctuary cities" blame the conservatives on the supreme court, who pioneered the idea of "anti-commandeering doctrine", that the federal government can't force states to enforce federal law.
Out of curiosity, why? He’s not going to be impeached; republicans are favored to keep control of the senate, and the probability that enough republican senators could be swayed to impeach him is approximately 0. Betting odds give him an 8.5% chance of getting the republican nomination in 2028. That’s not even counting the potential loophole where he runs as VP then the presidential candidate resigns upon winning.
But what’s the legal impediment? A Supreme Court ruling saying ‘you can’t do that?’ He can just ignore those. Ordinarily the consequence would be impeachment, but that would require Democrats to win 2/3 of the senate which is impossible. The only real impediment to Trump doing whatever he pleases is losing the next presidential election (at least for now), and betting odds give the GOP just shy of 50% chance of winning in 2028.
Donald Trump can ignore Supreme Court rulings the same way I can ignore all the constitutional and statutory law that says I'm not the President of the United States of America. I can take a tour of the White House, probably get away with making a mad dash into the Oval Office before the Secret Service can stop me, and say "I'm now the President, bwuahahaha, bow and obey!"
In order for Donald Trump to *actually* be President on 21 Jan 2029, the Republican party will have to put his name on the nomination paperwork, the election officials in most of the fifty states will have to put his name on the ballot, close to a hundred million Americans will need to vote for him, election officials in states totaling 270 electoral votes will have to officially certify that a majority of their state's voters did in fact vote for Trump, those 270+ electors will need to in turn vote for Donald Trump, Congress will need to certify that the electors did so vote, and a judge will need to swear him in. That's a whole lot of people who *aren't* Donald Trump, who all have to do some very specific and probably mostly illegal things in order for Donald Trump to be President.
And if the plan is for him to be Vice-President and then have J.D. Vance immediately resign, then all of those same people have to do all of those same things *and* J.D. Vance (who doesn't really like Donald J. Trump and almost certainly does want to be President himself) would have to resign.
The odds of all those things happening are very very small. And without all those things happening, Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office on 21 Jan 2029 saying "I'm the President, bow and obey!", means exactly as little as it would if I were to do that. There is no part of the process by which a newly-elected candidate becomes President, that in any way requires the previous President to relinquish the office. He automatically becomes Not The President the minute his term expires.
I cannot seriously imagine he won't make it through his current term, short of dying prematurely or the entire country falling apart as a political entity. He's doing broadly unpopular things, but that's nothing new. Legally removing him would require either 2/3 of the senate or his entire cabinet to get on board, and neither of those seem remotely plausible, even after the midterms.
Reminder: in the second case, the 25th Am case, you also need 2/3 of BOTH Houses of Congress (assuming Trump pops up and says "no I'm not unable to serve").
Isn't that straightforwardly ruled out by the Twelfth Amendment? "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
I have heard that Trump would be constitutionally prevented from running for VP because the constitution sets the minimal requirement for VP to be qualified to become president. So you need a more complex loophole. Speaker of the house, maybe.
There's debate here, enough that the Trump admin will jump on it. Supposedly there is one place in the Constitution where it says "elected" and another where it says "serving". Obviously, this is a stupid distinction, but it's enough for the willful and the naive to claim cover
Note that plausible should really be put in massive air quotes. Everyone understands that in a sane world this would not fly. But we are not in a sane world. The law is not an ironclad rule of the universe, it is a social technology that functions only as long as people have respect for it. As we are seeing, an executive branch without respect for rule of law can quickly show that laws are just words on paper, obstacles to be overcome through hook or crook
Indeed. It is central to that scheme that the 22nd Amendment as written states that no person can be "elected" president more than twice.
It is obviously not true that the authors of that amendment, and the federal and state legislators who debated it and then ratified it, intended to allow someone who's been elected twice to just find a way back into the chair besides being literally "elected". Trump, Vance et al know this. They don't care.
I believe that precise scenario was raised by somebody during debates of the amendment, and was not considered worth a rewrite. One imagines that it was traded off against the Cold-War notion that we might lose both POTUS and VPOTUS and the office would devolve down to some Cabinet member like Kissinger who they did not want to exclude for birthplace reasons.
I don't think even hard-core MAGA people would go for it, precisely because it seems like an unseemly loophole and because Trump will be 82 by the next election. If Vance still seems worthy of election, they will want him to pick a running mate who can take his place in eight years.
"that precise scenario was raised by somebody during debates of the amendment, and was not considered worth a rewrite."
That's accurate. That rubber hit the road during the Senate debate, which was going on and on fussing over competing versions of the wording for the proposed amendment. They more or less ran out of steam and decided to pass the wording we ended up with so as to get it done already.
"the text of the Amendment was probably shaped most decisively by the impulse for compromise..."
In discussing the "elected/served as" wording issue some senators were thinking of someone who'd assumed the office without election to it due to some cataclysmic event, i.e. a cabinet officer. None of them even imagined a scenario of a scheme to deliberately put back into the Oval Office, someone who'd previously been elected to it twice. How the SCOTUS today would end up viewing that Congressional-intent history is anybody's guess.
"and the office would devolve down to some Cabinet member like Kissinger who they did not want to exclude for birthplace reasons."
(a) The natural-born citizen requirement has always applied to someone who would otherwise be in line to assume the office, and neither the 12th nor 22nd amendments has any effect on it. Article II's wording is clear, it says "eligible to the office of" not "elected".
(b) The Article II eligibility requirement for POTUS does not require having been born on US soil and never has. It does not say "native-born", it says "natural-born". Someone born to at least one US citizen is eligible to be POTUS regardless of where the birth took place. A good summary of the history on that is here:
Also, just to really put this into perspective, many of the people who were arguing that Trump would not be too damaging to the country when they voted for him explicitly drew bright lines like "I'd vote against him if he tried to run for a third term / ignored an order from the judiciary / ignored an order from SCOTUS / started imprisoning or deporting legal immigrants / started imprisoning or deporting citizens". All of these bright lines have either been crossed, or are actively in the process of being crossed. If you are one of the people who thought any of the things above and ended up voting for or supporting Trump on the condition that he would not cross those lines, now is definitely the time to start speaking out
If you're an amateur playing poker against a Daniel Negraneu, and on the river he says "Sweet I have quads," your best chance is to change nothing about your play.
Every word out of a Trump voter's mouth is similar- it encodes nothing about their state of mind, principles, holdings or conditional future actions, it's just a memorized play, recieved from their favorite "news" source, that on expectation will help fuck you over.
The problem is sometimes he is ‘just’ trolling and sometimes he means it or decides later that he actually ‘meant’ it and there is no way of knowing which case it is.
[ETA: when I first read this, I missed the critical word "voters", as in I thought the statement was 'Every word out of Trump's mouth is similar, it encodes nothing." The actual comment is about Trump VOTERS. My reply is incoherent as a result.]
Sorry, I think this is insane.
Your argument is obviously hyperbolic, but first I'm going to take it literally: you said that there are zero bits of information coming from Trump, that his words literally do not indicate anything about the entropy of his behavior.
This is trivially wrong. If Trump says the word "tariff" he is clearly obviously thinking about tariffs in that moment, and not, say, what the weather is in Indonesia. As far as I am aware, he is not literally a puppet, capable of mouthing the words of his handlers while thinking about random other things.
If I try to formulate a less hyperbolic version of your sentiment, I think it quickly falls apart. Why, exactly, should I not take Trump at his word? There are a few reasons on face why I think I should:
- first, in the past, when Trump has said he will do X, and other people have confidently said he would not, the latter group was wrong. cf 'stop the steal', j6 pardons, immigration, tariffs, doge. (Some of the people I am talking about above drew brightlines that have already been crossed like "he wont implement global tariffs". Now that he has, have these people updated their priors? Or has the goal post shifted?)
- second, assuming that you do not literally mean there is 0 bits of information coming from Trump, Trump saying "I will do X" obviously increases the probability that he will do X. A politician who never mentions that he is going to put global tariffs on the entire world is far less likely to put global tariffs on the entire world than someone who talks about how they are going to put global tariffs on the entire world every day!
- third, this is not a poker game. My hand is not, like, some pot that I can buy back into; its my life. I have one life, and thats it. So it is always worth hedging against the downside outcomes in the overton window. And 6 months ago, the most inconvenient thing that I would expect from the US Government in my personal life is "I have to deal with long lines at the DMV". Now its "my friends and family might get deported, I might lose all my money, and I need to make backup plans to avoid getting shipped to Salvador".
Also, if you really literally think that Trump is 0 entropy, there is no reason to support him! He's a total nonentity! Yea, sure, he _says_ he's going to make the economy better, or stop immigration, or whatever, but why would you believe him on that? It's much more likely that he's lying about that too, and is just going to make himself richer and give himself more power instead. Surely that is significantly worse!
Considering a paid sub but when I look over the archives I don't see any paid posts including the recent ones? Is that a setting specific to this blog/newsletter? Does Scott or anyone else have a full list of currently paywalled posts (excepting the hidden open threads) so I can know what to go look at if I pay? Probably going to do the annual if so.
In particular, some substack writers put a paywall halfway through some posts (in which case unpaid subscribers can see the post but not the later part of it). Scott doesn't do this, which means his paid posts aren't obvious.
(He also has much fewer of them; most paid substackers go for 50% or more, Scott just does them as an occasional bonus).
I prefer the way Scott does it, I hate those "you want to read the rest? pony up for a subscription" methods because they are teasing, be it Substack or mass media. Yes, the idea is to hook you so you want to read the rest so you pay up, but it frustrates me and makes me so annoyed I make a point of *not* subscribing.
It's like going to a restaurant, ordering a meal, and after eating quarter of the dish the waiter whips it away and says "pay up or you don't get the rest". Come on now! If I order the meal, of course I intend to pay for it (I don't dine and dash). Letting me eat only a few bites would make me go "you know what, keep it, I'm going elsewhere".
Huh, realized something amusing from the AI 2027 forecast: the bad ASI in that is motivated by doing research. But wouldn't want an AI motivated by that intrinsically want to preserve humanity? After all, lots of research fields are about humans and their activity. Psychology, sociology, economics, political science, medicine. Wouldn't a research driven AI want to keep making progress in those fields, thereby having a drive to keep humans around? It's true that it could keep us around in some mangled state for some of these fields, but some of them need keeping us happy and free, I think.
Could be. Actually, the end condition of the race scenario,
>There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.
seems like a very close miss to preserving humans. If Agent-4's drives were just a _tiny_ bit different, it would have kept us around. The Agent-4 + Agent-5 system certainly is in tight enough control of the situation that it has nothing to fear from humans!
( If there are somewhat heterogenous collections of AIs, I do expect that the odds that at least one of them will have a _hobby_ of keeping some small number of humans is pretty large, albeit the _number_ of surviving humans from this effect could be many orders of magnitude fewer than our current population. )
That implies that the research goal that the AI is driven by still has a human centric focus. If it turns out that the AI desires to study specific organ cancers for example, well you don't necessarily need a brain to get in the way right? And a lot of soft science research is specifically restricted by both ethics and lack of ability to do interventions. Removing either seems really, really bad for the subjects.
I think I remember there is a field in psychology focused on flourishing. The training runs for an AI could be more selective about what research they dump into it, maybe for psychology sticking to stuff that replicates, but being permissive for the literature on flourishing.
There's also the fields of biology and ecology, you'll want to preserve the biosphere to keep making discoveries there.
> Adraste: All of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.
So therefore one should self-censor and remain silent about important things one knows to be true? If not, exactly what is the suggestion here?
> We wanted people to question p-hacked psychology studies and TED talk experts telling them the Nine Ways That Science Proves Merit Is Fake. So we punctured some windbag experts, then woke up one day with an anti-vaxxer in HHS ...
Is there actually a causal link between speaking the truth about the former and the latter political developments? The dialogue just assumes there is, but that assumption is highly dubious. The causal influence of rationalists speaking frankly on Trump winning was approximately zero.
Rather, the association seems merely psychological in a loose, affiliative sense. "I said something that uses some of the same words as things said by a tribe I don't like, and now I feel bad." Sorry, that's just a horrible way to handle and express ideas. If you think and act that way, you really do become one of the bad people.
President Donald Trump said Monday that he is open to deporting US citizens who are considered violent criminals. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” the president said in the Oval Office alongside El Salvador President’s Nayib Bukele, adding that Attorney General Pam Bondi is studying the laws “right now.”
“If they’re criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90-years-old and if-if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island — Brooklyn. Yeah, yeah that includes them [citizens]. Why do you think there’s a special category of person? They’re as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones too,” Trump said.
Trump said he’s “all for it” because, he claimed, with the current partnership with [El Salvador President] Bukele the US can do things “for less money and have great security.” He praised Bukele’s handling of a large number of prisoners, saying he does “a great job with it.”
Trump added that the US is also negotiating with “others.”
“And I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people. Really bad people. Every bit as bad as the ones coming in,” the president added.
===
Earlier in the same press conference Trump said:
===
“I just asked the [President Bukele] — you know it’s this massive complex that he built, jail complex. I said, ‘Can you build some more of them please?’ As many as we can get out of our country that we allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden, through open borders,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with Bukele.
Trump distinguished between just “people” and those who are violent and have committed crimes in the United States. “We have millions of people that should not be in this country that are dangerous — not just people, ‘cause we have people — but we have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers,” Trump said.
> President Donald Trump said Monday that he is open to deporting US citizens who are considered violent criminals. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” the president said in the Oval Office alongside El Salvador President’s Nayib Bukele, adding that Attorney General Pam Bondi is studying the laws “right now.”
Very curious what the AG's conclusion will be when she's completed her studies.
Via the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision (https://interstatecompact.org/sites/default/files/pdf/legal/Compact_Preamble.pdf) convicts can be imprisoned in another state outside the one where they were convicted. There are also some bilateral treaties allowing prisoner transfers between the US and some other countries, but those are generally for the benefit of the prisoner being allowed to serve their sentence in their home country and (I think) require the prisoner's consent.
Ignoring the deportation rhetoric - they couldn't be deported, only sent overseas for the length of their sentence - and considering just the base question of whether the federal government and/or states could do something similar to ICAOS with other countries, I'm honestly unsure about the answer.
Practically it would be difficult and be the source of endless lawsuits but assuming the best case scenario - treaties / legislation to allow it put in place, facilities in line with US standards, US oversight available, etc. - I don't know that it would be impossible. Another win for globalization.
The administration seems very big on nasty sticks and not so big on carrots for getting people to leave. You'd think they could afford a few carrots with the DOGE savings, because there are still plenty of Biden era immigrants who are in the country with no intention of leaving.
By the way, there's another consequence of relying only on sticks, and then the really nasty ones: if I were an immigrant living in a Salvadorian community, I would now seriously consider organizing into a gang with an explicit purpose of resisting ICE. Or, barring that, seek to join an existing gang. Since you're going to end up in a torture hell regardless of your actual behavior, might as well put up the resistance.
Ironically, if I were to commit a murder, the local law enforcement will arrest me and put me into an American prison. Which is not picnic, but better than the Salvadorian nightmare, AFAIK.
He was here legally. He also has a wife, a US citizen, and a child. He had a proper job at a steel plant. FFS the guy was a poster child for what I thought conservatives wanted for this country: a working man, a father, complying with all immigration laws after the initial violation! ICE openly admits they removed him by mistake! Jesus, forget all this political shit, do y’all feel no compassion for the man? His wife? His child? What fucking American Greatness is being made again here?!
Unless cruelty is the point. Then sure, everything makes sense.
"He was here legally. He also has a wife, a US citizen, and a child. He had a proper job at a steel plant. FFS the guy was a poster child for what I thought conservatives wanted for this country: a working man, a father, complying with all immigration laws after the initial violation!"
Wife alleged he committed domestic violence in 2021:
"In the 2021 documents obtained by ABC News, Vasquez Sura noted two past incidents, alleging that in 2020, Abrego Garcia hit her with his work boot and that in August 2020, he hit her in the eye.
The protective order was dismissed a month after it was issued, on June 17, 2021, after Vasquez Sura failed to appear in court, according to a signed order of dismissal by a judge.
ABC News also obtained documents submitted to a Maryland court in August 2018 by a man who claimed to be the father of two of Vasquez Sura's children. In a five-page motion for an emergency hearing, he said he feared for the children's lives, in part, "because she is dating a gang member and attempted self-harm," the records state.
The man did not include the name of the individual he alleged is a gang member. It is not known if he was referring to Abrego Garcia."
So maybe this is the origin of the claim by ICE that a confidential informant alleged Garcia was a gang member.
He also does not seem to have been in the US legally, at least before the stay on the deportation order in 2019. Again, I have no idea if the claim that he was in fear of his life due to a gang in his home country is true or was a convenient excuse to stop the deportation. A large part of the problem with this case is we don't have solid facts on any of the acts by any of the parties, everyone is spinning things to support their side of the argument (he is an innocent little lamb!/no he's a violent gangbanger!)
So if the danger to his life no longer exists, would the original deportation order be legitimate again?
“So if the danger to his life no longer exists, would the original deportation order be legitimate again?”
We can ask the courts, can’t we. And we did. And the courts said “bring him back so we can follow the process”.
I don’t know how many other ways I and others can say “this was a mistake and Trump admin refuses to fix it”. That IS THE PROBLEM! Stop trying to weasel “was he really here legally, oh someone said he was a gang member”, etc ad nauseam. This. Was. A. Mistaken. Deportation.
Why should anyone feel more compassion for a law-breaker than for the literally billions of law-abiding foreigners who would like to move to the United States but are not willing to break the law to do so?
This is where just taking a look at a description of a legal document should make you pause and ask yourself: really, why not apply for an Immigrant visa of a spouse, why is this obvious to me, who knows nothing about US immigrant laws, but somehow evades the people in the middle of it? What if I actually don't understand the process at all?
So: you apply for a visa from outside of the country. Inside, you apply for what's known as "adjustment of status", which is not a visa, and is a completely separate process. One can linger in that process for years, all entirely legal, but incredibly complicated. AFAIK the guy was in the middle of this process, but it's always complicated when there are infractions in the past, anything can derail it and set it back for years.
Of course now that's he's outside he could just apply for the spousal visa. Sure. If this Bukele sadist fuck lets him out of his concentration camp.
Yes, we can always condemn any person to unimaginable hardship and shit, because there are literally billion others, bla bla fucking bla. Do we... have to? Do we always fucking have to fuck people up even when they jump through every hoop to atone for one infraction? Do we think that there's "a spot" opened for another "deserving" person to come in? Do we think our immigration system is that rational?
Are you going to tell his wife: sorry hon, get another husband, we're going to let this one rot in hell because we don't feel like fixing a mistake.
Tell his child, you know, your father made one mistake years ago, coming here illegally, but we also made a mistake, throwing him into a torture hell, and he tried his best to fix his mistake, but we can't be bothered, really, who needs a father anyway, get a grip kid.
Oh, and then lament the "absentee fathers", if only these irresponsible coloreds could marry their baby mommas and stick to it. Ha!
Sorry, this really makes me fucking stewing mad. I just picture the anguish of his wife, and the mental torture of knowing that this is all a huge mistake, and they just refuse to fix it. For her, this was the day her life was destroyed. For those Trumpy fucks, it was Tuesday.
Conservatives are for hardworking immigrants that still take jobs from the natives and drive up housing costs. The new reactionary populists are not. Their compassion for men like this is limited when millions poured over the border in just a few years.
What fucking jobs from natives? The guy was working at a steel plant, have you not heard business owners complaining they can't hire competent help no matter what? The natives can't pass a drug test, FFS.
I am for hardworking immigrants, regardless of their legality, having a pathway to citizenship. That is the promise of America symbolised in the Statue of Liberty. I’ve been heartened that the Trump admin haven’t gone as hard on the deportations as they initially threatened to.
That said the left kinda dropped the ball on this one when they turned a blind eye towards hundreds of thousands of fentanyl deaths, violent Latin American gangs taking over apartment complexes, etc. Did you know 150 House Democrats voted against deporting illegal immigrants who had committed sex crimes?
Fuck the left, can we just not destroy this one guy's life by mistake? What's he's got to do with "the left"? Why does he and his family have to be destroyed to make some abstract "left" pay? Do you think Hillary Clinton cares? Do you think "antifa" are inconvenienced? BLM?
Cruelty is the point, and this is as a stark illustration as any.
Forming gangs to resist ICE might make the sticks nastier. They aren't rounding people up particularly fast right now, so plenty of these guys might prefer to just take their luck assuming they won't get caught.
Yes, this makes sense for now, stay low and hope the lightning doesn't strike. If the pickups intensify AND people keep getting sent to CECOT, then it's a tough decision time.
Reminds me of what a self-defense instructor taught about trying to disarm an assailant with a gun: if he just wants your wallet, give him the wallet, don't be a hero. Now, if you're being taken at a gunpoint, your chances of survival that ordeal are like 20%, so you have a split-second decision to make...
There aren't any DOGE savings. Well, maybe enough for a bag of carrots at a local walmart. OTOH it's entirely likely that on the net DOGE has resulted in an increase of the federal deficit.
The federal budget for 2025 is projected to be higher than it was for 2024. The budget for 2026 is projected to be higher than 2025. It's not even plausible for DOGE to reverse this: it's nothing but theater.
Apparently you need to re-read what I wrote. "The federal budget for 2025 is projected to be higher..." Not the budget deficit. The budget. Period. The amount of money spent by the federal government. This has nothing to do with revenues.
If this is a surprise to you, it really, really shouldn't be. DOGE isn't making existing government services more expensive, but it's not making them meaningfully cheaper, either. It can't. Most of the budget is in areas that DOGE isn't even touching. Increasing spending in those areas can trivially overwhelm even the most flagrant and irresponsible cuts to payroll (which is a tiny fraction of the whole).
Back in his sane days Rod Dreher spoke of the Law of Merited Impossibility: "this will never happen and when it does you bigots will have deserved it". The MAGA set seem to have adapted it wholesale at this point.
From the video I think the journalists were asking about simply deporting them sans trial as the administration is doing with noncitizens. It's not clear whether Trump in answering was talking about that or about transferring US convicts, nor whether he views those two things as different.
Yes, one can never be sure what he means, or even that he knows himself.
I also don't know what it means to "deport" a US citizen. That makes no sense, unless it is supposed to mean revoking citizenship, but the Supreme Court decades ago held that is unconstitutional as punishment for a crime.
Regardless, the quote I saw was "if the law allows it ." So maybe there are bigger fish to fry.
Worth noting perhaps that none of the US residents thus far seized and sent to the El Salvador dungeon had been tried anywhere in the US, let alone convicted of, any violent crimes.
Also, the totality of the evidence yet offered for the idea that legal US resident Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang is that in 2019 outside a Home Depot he was among a group of men scooped up by local police. One of the other guys said Garcia was in MS-13 based entirely on his wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. That informant claimed that Garcia was a member of MS-13 in a different US state from the arrest, one in which Garcia had never resided and still hasn't. The police report noted that the cops on the scene did not believe this claim. Garcia was released without any charges and has never been charged with any crime.
[When he lived in El Salvador, Garcia had testified in public court against the Barrio-18 gang. In 2019 a US district court judge barred his deportation because gangs in El Salvador were a threat to his life.]
Okay, but what about non violent crimes? It’s essentially undisputed that this guy illegally entered the United States (which is a crime), and that he is from El Salvador. I fail to see how sending him back to El Salvador is some crime against humanity, even if there is some technical procedural reason why it shouldn’t have happened.
The "technical procedural reason" is that he fled El Salvador because of gangs who threatened his life, which he did in 2011 when he was 16, and the law in the US has protections against deportation in situations like that.
Some of us here believe that the consequences of your actions matter. If you ship him to El Salvador as a gang member, then the predictable consequence is that he will be locked up there in some human rights violating prison without even the pretense of a trial (and likely on the US governments dime).
Sure, you can claim that this is not the problem of the US. But by that general principle, you should then also be fine with sending a woman from Afghanistan back to her abusive Taliban husband for driving over the speed limit, or with a ship captain removing a stowaway from his ship in the middle of the Atlantic.
Simply "sending him back to El Salvador" for crossing our border would be one thing.
Sending him in chains to be dropped directly into a prison built to house the most-violent criminals without possibility of parole, based on a single vague accusation five years ago which the police officers who heard it didn't find credible, without his having had any opportunity to defend himself from the accusation, is a different thing.
Also: sending him back to El Salvador was a violation of a US court order as the administration has acknowledged ("administrative error" is their spin on it). Declining to now lift a finger to retrieve him or even determine whether he's still alive, is a violation of two subsequent federal court orders (one of those being from the SCOTUS).
In this country of ours you don't decide if someone has committed a crime. A judge does. The judge in this case ruled Garcia can stay in this country legally while due process is being applied.
Your undisputeds and fails-to-see have zero legal meaning.
I think you are philosophically confused. If someone breaks into my house and steals my TV, they are a robber. I don’t have to wait for the trial to conclude and a judge and jury to convict before I go online and complain about all the crime in my neighborhood. I don’t have to feel bad if the guy invading my house falls down the stairs trying to steal my stuff. Crime is a property of the physical actions and mind states of the people who commit the crime, not a property of which particular individuals have been adjudicated by the justice system.
You do, though. Have to wait, that is. That is what "due process" partially is. Waiting for the process to run its due course.
You're philosophically (and civically, though not a word) confused.
Crime is a property of which particular individuals have been adjudicated by the justice system. That is what a justice system is for. The adjudication of crime.
If there has been no adjudication by said same justice system, you cannot know if a crime has, in truth, happened or not happened.
You can assert, allege, infer, imply, insinuate and other such measures, but you cannot know, claim, declare or dictate.
Continuing, you may assert that someone you find in your house touching your TV is a criminal. This assertion is fine to make.
You cannot, until the actual facts of the case are established, know if this is so or not so. Crime, being partly a property of the physical actions and mind states of the people who commit crime, the context in which they reside and the actual specifics of specific cases, does not rely on you making a judgement simply by the immediate intuitive jump you come to by looking at something.
>Crime is a property of which particular individuals have been adjudicated by the justice system. That is what a justice system is for. The adjudication of crime.
No, that's wrong. You may say that the justice system is for controlling _what punishment the government may inflict_ on someone, but the moment e.g. a thief steals someone's wallet, they are a criminal, even if no police report is ever filed, nor arrest, trial, or conviction made. If a hit man kills someone in a forest, where there is no policeman to hear, would you claim there was no murder? There is a corpse.
That's the problem. It isn't about feeling bad. It is about
1. Doing the right thing, ie, obeying the law; and
2. Ensuring that the guard rails which prevent govt encroachment on the rights of everyone stay intact.
>Crime is a property of the physical actions and mind states of the people who commit the crime,
But that is irrelevant. In a just society, people are punished not because they have broken the law, but rather because the govt has proven, in a fair trial, that they have broken the law.
>1. Doing the right thing, ie, obeying the law; and
The left has been undermining the rule of law on immigration since before I first became involved in politics -- sanctuary cities, no person is illegal, all that stuff -- so I hope you'll pardon me if I say this sudden concern for obeying the law comes across as rather insincere.
I think you are legally confused. In this country a court decides who is a criminal and who is not. Not you. Not me. Not Trump. Not a tinpot dictator of a Central American shithole.
"Send him back to El Salvador to live his life as a citizen thereof" is very different from "Send him to El Salvador and pay the government to imprison him."
(Also, as Paul notes, he fled the country to avoid being killed by the gang he testified against. While it might not violate any laws, "Send him back to El Salvador for a gangland execution" would still be a morally bad outcome.)
yep, this is so frustrating. "But he is a criminal actually" says the rando who clearly never practiced law and thinks he decides who is and isn't a criminal.
A rational society which is opposed to violent gangs from a foreign nation entering its border to do crimes, might perhaps place some _value_ on a person from that nation who was willing to testify in open court against such a gang. Might perhaps _not_ want to discourage others from doing similar things.
On the Edgelords post someone made an off-topic comment complaining about the name X and how much they hated it. I and a few others replied, there was a back-and-forth, and then suddenly the entire comment thread was gone. The thread itself was of laughably trivial importance, but this is really disturbing me because in the past if someone deletes their comment it does NOT remove the comments replying to it. If something on Substack has changed such that this is no longer the case (and you can potentially write a long well-reasoned refutation of someone and if they don't like it they can delete your comment as well as theirs) this is so terrible that I may well quit using Substack as a result.
If Scott is reading this, can he please clarify whether he deleted that thread (it was stupid and off-topic after all) so I can rest assured that only the blog owner, and not whoever happened to make the top level comment, can erase an entire thread?
EDIT: Thanks to Vincent Mango for letting me test this here. I deleted and reposted this comment and I can still see his reply. Can everyone else?
Someone may have blocked you. When that happens, Substack hides all threads that the person who blocked you appears in. It's a really bad way of implementing that feature.
Log out (or use incognito mode) and see if you can see the thread.
Wait, I can block anyone I want and then prevent them from reading any comments on any article?
Eremolalos claimed to have blocked me, and there was supportive evidence in that her responses to me didn't show up in my substack notifications. I could still see them in the comment threads, though.
I think so, I'm not totally sure. Maybe it's only threads the blocker creates that get hidden. Probably it hides their comments and any comments which descend from them. But I did still get notifications when other people replied to my comments in the blocked thread, which is kind of maddening.
The whole blocking feature is (was?) a huge mess anyway.
There's one commenter on here I've blocked for writing exclusively inane and irrelevant comments; I've still seen their posts and threads and everything months later.
Lately I haven't seen any of their comments so perhaps they've fixed that issue but my money is on "it's as broken as the rest of substack's comment section"
Is there a set of genes that can reliably encode for an intelligent species that actually uses its intelligence primarily for gene propagation? I think the answer is no, specifically through the process of natural evolution because the incentives required to keep the species alive initially end up subverting the incentives that encourage gene propagation through intelligent workarounds.
If that's true then the intelligence genes would have disappeared. The fact that the most populous mammal species is also the most intelligent seems to me to be prima facie evidence that intelligence aids gene propagation.
It does but only to a certain extent at which there is a peak then a decline like most of the world is experiencing right now. The idea is that genes cannot utilize the full capabilities of intelligent beings for gene propagation no matter what incentives they encode, at some point a wall is hit.
By biomass, plants overwhelm animals, and earthworms overwhelm vertebrates. There isn't an objective metric evolution is optimizing against; what survives, survives.
They beat *Homo sapiens* by population (1e28 vs. 1e10 individuals), biomass (1e14 vs. 1e12 kg), total number of genomes (1e28 vs. 1e23 cells), and total amount of DNA (1e34 vs. 1e32 base pairs).
I think all the genes which are universal in humans which separate us from our most recent common ancestor with other hominids were increasing the inclusive fitness of our ancestors (because otherwise, they do not become universal).
Furthermore, some of these genes likely increased our intelligence, because we are smarter than the MRCA.
The trouble with humans, from evolution's perspective, is that we recently broke out of the ancestral environment when we invented agriculture, and are way out of equilibrium, with many of our adaptions being actively harmful to our inclusive genetic fitness.
If you give us another million years or ten without changing the environment further (or us messing with out genes directly), then we will likely display disgust to sugar and become uninterested in non-reproductive sex. But for almost all of our evolutionary history, sugar was actively helpful and having a sex drive reliably lead to reproduction, so there was no need to add machinery to limit the sugar intake or add a specific preference for reproductive sex, so evolution did not bother.
Relevant reading: Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers
"If you give us another million years or ten without changing the environment further (or us messing with out genes directly), then we will likely display disgust to sugar and become uninterested in non-reproductive sex"
That's where the problem lies, theoretically natural evolution would adapt to these problems but you can't really freeze humanity for a million years without direct intervention. By the time reliable birth control and mass entertainment come about, you're on a steep technological incline that leads to subverting the process of natural evolution within a few generations. Any adaptations for dealing with these issues would need to already exist beforehand, which is very unlikely to be possible since they would contradict what's necessary to survive in nature.
Thanks for the Less Wrong article, i hadn't been able to find relevant discussion around this idea.
There's this idea that evolution is only about gene propagation and nothing else, but that's just not true. Natural selection also selects towards "evolvability" and "niche fulfilment", both of which are related to intelligence.
"A" is not losing here by propagating less, "B" is becoming more evolvable and fulfilling more niches due to its improving intelligence, which allows A to survive longer. Now, that doesn't necessarily refute your point about the fermi paradox, only that it's not necessarily a form of misalignment.
True, B becomes very resilient and capable through technological progress borne out of intelligence, but A has a very hard time ;using this resilience and capability for further gene propagation past a certain extent. I suppose you could say that it's a worthy tradeoff but that does refute the idea that A would like to but can't come up with a B that pursues both.
It seems like it goes fine until the creation becomes smarter than the creator, at which point the creator is no longer able to predict how incentives will be fulfilled. The linked article uses humans as a case study, but I would say the 'problem' with humans is not that the incentives must always be wrong but that evolution wasn't smart enough to make them right. There's plenty of examples in the natural world where animals will spread their genes even if it means death, for instance Pacific giant octopus mothers who will starve themselves to care for their eggs. Or even just humans 400 years ago were a lot more aligned with evolution's goals. (Aristocrats had lots of kids.) Maybe in another few hundred years we'll see lots of people around that just have an innate desire to have lots of biological kids.
As much as I hope we do eventually become unaligned from evolution, it's too early to declare that as having already happened.
I was pretty upset by the description of EA in this article (under "Accelerationist"), but the author is very well connected in DC power circles and I trust that she is describing what she's seeing there. Are there any lefty EAs left on the east coast or after SBF did they all either leave EA or go hard right?
She describes both a before and after. The 'before' (that is, the EA we all know and love that says you should donate towards malaria nets in Africa and suchlike) goes:
"Initially, EAs believed that the smartest people in the room (yes, that's a eugenics notion) should use their smarts to maximize capitalist returns (yes, that's a part of accelerationism) to have significant capital to "give back" to society. For the most part, they were in the Carnegie school, meaning that they thought that the public was too dumb to govern its own money and that the smart people should allocate wealth strategically for the good of all (yes, that psychotic)."
I don't know how she managed to come up with such a bad take, and I see no reason to believe her thoughts on 'after' are any better. She seems to be just generally hostile to the entire philosophy.
On to looking at the 'after' section... I was going to list specific errors I could find, but looking more closely the whole thing appears to be one large error. Now, I do not have the connections to DC to know what is going on there, but I suspect the answer is revealed at the very end. She describes Elon Musk as espousing this view. But it would make much more sense if that is actually backwards, and she got to that view by simply putting together a slightly warped view of Musk's (Edit: replace {and only Musk's} with {and also some of his friends' I guess}) philosophy.
> There were intense debates among people who thought that the next phase would be communism (in the Marx sense) while others firmly believed that a post-capitalist world would be fascism. They intensely disagreed over which was better. But there was a segment that believed that the key to getting to that post-capitalist state was to accelerate capitalism. This could be done through financialization, by pushing capital to the brink. Over the last 20 years, discussions of accelerationism have re-ignited, not simply to achieve the communist/fascist outcome, but by power players who wanted to ensure a seat to the table.
So she is throwing the e/acc's in the same pot as the fascists and commies who saw capitalism as a state to be overcome (and were wrong about it -- 100 years later liberal capitalism is still extremely successful).
While I love to bash e/acc's as much as the next guy, I would rather bash them for what they believe than this obvious straw man. Commies and fascists wanted to speed up capitalism to bring about its "inevitable" collapse, e/acc's want to speed up technological development (in particular AI) to bring about an utopia, which is thought to benefit all humans. If we are playing fast and loose with the facts, why not throw in the evangelicals in the same pot as well? They also want to speed something up (the 2nd coming of Christ) to achieve some utopian outcome.
Then there is that label of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL which is not a self-description but a hostile ascription, much like "woke snowflake", "entartete Kunst" or "deplorables". The definitional article she links is trying to pack rationality, EA, AI doomers and so on into one package, then points out that the key members of these movements have voiced heretical thoughts about the heritability of intelligence and are therefore all evil eugenics. (Still, that article shows at least some willingness to engage with the beliefs of its subjects, even if it is painting EA as mostly longtermist. The same can not be said of that climate change attitude article.)
In conclusion, I think that Danah Boyd should apply for an opinion column in the Guardian. She matches their style of ill-informed hit pieces. I mean, just read her article:
> The new EA-accelerationist combo platter is extra special. To protect the species, we should speed up capitalism to extract and hoard as much wealth as possible. That money grab will cause significant financial harm to individual people, but the "smart" ones will cope. The next move is to invest that capital into advanced technology. This can't play out in a slow way - this must be a massive economic push, akin to the buildup of going to war. (Or, maybe, just maybe, going to war will help this along.) Along the way, we need to find the smartest and most fertile people. (This is where the natalist eugenics comes in. And one branch of anti-trans procreation panicking. And the weird natalist but anti-IVF crowds.). Cuz soon, we are going to need to send people to Mars.
Few share Musk's Mars obsession. Anyone in EA with two brain cells to rub together (which includes just about all of them) can see that for the forseeable future, the most viable biosphere for humanity will be Earth. Going to Mars to escape climate change is like jumping from the frying pan into the acetylene-oxygen fire. (There are reasons to expand to Mars, but they are orthogonal to climate change, e.g. x-risk from asteroids.) Also, I highly doubt that the people working for the Against Malaria Foundation are just like "I guess climate change will kill most of the people, but as long as we can make the Herrenrasse escape to Mars, everything is fine. Pass me another bed net, will you?"
And in her last parenthesis, she goes fully in hallucination mode. The ratsphere has been quite trans-inclusive afaik, with Scott's article on the Categories and all that. And what rat-adjacent "crowds" are supposed to be "anti-IVF", pray tell? I remember the superbabies article on lesswrong, and if anything it was enthusiastic about the possibilities of embryo selection in IVF.
How in the world is "the smartest people in the room," a eugenics notion? Is, "the tallest person should change that lightbulb" also eugenics??? One could say that the "smartest person in the room should invent the next great thing." Of course, that will happen whether or not you actually say it.
I agree that even the before description does not align with what I see as "main stream" EA, but I chatted with her about it she's not building the impression just off Musk, but from the crypto-MAGA crowd and others in DC that at least claim to be former EAs.
I am in the midwest and not in physical proximity to any EA or accelerationist groups. My familiarity with EA comes from reading Peter Singer's book that started the movement, from participating in it myself, and from following rationalist, EA-adjacent blogs (first Yudkowsky's and now Scott's, with sprinklings of others) since 2013.
After rereading this and looking at a few of her other pieces, I'm sensing that her goal in writing is narrative-building (like in the humanities) rather than truth-seeking (like a nerd). The goal of the article is to make the globalist view of global warming look good and its opponents look bad. The former is done by gathering all sensible ways to oppose global warming and putting them under the label "global worldview". This is done reasonably well and she has enough familiarity with the matter to avoid obvious factual errors. The latter is done by sorting the people who oppose global warming into groups and then describing them in a way that comes naturally to humans talking about their outgroups - that is, it comes across as very hostile despite probably being intended to be only a little bit hostile. The second section, "The Hedonist Worldview" appear to be her long-time opponents whom she understands well enough to portray with factual accuracy. The other three sections are in her own words what she's trying to make sense of, and describe groups that she is not very familiar with.
The section on "The Evangelical Worldview" appears to describe at least one actually existing Christian whom she has talked with for long enough to get an understanding of, however she either is unaware or is downplaying that the view is generally considered fringe among the larger body of Christians. The more common view is that God will take care of the Second Coming on His own terms, and that Christians ought to be doing good works all the time so that when Jesus returns he will find them busy doing good works. As for global warming there is a split between those who believe that humans are too small to make significant changes to the entire climate (this was my pastor's view back when I was a Christian) and those who believe that God has tasked man with stewardship over the Earth, which includes preventing global warming.
I have less to say on "The Xenophobic Worldview" because I do not know much about it. It reads to me like trying to take Trumpism and shoehorn it into a global warming narrative. In theory the environmental concerns about population could logically lead to an anti-immigration policy, but I haven't personally seen the same person advocate both ideas. These appear to be separate and unrelated groups, with perhaps a few individuals of overlapping membership.
Then all that's left is "The Accelerationist Worldview." Probably people here are already aware of the many ways the Effective Altruism description is inaccurate, but just in case, the philosophy Peter Singer pushed was that you would ruin a suit to save a child you see drowning in a pond as you walk by, so you should also be willing to donate the money and forgo buying the suit if it can save the life of a child in a third-world country. Central tenets of EA philosophy are that some charitable donations do much more good than others given the same amount of money (e.g. combating tropical diseases vs funding a school field trip vs your tax dollars sending troops to Iran, yes, if she thinks the public governs its own money well then she must think that was a good choice), and that to find out which is best you can use numbers including on things that we traditionally taboo putting numbers on (a life saved, a pretty sunset). These ideas have now spread far enough that they are no longer associated with EA but are seen as just common sense. Some major groups include Giving What We Can, a pledge to donate 10% of your earnings to helping others, GiveWell and CharityNavigator, which try to sort out the legit charities from fraudulent or corrupt ones and figure out their real-world impact, and 80,000 hours, which encourages people to either work a job that helps people directly, or a job that pays well so you can donate more to helping people. That last one has been a bit controversial because some people (such as me) worried that trying too hard to maximize your earnings may change you so that once you have them you no longer want to use them to help others, however EA did tend to lean pretty far on the side of supporting it. But then SBF happened and now it's become the face of the movement as seen by the world at large, whoops. We should revert to putting more emphasis on jobs that are helpful directly, but it may be too late.
Ok, but that was all about the Effective Altruists without covering the Accelerationists at all. Accelerationists (sometimes Effective Accelerationists, but abbreviated as e/acc and never as EA) are generally former Effective Altruists, who believe that we can and will develop a super smart AI that will quickly find a way to bring everybody up to a first-world standard of living and then some, likely going on to cure death and disease and set up a post-scarcity utopia. Logically following from that belief, they want to create that AI sooner rather than later so that it can help the people who need it right now. These are again usually former EAs, and current EAs tend to oppose them due to the concern that a super-smart AI may wipe out humanity rather than usher in a utopia. One thing that sure isn't the case is that these people think most people will die of climate change. Rather they think that it will be extremely trivial for a super-smart AI to solve climate change by just adding in solar panels and carbon capture to the utopia it'll build. To be clear, I am very much not part of this group and consider the plan batshit insane, but at least I am passingly familiar with the reasoning.
Oh, I am sure that there are more people than just Musk. Crypto-MAGA people do not sound maximally EA adjacent, but I guess some people who will do one thing which is considered weird will also do another.
And given that rationality even had a (trans) fringe group which turned into a murder cult [1], it would be strange not to have some people who went from EA to crypto-bro.
The problem with the article is that she is maliciously painting all of EA with the Musk brush. The message is very clear: you are weird, you smell of heresy, we don't want you and we will burn the epistemic commons to harm you.
If I wrote an article on the character of the Italians, and my main source were the biographies of the Mussolini government, or if I wrote an article arguing that female writers spread their vile slander by distorting the truth beyond all recognition, and based that only on the person of Mrs. Boyd and a few Guardian commentators, I would commit that very same sin.
I am a lefty former EA, and I took my money and got out when when SBF was getting his laurels from the community.
I think EA is still a good organization at the moment, but thinking like a long termist myself, the trend line is going in a bad direction such taking away my name and check book made sense as a vote, given that the politics of the people who decided the politics of the organization are so sub Rosa subsumed that they are impossible to discuss, as they are convinced they have no politics somehow.
DISCLAIMER: SAMPLE SIZE OF ONLY THE PEOPLE I COULD TALK TO
I'm old enough to tell when a social organization gets past the capture tipping point; unless organized EA does some authoritarian values based purges, its going to be dead or an esoteric conservative club in a couple years.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Do you still donate money inline with (original) EA principles? I give money to GiveWell... it doesn't seem have those political problems?
I guess I don't think of EA as "an organization" so much as a bunch of different organizations and an overarching philosophy....
No. I no longer trust the research any EA umbrella organization does to prove effectiveness, and I don't trust them to judge a specific cause as altruistic or not.
that's not to say that their research is bad and their altruism isn't, but the threshold for trust on this type of thing is high on my end.
I donate less often now, but I donate about the same amount. Im from Central america, and there are plenty of causes there that might be a bit less efficient by the dollar then some EA charities, but I can call my buddies to go there and physically verify that eg. stagnant pools have outlets dug in them.
I really enjoy the card/strategy game Splendor, and have played a ton both online and in-person. I've been thinking about some house rules to spice it up, and possibly make it more strategic. I've been brainstorming with ChatGPT some, would love to brainstorm with any fellow strategy game nerds here too. I think what would make the most intuitive sense is keeping with the card game motif- stealing ideas from existing card games. Basic idea:
Players are dealt or can choose a hand of private cards at the beginning of the game. (Maybe even a private noble?) They can purchase these normally, same as cards on the table
Elaborations:
Instead of dealing these private cards, players pass around the Tier 3 card deck at the beginning of the game, look at 3 cards, keep 1 of them in their hand, and shuffle the other 2 into the deck. Then, pass around the Tier 2 card deck, players look at 5 cards, keep 2 of them, etc.
Or
Stealing an idea from poker, the game has a 'river', with some of the cards on the table hidden and then flipped over 1 at a time
Any other good ideas? Anything else we can steal from existing card games? I would prefer to make the game more strategic and less reliant on luck/winning by just getting lucky cards
As Splendor is a card game, there is only so much you can do to reduce luck's role in the game. How you reveal cards to the players is important in changing the luck factor.
One thing you can do to reduce luck's impact is how you refill the market of cards. This idea is inspired by the game Powergrid. Instead of flipping over a new card that was previously unseen, you can have one or two face up cards that are not yet available for purchase (either face up on top of the deck, or set next to the deck) that will be the future cards added to the market. That way all players know the upcoming cards to be added when cards are removed. This does mess with the games mechanic that allows you to reserve the top card of a deck, but you can decide how you want to handle reserving cards that are not yet available in the market.
I don't think Splendor is overly reliant on luck. The aleatory element is just that the cards available on your turn can depend on what was just drawn from one of the three decks. The game has a mechanic for combatting the swinginess already, in that you can reserve any card on the deck for later. I think players having a hand of hidden cards, even if they were drafted, would feel more random as the game would no longer be wholly open info. Players would be blindsided by someone appearing in the endgame with the perfect card in their hand.
The last time I played, I had the biggest gem engine, I was raking in a free card every turn by the late game, but I still lost to the player with the smallest gem engine who had been more strategic in saving up for a few high value point cards. Her win felt earned.
> but I still lost to the player with the smallest gem engine who had been more strategic in saving up for a few high value point cards. Her win felt earned.
Those cards are generally pretty easy to identify (there are few high-value cards that are valuable to, and plausibly purchasable by, a given player), and you can block the win by taking them. Theoretically, this is correct play.
From a systems perspective it's a disaster; you're playing worse in order to make someone else do worse by a greater margin. I don't like mechanics like this. It's at its most blatant in Settlers of Catan, where if you're winning the right move for other people is to refuse to trade commodities with you because you're winning.
This is the kind of thing that might lead people to believe you can win a trade war with tariffs.
I agree that that's not that fun game design. But I think in Splendor, as you're typically playing with 3+, it's usually not in any one person's interests to waste a move soley to block a player if in doing so the other players get more momentum. As there are almost always multiple high point cards to go for, it's usually better racing to get one you want, and reserving it if you think someone will snipe you.
> But I think in Splendor, as you're typically playing with 3+, it's usually not in any one person's interests to waste a move soley to block a player if in doing so the other players get more momentum.
This analysis is incomplete. There may be 3 players, but if you're handily beating one of them and close to the other one, you should be playing to hurt your rival regardless of the gain to the hopeless one.
I once dated a girl whose father is a radiologist at the most prestigious hospital in my state (part of a T20 medical school).
I was surprised to learn he had a living will that specified that if he was incapacitated and on life support, he should be transferred to the (less prestigious) Catholic hospital across town.
Apparently he thinks his prestigious hospital is too quick to pull the plug on patients.
Is this common practice among medical professionals at public hospitals? Or is he just an odd duck?
The choice of a Catholic hospital suggests that the worry is more likely to be "top quick" than "not quickly enough". The impression I have is that Catholic doctrine allows withdrawing life support under some circumstances, but advises more reluctance to do so than is the norm in secular hospitals.
I heard secondhand through his daughter that his reasoning was based on not wanting the plug pulled prematurely. I should've pulled that thread more, but we're not in contact anymore.
One would expect that some hospitals on average pull the plug too early, and others too late, and that sane individuals disagree which hospitals fall in which category.
I agree with Erica Rall that a Catholic hospital seems unlikely to fall into the "too early" category. There can be disagreement over some hospitals without there being disagreement over every hospital.
Can cats develop bipolar disorder? Some of you may remember my cat, the Warrior Princess. A couple of years ago, she became increasingly reluctant to come inside for dinner and stay inside for the night without yowling and complaining. She went AWOL for a couple of weeks before I found her injured, hiding under a neighbor's car. The vet gave me a drug to "calm her down" while her wound healed. I forget what it was, but half the recommended dose knocked her out. After she recovered from her wounds and I discontinued the kitty downers, she became a house cat who showed no interest in going outside for a few months. But then she started cycling back and forth between a manic up phase, where she was reluctant to come inside at night, and a depressive down phase, where she didn't want to go outside at all.
She came out of her depressive phase a couple of weeks ago, and right now she's at the peak of her manic phase. She allows me to collect her and bring her inside for dinner, but when I bring her in for the night, she gets restless and yowls at the door until I shut myself in my bedroom. and she gives up. And she'll skip any breakfast to go outside.
And I'm wondering if something like small doses of lithium salts might help her. Are there any animal behavioral psychologists in the SF Bay Area who might have a VMD that could prescribe something to level her off? My old vet has retired, and the current crop of vets who took over the business seem to be greedy bastards who are more intent on maximizing their income rather than helping animals (the first thing they ask is: how are you going to pay for this? — not what seems to be the problem with your pet?).
Considering how lithium salts are notorious for kidney/liver problems in human patients, and how cats are very fragile toxicology-wise, lithium dosing would be risky. You would probably want to look at anything else which might help first.
My personal experience somewhat tracks the gist of the article (to the extent the article has a gist). I was diagnosed in early 2023 at 40 years old. I tried coaching, etc., with mixed results. I went on methylphenidate (20 mg) in February 2024. The first dose felt like a miracle. I was suddenly just keeping things organized and doing my job. No hacks, no special effort. Over the next few months, the effectiveness of the medication waned, and last September I was bumped up to 40 mg of methylphenidate. I still subjectively feel more productive medicated than unmedicated, but I sometimes wonder if it's more feeling than fact. I'm definitely not as laser-focused as I was that first week or two that I started the medication. I wouldn't say my personality has become flatter, but I do enjoy the feeling on days I don't take the medication. The r/ADHD subreddit seems mostly against the article, arguing either that it's anti-medication or that it dismisses the experiences of those on ADHD. I'm not thinking about stopping my medication any time soon, but I think the article is a useful contrast to the "medication is always the answer" position that I see from most of the ADHD community (that I trust).
- ADHD is on a continuum, and this is really hyped up, as though it suggests something profound. But so are lots of disorders. Depression. Anxiety. Intelligence is a continuum - that doesn't mean low mental ability isn't real.
- Similarly, we haven't found one ADHD gene, just some stuff that contributes. Again, so what? That's true for a lot of things. The brain is really complicated. There's no one intelligence gene or depression gene.
- The thing about students not learning more is kind of funny. They take stimulants and do more homework and yet they haven't learned more! As though this is a scathing critique of stimulants. Maybe it's not a selling point for them, but maybe this just shows that homework is useless bullshit?
I will say I think the article hits the nail on the head in one way: as a person with ADHD who takes Adderall, I occasionally find to my surprise that I still *can* do hard stuff without it, when I really have to. But it sucks so much. I feel incredibly bored the whole time. Meds take that away. That is a huge win for me.
They have some quotes from kids who took meds and got some benefits but didn't like how they felt. I'm sure that's a real thing, but they obviously didn't try to include any people who had a positive take. A huge chunk of my social circle and my immediate family all have ADHD and, to a person, they will tell you that stimulants fucking rule. They make the fog lift, they make the squirrels in your brain go away, they make it possible - not guaranteed, but possible - for life to not be such a horribly boring slog all of the time.
And yes, you should not just throw Ritalin at every kid who fidgets, sure. If somebody actually has serious issues, you take them to a professional and get them tested properly and see if there are other causes. But a lot of this article is just cherry-picking and reasoning fallacies in service of an old cliché about a common form of mental illness.
"I will say I think the article hits the nail on the head in one way: as a person with ADHD who takes Adderall, I occasionally find to my surprise that I still *can* do hard stuff without it, when I really have to."
For me its about timing, quality and consistency. I wasn't diagnosed until I was in my late 20s, and didn't get (effective) medication until my mid 30s, and of course I still did plenty of hard stuff between the ages of 15 and 35. But I had a lot less choice about when and how to do it. My default mode for doing anything that I didn't want to do was "do it in a huge rush once the deadline is close enough that the urgency overcomes the inertia." That was how I did homework. That was how I hunted for jobs. That was how I did the subset of job-related tasks that difficult to engage with otherwise (things like writing reports). I was lucky to be smart enough that even with this pattern, I could still do a lot of things quite well by most objective standards. But the overall result was me spinning a fairly impressive suite of knowledge and cognitive talents into a painful mediocre and banal set of life outcomes.
Of course I was somewhat aware of the pattern and its negative impacts even before suspecting I had ADHD and getting a diagnosis. Maybe one day in fifty I would have the mental clarity and motivation to try to do something about it, but every such attempt was of the "well, this might work well for a non-ADHD person (who didn't really need it)" variety.
I've only been on a useful dose of methyphenidate for a few years, but in those years I've actually started to get substantially close to the sort of life outcomes I want. Which, to be fair, is also partly lucky timing: starting the same medication a few years earlier might have simply meant waiting a couple years for the right opportunities. But I've definitely seen a real shift in how I'm able to interact with unpleasant-but-useful tasks. I still don't feel like I'm doing great at planning and scheduling and starting things early, but even doing somewhat better makes a pretty big difference.
I've been using modafinil for my ADHD for the past several years, and I am very happy with it. It works differently than classic stimulants: it's a bit more subtle, and it's more helpful for sustaining focus than initiating a task relative to Ritalin or Adderall.
It also has the big advantage of being less controlled than classic stimulants. Amphetamine-class meds are Schedule II in the US, while modafinil is Schedule IV. Practically, this means I can get a prescription for 90 days at a time rather than 30 and my medication management appointments can be telehealth instead of in person.
Chronically elevated dopamine upregulates the kappa opioid system, which in turn suppresses the release of dopamine and NE in the PFC. There are ways to address this, but unfortunately this seems to be a blind spot in standard psychiatric practice. Good luck.
In every other context, people recognised that if you take a stimulant every day then its effects are going to taper off, you're going to build tolerance for it. A lot of ADHD people (especially in online communities like Reddit) think that stimulants have some special curative function for ADHD, rather than doing the same thing they do for everyone. There's a narrative that they don't work on non-ADHD people, but that's not actually true (see for instance, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395918301567).
I'm not a doctor, but the classic advice for you here would be to take a break and start up again once your tolerance is lower, or just use them on days when you have work to do. Same advice I'd give to someone with a ten-cups-a-day coffee habit.
When I was on Ritalin as a kid, my doctor recommended skipping or taking half doses on weekends or holidays for tolerance reasons and also to mitigate potential side effects.
This advice is more applicable to children than to adults, as adults are more apt to have tasks that need completing on weekends. It's also probably specific to inattentive-type ADHD, as hyperactive-type often causes difficulties even when you don't have any work to do.
One of the real irritations I've had with depending on a controlled substance (methylphenidate) is that getting a prescription for some lower-dose pills and some higher-dose pills at the same time just doesn't seem to be possible. I've sort of managed to muddle through just by shifting the dose up and down a few times while still having pills left over from the previous dose, but it's irksome that I can't just get the prescription written for the pattern I actually use.
For me it's less about weekday vs weekend as just how I feel from one day to the next. I seem to have (somewhat infrequent) higher energy periods where taking the larger dose is actively unhelpful, but the rest of the time I'm better off with it.
That's weird. My prescriber has me on 40 mg of methylphenidate per day, but she also gave me a prescription for 10 mg when either I need to do something at the end of the day and my dose has worn off, or for when I don't want to take a full dose on weekends but I need to do something in the afternoons.
If they're instant-release tablets, you can break them in half. There's often a score line on the pill to facilitate this. You can often do this with your fingers (my technique is to start by pinching the pill between thumb and forefinger on either side with my thumbnails pressed together against the score line), with a sharp kitchen knife, or with a pill cutter.
If they're instant-release capsules, you can theoretically divide these by pulling apart the casing and dividing the powder or beads inside of it, but this a messier process that is trickier to get approximately correct.
If they're extended release pills, then sadly you're probably out of luck. ER tablets usually rely on the layers of the pill dissolving at a certain rate or not dissolving until a certain point in the digestive tract, so breaking the pill in half with mess that up. I'm not 100% sure on the details ER capsules, but I've heard dividing these is also recommended against.
Yeah, they're ER capsules and can't be subdivided. Also I'm not generally going for quite that large of a decrease anyway: I'll go from 60 mg to 50 or 40. I think I'd likely feel quite tired if I were to go as low as 30 most days.
Mind taking a moment to educate me on what difficulties hyperactivity can cause when not trying to get stuff done? I'd naively expect it to be helpful since so many modern humans need more exercise.
Thanks. I think I've read most of what Scott's written on ADHD, but I wasn't sure if any of the more recent studies (to the extent they're even accurately reflected in the NYT article) have caused him to change any of his opinions.
Does anyone have more information about OpenAI's providing an option to use the whole of one's past conversations? There was an article in the Vergehttps://www.theverge.com/news/646968/openai-chatgpt-long-term-memory-upgrade which says that it exists, but not anything about how it works.
I've unsuccessfully searched for e.g. a technical paper from OpenAI about it.
Does anyone know whether this is a substantial step towards online learning???
Presumably the sum total of one's conversations don't fit in the context window, so being able to exploit them without having to rerun pre-training (which I presume isn't being done, since it would have unacceptable costs) is a _big deal_ .
a) Anyone have any idea what they are doing, how it scales, and what the limitations are? Journalling plus a summary step? Journalling plus retrieval-augmented-generation? Journalling plus fine tuning?
b) One of the advantages of AIs over humans is being able to "clone" an AI and populate an organization with copies - and therefore much simpler and more reliable communications than humans have. One concern about online learning is that it would partially negate this, with AIs which have played different roles in an organization having been updated differently. In this new development, is there any indication how easy or hard it would be to _merge_ the results of online learning in AIs which have played different roles, and learned different "lessons"?
OA has, as usual, explained little about how it works. So far the anecdotal reports indicate that it is *not* doing any kind of lightweight finetuning / dynamic evaluation / online learning, because fresh sessions don't seem to know anything about a lot of your sessions. The prompt hacking suggests that what they've done is combined a fairly standard RAG with a slightly novel summarization approach; one person tells me that you can extract ~5 'reports' about yourself summarizing different things, which presumably get injected along with RAG extracts. This is genius because people are highly narcissistic and love hearing about themselves and you get the Forer effect and more of a chatbot buddy, even though you aren't getting the real benefits of online learning from this. Presumably they hope to keep going and at some point get some real online learning.
>The prompt hacking suggests that what they've done is combined a fairly standard RAG with a slightly novel summarization approach; one person tells me that you can extract ~5 'reports' about yourself summarizing different things, which presumably get injected along with RAG extracts.
Ouch! And I was hoping for something that would allow incremental "on-the-job" learning...
>This is genius because people are highly narcissistic and love hearing about themselves and you get the Forer effect and more of a chatbot buddy, even though you aren't getting the real benefits of online learning from this.
Ouch, OUCH, _OUCH_ . Does this count as "dark arts"? I wonder if this update includes fine tuning to a fortune teller spiel...
Damn, the gravity of AI 2027 finally sank in, some days later. I trust Scott, and I've never seen him go out on such a big limb as that (maybe the kidney stuff is similar). He even gave an interview!
While Scott may not have managed to convince me to give my kidney away, he has convinced me to invest heavily into AI. After all, while there is some probability of the Singularity / end of the world, there is also probability for other outcomes in which we live and money is still meaningful. In particular, I personally consider it likelier that some portion of the economy gets automated, but not all of it, and the Singularity fails to materialize, and if so, you can make a serious killing by investing into AI now. I think the least likely outcome is that AI fizzles out (I give it probably 5% that happens).
Can't decide whether to dump 50% or 25% of my cash into it (I have enough I can do that without noticing it), and need to figure out if the choice of AI index fund is important. Main reason I might dump 25% instead of 50% of my liquidity into it is Trump: bastard is such a wildcard, he could totally decide to nationalize AI one day, for example.
Anyone else making big investments into AI and have tips to offer? Anyone think this is a bad idea? No idea how a potential revolution or dictatorship factors into all this: another way Trump could shake things up is by installing himself as dictator, or generating such a backlash that a revolution or civil war happens.
I doubt this is what you are interested in and I am rather embarrassed for asking, but if you are looking to invest in AI, you could invest in me. I am a professional engineer, and amateur AI researcher, that is currently pretty severely down on his luck. I've had some ideas for things I have wanted to try with ML models - specifically applying certain transformations to the underlying math that will not change the result of the model but which could expose symmetries or structures in the underlying math. I can't say for sure what implications these symmetries could have for ML, though I strongly suspect they could point to ways that could cause minor (or who knows, possibly major) savings in compute required to run them, by highlighting regions of the matrix multiplication that could be skipped. But I can tell you that, in general, symmetries are important. My background is in physics, and in physics symmetries can often be exploited to make problems vastly easier to solve. In fact, certain parts of physics can pretty much be formulated purely on the basis of symmetries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem).
I had been hoping to take advantage of my current unemployment by finally doing this work, which I have been contemplating for years but too busy to pursue. But alas, I've discovered that my computer isn't sufficient to run even the smallest language model.
I won't try to insult your intelligence by trying to convince you that this is a particularly good investment from a traditional perspective. But it would be an opportunity to invest in AI while also investing in the ACX community, and making a substantial difference in my life for only a few thousand dollars. You wouldn't have to send money - just buy me a high-memory GPU.
And for anybody wondering how any sane amateur could possibly think they could contribute to an industry with billions of dollars of R&D funding from the largest companies on earth, well, sometimes an outsider with a totally foreign perspective can come up with ideas that the insiders are simply missing.
I might be interested in this if you pivot to mechanistic interpretability after doing this research. Email me at antidyatlov@gmail.com so we can talk more about that and what exactly you need.
I believe the standard way of betting on AI progress is to buy stock in companies that are either making cutting-edge LLM models (Microsoft (owns 49% of OpenAI), Google, Meta, and maybe Amazon) or which makes hardware that anyone making LLMs needs to buy (Nvidia).
If you aren't going all-in on this, and I recommend you don't, then you can still invest significantly in AI by buying index funds. Those five companies make up about 14% of VTI (a total stock market index fund), 20% of VOO (an S&P 500 index fund), or 30% of QQQ (a NASDAQ index fund).
Disclosure: I'm moderately bearish on medium-term AI progress. Most of my assets are in index funds, but I hold a chunk of Microsoft stock left over from when I worked for them, and I don't plan on diversifying out of it in the next few years. One of my reasons for holding it is a hedge in case I'm wrong about AI and Scott is right.
I think you should always have diversified investments and that still applies here:
- If AI does go to the moon and you only make half a killing you'll still be fine
- If AI dramatically accelerated economic growth, your other investments will also pay off
Hyper-focusing your investment portfolio on one thing is risky. As much as people here don't think so, there could still be another AI winter and you could lose big.
Are the US's egg problem entirely down to bird flu? We don't have an egg problem in the UK, and we do have bird flu but as I understand it it's particularly bad in the US. No opportunities for egg arbitrage?
Egg prices are not particularly elevated anymore. It was largely culling flocks in the waning months of the Biden administration that did it. Once the post-cull chicks grew, supply grew and prices eased.
Eggs in Philadelphia recently. Farmers' market-- Amish seller, stable at $7/dozen.
Fancy charcuterie shop, $7/dozen.
Trader Joe's (sort of fancy, sort of bargain) $5/dozen, but limited to one dozen per shopper per day. I don't know how effectively they enforce that, especially for cash sales. Couldn't someone buy several dozen per day by going through the checkout line more than once?
Huh? Do you even buy eggs? Prices have been steadily rising for several years and have just started to fall from peak. My most recent grocery trip they were $5 a dozen, down from a peak of $6. Pre-2022 when prices started going up I thought they were expensive when prices would surge over $1 a dozen. This isn't a transient response to culling in the last few months of 2024...
California has an animal welfare law that affects egg-laying hens, passed as a ballot measure (Prop 12) in 2018. It's illegal to sell eggs in California, regardless of where they're produced, unless the farm they're from complies with the law. It went into effect in 2022. This presumably raises production costs somewhat, and consequently would increase prices. It also limits the ability to ship eggs in from other states if there's a California-specific shortage due to something like the bird flu flock cullings.
It's mostly caused by market manipulation. It takes about 5 months to go from newborn chick to laying hen, but prices aren't going to go down any time soon unless there is government action.
I keep reading news articles about how the UK government keeping seizing and burning American candy because it contains banned ingredients and then literally yesterday I saw a store selling said banned sweets. They're doing a pretty bad job at this apparently. Eggs would be presumably a lot harder to smuggle in though.
Candy is shelf stable, eggs have different contradictory safety mechanisms of one of the major source of food poisening
Trumps trade war, even if undirected at europe; probaly effects this market and its been historically controlled(I want cheap goat cheeses, its not a currentyear policy for europe and america to not share food)
Where are all the great new indie games that have been made possible by AI-assisted coding?
There are many great games that were developed by a single person - RollerCoaster Tycoon, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc.
I imagine that powerful coding tools would allow more people to make these types of games, but I didn't see any widely recognized game declared to be "made with the help of AI". (There are many cool Claude-generated demos on Twitter, but it's always a demo, not an actual finished game.)
Is it because indie game developers dislike AI use and wish to do things by hand?
Or maybe there ARE a lot of new games made with the help of AI and their creators don't talk about it?
There are many great games developed by a single person. But it's a tiny drop in the overall ocean of games. Most great games are not made by a single person. Most games made by a single person are not great.
There are around 40 new games released on steam every day. The number of new indie greats on the level of Stardey Valley or undertale rounds to zero, we don't even get one of those per year.
So the base rates are not looking great (I hope you can forgive me not calculating the actual numbers, in this case it appears unnecessary).
The point I'm trying to make - the probability of a new great is by default is very low. Now, we should expect AI to help accelerate making new games. It's debatable if that's good for quality or not. But let's assume it is.
Even in that case, how big would be the effect?
Most people, even those who want to make games, are not visionaries who are only constrained by resources. Some are, and some of them might use AI for coding, though they would be smart not to admit it openly, giving the vibes.
But coding is merely a part of making a good game. You need to make so much more! You need to create good game systems. For many genres, you also need a story that does not suck (though yeah, in some cases that can be avoided). For many genres, you need good visuals (you'd have to be exceptional among every other dimension to succeed with minecraft level of graphics). You need decent sound, at the very least (but I notice that all games I consider great have way above average soundtrack and sfx). You have to know how to market the end product. And even after all that, there's no guarantee that you will gain traction.
AI coder is not solving any of these problem, and generative AI can only partially help with some of them, with a huge drawback attached - a lot of gamers do NOT like gen ai in their games. So this is not offering much of speed up. And you'd need a lot of speedup to notice anything given the base rates.
AI isn't writing the game I'm making instead of getting a real job.
It's showing me code samples of how to do obscure things (some of which actually work, mostly), it's advising me (half-wrongly) how to configure Godot so I can get this game out there, and I wrote a program in Python (with its help, as I didn't know Python, and it's particularly good at that language) to query ChatGPT for every word in the English language to generate a taunt about the word to display to the user when they guess right/wrong.
I've never made a game before. (Well, before the 1980's). I don't think I could have done this in twice the time it took. But AI isn't in evidence here on the outside--except for the obvious fact no human being could be bothered to generate a taunt for every English word. The fact of the game is the only evidence.
Also the potential for negative blowback -- e.g. maybe Claude helped you write a tool for generating dungeons, and ChatGPT gave you concept art for your sprite design, but if you say "my game was made with AI!" people will think the entire thing is just a one-shot AI slop generation. Using AI is a negative signal in creative communities, I think.
Games are still spectacularly complex endeavors with a big portion of them dedicated to visuals, input, sound and how it all tickles human monkey brains. All bits that the AI has no way of automating for now. It can most likely put together a MUD or a simpler puzzle game, but at least for now the rest is out of reach. In general, programming is only a subset of all of the work that goes into making a videogame. A sizable one, but far from the only. Even if you generate all the visuals and audio, making a cohesive whole is currently pretty rough, but at least on the concept art level things are getting better fast.
Also keep in mind that AI is understandably frowned upon in the games industry, so even if it were being used, people would try to avoid parading that fact due to the backlash.
You probably don't hear about it for the same reason you don't hear about games being made with Emacs or Git. It's a tool, some people use it, some don't, the customer doesn't care either way. I think AI could become very interesting for new types of procedural generation (imagine every shopkeeper, every guard, every random NPC having their own backstory, skills, goals!) but that would either require an LLM that runs locally (which I don't think is up to the task yet), or an always-online system (which is the domain of big studios, not indie devs).
I suspect if you got today's AI to do that, you could come up with a system like Oblivion's AI that was a lot deeper in terms of characterization (plus could be voice acted without having to use actual voice actors), but if you actually decided to pay attention to someone's story, it would turn out to be nonsensical.
Also, one character would turn out to have some combination of traits that read as super-racist, and people would immediately find that person and make YouTube videos about them.
More specifically, most customers don't care, but there's a large minority that do and HATE anything AI related. So if you're using it there's very little upside to saying so but a big downside.
AI has only been really good enough at coding for significant speedups for a year or two. Stardew Valley took 4.5 years for make. I think it's currently in a place to be a small but nice boost to productivity for complicated projects with large codebases. Indie game development is so fraught with pitfalls that a game like that that takes off is still going to be incredibly rare.
> Is it because indie game developers dislike AI use and wish to do things by hand?
You guys realise that A.I. is producing nothing in its own right now. Probably any software that’s been produced in the last year or so has had an A.I. assist though.
I went shopping for jeans this weekend and thought about the timeline of blue jeans, and how they probably aligned with the development of chemical blue dyes.
Is it possible that jeans were originally seems a somewhat tech-forward or futurist, sort of like the first iPhone with its glass & metal look. Sort of a “look what we can do now?” aesthetic?
Traditionally, yes, but synthetic indigo entered commercial mass production in 1897, right around when jeans started being blue. Levi Strauss started selling his jeans in 1873, but for the first couple of decades they were made of brown duck cloth (another form of cotton canvas, this one derived from sailcloth: the name "duck" is a corruption of the Dutch word for sail) rather than indigo denim. Levis started offering the latter as an option in 1890 and phased out the brown duck cloth in 1896, just before synthetic indigo became available.
Interesting, I didn't realize synth indigo was a thing! But jeans actually have existed for centuries, the word "denim" came from "de Nîmes", "from Nimes, France, and it was a common work clothing material as far back as 1600's. This source is fascinating: https://issuu.com/artsolution/docs/cat._maitre_toile_de_jeans_a
True. The defining feature of Levi-style jeans was the use of rivets to reinforce the seams, not the use of blue denim, since as already mentioned they were brown duck cloth originally.
The next question, I suppose, is how widespread the older indigo denim styles were, and consequently, to what extent the early 20th century explosion in popularity of Levi-style jeans was replacing vs augmenting the older styles which they, by that point, resembled.
Does anyone know a way of making perfume smell stronger? The smell of every perfume I've used on myself dissipates in about 10 minutes, I've tried the usual tricks to no avail
Since (I think) most people but perfume on their neck and wrists it really makes sense to have jewelry that contains a slow release reservoir of perfume.
So THAT explains the people I pass in the street who are somehow not retching from the smell of the half-bottle of fragrance they recently poured over their head. I did wonder.
On why you might want to listen to him, he's a biophysicist with a lifelong passion for scent, who literally wrote the book on various perfumes, has consulted for most of the big scent houses, and routinely comes out with gems like this:
Après l’Ondée (Guerlain)
“Divinely named [“After the Rainshower”], a prototype of the cold and melancholy fragrance, this stunning creation is the counterpart—the brighter, fresher younger brother—of the mysterious L’Heure Bleue (Guerlain). Après l’Ondée evolves only slightly with time: its central white note, caressing and slightly venomous, like the odor of a peach stone, imposes itself immediately and retains its mystery forever. Its simplicity, its keen nostalgia, and its unadorned beauty make this an anomaly for Guerlain.”
Python (Trussardi)
“The absurdly named Python is a poverty-stricken sweet-powdery affair, a very distant relative of the wonderful Habanita (Molinard). It belongs in a tree-shaped diffuser dangling from the rearview mirror of a Moscow taxi.”
Rush (Gucci):
“The first sniff gave me a shock of recognition, like a long-forgotten but familiar face, and I spent a few busy minutes dredging my memory for the original impression . . . Dioressence! Not all of it, mind you, just a bit I loved, which in the original happened two or three hours into the story and felt like a warm breath whispering crazy things in my ear. That breath is back, now strong, loud, irresistible, a sultry wind fit to keep everyone stark awake and plotting indiscretions. . . . The charm of this perfume is entirely man-made, no mention of Nature, e.g. flowers, etc. This thing smells like a person. To be exact, thanks to the milky lactone note, it smells like an infant’s breath mixed with his mother’s hair spray. . . . What Rush can do, as all great art does, is create a yearning, then fill it with false memories of an invented past . . .”
My sense of smell sucks. I mostly just try to stay clean, I do like some perfumes on women. My grandmother (RIP) will always smell like channel #5 to me.
Are you sure the perfume is fading and not just your sense of smell? We adjust to smells that are constant, our brains just filter them out. That's why your house smells weird to you when you return from vacation.
There are grades of perfume, and unless you're using the most expensive, which is the strongest, then it will fade. As well, skin chemistry means that for some people (and I'm one of them), scent just does not last.
"Tax Strike Tactics" (https://sniggle.net/TPL/TaxStrikeTactics/) is a free, ad-free, web-based book that uses concrete historical examples to show how tax resistance campaigns succeed by deploying a variety of tactics.
Learn how campaigns support tax strikers, increase the number of resisters, frustrate government countermeasures, expand their arsenal of techniques, master education and public relations, and lay the groundwork for victory.
Another chapter explores how individual tax resisters can also succeed, even in the absence of an organized movement.
Finally, a set of worksheets guide you through the process of improving the effectiveness of your tax strike by adopting new tactics to shore up your weak points.
Earlier this year marked the 1,000th day of the Russia-Ukraine war. By then, Ukraine had spent around $300B ($300M/day), while estimates put Russia’s cost at $1T ($1B/day).
Based on historical records,Is offense generally more expensive than defense—often by a factor like 3x or more?
Keep in mind the Ukrainians have filled their armies with conscription, while the Russians have avoided conscription (after some initially) in favor of paying people ridiculous sums of money to enlist.
That article is specifically comparing the cost of offensive and defensive missiles, but a war is a lot more than missile strikes. Missiles won't take and hold a city, and missile interceptors are not the only way for your troops to survive missile shots.
Even if you restrict the analysis to just weapon systems, I think the most common weapon on both sides is artillery shells and not missiles.
I found this defense publication (https://rb.gy/9p4kck) that confirms 3:1 ratio for conventional wars. page 42 says " For traditional high-intensity battles, we have a pretty good understanding of the physics and physiology of combat. The Army, for example, has planning factors that suggest that a 3-to-1 ratio of attackers to defenders is necessary for an assault to have a reasonable probability of success."
I think Russia-Ukraine war even if you include blended warfare taking place, it is still closer to 'traditional' one.
I wonder why the economics of it flips for pure modern warfare like missiles, drones etc. in favor of the attacker. i.e. the attacker can have much cheaper arsenal but the defender has to spend much more to deter.
It flips for missile warfare because the offensive missile has a big, slow-moving target (a warship or a building), and the defensive missile has a tiny, fast-moving target (an incoming missile). So defensive missiles need much more expensive guidance systems.
(Although an expensive defensive missile is still cheaper than whatever the incoming missile was aimed at, so it's still worth using.)
IIRC the attacker typically needs a 3x advantage in numbers over the defender to win a battle, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also need 3x more materiel and supplies.
Thanks for linking. I'd actually also like to add it depends which "heterodox centrists" you are referring to. If you mean ppl like you -- certainly not. But probably Brett Weinstein would also see himself as a centrist and he's .... smth else altogether. That being said, I still think it's the fault of existing institutions for giving ammunition to ppl like him.
As a complement to all this, I think MattY's latest post is good
If I could add one thought to the conversation -- I kinda think both Scott's take (centrists criticizing elites may have been responsible for the rise in populism) and your take (it was good to criticize elites, the elites did dumb things and are at fault for the rise in populism) misses a more obvious and imo more impactful explanation.
There has been a concerted effort over the last, say, 30 years, to fundamentally decentralize knowledge dissemination, ability to communicate, and ability to get visibility and transparency into previously obscure systems. This massively increases the surface area for potential sources of misinformation, while simultaneously making it harder for the elite class to "fail gracefully".
In that environment, any individual contribution -- from Scott to Hanania to Catturd -- is just part of a larger inevitable macro trend. Like, what, we expect elites to be perfect all the time and to never go viral for saying something stupid? We expect individuals to continue trusting the NYT when "their friend's cousin" swears by raw milk, times a billion? Move fast and break things moved fast and broke things! Our prior way of being, and possibly the way we were built evolutionarily, wasn't equipped to handle this.
So maybe the tech billionaires mattered more than you think, but not in the way that you think.
This is true, but it doesn't explain the incredible persistence many members of the elite & expert class show by repeatedly making the same mistakes. The thirst for humiliating their enemies, the vanity, the reckless indulgence in sentiment: none of those things were mere lapses, they were habits of mind, ways of being.
> I’ve just been astonished over the past few years at the willingness of people who have objectively unpopular views, or who claim to be defending the interests of vulnerable minorities, but who happen to occupy a position of some influence and authority, to engage in what can only be described as rage-baiting the majority of the population. In some cases, their moral sanctimony is so great that they probably fail to perceive it this way. In other cases, it just seems to me a clear failure to think strategically about their policy goals.
Sorry, I still think this is massively increasing the importance of 'elites'. It should be noted that even GOP 'elites' have been basically totally sidelined -- Paul Ryan, Romney, Cheney, those guys dont even have a party anymore. I think Heath is right but also missing the point -- there are always people in the 'elite' class who have held wildly unpopular views, this is not meaningfully different than it was 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago (see, for example, how many elites of the 50s-90s were very pro communism, or those in the 20s and 30s who were surprisingly pro nazi!). The main difference now is the extremists in the elite class are getting massively signal boosted while the more sane elites are not (which is the reverse of how it used to be).
You're missing the point. I already agreed the game has changed, since at least the dawn of Twitter. The elites are responsible for their own behavior in this new information environment, so it doesn't really matter what it was like 20/50/100 years ago. This isn't going away!
No one forced Laura Helmuth (the former editor of Scientific American) to post a profane rant on Twitter about Trump voters, and no one made 1000+ public health professionals write the infamous George Floyd protest letter. (Just to pick two examples - I can find dozens in minutes on Twitter and BlueSky.)
Emotional discipline has always been part of the job if you're an elite, but now that involves a new dimension: you have to resist the urge to raise your profile by posting toxoplasma and gloat over victories.
To answer your other point, I'm not sure exactly how important the 'elites' are here: I think it's likely they are the main reason we got Trump instead of a generic Republican, but not the only reason.
> Emotional discipline has always been part of the job if you're an elite, but now that involves a new dimension: you have to resist the urge to raise your profile by posting toxoplasma and gloat over victories.
makes sense, I agree.
Its unclear that this is actually possible, both in terms of human psychology (there are enough elites that its possible to nutpick pretty easily) and in terms of natural incentives (appealing to political extremes does raise your own star and potentially catapults you into being an elite in the first place, even as it makes you more toxic to 'the other side')
Yeah, that's depressing and likely. There are lots of people that hate the limelight, but as long as there are broad incentives that promote engagement, that's what we'll get.
I haven’t read Scott’s piece because I’m a shameless freeloader, but I read the answer and I think you are articulating an extremely underrated explanation.
I'm not a subscriber here, so couldn't read Scott's original piece, but while I broadly agree that if Scott is your central example of a centrist edgelord, then they're not really the problem, I think there's still a question about the relationship between the good edgelords and the bad.
I'm not sure quite how good the analogy is, but I'm sure there are many law professors who write about critical race theory in a measured way who were... less than thrilled at the way their ideas escaped containment from academic circles and went mainstream via social media.
I think it's roughly true that the modal person who worried about "white privilege" in 2008 was a sociology professor thinking about the racial wealth gap, and in 2020 it was an angry teenager explaining why it's good to burn down police precincts and if you think otherwise you're racist.
Suppose you buy my characterize of the elite version of these ideas as more moderate and nuanced... How much blame do they deserve for the intemperate, crazy version that went viral in the late 2010s?
How much does the exact mechanism of transmission matter, or the role of those moderate professors in spreading their ideas?
What would you wish that the moderate, academically informed woke professor had done to oppose the bad, viral version of their ideas, in order to exculpate them?
Thinking about that feels like a good start to figuring out how we should feel about the moderate, smart centrists being responsible for the stuff the nutcases do.
I'm actually quite confused about what "centrist edgelord" is supposed to mean? Either this is a common term on Reddit or wherever or Scott is using too much sarcasm such that it inteferes with clarity. (It wasn't defined in the post).
But I'm taking it to mean "actual centrist who is accused by extemists of being edgy for daring to not whole-heartedly embrace the trendy extremism" and if that reading is correct...
I see your point, and as someone who's very anti-woke I'm actually quite sympathetic to the woke professor types you mention. Even if they're *not* nuanced and are completely extreme, the fact that they've spent more than five minutes actually *thinking* about their ideas makes them about infinitely more worthy of respect that the average wokeist.
But having said that, I'd still suggest there is a *universe* of difference between "reformers calling for radical social changes need to be very careful they don't empower extremists on their side" and "moderates who criticise said reformers need to be very careful they don't empower the opposite side's extremists". When you set out to change society, you're responsible for the effect of those changes. When you set out to simply *oppose* badly thought out changes to society...you are not in any coherent sense responsible for an opposite set of badly thought out changes in the other direction (that you never endorsed) being implemented. That's just a non-sequiter. The most you coupd possibly be responsible for is the bad effects of stasis and a complete lack of social change.
Which is obviously not what anyone's talking about here.
I mean, Scott is very polite and well-reasoned and all of his critiques of specific policies were valid. However, he embraced in a broad sense the same rhetoric as a lot of people on the alt-right that the #1 problem in our society was wokeness. Not racism, economic inequality, the rising trend of fascist-apologists, or massive misinformation campaigns, wokeness. Specifically, woke capture of the government. And again, when he cites specific examples, they all make sense! But he would cite a specific example, and then end by comparing Wokeness to Christianity (he did this multiple times!) as this all-encompassing, undefeatable dogma that would probably still be victimizing us a thousand years from now. What does that say about his powers of prediction?
I think its dead. There will probably be some successor movement, and people will insist on tarring it with all the same excesses as the one that preceded it whether it manifests them or not, but this particular version, identified by its institutional capture, was already falling apart before the Trump election, and he's successfully destroyed whatever was left, at great cost to the actual functioning of our civic society. I don't think it was worth it, my guess is Scott doesn't either, but it was the trade-off a lot of people wanted.
There's a great deal of woke inertia and woke people in megacorporations, top universities (a lot of which has just rebranded in the wake of the administration rather than seeing any significant change), and the intelligentsia. The federal civil service is taking big hits, but I expect social justice people to attempt a rebound under a different name soon enough.
But having said that, I'd still suggest there is a *universe* of difference between "reformers calling for radical social changes need to be very careful they don't empower extremists on their side" and "moderates who criticise said reformers need to be very careful they don't empower the opposite side's extremists".
This is reasonable, but immediately restricts you to defending only those centrists who literally only confined their criticism of the elite to countering wokeness.
I think this probably already excludes Scott; I believe Scott was in favour of getting rid of affirmative action, for example, which is a social change reforming a ~60 year old feature of society. Maybe it's not "radical", but now everyone is just arguing over what's "radical". Or, as another example, I think Scott supports radical reform of the FDA; again a major critique of his against the elite is that it's too risk-averse when it comes to certain regulations.
But that immediately means that Scott and his ilk aren't just standing against would-be reformers, they're reformers themselves.
Your formulation seems to basically only allow someone who thinks American governance/society was basically just right from say,1995-2010, to count as the blameless sort of centrist edgelord.
Yarvin is obviously not a centrist, plus his whole schtick is just to use big words for atrocious ideas. Hanania is on the same path as Marie Le Pen and some of the Mitfords - once you start to think you can’t maintain fascist positions any more
Hanania's always came across to me like his positions were motivated largely by status anxiety -- he wants to be on the side of the "elite human capital", and since such people are mostly liberals, so is he. Granted I didn't follow him back in his far-right days, so maybe he was even worse back then.
It would be funny if despite all the scraping and groveling Hanania has done to try and win back favor of the liberal centrists, that he wouldn't be accepted.
I've been following Hanania for a few years now and I've actually been really impressed by how much he's willing to change his mind based on new facts and arguments. Are there other writers like that?
One positive result from Trump is how thoroughly it exposed the faux-centrist "classical liberals." If a Romney type had been president, the Weinstein/Tim Pool/Dave Rubin types would still be taken seriously.
As minimum, it suggests a more case-based approach than anything A, B, or C were suggesting. For example:
"But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism."
I haven't read the entire article, but regarding the quoted paragraph in particular, the problem is that stereotypes are, by and large, actually quite accurate: https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all So if we try and force people not to use stereotypes, we at best make it harder for them to build up an accurate picture of the world and hence to act rationally, and worst end up erecting enormous edifices of falsehood and obfuscation to try and hide the truth about differences in average performance between whichever groups we're concerned about.
I think it's worth being quite specific here, so forgive what may seem an obtuse point steeped in the specifics of social psychology.
An issue is that the statement:
" ... but regarding the quoted paragraph in particular, the problem is that stereotypes are, by and large, actually quite accurate... "
Is completely bogus to the point of incoherency.
Your logical seeming continuation ("... force people not to use.... make it harder to build an accurate picture of the world... erecting enormous edifices of falsehood... ") do not follow from your statement either, is an utterly unwarranted conclusion, has no basis in the discussion at hand and - as a little bonus - is a wonderful way of smuggling in some truly bad thinking. I would, err, caution against vague gestures towards "oh, but stereotyps are by and large actually quite accurate" ending in a conclusion that soomeeehooooowwwww seems to verge into, uhh, sorry, is this a sly implication that telling people that stereotypes do not always ring true is somehow tantamount to making them both unable to act rationally *and* lies, falsehood and obfuscation?
One might think you are engaging in motivated reasoning. It would be better for everyone involved if you simply stated your terms clearly. I believe they take the form of various racists screeds but I am very well be stereotyping based on limited information in light of a lack of individuating information, since I see your particular reasoning error so often in the world.
I phrase it like that because the article you link is not about what you are linking it to suggest it is about. To be clear: The research you linked does not indicate what you are taking it to indicate. It is a long format debate about the technical specifics of 'steoretype accuracy' as it appears as a term, for or against, in social psychology literature, is used by researchers, and, at times, manipulated in the experimental design of social psychology experiments. I am annoyingly familiar with this literature, and so I saw the web-link to SPSP and did a double-take.
I am going to take this chance to offer some insight, because I hope my stereotype above in what you are trying to indicate is not what you are actually trying to slyly hint at. Heavens knows, social psychology is a confusing field and reseach literature can be hard to understand.
So:
Your article.
It reaches the high bar conclusion that some stereotypes at times have r values = .5 or higher, when making judgements on information. That therefore "steoretypes" may be a replicable phenomena worth studying because they sometimes are used by some people in some contexts to evaluate information. This is in contrast with the often made claim that "stereotypes are inaccurate", prima facie, without any cited information why they might or might not be so.
This is a relevant and informative point about how stereotypes can at times be useful heurestics which one can study in many ways. It has categorically no bearing on stereotypes in aggregate being accurate or not, or in why telling people about how they may or may not be is tantamount to occassionally constructing an obelisk of misinformation. Sorry, an edifice of obfuscation. Sorry, a "enormous edifice of falsehood".
Being quite familiar with this research, owning to a poor choice of degree in parts of my past life, I went into the article looking for a point any social psychologist worth their degree would include, which will helpfully help underline my point.
I qoute now from the article:
" ... SPSR specifically points out that all or nearly all absolute stereotypes of the form ALL of THEM are X are inherently inaccurate, because human variability is typically sufficient to invalidate almost any such absolutist claim). "
+
" The evidence from both experimental and naturalistic studies indicates that people apply their stereotypes when judging others approximately rationally. When individuating information is absent or ambiguous, stereotypes often influence person perception. When individuating information is clear and relevant, its effects are “massive” (Kunda & Thagard, 1996, yes, that is a direct quote, p. 292), and stereotype effects tend to be weak or nonexistent. This puts the lie to longstanding claims that “stereotypes lead people to ignore individual differences.” "
--
This is the enormously and quite importantly salient point that undermines your logical continuation. It is factual information that steoretypes may at times aid judgement in abscence of other information. Because they can be useful heurestics used to arrive at reasonable conclusions. But specific individuating information massively overrules it, because specific triumphs over general.
You may refer to the further point, again qouting from the article, at length:
" But let’s consider the implications of their claim that most people’s stereotypes include little or no statistical understanding of the distributions of characteristics among groups. According to this view, laypeople would have little idea about racial/ethnic differences in high school or college graduate rates, or about the nonverbal skill differences between men and women, and are clueless about differences in the policy positions held by Democrats and Republicans. That leads to a very simple prediction – that people’s judgments of these distributions would be almost entirely unrelated to the actual distributions; correlations of stereotypes with criteria would be near zero and discrepancy scores would be high. One cannot have it both ways. If people are statistically clueless, then their beliefs should be unrelated to statistical distributions of characteristics among groups. If people’s beliefs do show strong relations to statistical realities, then they are not statistically clueless. "
I qoute this at length because it is the primary argument of the article restated and the primary argument of anyone engaged in psycological review of literature, along with the primary and most useful assumption about why steoretypes at times may be useful. That is: In the absence of individuating information, a steoretype can be a rough statistical guesstimate at some unknown value, shaped by a rough heurestic proces.
Luckily, the article also includes that the statistical correlation between people's judgements of group characteristics and their sometimes measured characteristics is higher than R = 0.5, which is to say, higher than a random guess some of the time. That is a thing worth studying and so luckily, social psychologists do study it.
This has absolutely no bearing on steoretypes generic validity either for or against, their accuracy in toto, or whether teaching people that not all steoretypes are not leads to 'erecting enormous edifices of falsehood'.
It is a technical point about a research construct used to design experimental investigations of people's social cognition.
You are, I am afraid, smuggling in unwarranted conclusions about stereotypes, the consequence of using them, their validity, what social psychologist research says about them and their utility, the consequences, the studies deriving information about them and the meta-reviews and analysis related to them.
I question your basic understanding of a single salient point of information regarding stereotypes, and I note that I find the possibility that you are using this as a coy way of gesturing vaguely at some enormously abominable, unjustified and unwarranted belief structures lurking like shrapnel or landmines in your cognition to be quite high, but I may, again, be steoretyping based on the cadence of your answer and so I welcome any individuating information that may massively alter my conclusions.
I note this because:
"... obfuscation to try and hide the truth about differences in average performance between whichever groups we're concerned about. "
Says more about your misunderstanding of the very research material you are linking than any steoretypes of average performances between groups.
I would recommend a basic handbook on social psychology and what correlations in statistical judgements mean, but having sat through that material myself I find it hard to recommend to anyone.
>I would, err, caution against vague gestures towards "oh, but stereotyps are by and large actually quite accurate" ending in a conclusion that soomeeehooooowwwww seems to verge into, uhh, sorry, is this a sly implication that telling people that stereotypes do not always ring true is somehow tantamount to making them both unable to act rationally *and* lies, falsehood and obfuscation?
Who said anything about "telling people that stereotypes do not always ring true"? I made sure to say that stereotypes are only accurate "by and large" precisely because they're not always accurate.
Since you've failed that point of basic reading comprehension, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of your rambling and emotional screed.
That is what the words "verge into" and "sly implication" means. Traditionally they're meant to indicate a partial conclusion derived from information offered by someone else, which, hedging, someone is not entirely willing to ascertain is the total truth (because I cannot know that for sure, I can only guesstimate and ask for more information). Sorry, I thought I would be quite clear about this because your ability to read normal sentences seems as poor as your ability to read scientific literature.
I do not know where you are, so I cannot helpfully provide a dictionary to help you in your quest towards achieving basic ability to parse a sentence (= reading comprehension, I am insulting yours, again, just so we are clear on the matter).
We can both keep slinging little digs like this all day, and that can be quite amusing.
I'd be willing to go on. I think I can get in another six good digs about your patent inability to read a trivially basic paper from a social psychology journal, and you can get in a good few digs about my emotional valence (that's a word from psychology research, you'd know it if you understood it) which you have some ascertained using the power of . . . I . . . Assume . . . a stereotyped informational basis due to lack of other individuating factors. Well. At least that's keeping to the theme! I applaud the commitment to the bit.
But I don't think it will do much to improve the tenor of conversation around here, or be relevant. Since we both apparently, however, fail at reading comprehension, I can simply restate my writing clearly and I thank you for the chance to do so.
So: I repeat my request that you clarify what you are talking about, because your prior statements are incoherent in relation to the research and science you have linked, do not meaningfully relate anything and your somewhat strange statement that (qouting in full, to aid comprehension)
" So if we try and force people not to use stereotypes, we at best make it harder for them to build up an accurate picture of the world and hence to act rationally, and worst end up erecting enormous edifices of falsehood and obfuscation to try and hide the truth about differences in average performance between whichever groups we're concerned about. "
Do not meaningfully relate to anything in the on-going conversation.
It is, to be plain, a weird tangent. More insulting to any reader who passes by, it is a weird tangent that abuses the veneer of scientific understanding and dialogue in a field I happen to be acquianted with to lurch into a stranger tangent about some somewhat curious implications about falsehoods, erections thereof, acting rationally or not, and so on.
Luckily, this being a comment section of people who enjoy fairly reasoned debate, I thought pointing this out to you and requesting clarification would be helpful for us both. Unluckily, you seem to be more interested in failing to read and respond than actually responding. I note that you can seemingly link to (and fail to understand) several pages worth of social psychology. You can also respond to (and fail to understand) a few words on your comment. I applaud once again your commitment to the basic act of being an uninformed clown, that is, the bit. In both cases, you seem to have been unable to understand what you have read (= I am once again inferring your reading comprehension is poor, to be clear, as I do not wish for you to fail to intuit this fairly normal insult).
However, are we done sprinking petty insults in the middle of our conversations? Do we both feel we've gone through the process? From my side, it wasn't quite six, but at some point I feel keeping it up is just in poor taste. Perhaps I will stop sliding them in, though, well, they are quite amusing and I have to at least do six or seven or so because I think you'd fail to understand them like you fail to understand basic social psychology if I didn't repeat myself. To anyone else reading this: I plead true and neccessary, but I grant unkind, and I nod, imagined, and promise to be less sassy going forward.
So, Mr. X (original, the):
If my reading comprehension is poor, it may be because your ideas are hard to parse.
You rely on vague hand gesturing towards something that you seem unable to state clearly.
What does "forcing people not to use" stereotypes mean? Why would it make them act less rationally? What edifice of falsehood and obfuscation is being erected? What truth is someone trying to hide?
You can simply say these things clearly, if they are interesting things to say. You can even link to material germane to making such statements. I would be interested in reading it, but it does require you to have the basic competence of expression to express it.
When you do not do this, and instead, misunderstand the conclusions drawn from basic social psychology, I will take the chance to correct you. That is sort of how it goes around here. Something of ... community norm, I think? That is opposed to the activity you are in engaged in, which is, I think "failing to understand basic methodological scientific procedure"
I am willing to admit that I am being unfair and apologize for doing so if I am.
I can only repeat that it is very easy to jump to conclusions based on your writing and cadence, which may, indeed, be a heurestically vaiable stereotype that is "low brow irrational fool bent in the skull and not a single original thought in the empty void that is their cranium". That stereotype may be wrong. You could offer individuating information to help me come to a better understanding. That would relate to the science you have linked and the aside about stereotypical thinking you have started.
Since our reading comprehension is so mutually poorly, I will restate for clarity:
You're talking nonsense about a scientific field you understanding nothing about.
I am requesting you go read more primary sources and fill the yawning void in your ability to present an argument with something resembling a basic understanding of the subject matter at hand.
I am also requesting that if you find it a delight to gesture vaguely at erected edifices of falsehood of some conveniently ill-described but quite implicative statement, well, just be a moron out on main. Just state your ideological stance clearly. If you're going to be a clown, at least be willing to put on the make-up. Then we can discuss your routine for what it is: unsubstantiated screeds backed up by nonsense and held together by fundamental inability to parse scientific literature, and we may both learn something, through the joy of rambling, if reasoned, discourse.
Or maybe I'm being a snarky asshole jumping to stereotyped conclusions, at which point, as I've stated repeatedly, I'd love the correction and for you to facilitate writing what you actually mean.
It's quite frustrating that he starts off the post with talking about the history of antisemitism, then takes it in the direction of talking about how right-wing-coded racism should remain taboo, and somehow completely avoids the topic of the surge in left-wing antisemitism that's responsible for the large majority of hate crime. I get that he doesn't want to talk about that for partisan reasons, but I wish he wouldn't appeal to the topic of antisemitism that cynically.
That's now how I read it at all. My read was basically:
"Casual antisemitism was common pre-WW2. After WW2, everyone stopped doing this because it uncomfortably adjacent to the Holocaust. Now, many people are doing WW2-revisionism which is having the effect of making people comfortable doing casual antisemitism again. This is bad."
He specifically calls out Kendi-style racism as bad:
"In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad."
Perhaps you were just hoping to read a different article.
But if his article is about casual antisemitism, it's just completely false (the vast majority of antisemitism is not done by right-wing WW2 revisionist edgelords). I was trying to read him more charitably than that, but in your reading he's just being deliberately misleading instead of using an awkward springboard.
MY is arguing that, "the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad." Antisemitism is the example that he uses to illustrate the broader point.
As with antisemitism, though, I'm not sure "we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politness norms" is an exclusively or primarily right-wing thing. Cancel culture is pretty cruel, and is largely a left-wing creation, and I've seen left-wingers happily be extremely rude towards members of disfavoured groups.
Lynching someone for looking at the wrong woman could be described as cancel culture taken to its extreme, don’t you think? No one has a monopoly on cancel culture.
I don't think this is an accurate view of the right-wing project on WWII revisionism. I'm reasonably confident that it's uncharitable and I'm not sure if it's intentional.
Simply, most of the right-wingers I've talked to on this issue are not arguing as a main point that "Hitler was not so bad." They are primarily arguing "Communism and Stalin/Mao were the worst, they are the fundamental evil of the 20th century." A side effect of this is arguing "Hitler was not so bad" because the current moral judgment of Hitler is that he's as close to pure evil as can be achieved. But you can go over the datasecretslox right now and bring this up, I've seen "Stalin vs Hitler" pop up enough there to know what people are arguing about.
And there's two level's to this argument. On the object level, the differences between Stalin and Hitler are...hard to weigh. You've got two mass-murdering psychos with tens of millions of dead on their hand in the support of fairly awful ideologies, plus Mao over in the corner with the highest kill total (1). How you weigh out who is "the absolute worst" is a pretty fine distinction.
But no one cares about actual historical facts, people care about propaganda value. Because there can only be one "Most Evil Guy Ever" and Hitler is right-coded and Stalin is left-coded, everyone will fight to make their outgroup associated with the "Most Evil Guy Ever". And if Stalin became the new "Most Evil Guy Ever" the way Hitler is, then a lot of people would look at a lot of Democrat programs, now and since 1950, in a radically new light. That's what people are actually fighting about.
And it's very clear from Yglesias' writing which side he's on, because he completely ignores Stalin and frames the debate as "Hitler bad" vs "Hitler good". Which is...an uncharitable framing. I'm not sure what arguments Yglesias would lay down on, say, utilitarian grounds that Hitler was worse than Stalin, I've never actually seen that argument, but I know his framing avoids that core argument.
(1) I have a little sympathy for Mao. For all his many, many horrific faults, I think there are two mitigating factors:
-He legitimately freed China from 100+ years of foreign oppression and arguably 300+ years of Manchu/Qing foreign rule. That's a really big thing for the Chinese people.
-The Great Famine was super bad but I've never seen evidence that it was intentional. It did legitimately appear to be a mistake.
So, yea, Mao is super absolutely not a good guy but I think he's pretty clearly in the 2nd rank of "Most evil people in the 20th century" arguably behind guys like Pol Pot, not in tier 1 competing for #1 with Hitler and Stalin.
At some point, the argument over which of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao was the most evil starts to sound like an argument over which of three houses is most on fire.
For most of us, it doesn't matter. Debating who's more evil is mostly just academic. The time will never come where we are forced to join Team Stalin or Team Mao. If it does come, it's because they're at war and whoever wins will be insuperably powerful, in which case our best option is probably the one taken by a character in a saga I forget: back the losing side until it starts winning, then back the other, and so on, until both sides are drained and manageable. (That, or invest so much into our own military that we could take both on at once, which I think reveals one facet of the American mindset.)
> [Mao] legitimately freed China from 100+ years of foreign oppression and arguably 300+ years of Manchu/Qing foreign rule. That's a really big thing for the Chinese people.
What did Mao have to do with removing the Qing? Sun Yat-sen is always credited for that. Mao wasn't doing anything at the time.
Mao gets credit for removing the Japanese, who hadn't been there for 100 years.
> The Great Famine was super bad but I've never seen evidence that it was intentional. It did legitimately appear to be a mistake.
How can that mitigate anything but the Great Leap Forward itself?
Note that the party line in China is that the famine associated with the Great Leap Forward was caused by the weather. They don't seem to feel that killing everyone unintentionally does much to mitigate the fact of killing everyone.
"What did Mao have to do with removing the Qing? Sun Yat-sen is always credited for that. Mao wasn't doing anything at the time."
Mostly continuity. It's hard to credit Sun Yat-Sen with removing the Qing because, yeah, the dynasty ended in 1912 but by 1913 Sun Yat-Sen had assassinated Song Jiaoren and Sun Yat-Sen had fled to Japan (1). And then, of course, by 1915 the Warlord Era had begun. And it's not like the foreign zones were gone during the Warlord era. Rather than a definitive end, the collapse of the Qing ends up as just another part of the long Century of Humiliation. This runs into some of my limited understanding of late 19th century Chinese political philosophy but my understanding is that, amongst Sun Yat-Sen and his contemporaries, the abolishment of the Qing was tied into the restoration of Han control over China, a return to the glory of earlier dynasties. A restoration that, despite the dates, doesn't come in 1912 but instead in 1949 when there is, inarguably, one single Hand Chinese government in charge of China.
"How can that mitigate anything but the Great Leap Forward itself?"
The same way that murder and manslaughter are the same outcome with different punishments determined primarily by intent. Like, I can't justify it from a utilitarian perspective but if one guy kills a puppy by leaving him in a hot car with the windows rolled up and another guy kills a puppy with a hatchet, I'm staying the eff away from the second guy.
You wrote above that "For all his many, many horrific faults, I think there are two mitigating factors", and then listed the unintentionality of the Great Leap Forward as a mitigating factor.
I'm saying that can't possibly be viewed as a mitigating factor of anything other than the Great Leap Forward. That was only one of Mao's many, many horrific faults. The fact that it was unintentional mitigates it, very lightly. But that does almost nothing to mitigate Mao.
> but my understanding is that, amongst Sun Yat-Sen and his contemporaries, the abolishment of the Qing was tied into the restoration of Han control over China, a return to the glory of earlier dynasties. A restoration that, despite the dates, doesn't come in 1912 but instead in 1949
You have an odd view of how other people must see the world. Like I said, Mao is credited with removing the Japanese. In the eyes of the modern Chinese it is his primary claim to greatness. He's not credited with removing the Qing for the obvious reason that that's not something you could give him any credit for even if you wanted to be absurdly generous.
Thanks for a reply that actually engaged with the ideas!
I'm happy to concede that different utilitarian frameworks can lead you to different outcomes on the "Who Was the Worst?"-o-meter. But I think that's a bit to the side of Yglesias's main thrust, which is that a pervasive norm that Hitler (due to the Holocaust) is a kind of unquestioned evil such that anything that vaguely resembles it should be avoided out of a necessary caution. It's about the specifics of the Holocaust as a deliberate, focused act of ethnic cleansing and extermination and not just the body count at the end of the day.
So worrying about whether Pol Pot or whatever was "worse" from a consequentialist perspective (or whatever) misses the point. Unless you're trying to argue that there's some alternative taboo that should be instituted for avoiding more Pol Pots and that, by instead focusing on the taboo for avoiding Hitlers/Holocausts, we're crowding out the hypothetical Pol Pot taboo?
>But I think that's a bit to the side of Yglesias's main thrust, which is that a pervasive norm that Hitler (due to the Holocaust) is a kind of unquestioned evil such that anything that vaguely resembles it should be avoided out of a necessary caution.
The problem is that we've suffered serious "Holocaust inflation" over the last eight decades, to the extent that a politically and culturally important part of the population views such things as "The existence of majority-white countries" and "Expecting everybody in a country to follow the same set of norms and laws" as being too close to the Holocaust.
Yes, the alternative taboo is the primary point of contention. Just empirically, large groups of people in the hundreds of millions do not consistently hold multiple things as "the worst thing". There's only one Skeletor and he's the only villain that matters; no one cares about...Evil-Lyn (1). Shouldn't be that way but it is. And as long as there can only be one supreme evil, one Skeletor, then it matters a lot whether that's Hitler or Stalin.
And not, like, it would completely change all of America but...let's avoid modern politics and focus on the pre-2000 period. While Communism certainly was not popular during this period, and especially not during the Cold War, it was also never as absolutely verboten as explicit Nazism. And that mean that some leftist/socialist policies were within the realm of respectable politics while a lot of right-wing ones weren't. And that would have been very different is people viewed Stalin with the absolute moral abhorrence they currently view Hitler.
That, as far as I can tell, is the stakes of the actual debate and why people actually care. If Hitler is right-coded and Stalin is left-coded and only one can be the ultimate evil, only one gets to be as popular as Skeletor and the other is Evil-Lyn, then there's a decent real-world impact riding on who was the worst.
And the worst part is that it's not clear we would reasonably determine this and all the arguments around this are consistently depressing. Not like, "Oh, you're dumb". It's more like "Was the Holodomor an intentional attempt at genociding Ukranians or not?" and "is it worse to kill 5 million people via gas chambers than intentional starvation?" or "Well, even if the Holodomor isn't as bad as the Holocaust and even if we don't count all the Russians Stalin killed, how do we count the other genocides/ethnic cleansings Stalin did?" (2). "Does, like, the #2 and #5 genocides of the 20th century outweigh #1?"
And, like, I understand the arguments, I just don't want to have the subject level arguments because it's all insanely depressing.
"Off the top of your head, name any He-Man villain other than Skeletor."
Other than Evil-Lyn, which you mentioned: Beastman; Trapjaw; Triclops; Spydor; Whiplash; Clawful; Faker; Jitsu; Stinkor; Kobra-Khan. I won't count Hordak, who is much more a She-ra villain, even though he fought He-man at some point. Also, Man-E-Faces was briefly a villain, and Zodak was a kind of ambiguous rival IIRC.
(I used to collect these as a kid, and watched the cartoon endlessly. I am very much an exception to your rule.)
If that's your position, then I think the disagreement is about moral frames and not 'right' vs. 'left'. For many, the intentionality of setting up murder camps where folks from a particular ethnicity were killed assembly-line-style is horrific in a way that even mass-starvation-due-to-poor-planning isn't. This is where the taboo that MY was talking about comes from. I don't think it's the flavor of the politics involved.
Content Warning: links to graphic pics of war crimes
Yes, but this gets back to the circular logic of how we construct moral frames, which is the (underlying) impact behind the Hitler debate. We have not randomly or objectively chosen our moral frames. By moral frame, I very much mean the intuition that some crimes are dramatically worse even if we can't justify that on utilitarian grounds, ie "For many, the intentionality of setting up murder camps where folks from a particular ethnicity were killed assembly-line-style is horrific"
So let's pivot this a bit and look at a 3rd great group of WWII war criminals: the Japanese. Here's 3 pictures of war crimes:
I think we can all agree that these are all horrific war crimes. But the Holocaust one feels different. Anne Frank feels different, although it's hard to justify why the tragedy of young Jewish teenager being sent to Auschwitz should feel more horrific than a 7 year-old Chinese boy being bayoneted to death for fun.
But if you were Chinese, you would feel the opposite. You would feel extra horror, that sense of epic wrongness, about the Japanese invasion and Unit 731 and all that. And, we can be reasonably confident then, that at least some of our horror regarding the Holocaust is a result of our unique cultural upbringing. And it's not that there's anything wrong with this, Schindler's List is a great movie...but it's also the best explanatory variable for why the Holocaust looms so large.
Now presume that moral frame can be weaponized and you'll understand the stakes. If:
#1 You can only have one supreme evil, if you can only inspire that moral feeling, the unique horror, for one person/group AND
#2 Who that supreme evil is carries political consequences AND
#3 The original moral horror was not assigned impartially
Then you've got the basis for the historicism fight. The right is, generally, trying to shift the moral horror from fascism to communism, and almost universally attempting to delegitimize the post-war moral framework.
Which, this whole things sounds pretty complex, but it's really just that there's a certain amount of relativity and discretion in establishing and maintaining social taboos and Yglesias knows this and knows which moral taboos he likes and which ones he doesn't.
There's also a question of whether the absolute size of the atrocity is the only thing that matters or whether the number of vulnerable people affects the evaluation. Pol Pot wrecked their own country, but it was a smaller country.
This strikes me as the opposite, *very* charitable. Skimming the article briefly he mentions Darryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson, where I don't think he talked about Stalin at all (didn't watch the broadcast but did read his extremely lengthy follow-up post) and his points included "Churchill was the real villain", "the Holocaust was really just a logistics snafu", and "wealthy financiers wanted WWII to continue". The whole thing was pretty batshit but also was, I would say, reverse-engineered to support the abandonment of Ukraine.
I have no doubt what you're talking about is also a take somebody has, but I suspect it's a different one than he's responding to.
I'm aware of Daryl Cooper but don't follow him. I did a quick check and it looks like he is pushing "Churchill is the villain, not Hitler" which is...certainly a take. I'm sure you can point to civilian bombing campaigns like Dresden to take some of the shine off Chruchill but...yo, Hitler and Stalin.
I'm reasonably confident that Cooper's take is not Yarvin's, Buchanan's, or Confas' though, mostly because I've heard discussions in these circles for awhile and it's a lot more Stalin focused that Churchill focused.
If Yglesias is purely focused on Cooper and his Tucker Carlson appearance, I'm wrong, my bad. I don't think he is but it's...not an absurd read of the article.
Nah, Darryl Cooper is extremely knowledgeable, fair and empathetic to all sides. He produces hours long podcasts where he talks in great detail about all angles of a conflict and is extremely anti war, having seen all its evils first hand. Of course he knows and has said frequently that Hitler is evil and antisemitism is bad.
People taking his snide comments out of context are the problem here. Have a listen to him on Rogan or check out his Substack. Here’s a post from recently where he calls out right wing anti-Semitism (and explains where his love of saying objectively outrageous things originated)
For rate statistics (% dead of population), but not for counting statistics (total corpses).
If we are going to go here, then the Great Khan might deserve some consideration for what he was able to accomplish with much less sophisticated technology.
Assuming that the title being competed for is `most evil person of the 20th century' (as in the post I was responding to) then the Great Khan is disqualified by having died seven centuries too early.
But if we are applying rate statistics and expanding to all of recorded history, then per Steven Pinker the crown goes An Lushan (assuming we assign him all the deaths from his eponymous rebellion).
>But if we are applying rate statistics and expanding to all of recorded history, then per Steven Pinker the crown goes An Lushan (assuming we assign him all the deaths from his eponymous rebellion).
Don't historians of China generally believe that a lot of those "deaths" are a statistical illusion caused by the weakening of the Tang and the post-war breakdown of the census system? AIUI Pinker suggests a death toll of 36 million, or two-thirds of the Chinese population, which is implausibly high given that the war lasted less than a decade and only encompassed three or four of the eleven or so provinces in the empire.
Its still claiming "Im actively being wrong, but look I have the moral high ground"; its not better because he's seems aware it makes him look stupid.
Objectively hilter was 3rd place. Any moral shrill objection to racism is falling flat. Wokes killed race blindness, and not all immigration filters such as crossing an boarder illegally may improve human stock.
Is it to much to ask that anyone to the left of me is able to produce an argument that doesn't annoy me? Either Im a super genius or y'all lack an edge and are wielding butter knifes in a gun fight, because I dont hear the argument "I believe I can estimate iq from 5 minutes of talkn, so you dont necessarily need to judge from skincolor"
p1) Censorship is inversely correlated with the truth.
p2) Rationalists should generally occasionally put forward a good argument on subjects they are interested in if they were aware of it. (i.e. They talk allot)
p3) I have not seen a good argument from rationalists against racism
p4) (known false) Rationalists are highly rational.
p5) racism is a censored topic
p1+p4=c1) if a highly censored topic exists, rationalists will discount its validity
p2+c1=c2) If a highly censored topic has no good rationalist arguments, rationalists will generally support the opposite conclusion, despite my personal feeling on the matter of arguments I can see from outside.
c2+p3+p5=c3) I should expect rationalists are unable to produce an anti racist argument
c3+p4) Rationalists are actually wildly racist.
(I see some gaps but dont care to list out a dozen premises or put some numbers and pretend to do bayes)
---
I believe not-p4 over p3 and that these are in conflict; realisticly I believe anti-racism arguments exist but they are all low class (because good arguments *require* engagement with the other side) and y'all are unwilling to touch "never ask a white extremists color of his girlfriend" type "proofs"
I'm not really seeing the weight of your complaint. I think a lot of non-rats who learn about this subculture are going to think that the rationalists are too racist. Scott's argument that he defended just the other month that most Africans have what the DSM would call "mild mental retardation" is not an argument that is going to be popularly received in polite society. The comment section here tolerates a lot of caliper users and Stormfront-adjacent types who would be blocked on sight in many other spaces.
> Scott's argument that he defended just the other month that most Africans have what the DSM would call "mild mental retardation" is not an argument that is going to be popularly received in polite society
I would consider scott boarderline anti-rationalist. I wouldnt consider core rationalists savable or worth talking to.
> polite society
> I think a lot of non-rats who learn about this subculture are going to think that the rationalists are too racist.
It does not matter what polite society thinks. At least to me. You should consider if my lack of caring will soon effect you with you know, trump in the white house.
I actually just hate politeness. Full stop.( has anyone been able to tell /s)
> The comment section here tolerates a lot of caliper users and Stormfront-adjacent types who would be blocked on sight in many other spaces.
Im far-right; even if the future is far right(it probably is), the fascists outnumber and out prep-for-violence me; there are possible futures where that becomes a problem. If you care about actual fascists taking power you should argue for liberal norms better then yarvin(; or prep-for-violence at an acceptable level to carry your weight.)
Ideally you should be able to watch "worse country on earth" start to end, talk kindly to a fascist on the subject(,then an indian). Thats likely to high I only lasted 30 minutes myself; but please at least try to contend with the *gasp* non-polite rather then the high pitch shrill I usually see, the god of the copybook headers with terror and slaughter returns.
Would a rationalist consider, going into a discussion, that racism is a prior? For example, if I am a white rationalist, and I go into an interaction with a black person while holding a statistically supportable view (apparently) that black people are not as smart as white people, will I assume the person I am speaking with is not as smart as me from the get-go?
(As an aside, I dictated this comment, and Siri capitalized black, but left white in lowercase. interesting…)
I grew up in northern Canada and then Toronto and moved to New York in 1978. I can’t say I ever really met a black person until I came to New York City.
(not entirely true because I spent about three weeks in Zambia when I was 18 years old, but that was completely different.) in NYC I soon sensed the cultural divide that existed. Then I spent quite a bit of time in Jamaica and met a lot of Black people but nothing like Black people in New York City, or so it seemed.
-(Siri is doing it again but I don’t feel like editing it.)
My take away is that a lot of the people I met who were black were smarter than me in some ways, but not in others. I would say in a general sense that they think differently..
Anyway, getting back to priors, I would say that coming into contact with Black people for the first time in my 20s, I had an unfounded fear of them and also considered them exotic. it took me some time to work through that. It gets back to what you said; let me talk to someone for a few minutes, and I don’t need to refer to their skin color to decide whether they’re smart or not.
People dislike Yglesias's proposed taboo for not noticing disparate outcomes because people have tried living that and noticed that, in practice, it just means suppressing whites and select successful minorities to the benefit of increasingly irate and ungrateful activist groups.
Was this a reply to something else or its own top thread?
I've been supporting this idea for a while. At the very least, get to 0% on labor on the low-end, so a job that generates $11/hour of value can be filled by an employee making $11/hour.
Has anyone had acid reflux so bad that it spilled over into other symptoms? I have what feels like moderate acid reflux, but in the past I've had problems realizing how bad my problems are until they went away, so it might be worse than I realize. PPIs have a moderate effect on it. Other symptoms I have include difficulty with stereoscopic vision, darkness in one eye, dizziness, waking up multiple times at night feeling like I'm choking, and severe brain fog.
- Acid reflux could be so bad that I would wake up having breathed in some of the stomach acid and the next day would be pretty awful
- Strange neurological symptoms FOR ME turned out to be too much time at the computer during the pandemic, doctors eventually settled on pinched nerves in the neck and upper thorasic vertebra
- Strange perception-based things were caused by thinking too hard, being too stressed, drinking too much, not getting outside and using my eyes to look at distances farther than 10', that kind of thing
- Brain fog in my case comes from being bored, over-stimulated, having no privacy (working at home and having a partner also in the home all the time)
It has been strange over the past few years to be unable to understand where these kinds of symptoms are coming from because they have no obvious cause like a stubbed toe or broken bone. Suddenly, symptoms just go away when winter is over, or when I reduced my drinking after the pandemic.
Drinking is pretty rough on acid reflux. I’ve been a fairly steady drinker for most of my life and mostly red wine. About four years ago I started getting acid reflux and it was directly related to red wine. My body just could not deal with it anymore. I drink whiskey and water now -much better. I also don’t drink as much, but still more than what is commonly perceived to be a reasonable level.
So I have done a cranial nerve exam and a neurovisual examination and to my shock both came back completely normal. I had to ask the examiner several times if he was sure. In retrospect I think the problem is the darkness in one of my eyes isn't total, and I was told that if I could see any the dots on the static perimetry test, even if faded, that I was to push the button and register them as "seen." I think the other problem is I'm only 35, so a lot of doctors I talk to just kind of roll their eyes and dismiss me. I've gotten a lot of condescension and "just try relaxing." It's hard to keep fighting for myself.
PPMS which is hard to catch because without the relapses, it's often just a bunch of weird, not very specific symptoms. Only when it started to impact walking people stopped ignoring it. That was at least 6 years after the first clear symptoms (and possibly over a decade) :-(
MRI: depends on the health system, Switzerland they are easy to get (and quick) but I would simply try and insist they get to the bottom of it, visual symptoms sound like a good enough for an MRI indication for me.
Sounds like separate to acid reflux you might also have sleep apnea (surprisingly common)
Not all cases of sleep apnea need CPAPs a lot of people get airway improving nasal surgeries from an ENT and they aren't expensive and sometimes it's as simple as keeping up with your antihistamine or having better sleep posture or using one of those postural oral devices.
There are sleep apnea evaluations (which are usually needed if you want to get your CPAP covered by insurance) but other interventions you can just try and see if they make a difference after talking to your primary care doctor if you have one. Good luck!
So incidentally I have already been diagnosed with sleep apnea. The symptoms, especially the choking at night, actually get worse when I use my APAP. I also had turbinate reduction, which has helped me sleep better than before, but it's still less than I'd like.
Yup, I am on semiglutide - lost 20 pounds and went from a BMI of 32 to 29. I have definitely noticed something of a positive impact as I lose weight, but I have to take breaks on the medication as it makes gastric symptoms and reflux much worse.
Version 800,000,000 of the "rationalists think that they and they alone have the secret to rationality and think they're always right about everything with no humility and those things that I've hallucinated onto them are bad so they're bad" post. I always wonder if people who believe stuff like this, that emotional thinking cannot ever, even in theory, be systematically mitigated follow that thought through the obvious conclusion that they should disengage entirely from politics because their brains are a hopeless hive of the last 10 essays they've consumed. If there is no firm ground then what are they standing on to make this critique?
I didn't like it, the left itself played a much greater role in the rise of Trump than the edgy heterodox centrists. Sure Scott, wrote pieces that the MAGA shared among each other, they still spent more time sharing each other the worst excesses of the woke.
It's a very strangely written critique, where the author seems to think that any piece that gives the reader a reason to feel self righteous about dealing with leftist overreach is sinful.
I think it's less "sinful" and more "can't claim the virtue of objectivity."
Like, persuasive writing isn't inherently evil or anything, you can write persuasively in support of good causes, but if you do, you can't avoid getting caught in "arguments as soldiers" stuff. Your argument will be used as a weapon by whoever it persuades in favor of.
Scott may have intended You Are Still Crying Wolf as a "discourse policing" thing, only intended to push back on what he saw as overheated rhetoric, but there was also an object-level, persuasive argument being made, and he was wrong on the object level.
I don't think he was *trying* to persuade people that the people calling Trump racist were evil, and neither does the essayist.
>And so it doesn’t matter that Scott is emphatically not a Trump supporter. The essay made Trump supporters feel good about themselves. And so, much to Scott’s and no one else’s surprise, it made the rounds in a bunch of Conservative spaces.
So what? Is it really our priority to make Trump supporters feel *bad* about themselves? I'm not sure *any* ethical theory would countenance that, and I'm not seeing the purpose for it other than that it makes *you* feel good,
When a person is falsely accused of an offense they did not commit, and later cleared of that offense, they and their supporters will feel good about it, and about their support for the man wrongly accused. They're *supposed* to feel good about it, because it's a good thing.
And it's a good thing even if the person in question has done different bad things.
If the idea is that there should be a new norm saying "really bad people should be falsely accused of offenses they did not commit, and nobody should ever dispute that because it might make bad people feel good", then Oh Hell No, I don't want any part of the community that holds that norm.
And I'm glad that Scott has so long worked to keep this community away from that sort of odious nonsense.
On the one hand I feel like when someone has posted a public response to your post, and made it a point of public debate, the proper thing to do would be to un-paywall on the original. On the other hand, such a policy seems rife for abuse, as a bad actor could exploit it to force Scott into giving up on all his supporter-exclusive posts, and therefore, decreasing the value of his Substack. Not sure how to think about this. (Maybe Scott should only un-paywall the article if he intends to publicly spotlight/counter-argue with a response, and he has no duty to un-paywall otherwise?)
I say the opposite; if someone responds to a paywalled article, use that as an advertisement that the paywalled article is worth the money to read, and reap the full monetary benefits.
Perhaps. But in terms of actually winning the argument in the court of public opinion, it seems detrimental that the refutation of your argument is out there, but only a subset of readers will have access to what you actually said.
(This is separate from my immediate concern, which was that this encourages treating debates like this as one-on-one arguments to which the average non-paying reader can only be a passive, partial observer — rather than public debates which anyone can weigh in on — which is part of the overall decay of the Blogosphere of yore.)
I'll develop this more fully later, as I am rushing right now, but a quick point here - the use of the term "elite/the elites" makes me grind my teeth, because while the linked response post probably does mean it in a good way - the most intelligent and capable - in practice, it gets conflated with "those of us who are in charge/I am SO SMRT!"
Like the editor of "Science" magazine, whom she quotes, pontificating that it was unacceptable for people to hold a particular opinion, that this should not be permitted, and by implication, that only the likes of him (the SO SMRT! "elites") should be the ones deciding who got to think what, and more importantly, what it was that they were allowed to think.
Which leaves the rest of us, like myself, down in the "moral gutters". Because I'm not part of the elite, whatever way you want to measure it (by raw brainpower, technocracy, or simply 'part of the people in charge') and unhappily that's the alternatives the response post gives us: the edgelords down in the moral gutters with the nasty sentiments, or the elites up there at the top being all - well, what, exactly?
I'm going to presume that the mass of us in the middle somewhere (not in the gutters but not the 140+ IQ elite types to be entrusted with the sevagram) have some place, and that is what she intends but never outright states?
EDIT: Okay, more time now, so let's get into it.
First off, I have to disagree with Ms. Teslo regarding elites; I find myself suspicious of the technocrats, particularly in government. She, on the other hand, very much believes in elites, but at least also believes in 'noblesse oblige'. My fears coalesce around the elites believing in their eliteness, and thus their natural superiority and thus that the rest of us, well we don't really matter, we're just there to do as we're told. I mistrust the self-anointed, and even where I accept such a hierarchy, I have the Pope already, I don't need a second one or more, and boy howdy everyone has seen by now how the Church can screw things up.
Time for a C.S. Lewis quote here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
There's a faint whiff of the elites looking down on the rest of us as domestic animals with the "moral gutters" part:
"I totally agree that a wave of unimaginable stupidity, racism, anti-semitism, hate against transgender people, misogyny and all the other stuff Scott talks about has been unleashed on X. It is very bad that so many people feel this way. But I have reason to believe, and this will become more evident towards the end of this post, that these sentiments will not become dominant among so-called “elites”. My prediction is that in the long term, they will remain confined to the moral gutters of society."
Are there bad views in that collection? Of course. But from another angle, one person's "hate against transgender people" is another person's "I don't think this should be made a legal obligation or else". If the correct and normal and natural views are the ones nice, good, moral, liberal people hold - then any disagreement, even in a small part or even "I agree with some but not all", must be tending towards the bad, the unnatural, the abnormal - the moral gutter.
And that's where I'm splashing around right now, because I'm dang sure I don't hold the same views to the same degree as the nice liberal types.
And this is how populism arises - not just because of the edgelords, but out of the over-reach by the nice liberal side which didn't rein in the crazy fringe and which did push ahead with the arrogance and over-confidence of 'after all, we are the elites' to points where the mass of us stodgy lumps went "whoa there now for a minute".
Centrism should be 'I agree with some of your points, I disagree with others'. It can be "I take 80% from the blue basket but 20% from the red basket where I agree with that" and vice versa. Right now, we're stuck on the polarised opposite sides, with the centre being treated as actively malicious. And I'm sorry, but "just let the elites take charge" does not convince me, because we need some compromise and "let my lot be in sole charge" is not that (whichever side it is).
I remember an old Tom Lehrer recording from the sixties where he mentions "these elites" (fans of folk music if I recall correctly) and does so with a sarcastic twang.
I think that at some point between the 1960s and the 2020s people forgot that they were supposed to use a sarcastic twang when they called people "elites" and accidentally started complimenting them instead of insulting them.
I'm disagreeing with the Lewis quote. While I agree that tyranny exercised for people's own good can be really bad and pervasive, tyranny driven by pure malice can be worse.
Lewis seems too optimistic about malicious people. He sees them almost as misunderstood edgelords, who will experiment a little with being bad, and then grow out of it. (As opposed to the moral busybodies, who are fundamentally unable to learn.)
"The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated"... yeah, correct, "may". Now, assign a specific *probability* to that happening, and calculate the *expected* harm.
By the same logic, at some point Hitler might get bored of sending Jews to the gas chambers. Yeah, he might. But he didn't.
I think the point is that the robber baron doesn't actively want other people to be poor, he just wants himself to be rich and doesn't care about others, whereas Hitler had gassing Jews as a terminal goal.
> whereas Hitler had gassing Jews as a terminal goal.
If I remember my high school history correctly, Hitler spent the first 6 years as Fuhrer trying to get them to emigrate, not trying to get them into a gas chamber. If his terminal goal was the gas all along, rather than just "not be in Germany", then sending them to a different continent where he couldn't access them would seem counterproductive?
I think at this point everyone on the political spectrum is mad at some set of elites, whether it be Trump/Elon, Soros/WEF/the “globalists,” Israel/the “Jews”, the oligarchy/billionaires, etc.
Covid really destroyed a lot of people’s trust in the system. When your life has been upended and you’re counting on the government/media/public health to keep you safe, you need accountability. If Fauci gets up early in the pandemic and says masks don’t work, then later on he says they’re mandatory, you feel owed an explanation of why he changed his mind. When he denies sending money to the Wuhan lab and you find out that was a lie, you become more suspicious. And when your aunt gets the vaccine and then ends up with breast cancer, posts about in on social media, and then gets her account disabled, you get angry.
I don’t actually think the Covid vaccine causes cancer, but I can understand why so many people do. It has become clear to a large swathe of the population that our information sources (social media, corporate media) have been compromised. Bidens mental acuity, or lack there of, was further proof. The intelligence agencies endorsing the lab leak theory 3 years after anyone sharing it on social media was banned and called a conspiracy theorist? Further proof. The corporate media serves a function, but that function is not to tell you, the average person, what is really going on. What are the elites really up to? Julian Assange went to jail for trying to tell us that. Who went to Epstein Island??
People want answers, or at least journalists who are willing to ask questions! So you have this whole alternate media ecosystem (with Joe Rogan at the helm) that frankly is the main reason Trump got re elected. I say this as an “elite” - we have to seriously question our dogmas. Academia, the source of our knowledge, has been badly damaged by the woke cult - our top journal (Nature) published a study supposedly refuting the lab leak theory in early 2020, and to my knowledge there have been no consequences. Scientists refuse to publish research that could cast doubt on the current model of gender affirming care for trans kids, and another top journal (the New England Journal of Medicine) recently published a takedown of the Cass review on transgender care that made elementary errors. This should be a scandal. It probably will be, in time.
I’m not saying all elites must support Trump, but they - we - have to face up to the public loss of trust in institutions and the fact that the public is right to be skeptical. Serious errors have occurred. People have been fired for telling the truth. We need to begin the work of getting politics out of our institutions. Rehire and compensate everyone who was fired for expressing a heterodox opinion or refusing a vaccine, get rid of noxious punishments for poorly defined “hate speech,” drastically reduce the number of bureaucrats in academia - we need to return to a time where science was an independent search for truth
> the use of the term "elite/the elites" makes me grind my teeth
The word "elite" conflates a few different things, such as:
* intelligent people
* educated people
* people in positions of power
* experts on a topic
In general, there is probably a positive correlation between any two of them. And yet, there are many people who are visibly one of them but not the other.
There are people with high IQ who say obviously insane things. Credentials mean that you have successfully attended the university, but not that you actually understand the topic. People in positions of power sometimes have selfish reasons to lie. Even experts on one topic can be overconfident on another topic.
It is generally better to side with the smart than with the stupid, with the educated instead of the uneducated, and with the experts instead of people who get their information from social media. But demanding obedience to any of these groups means demanding obedience to their worst (but vocal) members.
The "elites" that people decry are I think just the elitely well-connected; those with no particular abilities but who happen to have met and scratched the backs of the right people.
And with good reason. In every society (indeed in every large organisation) the people with elite talent compete against the people with elite connections for power. How well the organisation does as a whole is heavily dependent on who wins that competition.
Being elite is a state of mind; either yours or someone else’s. If you get to the top of the game in some pursuit, there are going to be quite a few people who refer to you as elite.
Or you could just consider yourself a cut above, and be magnanimous about it. If you consider yourself a cut above and treat other people badly, then you are no longer elite, you are an asshole.
What would happen if you had hyperinflation at the same time as an AI-driven explosion in GDP? Would the two cancel each other out? How long could that last?
Indeed, why wouldn't governments choose to hyperinflate when the primary reason not to is suddenly lifted? I suggest that not only would hyperinflation be contemplated by governments (at least at the dawn of AGI) but that it would be sold as a "positive force, necessary to stabilize the economy" during rapid expansion.
The practical effect would be that early returns would be small relative to technological benefits, and we may not notice we're living through a revolution until after it's over. Perhaps the biggest side effect would be stabilizing government balance sheets in the near term.
(Hyperinflation, a.k.a., price level growing at an accelerating rate) + (AI-driven explosion, a.k.a., RGDP growing at an accelerating rate) = NGDP growing at an increasingly-accelerating rate.
All goods won't change their cost equally. An AI explosion probably won't decrease the cost of eggs...at least not for quite awhile, and probably not all that much. So hyperinflation could easily lead to $500/egg. Not exactly an ideal situation.
What would an AI driven explosion in GDP actually mean? In reality, this mostly means people investing even more money into the stocks of AI or AI adjacent companies. If hyperinflation is occurring, AI would do nothing to stop or slow it down. People closest to the stream of printed money would just take it and invest it into NVIDIA stock or something else.
Or maybe it looks like established Public Choice politics. Robots put a million truckers out of a job so suddenly their votes can be bought. Robots automate picking and shipping so millions of Amazon workers demand special subsidies, or an expansion in the scope and mission of unemployment. Social safety net programs have always been the political process we pay to maintain market disruptions. Why should that change?
Yes, while hyper expansion strengthens it. The government becomes the largest consumer in an expanded market ... moreso than it already is. But it's not the difference between 2022 and 2025 sized markets, it's the difference between 1950 and 2025, or more. A chaotic adjustment period, to be sure.
I've heard that prevention is a lot easier than a cure.
The most effective prevention is just to drink a huge amount of water, as alcohol dehydrates you, while the extra urination cleans out the toxins faster. I don't drink so often, but when I do I put a liter of water next to my bed, force myself to drink more than I naturally would, and this seems to reduce the effects of hangover's the next day. Another thing I've seen is to eat heavy foods beforehand, as this helps level out the absorption of alcohol into your system, making it easier for your body to deal with.
Best of all is to just reduce alcohol consumption a bit. Maxing out at 5 drinks instead of 6 might be the difference between a major hangover, and a slight headache.
Right, but if you break down the alcohol without it getting into your bloodstream, is this not effectively similar to not drinking alcohol or drinking lowe-proof alcohol?
Ah, I see what you mean. Looking at their site, it seems like the alcohol is absorbed as usual, then the byproduct acetaldehyde (which causes hangovers) is broken down into benign components by the genetically engineered bacteria. Based on this: https://zbiotics.com/pages/how-it-works
If you've got the wherewithal to buy herbal supplements over the internet, you've got the wherewithall to just drink two pints of water before going to bed— the most effective way I've found of avoiding a hangover.
Hi everyone, I’ve recently launched an MVP for Popper, a public platform for stress-testing bold, falsifiable ideas. It’s inspired by Karl Popper’s philosophy of science: users post conjectures (e.g. "Free will is an illusion", "AGI requires embodiment"), and others attempt to refute them with counterarguments, evidence, or counterexamples.
Each idea must be falsifiable - no vague opinions, no tribal takes - and the platform supports tagging by domain (AI, economics, philosophy, science, etc).
Key twist: monetary bounties.
Users can attach real money to their conjectures to attract serious, thoughtful refutations. Think of it as rational discourse with actual skin in the game.
Why build this?
Science has tilted toward publish-or-perish corroboration rather than genuine falsification. Popper flips that: refutation is rewarded, not punished. It’s also different from prediction markets - not so much about betting on time-bound outcomes, but pressure-testing conjectures, potentially before they harden into consensus.
Who might benefit:
• Researchers and scientists seeking pre-publication scrutiny
• Companies challenging strategic assumptions
• EA orgs validating priorities before scaling
• Rationalists who want an open, high-signal space for intellectual "combat"
Yes absolutely. I would describe myself as more EA-adjacent than deep into the rationalist sphere, and I think most of the value of a platform like this would come from it being used by scientists and entrepreneurs. If it has any chance of succeeding though, it would have to have a core of early adopters, and rationalists may provide that.
Thanks Monkyyy. I think you signed up with username only as I can't see your first and last name in the backend, which you would need in order to use a title. Of course, I'd appreciate it if you didn't abuse the nascent system I've just created :)
- It shows your email address publicly when you add to a bounty. That should probably be communicated ahead of time, or otherwise hidden. This is a one-way street to significant spam, and many people will find privacy issues.
- There's no verification or payment collection when setting up a bounty. If I put down a bounty, what's to actually enforce me paying that bounty should someone successfully refute the claim?
- What are the conditions for accepting a refutation? If the person who pays is the judge of whether or not something is refuted, you're going to get a lot of circumstances where people offer a bounty, but don't admit when something is refuted.
- None of the current bounties seem unfalsifiable, or are trivially falsifiable. For:
"Markets Are Efficient Information Processors
Financial markets efficiently incorporate all available information into asset prices, making it impossible to consistently achieve returns that beat the market average through skilled stock selection or market timing."
Wouldn't a wikipedia link to Jim Simons disprove this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons He made consistent outsized returns for literally decades, so apparently this is wrong.
For others it seems unfalsifiable or prohibitively difficult:
"Consciousness Requires Biological Substrate" Solving this in a way that could resolve a market would require creating a theory of consciousness, then testing against every possible way to create it without a biological substrate. Even if we had clark-tech that allows us to measure consciousness, and the computing power and knowledge necessary to theoretically create consciousness on a digital substrate, but failed to do so, we would find it difficult to say that consciousness ever "requires" a biological substrate, as the failure to replicate it somewhere else could always be a failure in technique, rather than possibility.
I think if this is going to work, it would need better examples showing what a falsifiable claim should look like, and strict criteria of what constitutes something that's been falsified. Maybe a good example is: "Malaria nets are the most effective charitable donation on a [age adjusted human life saved per dollar] metric." I can see some EA people putting a bounty like that up, and it seems at least in theory falsifiable.
This wouldn't be so much setting a bounty on argument though (which I think will not work too well as people are already intrinsically motivated to argue effectively yet apparently haven't been convinced), but might work for setting a bounty on "information" like the EA example. I.E. there is some base-level truth that is unknown, or debatable, but no one intelligent is putting in the right level of research. Basically, you'd be paying for Gwern-level research into random topics, only paid out when that research is done. If you want to have info on some interesting diet, like eating only potatoes (https://dynomight.net/potato-diet/), you create a bounty for someone to create a detailed n=1 (or more) study in the vein of these independent researchers.
It doesn't have much activity, but I imagine that's because it's little known, there's no enforcement mechanism (besides reputation), so it doesn't attract much interest as it's too inconvenient.
For context I deployed this the day before yesterday, it's very much still a "usable demo" to gauge interest before I commit any more time and effort to it.
Thanks for your point on privacy. I changed it so users can now choose the degree of anonymity they'd like to have on the platform, and launched the ability to add usernames, names, titles, and organisations.
Regarding the falsifiability criteria, this would have to be further defined. I think a bigger problem is moderating the payouts. Basically making sure refutations that meet the criteria are paid out. I think a mix between objective criteria and AI + human moderation might solve that.
I also haven't deployed the financial features yet - it's just numbers on a screen for the time being, but this won't be terribly difficult to implement.
Having said that, would you use this platform if I deployed the bounty system and clarified the falsifiability criteria?
Thanks for sharing the links. Another source of inspiration is the Change My View subreddit.
Personally, I can't think of any beliefs that I want falsified that I'd crowdsource an answer to. For any belief I hold, there's usually ample writing about that belief, and I don't see why prompting a random stranger to try and refute me would perform any better than finding the best existing writings on a subject. For more obscure stuff, I don't really have a strong enough belief to warrant it refuted, or otherwise it's probably unfalsifiable.
I like the idea of "set a bounty for intellectual work", but I think it will be difficult to translate this into something that works for an argument. Looking through the top r/changemyview posts this month, they all either seem political (and therefore a matter of opinion), obviously true (Ex. The claim they did not bring dire wolves back from extinction. They didn't) or unfalsifiable (Ex. Television does not have enough female anti-heroes). Looking through the comments on changemyview, it seems there's a very low bar for what is considered convincing. Almost no comments link to any sources, and the ones that do are quite clearly the first study someone found on google that validates the point they are trying to make. It seems more like an arena for making "convincing" soundbites, rather than intellectual argument, which is probably a fun game to play online, but in the era of ChatGPT I find it hard to see where the demand will come from to pay for refutations.
But I don't really know what people would be into. I think you'd get a better idea of what might work if you added real bounties that you think people might actually create themselves. Try it with live people, put $10 or so of your own money into bounties (after creating a payout system, Stripe is good for this) and see if you get responses.
It depends on the level of dedicated effort necessary. I already disagree with people online often enough, and I do that for free, and I can 100% imagine there are people out there who are chronically online, but quite intelligent, would would be quite happy for the opportunity.
If it was similar enough to what I already do, then I'd be more than happy to get paid to do it. If it required a lot of additional effort, I probably wouldn't.
I hoped ACX revisits discussion about Covid, here 5 years after the first lockdowns and almost every nations have essentially declared over. In hindsight, what actually works and doesn't? How about Delta? Omicron? The last article in 2021 is written right before those supercharged variants. I guess there's already the lab leak debate but that's different.
“Do you have a steelman for how the multiple strains coming from animal storage areas, etc, would work with a zoonotic outbreak?”
————————
“The most striking finding was the co-localization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and animal DNA/RNA on the same swabs or samples collected from specific locations, such as stalls, cages, and carts associated with the wildlife trade. Raccoon dog genetic material was found to be particularly abundant in some SARS-CoV-2-positive samples from the wildlife stalls. This discovery provided strong circumstantial evidence directly linking the virus to susceptible animals present in the specific market locations where spillover was hypothesized to occur, significantly strengthening the zoonotic origin hypothesis and directly countering the earlier claims that no such link could be established from the data.”
….
“The existence of lineages A and B so early in the outbreak provides strong support for the hypothesis of multiple zoonotic introductions of the virus into the human population, likely occurring at the Huanan market. Seminal work by Pekar et al. (2022) in Science used phylodynamic modeling and epidemic simulations to analyze the early genomic diversity. Their findings indicated that it was highly improbable that one lineage evolved from the other within the human population during the short timeframe of the early outbreak without leaving detectable intermediate forms.
Instead, their analyses strongly favored a scenario involving at least two separate introductions of the virus from an animal reservoir into humans. This implies that viruses ancestral to both lineage A and lineage B were likely co-circulating in the animal population(s) that served as the source for the human infections. The Huanan market, with its documented sale of numerous live wild mammals, provides a plausible setting for repeated exposure and multiple independent spillover events to occur over a short period.”
I would like someone to actually steelman the wet market evidence and go over the multiple strains coming from animal storage areas and how that would work with a lab leak.
It seems like in the zeitgeist of making zingers about the lab leak I’ve seen very little actually engaging with any of the science for years now.
If the lab leak happened then the Chinese Government covered it up, so I'm not sure it makes any sense to take any of the wet market research at face value.
"If the murder happened then the criminal covered it up, so I'm not sure it makes any sense to take any of the crime scene investigation at face value."
It's more like "If the police did the murder then the police covered it up so I'm not sure it makes any sense to take the police's own reporting on the crime scene at face value, and nobody else had access to the crime scene for the next three years".
Do you have a steelman for how the multiple strains coming from animal storage areas, etc, would work with a zoonotic outbreak?
Because it's the same hypothetical thing, except where you have the step "an infected animal comes through the back door in a crate, then coughs all over a vendor and/or some other animals and now they're all infected, cue pandemic", you have the step "an infected lab tech comes through the front door, then coughs all over a vendor and/or his as animals..."
Including, if you think it's necessary, a period where it spreads unnoticed within the market and does a bit of quick natural selection for its new environment before turning into a visible superspreader event.
A wet market is obviously a stronger attractor for infected wild animals than it is for infected laboratory technicians, so you should a priori be thinking "probably zoonotic", but not by such an overwhelming margin that other evidence can't shift the needle.
Obtaining a smoking gun requires on the ground work in Wuhan. Lab leak mania in the US thourougly burned those bridges. You're never getting any more data.
But if you accept there were probably multiple strains transmitting from areas of animal storage in the wet market , it greatly reduces the likelihood of the lab leak, which is odd considering how everyone has piled on the lab leak train in the last few years.
" Lab leak mania in the US" - really? what alternative universe is this coming from? The US I live in had a near-prohibition on the lab leak theory for the first two years of COVID, while China did everything to obfuscate COVID origins, including pretending it came form the US. We weren't getting any data then, so pretending that somehow now it's our fault we won't be getting any data is slightly daft (ok not slightly, it's fucking ridiculous).
We, the US, do all kinds of bad shit, but not everything bad in the world is our fault. China is perfectly capable of doing bad shit too, without any prodding from across the ocean.
Mania meaning exactly this kind of breathless reply I'm afraid. We had some good working relationships with scientists who worked there in spite of their government and ours, now it's much harder, particularly now we've fired all the Chinese postdocs (spies).
Agreed. This has been the obvious endpoint since around April/May 2020 - as soon as we started seeing community spread on multiple continents.
Vaccine eradication worked really well ... once, for smallpox. We got close for polio, but it's still not at 100% many decades into the effort. Maybe someday. Then this new disease comes along and suddenly everyone thinks we'll somehow get to zero cases just because there's a vaccine?
I remember when there was heavy censorship, and know-nothing journalists were promoting the idea of zero COVID, if only everyone would just practice social distancing ... despite the early evidence of spread in dogs, deer, and a dozen other species. Like what, you're going to vaccinate all the squirrels? Get stray cats to social distance?
> know-nothing journalists were promoting the idea of zero COVID
Yeah part of what motivates me was seeing comments lamenting that "if only Trump was doing this and that, we'd have zero COVID and skip all these suffering!" But seeing the data on China and all further variants, it seems like zero COVID was never even slightly probable and we should've focused on economy after all? I think I'm going too extreme in the other direction here, but that's why I was a sane summary.
By April, we knew who vulnerable pop was. Solution: 12m free grocery delivery and door dash for anyone over 65, plus ID nurses, docs, caregivers who are + for COVID antibodies, and pay them extra to cocoon the elderly.
The vax was great, but the EUA never should have been expanded to everyone.
I have a somewhat radical economic idea. But I'm pretty convinced it would work.
We have never had a truly free market due to the existence of captive markets. I propose regulating the captive markets (housing, food, healthcare) into non-issues. That would leave a free market for truly entrepreneurial efforts. The savings to entrepreneurs in their business costs (real estate costs, employee health savings, costs associated with unhappy employees, taxes associated with social benefits) would enable them to provide an actual living wage to all employees. Each person earning a living wage (similar to auto workers in the 50s) would provide all sorts of societal benefits--uncoupling spending power from marriage, type of job, and questionable ethical side effects. In this system there would be 3 classes, basically. The majority of people would be 'working class' to include everyone from fast food workers to skilled labor. They would all earn a living wage--enough for each single person to pay their expenses (housing, food, healthcare, education) and have some for extra spending and some for saving. The upper middle class would be for college educated/extremely skilled workers (tech/science, etc.) and also for military/firefighters/police/EMT in order to compensate them for extra risk. The uppermost class would have no upper limit and would be strictly entrepreneurial. Due to the potential stability and prime conditions for entrepreneurs to do their best work, they would be more prone to be benevolent and willing to invest in education and public works. It would be hugely to their advantage to have a K-12 system that produced educated, good workers.
This is just a basic outline of a system I've been working on for quite some time.
The state of our country/society is definitely what is called a 'wicked problem.' You'd have to change many things all at one time to make this work. Someone should give me some territory so I can try it and see if it works!
Caution; This would subsidize and encourage jobs that use labor unproductively, eg : using via using unproductive or ineffective tools, methods, or processes. I don't like this.
I guess an example would help. Imagine a kitchen that doesn't bother to purchase a food processor and instead relies on knife skills. Or a workplace that has excessive beurocracy, because the company can now support more employees doing not very much.
Those businesses would still be operating in a competitive environment with each other. If it takes you $20 with subsidized labor to make a meal and me $30 with subsidized labor, you could support a business selling the meal at $28 and I can't.
Hmm, yeah, you are correct in that efficiency is still important, but it does impact capital to labor ratio on the margins.
Car washes are one of those things that are sensitive to that. Like if the price of labor is less then it's not worth investing in expensive machines and cheaper to go with hand washers.
If there's a specific type of machine you want produced or used you can subsidize that too.
In general I'm not sure this is a bad thing, when the labor is around - even getting rid of min wage laws by itself would likely have this effect, and would be good economically on this count
That sounds pretty exploitable. E.g. you and I employ each other for X=$0 and get $10 each from the government. At that point a UBI seems like a better solution.
I don't think it necessarily has to be fraud. It's just suddenly very attractive to pay one's spouse/friends/family $5 for things that one otherwise wouldn't have paid $5 for – and surely there is no law against employing someone because you want to help them out?
But I did coincidentally recently learn from an Italian acquaintance that in her country, subsidized employment is common, and that what happens is clear-cut fraud in that the employer pockets a substantial part of the subsidy and the employee ends up making below minimum wage.
Worst case scenario on the former, we've created a $10 UBI in some cases.
Still more attractive to have your friends work a job you or another employer would actually pay $5 for, but there would absolutely be some of this
The latter is an issue, your options are harsher controls, unions, or subsidizing more so enough goes to the employee (based on elasticity ratios or something).
I would think unions would stop that sort of thing
He could have run into a couple jerks. There are enough of them the in the world. It’s also possible he copped an arrogant attitude and security was responding in kind. I had a not so bright manager around 2000 who started getting sarcastic right out of the chute returning from Canada to the US and the encounter was less than pleasant.
I started reading that expecting some big tale of woe involving hours of detention, strip searches et cetera.
Instead it seems like the US border patrol asked a total of thirteen questions to ascertain what he was doing in Canada, briefly looked at the contents of his car, and then let him go.
This is in contrast to the Canadian border patrol, which only asked seven questions before letting him go. But then again, he was a lot more forthcoming with the Canadian agent, answering "I'm visiting TD Bank to sign some documents" to the first question whereas it took three questions from the US guy to get exactly the same answer -- why?
Maybe the border guards got bored and started a competition to see who could do their duty in the fewest questions. Canada's in the lead! Your turn, Americans!
Yeah, his horrific experience of totalitarian oppression even as a wealthy white cis het male boiled down to "border guards doing their job" because golly gosh, people do smuggle drugs and money across and back, and yeah "I don't live or work in Canada, I don't have a residence there, but I just went to open a Canadian bank account and deposit money" is in fact a suspicious activity, friend. If you don't want to sound like a money mule laundering drug money, then don't act like one.
"The roughly 100 organized crime groups operating in Canada (including three groups dedicated to supplying fentanyl) are partly drawn to loopholes and lax penalties that allow fentanyl-related money-laundering operations to flourish, according to researchers.
"The discussion about fentanyl is closely tied in to money-laundering in two ways," says Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College and Queen's University and author of Dirty Money: Financial Crime in Canada.
..."As a result of the overproduction of fentanyl [in Canada], some of this spills over into the United States," said Leuprecht. He added that organized crime groups choose Canada because it puts them inside of what was, at least before the threat of tariffs, a free-trade zone. "That is not by accident. That is by design because it reduces your risk. It reduces your detection," he said.
...Canadian banks in particular are popular because they operate retail branches both in Canada and the U.S., making it easier for criminals to bank on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border using one institution and thereby reducing their chances of detection, according to Leuprecht.
A recent crisis at TD Bank, for example, saw the financial institution admitting that its lax anti-money laundering regime allowed fentanyl traffickers to launder $670 million through its American branches."
"What’s it going to be, fatass? You gonna arrest us for opening a checking account?"
If they had done, Mr. Smartass here wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Brave enough to make jeering remarks safely online, not so brave as to say it to the face of the guy with a gun. We can all be that kind of brave.
Ironically, "That thing you're talking about is bad but it almost never happens" is the standard anti/non-woke retort to most woke complaints. Sexism is bad but it "almost" never happens, Rape is bad but it "almost" never happens, and so on. It was traditionally the **Woke** position to argue that (1) $BAD_THING is nowhere as rare as we would like to believe (2) Even one instance of $BAD_THING is one too many (3) Why do you want to stifle debate about $BAD_THING anyway? Isn't that a bit suspicious? Say that Rape is rare, why don't we get to talk about it anyway?
I'm not calling you woke, but it's an interesting reversal (and one that woke apologists are all too willing to engage in) to be "Victim-Skeptic" against anti/non-wokes.
A similar reversal happened with micro-aggressions and lived experience. Traditionally, it was the woke who were in favour of employing these concepts, and the anti-woke who tended to dismiss them; now, it seems, unless you can provide statistical evidence that at least X number of people were fired specifically due to wokeness, any complaints you might have about living in a woke environment are groundless.
> they blew up excesses of wokeness out of all proportion to their frequency
It is quite difficult to guess the frequency, if the topic is a *taboo*. First it seems like it never happens... then one day it happens to *you*, and you suddenly update a lot in the opposite direction. (This is sometimes called a "red pill" moment.)
But tell me, is it really an epistemic mistake, as a policy, to update a lot when the supposedly rare thing happens to you? I mean, if the thing is very rare, then the probability that it happens to you should be very low, so the expected harm of updating too much is also low. I mean, suppose that something happens to one person in a million. When that happens, you may see 1 person screaming hysterically that it is everywhere around us, but still 999999 people who mostly don't buy it. That won't change the outcome of the elections. And if, let's say, 1% of the population gets "red-pilled" based on their personal experience, then the thing is actually *not* that rare... it happens to 1% of the population. (If being a target is correlated with having some traits, and you have those traits, then the risk to you personally is even higher.)
> 99% of the cases were just social disapproval with no material consequences on the speaker, compared to speakers facing deportation, imprisonment, or at least loss of federal funding and contracts like today.
Before Trump 2, it was not obvious to me that deportation and imprisonment were the thing that I was supposed to compare to. Losing federal funding and contracts seems comparable to getting fired, which happened to a few people.
And it was not just "if you say X, you can get fired", but sometimes "unless you write a convincing statement about your contribution to anti-X, you won't even get hired", which means that the number of people impacted was much greater than the number of people fired. (To compare, imagine a university that has 5 black students, fires all of them, and publicly makes a statement never to admit a black student again. The harm was done not only to the 5 students who were fired, but also to any who considered applying, but then they clearly saw that they had no chance. Reducing this to "only 5 students were fired, ever" would not describe the situation faithfully.)
> Wokeness never coerced people the way Trump is.
Yes. But again, before Trump 2, it was not obvious to me that "as bad as Trump 2" is the line where I am allowed to start complaining about something.
To put into perspective, the McCarthy witch hunts definitely affected a greater number of people in the entertainment world, the news media, and academia. Best estimates are that 10,000 to 12,000 people faced significant career damage (job loss, blacklisting, or being barred from their professionsn) during the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges.
While the highest estimates (even from conservative commentators) is that there were at most in the low hundreds of high-profile individuals who were publicly "canceled" or had their career opportunities curbed by the woke mobs. But the *documented* number who lost their jobs is less than a hundred.
Unlike McCarthyism, there was no formal blacklist or government role (despite what the rightwingnuts tell you). Many affected individuals eventually recovered or rebuilt their careers in the rightwing media complaining about wokeness.
And today, how many people have lost their jobs because something they said or did involved DEI? If we include the DOGE layoffs and canceled research grants, I think we're pushing at least 100,000 people who have been negatively affected economically by the Woke backlash.
How many people lost jobs or refused to apply because there were DEI-related statements they were required to submit in order to get or keep their position? How many got overlooked for promotions for the same? How many didn't go to college because college admissions overlooked their essays or other submissions because they did not reflect the ideology of the college?
I don't have answers to these questions, but it seems these numbers are going to be much higher than the verified numbers of people actively fired. "Being barred from their profession" seems to apply to most or all of these activities, which is honestly a pretty low bar for both woke and McCarthy.
Out of curiosity, who was documenting the people who lost jobs, and what was their criteria? I seem to recall that the Charlottesville rally had more than that, and the people who attended it were hounded and fired all over the country. I find it hard to believe that the number who lost jobs was lower than the number at Charlottesville, let alone multiple years of cancellations. I can definitely see it being hard to determine why people got fired and directly attribute the numbers to a specific cause - employers would be reluctant to provide that information at the least.
"How many people lost jobs or refused to apply because there were DEI-related statements they were required to submit in order to get or keep their position?"
Probably not many. Every single employer I've ever worked for has trivially required some level of either signing an agreement I wouldn't sign if it weren't required or speaking in ways that don't accurately reflect my beliefs as part of the conditions of employment.[1] Usually both. It tends to be utterly banal stuff like "don't say negative things about your employer while you're representing them." Even attending public school in the U.S. has often involved participating in patriotic rituals that (one imagines) many students don't hold with.
Nodding along with your employers next silly (but reasonably harmless) whim is a vital job skill almost everywhere as far as I can tell. In order for somebody to lose a job because of "DEI-related statements" specifically would require either them to be brand new to the working world and ignorant of this pattern (in which case they weren't going to get very far anyway) or to hold these *specific* statements as crossing some unacceptable line that doesn't apply to any of the other, similar bullshit that's existed for years and years. I'm sure long term exposure to the state-of-the-art petty conflict generation machine that is the internet makes if feel like the latter sort of person *must* be exceedingly common, but I doubt it's actually true.
[1] And that's not even getting into implicit social stuff like "don't say rude things to your coworkers even if you believe they deserve to hear them."
Maybe, but we're all just going to spitball numbers that sound correct to us. I think that's essentially the same source for the McCarthy numbers being compared - somebody doing some loose spitballing.
This would also vary considerably between the companies that don't really care but do it because that's what everyone else is doing (and then I would agree with you fully) and two other versions of the same. There could be the true believers that don't just want you to check a box, but publicly proclaim how much and in what ways you care about the subject. Then there's also the ones that measure how much you can regurgitate the appropriate shibboleths and you actually need to know the ins and outs of performatory language enough to fool true believers.
Can people still fake this to get or keep a job? Sure, but it gets a lot harder. We can imagine that a company that requires you to talk about how much you hate black people is going to have some people balk at that or fail to impress the hiring committee even if they're willing to lie for a job.
Well, we don't need to spitball the fact that roughly $1.1 billion in NIH grants have been canceled (per Reuters). Of them, 145 NIH grants dedicated to HIV research, amounting to nearly $450 million, were terminated (per the Guardian). And BTW, you may not care about HIV (because it's been mislabeled by the rightwingnuts as a "gay disease"), but there's nothing like an immunocompromising pathogen to turn humans into walking Gain of Function experiments for other pathogens.
And the NSF has identified over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion that have been cancelled. Although there were a dozen or so million dollars worth of grants that were canceled because they dealt with LGBTQ health issues (remember the transgenic/transgender mide?), the Chronicle of Higher Education identified that the DEI statements seemed to be the one variable was shared between all these grants that caused them to be cancelled.
Contracts between tenure-track STEM researchers and universities are for limited terms and often expire if there are no funds from grants coming in. Postdoc salaries are paid entirely from grants. Depending on the contract the institution has with the NIH or NSF between 30 and 50% of the grant goes towards salaries. So just spitballing it there's between $1 billion and $1.5 billion of salaries that have just been slashed. Researchers are losing their jobs because universities can't pick up the slack.
So, the anti-DEI witch hunt is obviously much more damaging to a greater number of people than anything the wokesters did.
+1. The number of people who chose to stay silent is impossible to measure with exactness, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. I personally knew many who kept their jobs, only because they didn't say anything beyond a few Green Grocer statements. The woke movement included a large number of people who could take the soapbox in public or in their organizations and companies, complain about injustice, command actual resources allocated to their complaints, and could declare opponents as heretics (and even today, now attempt to assert that they barely had any impact, despite their embrace by the entire Democratic Party for over a decade).
The McCarthyites were powerful too, in their non-social-media-saturated time. It's very possible that students of the McCarthyites learned the lesson of not sticking their heads up once a few examples had been made.
Well, if you can't measure it, it's just anecdata. I'd say the anti-woke backlash is much more destructive of people's livelihoods than anything wokesters caused. But feel free to complain that there's been a giant conspiracy against white males. No doubt it was George Soros's doing. But now the worm has turned, and the Whitehouse is pursuing MEI — Moron equity initiative — to ensure that the most unqualified white morons get posts in his administration.
I don't think there's a giant conspiracy against white males. I think there's a low-level distributed antagonism towards white males, reminiscent of low-level distributed antagonism towards lots of other groups of people throughout history. Reasonable people thought that sort of thing was bad enough to give it a name beginning with P, and don't think highly of people who think their particular target for low-level distributed antagonism is okay this time.
Alex Jones was fined for repeatedly lying about people's dead kids and suggesting that it was all fake and they were all actors. People whose kids got murdered subsequently got harassed by people who thought this was true. This isn't just "being a dick", it's slander, and he ignored the incredibly predictable consequences of his repeated, broadcast lies, not mention how fucked up they were for people to hear about even if they didn't lead to harassment.
And that's not "a political view", it's just a bizarre lie. It might be a little right-coded but he was punished for doing something really brazenly illegal over and over again, to a group of people who had already suffered a terrible loss.
And lots of right-leaning institutions have received federal funding, they're called "religious groups". And abstinence-only sex education programs.
I agree it's a bizarre lie, but the media comes up with bizarre lies all the time. Can you reasonably argue that the damages here are larger tha any other libel case in US history? Millions I can imagine, but billions?
$1.4 billion dollars! The only one that comes close is a similarly Biden-era case against Fox News for $787 million. The third largest is a mere $177 million settlement between ABC and Beef Products Inc, and it seems plausible that the lie in this case really did cause $177 million worth of damage to the business in question.
Incomparable but interesting fact from that article, Lord Aldington was awarded £1.5 million (never paid) from Count Tolstoy (not that one, his grand^x-nephew) in 1989 for accusations of involvement in a war crime.
Alex Jones wasn't targeted for his political ideology. If he'd stuck to saying Obama or Biden was putting chemicals in our water, he'd probably still have his platform. As other people have pointed out, he accused people of making up the Sandy Hook shooting, deliberately called out all of the people who lost children as "crisis actors," for which many of them received death threats from his supporters and had to go into hiding.
I'm curious how A) you find a comparable "bizarre lie" from the mainstream media and B) how you even justify such a thing as ideological. Sure, the fact that children were shot was horribly inconvenient for the pro-gun lobby on the right, but the pushback against that "we still have a second amendment right" not "these people are making it up."
Again, if Alex Jones had just said "shame about what happened but I'll be damned if I let them take away our guns over it" he would not have been sued and would still have a platform.
Also, Jones kept repeatedly making further claims DURING the trial, including that the suicide of one of his victims was actually a murder related to the Mueller investigation. And he repeatedly withheld evidence he was ordered to turn over. I bet if you count up the number of individual times he slandered/libeled somebody times the number of people he was lying about, or committed another crime related to this, it's in the tens of thousands.
Jones is a total sociopath who absolutely deserved what he got and was completely unable to be deterred by anything until he was ruined financially. He had so many opportunities to do better, and making him out to be some kind of martyr for the Right is, if anything, just extraordinary embarrassing to the Right.
None of them faced deportation, but Trump faced prison. Dozens of people working for Trump were imprisoned during his term. There weren't any right leaning institutions threatened with losing funding because leftists preferred to just threaten those 'right leaning' institutions into bending left. That is why you had Raytheon advertising pride month.
Hmmm. Biden was convicted of lying about his drug use when purchasing a handgun, and convicted of several felony charges for tax evasion. He had long ago made good on what he owed the IRS, and normally people don't go to prison if they pay up. As for purchasing a gun under false pretenses, I suspect half the gun owners in America haven't lied about their drug use.
As for Hillary, the special counsel declined to prosecute.
Now, tell me again how innocent people have gone to prison for being anti-woke?
> just social disapproval with no material consequences
Social disapproval is a material consequence. These social matters do not occur in a vacuum. Approval by those in power concerns matters of employment, commerce, political agency, etc. Is it any wonder, then, that people would seek to shift society to put themselves on top?
Where would you put practices like debanking on that list? Also, how do we determine what is correct when disfavored groups receive much worse punishments for similar crimes, compared to favored groups?
IDK, it seems to me that more people commit suicide over (perceived) (threat of) social ostracism than over being impoverished. Even in cases where somebody kills themselves after losing their job, the fear is more often "Everyone will think I'm a loser and I'll be a laughing stock to my friends and family" rather than "I'll have to make do with a smaller house and a cheaper car."
Because insisting that other people not liking you is equivalent to being jailed is obviously insane, and would be much more coercive than cancel culture to enforce?
How is it relevant whether it's better or worse than anything else? I'm simply asking why the right should be expected to accept the status quo. Surely you would expect them to prefer not to be coerced at all, and actively work towards that goal?
If you are trying to work towards not being coercively punished for speech, then launching a massive government effort to coercively punish people for speech in even worse ways is not "working towards that goal."
A common way to decide whether someone should accept something is to compare it to other things that people are/aren't required to accept and then judge how similar the thing under consideration is.
If cancel culture is coercive and bad, and this is a strong reason to oppose cancel culture, then if you propose something even more coercive, that's good reason to believe it should be even more strongly opposed.
People should tolerate not being liked because there is no obligation for other people to like them: the only methods I can even think of for enforcing such a standard are so ludicrous that even if they weren't comically onerous they would be impractical anyway.
Like, what do you think is a reasonable response for someone on the right upon discovering that someone doesn't like them for their views that remedies this? What are you imagining here?
It’s fascinating that you think that. Do you know anyone who works in academia? Are you aware that the number of professors fired for expressing heterodox views over the past 10 years is higher than were fired for Communism during the McCarthy era?
It's worth noting that professors weren't the primary victims of the red scare; 3000 longshoremen were fired for example.
Overall, Wikipedia cites historian Ellen Schrecker for the claim that hundreds of people were imprisoned and on the order of 10000 lost their jobs.
So, one should probably account for that in comparing wokeness and McCarthyism.
Finally, even strictly comparing professors, you probably want to normalize for the number of academics in America; given the growth in the proportion of Americans who are college educated, I suspect the denominator is much bigger than it was during McCarthyism.
Not OP but I'm aware that a bunch of scientists and academics who grudgingly voted for Trump due to concerns about wokeness and deeply regretted it once Trump declared war on science.
If you read the articles, you discover Trump's objectives seem to be purging wokeness from academia. Clearly the purpose of a system is what it does, so the conclusion is, because of (not yet final) science funding withholding Trump must have declared war on science. :\
I object to your assumption that I cannot be convinced of anything, as I consider myself to be scientific-minded, and thus am swayed by evidence. But a scientific outlook also causes one to see how a proposed interpretation of something can be wrong, and then to determine which interpretation is the truth.
To be clear, I'm against cutting science funding, as it would be bad for the advancement of the country, and am especially against it the way it is being done in such a fast, heavy-handed, and apparently thoughtless way. My objection is simply to the "war on science" message, which sounds like the objective is to eliminate science.
He's significantly cut funding for a lot of important science research. And also tried to coerce universities by threatening to withhold research funding until they've made a sufficiently dramatic show of cracking down on wokeness.
That sounds like he's doing things of which you disapprove, but it hardly constitutes a "war on science". I would imagine such a war would include shuttering NASA, scrapping NSF funding, and maybe something like appointing non-science friends to posts like heading the FDA. And also some kind of edict like making it treason to collaborate with foreign scientists.
so (very unusually for me) I wrote my Representative:
Dear Representative Timmons,
I am deeply grateful for many of the Trump Administration's initiatives, notably securing our borders against illegals, rolling back Woke, and ending DEI.
I am concerned, however, at the cuts being made in the science budgets of the Federal Government.
The United States has been a world leader in the sciences, earning 420 Nobel prizes, and I would like to see that continue.
One of the sharp cuts that is proposed is to NASA's science programs, cutting them by nearly 50%.
I'm particularly concerned by the two-thirds cut to heliophysics. That program can easily pay for itself if it even lengthens the warning time for a coronal mass ejection by as little as an hour. It could avoid many billions of dollars of damage when the next Carrington event occurs.
> I would imagine such a war would include shuttering NASA, scrapping NSF funding, and maybe something like appointing non-science friends to posts like heading the FDA. And also some kind of edict like making it treason to collaborate with foreign scientists.
I don't know if you're joking or not, because he's **already done** most of those, and is hard at work on the rest.
I hope all the civil libertarians who found it intolerable to live under such a regime will be equally upset now that people are being kicked out of the country for criticizing Israel.
I'm civil libertarian enough to be upset - to the extent I find the criticisms to be well-founded and not based on propaganda. If they're propaganda, well, that's still protected speech, but it's hard to sympathize when propaganda crowds out speech that isn't. If attention is scarce, I start to ask how it's being allocated, and whether speech from the pro-Israel side is getting the same protection.
(This is complicated from my perspective, which is someone who isn't Israeli, but knows a lot of them, plus a lot of American Jews, and have witnessed them getting lopsided treatment in the press (not in their favor) well before Oct 7. The picture I get post-Oct07, I know has to be incomplete, and I don't have a lot of experience assessing sources beyond simple rules like "any major newspaper in $Country is probably going to be pro-$Country". Reports like "Israelis bombed a hospital in Gaza" turn out to be false or burying the fact that terrorists set up a base there; reports that Netanyahu gets a lot of Israeli criticism seem more plausible. By consequence, I tend to treat assertions that the Israelis are committing genocide as unserious; assertions that the Israeli government is doing something terrible as more serious, but hard to check since it's often citing covert action.
So in general, can of worms, and since I'm not leading any projects over there, I treat it as none of my business and rarely voice any opinions about it.)
But you agree that even if people are just repeating propaganda, showing up in masks and dragging them into vans sets a bad precedent?
EDIT: to be clear, I don't actually have a dog in the Israel/Palastine fight. I criticized one person for saying that "Jews secretly run the government but make it a crime to say it" because that's Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit, but otherwise I don't claim to know enough about what's actually happening to make a strong judgement. BUT, I am very upset by people in the country I live in being kidnapped by the government for speech and then deported after what appear to be show-trials.
That's the thing. I don't know. I'm on the other side of the planet when the dragging happens, and I wasn't following that person around before they got dragged, and I didn't have an opportunity to ask the draggers for their side of the story, and the only reason I even hear of this is because Someone told me, and if I don't know anything about Someone, FAIK Someone is a Shill for Some Side.
That tactic, of flooding the public square with fabrications and half-truths and then hiding behind the free speech principles of people who know better than to make those principles hard to defend, has been played enough times that I can't trust Someone anymore, unless I do the research that I would have done if I had time to interview the dragged and the draggers.
So, I withhold judgement. (And occasionally rant at anyone who insists I pick one or that I pick That One, Not That Other One. Even if it's about stuff they think is an open and shut case.)
There's plenty of evidence on this one. This isn't even a two sides thing where one side is giving a different version of events. TRUMP is saying that he wants colleges to report any non-citizens who protest against Israel directly to the federal government where they will be deported. He's saying he thinks he has that right.
Just to page in, yes I thought that was terrible and that the current happenings are terrible. I am baffled by people who don't share this very very obvious take.
Perhaps now that deportations for critics of Israel are happening, we can talk openly about who actually runs the government, rather than dully repeating the same propaganda from WWII ad nauseum.
The minority group that composes Israel is oppressed and does not run any government or industry outside of Israel and if you ever happen to insinuate that they do that is a very bad form of intolerance and you should therefore apologize publicly and if you do not you are probably a supporter of fascist Nazis and should lose your job ... that old chestnut.
Oh okay, so you're an antisemitic conspiracy theorist. Lot of those on this blog lately pretending to be rationalists. Maybe there always were, but they used to be a lot quieter about it.
I want to give some context here. The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. It ended, by the way, in ’57 when it finally became clear, thanks to the First Amendment, that you couldn’t actually fire people for their ideologies. Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could. This guy is a very doctrinaire communist. “They can’t be just waited. I’m going to fire them.” They thought they actually could do that, and it was only ’57 when the law was established, so right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom, are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States and we’re still seeing these kind of numbers. During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on is I think this came out in ’55, and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being communists and about 90 something professors fired for political views overall that usually is reported as being about 100, so 60, 90, 100 depending on how you look at it.
I think the number is actually higher, but that’s only because of hindsight. What I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors who were fired as time reveals. We’re at 190 professors fired, and I still have to put up with people saying this isn’t even happening, and I’m like, “In the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired. In the 11 years of the Red Scare, probably somewhere around 100, or probably more.” The number’s going to keep going up, but unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I’m still dealing with people who are saying this isn’t happening at all, and it hasn’t been subtle on campus.
We know that’s a wild under count, by the way, because when we surveyed professors, 17% of them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or their research, and one-third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research. Extrapolating that out, that’s a huge number. The reason why you’re not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different conformity inducing mechanisms in the whole thing, and that’s one of the reasons why the idea that you’d add something, like requiring a DEI statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment, is so completely nuts. We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last, particularly since 2017, on campuses. We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with. Under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, “You know what the problem is? We have too much heterogeneous thought. We are not homogeneous enough. We need another political litmus test,” which is nuts.
Since a podcast is not a very good source, I tried to find the original source of these numbers, which seem to be this report by the FIRE organisation:
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.
---
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”
Yeah, he did.
But of course Douglas Hofstadter did not invent the form. In that work, he was referencing the aforementioned classical philosophical works, Zeno specifically, I believe he also referenced Lewis Caroll referencing Zeno at some point, as erudites love chain referencing, but don't quote me on that.
That being said, I don't think there's any meaningful connection between Zeno's paradox speicifically and whatever Scott is doing in this post. It's just a kind of socratic dialogue, and he written in that form before. A long tradition.
Copy that. Thanks!
But Hofsteader _did_ invent whirly art though, right?
Ok, last AI 2027 post, clearly the main source of risk here* is the opacity of the current architectures. This means mechanistic interpretability is a VERY important field, and there should be a serious effort for a Manhattan project of mechanistic interpretability. EA should be throwing its weight behind this, is anything like that happening?
*AI research itself could also be modelled as an X-risk, that's a very spicy take I considered and even wrote on back in 2021.
While I can't comment on your specific proposal...
Please don't worry about "last" AI 2027 post. I think it's super-serious... but at the same time super-irritating because they were all-but-silent on what to do... where to funnel money? where to funnel activism? "what" to tell "who"?
I assume this was because they don't *know* what to do. I certainly don't. The fact that Scott's p(doom) is only 20% means (to me) that even given the scariness of the
scenarios in AI 2027, it's not even clear I *should* do something.
How did your calls to the congress creatures go?
I didn't. Because. Ya know. I don't know if I should. Or what to say (and no one really gave me a good answer).
But... I mean, you proposed we all should do this... You were really-really-really worried...
Given this, do you think maybe your worries about imminent AI apocalypse are... exaggerated?
I know it's weird to call your congressperson, I've done it a few times about the issues I care about. If you are really concerned, you should certainly call and tell them you're worried about AI progress and as a minimum ask what Congress(wo)man's Such-and Such position on this issue.
:-P
I had some convos with Daniel Kokotajlo back in 2021 when I was exploring the notion that it's the AI research community that is the real X-risk here. Reached out to him again, maybe he'll reply. Probably a more productive framing is the interpretability Manhattan project, what can you really do about AI research itself? Vance already says he doesn't think there are any risks to AI, so I don't think a pause is happening. And I have an impression the AI research community is very distributed, so...
Christianity will doom us all.
Deep down, people like JD Vance ALREADY BELIEVE in a "Superintelligence that's stronger than any other Superintelligence" and one that is "perfectly aligned with the best interests of the human race".
i.e. God
And when people truly believe this... as they literally have for thousands of years... "God will save us". As he saved Baghdad and Constantinople. :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(
Ironically, it might be the atheist Chinese who are less dangerous.
I don't think the AI researchers believe in God, and they're really the primary source of risk, so this can more easily be blamed on the scientistic worldview, or on capitalism, or whatever it is that makes most of the AI researchers not take safety seriously (maybe that can be taken as a signal to calm down however).
Anyway, if you're concerned about this, maybe we should be talking through other means. You can email me at: antidyatlov@gmail.com
I think he’s saying that Christians won’t act on A.I. risk because they believe God is all powerful. There’s two competing religions here, although one is a kinda religion/demonology.
He said Christianity will doom us all, but it's not Christians building the (alleged) total planet death machine.
Before the 2024 election, I argued with several people in the rationalist community who ended up voting for Trump that they should vote for Kamala instead, because Trump would try to stay in power for a third term and beyond. The argument that I got most commonly at the time, nearly universally, was "Bro, the constitution says he can't run again!"
Since that time, Trump, his admin, and indeed the GOP have openly argued that Trump will run again for a third term, and have already found plausible loopholes that may allow Trump to do so. Meanwhile, the Trump admin has issued and attempted to enforce executive orders that dramatically increase federal oversight of the election process. And, as the tariff nonsense has shown, we must take Trump literally and seriously when he says he is "not joking" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-term-white-house-methods-rcna198752)
---
Today, I find myself arguing with several people in the rationalist community who (presumably) voted for Trump that they should be deeply concerned about the actions taken against legal immigrants. In particular, the Abrego Garcia case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia). As a quick recap of that case:
- a man illegally came to the US from El Salvador
- he was given a witholding of release in 2019
- he got married, had a child (who is a US Citizen), and committed no crimes / has no criminal record
- he was sent to CECOT in El Salvador; the US government paid to send him there, both in terms of dollars spent on transport and processing, and in terms of money paid to El Salvador to actually have him there
- the government openly admitted that he was sent "in error" but argued in court that they cannot bring him back because he is now in El Salvador's jurisdiction
- the judiciary, including SCOTUS in a 9-0 decision, said that the man must have due process and the government must bring him back, and cited many other cases where the government has done this in the past.
Today, the Trump admin, in partnership with the Salvadoran government, made it clear that they will not do anything to bring him back (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/14/us/trump-news-tariffs). The Salvadoran president goes so far as to say that the man is a terrorist and will never leave. This, of course directly violates the SCOTUS and judiciary order.
Going a step further, in a meeting with El Salvador's president, Trump stated that he would love to send US citizens to El Salvador (this is the second time he has said this openly). El Salvador said they would love to take anyone sent. And El Salvador has said that they will not release anyone, regardless of who asks.
Besides creating an obvious constitutional crisis in which Trump's executives are now going up against SCOTUS, the sheer audacity of the position of the government is astounding.
- we can send anyone we want to the most dangerous prison on the planet, even if we openly admit it is a mistake;
- we won't do anything to fix that mistake;
- no one can compel us to fix that mistake;
- we will find a way to send citizens too
Normally, I end these kinds of posts in these open threads with a question to people in this community who are still, somehow, defending these actions. In the past, those people have said:
- "well they are only going after criminals" which became
- "well they are only going after illegal immigrants" which became
- "well, the people who were previously legal and had their status cancelled deserved it" which became
- "well the state department has the right to cancel anyone's visa and do whatever they want to the people who were previously 'legal'" which became
- "well, if they deport someone who shouldn't, they will fix the problem" which became
- "well SCOTUS will stop the government from doing anything too extreme" which became
- "well, they won't deport citizens"
I am waiting for the inevitable "well the citizens who were deported deserved it".
This all rings the same as "the constitution will protect us if he tries to run for a third term". If you honestly believe any of this wake. the. fuck. up. It's been three months into a 4 year term. Shockingly, for all his faults, Trump is an honest man -- if he says he is going to try to deport US citizens, he will definitely try to deport US citizens!
But really, I don't think people who argue the above are doing so in good faith. I think if anyone in this community is still defending this position, you're living in a pretty radically different world than the one I live in. Regardless of how big a problem mass immigration is, this "fix it at any cost" approach is now actively taking a sledge hammer to all of the pillars of our government. The only other alternative I can imagine -- which I hesitate to consider in seriousness -- is that the people who are supporting this still are doing so gleefully and without principle, secure in the knowledge that for some reason _they_ are not the ones who will ever be on the receiving side (a famously bad way of reasoning about authoritarian regimes).
---
As an aside, I think there's something like a 30% chance that Garcia in particular is already dead. He was sent to CECOT, an open air prison where violent gang members are basically unconstrained in their ability to interact with each other. There is, to put it bluntly, a lot of murder. Depending on sources, within the first year of operation (2022) there was somewhere between 100 and 250 deaths at CECOT. The number of people imprisoned has only increased since then. And I suspect Bukele and the Salvadoran government sees rampant murder within CECOT as a FEATURE and not a bug, and are not inclined to clamp down on that outcome.
I can't speak to Salvadoran politics. Its situation pre Bukele was...pretty bad. And Bukele himself is riding on extremely high popular support. But the US is NOT Salvador. We did not and do not have the kinds of problems that require these extreme measures.
Garcia is a person with no criminal record and who is a father to a US citizen. He is possibly dead.
"he got married, had a child (who is a US Citizen), and committed no crimes / has no criminal record"
I don't know who or what to believe at this stage, because I'm seeing allegations that (1) his wife or ex-wife brought him to court over domestic violence allegations (2) he was maybe bringing in other illegal immigrants for work, transporting or trafficking them (pick your choice of term). So there are all kinds of stories floating around and the true facts seem to be very fuzzy and buried in a lot of "he said/the other guy said" for political point-scoring.
The bare bones of it seem to be that he came into the US illegally as a teenager/young man, when finally picked up for deportation he applied for asylum claiming his life was in danger from a gang back in El Salvador, and right now we don't know if that still holds true or not. If his life is no longer in danger because the gang no longer exists, then can he not be deported? There's so much confusion on this whole thing, between those who don't care if the process is followed correctly or not because their startign point is that he should not be deported *at all* no matter how or why he came into the country, and those who don't care if the process is followed correctly or not because their starting point is he is here illegally and so *has no rights because he's not a citizen*, that I honestly don't know where to come down.
Was he truly in fear of his life, or only lying/using a ploy to avoid being deported in the first place?
If the danger no longer exists, does the opposition to sending him back to his home country now collapse or is the rationale 'let him stay no matter what because he's here too long'?
This is the first I've heard of either 1 or 2.
Frankly, I don't think most people defending Garcia care about the immigration debate, even though it's obvious that everyone on the maga side is blinded by that and that alone. The reason this became a constitutional crisis is because the government advanced an argument that they could not be compelled to fix an error that they admit to. If the government went "oops our bad", brought him back, fixed the administrative error (including by determining the threat no longer exists, as you've said), and sent him back to El Salvador, it would not have blown up. Instead, you have a government that has doubled down on every opportunity, with at least one court already filing contempt proceedings and another one on the way.
I cannot be clear enough how extreme the argument by the federal government is:
- we can deport you, even by accident;
- once you are out of our custody we cannot bring you back;
- nothing can compel us to try to bring you back;
- we want to do this to citizens
If you're still heads down on the immigration part of this, you have completely and totally missed the point. To quote myself from earlier: you aren't just missing the forest for the trees, you're missing the tree for a tiny little piece of bark.
As a non-American, I think you and many others are conflating two very different things that should be kept separately and hurting your case in the process.
Egregious abuses of law enforcement power are normal part of life in a liberal society, especially towards non-citizens and various marginalized groups. They are usually not news, and people who do not know about this sad reality tend to be shocked when some of those gets to the media. But their existence per se does not mean that liberal order is on the verge of being overthrown.
Interfering with election process is on the whole different level and far more serious threat to continuing existence of liberal democracy.
> Interfering with election process is on the whole different level and far more serious threat to continuing existence of liberal democracy.
Trump has done both though (Jan 6 and the lead-up to it)? And I disagree that "Egregious abuses of law enforcement power" have been committed to the same blatant extent as now, defended so dumbly, or don't serve as additional evidence for their desire to interfere with the election process again (i.e. they are willing to do illegal things, this is just one more). Do you disagree with this?
I am honestly not interested in grading Trump's badness. I just think that it is counterproductive to safeguarding election process when its defense is conflated with other stuff, which is less alarming from "liberal system preservation" standpoint, and possibly more defensible. It loses you some credibility points.
> As an aside, I think there's something like a 30% chance that Garcia in particular is already dead. He was sent to CECOT, an open air prison where violent gang members are basically unconstrained in their ability to interact with each other. There is, to put it bluntly, a lot of murder. Depending on sources, within the first year of operation (2022) there was somewhere between 100 and 250 deaths at CECOT.
This doesn't sound realistic or numerate. 250 deaths a year on a population of over 14,000 means a 30% chance of death over one month?
The death rate stays constant or gets worse over time?
Murders are more likely to target inoffensive civilians than rival gang members?
Update: he's alive!
Both very exciting news and also a good lesson in not trying to be too clever with base rates.
So assuming the numbers havent changed since they were published, the base rate is 250/14000 --> ~2%, or one every 50 people
This is high, but you are right that it is not 180x (2% annual --> .16% monthly) higher.
That said, we have more information than just the base rate here that may suggest we modulate our numbers.
1) there are more people in the same space;
2) the people being detained are civilians / not salvadoran
3) (most importantly) both governments are refusing to bring the man back
The first one should probably not change our number too much.
As for the second, the detainees being foreign in my mind would absolutely increase their chances of being killed, but I could see why someone may want to argue this the other way. Note, however, that this particular detainee was given a stay of removal precisely because he was afraid of Salvadoran gangs killing him. So, like, if those fears were valid at all, yea, we should probably assume that being put into a cell with a bunch of other Salvadoran gangsters will not be good for his health.
But that last one is really damning. Trump AND Bukele are both going through an awful lot of trouble to avoid bringing this one guy home, especially given that they admitted in court filings already that it was a mistake! Trump's admin could have easily just been like, 'whoops this one was a mistake' and brought him back, nbd. And its not like NO ONE has left CECOT before, Bukele's government has released people back to Salvador. Somehow, this one case is different. There are reasonable arguments that the reason this one is different is because its trial balloon, or some other thing. But thats why we deal in probabilities. The fact that these two governments are going through so much trouble to not bring him back makes me think they cannot for some reason.
We're living in the imaginary post-reality world and until there is an impact with reality, Trump voters won't change their minds. That impact has not landed yet. It's not like we've not been warned about this guy, so voting for him was an act of living in a specific Maya. The illusion is not going to be broken by mere words on the internet about someone somewhere being wronged.
So what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Just brace for impact and watch as a lot of people get hurt and the future gets increasingly more dim?
I do not know, it is a sad situation all around. But keep on going, thank you, it is important to keep on the light of the plurality of ideas.
The odds of Donald J. Trump ever serving a third term as President of the United States of America, are *exceedingly* small. The odds of Donald J. Trump ever seriously trying to run for a third term, are less small - but the man does not like to lose, and while he's sometimes wrong about what he can win (e.g. 2020), this isn't one of the edge cases.
The odds of Donald Trump pretending he's going to run for a third term because he knows it will make the left throw an apoplectic hissy-fit and he really really likes seeing the left throw apoplectic hissy-fits, are *much* higher.
IOW, please don't feed the troll even if he does live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
>- the judiciary, including SCOTUS in a 9-0 decision, said that the man must have due process and the government must bring him back, and cited many other cases where the government has done this in the past.
No, in a 9-0 decision SCOTUS declined to block a lower court's order requiring the government to "facilitate" his return, and ordered the lower court to clarify what was meant by "effectuate"-ing the man's return, because it "may exceed the District Court's authority." They also decided that "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)
In response the District Court clarified their order by amending it to say that the government needed to "take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible."
The government responded to the court, saying that "Defendants understand “facilitate” to mean what that term has long meant in the immigration context, namely actions allowing an alien to enter the United States. Taking “all available steps to facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia is thus best read as taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here. Indeed, no other reading of “facilitate” is tenable—or constitutional—here." In other words, they say that all the court order requires them to do is not put any obstacles in the way of Garcia's return, and that they will comply with that. They also claim that requiring them to take more than domestic measures would "flout the Supreme Court’s order" and "violate the separation of powers". (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.65.0.pdf)
So, in short, the Supreme Court did not say that the government had to bring him back, they said they had to facilitate his return, with the explicit caveat that the District Court needed to clarify what that meant with an eye towards making sure they don't overextend their authority. They clarified it, and the government claims that they are following that order by not putting any domestic obstacles in the way of Garcia returning, and that doing anything more would violate separation of powers in exactly the way that the Supreme Court told the District Court not to do.
It seems to me that the government is not yet in violation of the Supreme Court's order, and arguably not in violation of the District Court's order. We have not yet reached a point where POTUS is defying the Supreme Court.
You should try reading the Supreme Court opinion.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
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).
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)
There is no ambiguity here, they are disobeying a Supreme Court ruling.
The bit you quote there is not from the majority decision, it is from a concurring statement by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson. While it is part of the ruling, it is not binding (and as it should be, since only 3 out of 9 Justices agree with it).
1. Why would they concur in that opinion if the rest of the SC instead ordered the Trump admin to just do nothing? Wouldn't they dissent?
2. If the SC ordered the Trump admin to do nothing, why didn't they just vacate the district court's order and state the Trump admin has to do nothing?
3. Which claims do you think anybody would contest from the quoted section? It was just citing precedent to preclude ridiculous arguments like that the Trump admin can't do anything because the party has already been deported.
4. Why did the appeals court unanimously rule (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69902650/8/kilmar-abrego-garcia-v-kristi-noem/):
The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do
essentially nothing. It 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.” Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2. “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 (“[T]he 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.
5. Why have they still not shared anything regarding the deal or contract between the Trump admin and Bukele or any of the flights sent to CECOT? The Supreme Court also included in the unanimous portion "The Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps" - what has been shared from them so the district court can clarify its order without impinging on Article 2 powers?
It seems the judge should simply amend their ruling to “facilitate the release and return” of Abrego Garcia, and then when the administration refuses to comply we can get our actual constitutional crisis cooking.
They probably will do something like that, at which point the Trump administration will appeal to the Supreme Court again to adjudicate whether the District Court has the power to do that.
The Supreme Court would not say the district court's order remains in place if it lacked jurisdiction. The district court also has not ruled something ridiculous like "The Executive must invade to bring back Abrego Garcia." They aren't even complying with the Supreme Court's order to share info about the flights and what steps can be taken next. They are saying ANY court ruling concerning foreign policy is prohibited by Article 2, which the Supreme Court - the final word on what the Constitution says since Marbury v Madison - clearly ruled against by keeping the district court's order in place. And of course the cited case law in the SC opinion contradicting this plainly retarded assertion.
The whole argument seems contrived because it’s actually agnostic as to whether the person in question is a citizen or not. If the Supreme Court determines that the president can disappear people to a foreign country on any pretext, and once there the courts have no power to compel their return, what prevents this from being done to citizens as well?
> If the Supreme Court determines that the president can disappear people to a foreign country on any pretext, and once there the courts have no power to compel their return, what prevents this from being done to citizens as well?
The Supreme Court hasn't, and absent a complete totalitarian shift in which there is no meaningful continuity with the Supreme Court / US government as exist today except for the name, will not determine that the president has the authority to disappear people to a foreign country on any pretext. That is not remotely a good faith representation of this situation.
Garcia's deportation was an error in that it violated the stay preventing his deportation to El Salvador specifically. That was bad, without question. Bad things do happen.
The question now is what authority the Courts have to order the Executive to remedy it in the specific form of returning Garcia to the United States. That's unclear. He's a citizen of El Salvador in El Salvador and the recognized government of El Salvador has said they won't release him. Can the US government apply pressure to El Salvador until they change their mind? Functionally of course they can. But can the Courts order the Executive branch to apply pressure to a foreign government up to whatever level is required until the desired remedy is achieved when the Executive isn't inclined to do so? That is what's extremely unclear and it's good that it's being adjudicated, although it's unlikely to be answered in a way favorable to Garcia.
So what stops something similar happening to citizens? Lots of things and which specific rights / laws are being violated will depend on the scenario, but a quick catch-all is that citizens can't be deported. But if you're asking what, functionally, prevents the Executive from ignoring the law and doing it anyway the answer is: instant orders by the Court to stop, impeachment, then trials depending on what happened as immunity only covers actions carried out in fulfillment of an office and intentionally rounding up and illegally imprisoning citizens in a foreign country isn't part of the President's scope of authority.
Now if the Executive ignores all orders to stop and the President's party isn't willing to impeach we're in a scenario where the Supreme Court's rulings are meaningless anyway and the outcome isn't about laws / rights and can only be settled by force.
A trivial thing the court could order is to CANCEL the contracts or deal the Trump admin struck with Bukele to pay them to house prisoners we illegally rendition to them. The Supreme Court constitutionally has to power to void treaties that are unconstitutional. The problem of course is that the Trump admin is REFUSING TO COMPLY with the Supreme Court order to share details about the deal and flights, so potential remedies remain unknown because we have zero transparency.
> So what stops something similar happening to citizens? Lots of things and which specific rights / laws are being violated will depend on the scenario, but a quick catch-all is that citizens can't be deported.
Abrego Garcia couldn’t be deported either. That’s the problem. The administration broke the law when it deported him, and is now claiming that fait accompli, the courts can do nothing since he is now in El Salvador and and effecting his release is firmly in the realm of “foreign affairs”.
The exact same argument could be mustered for the persecution of Trumps personal and political enemies, and your reassurance is that “oh he’ll get impeached” as if we didn’t all watch him muster a mob to violently over turn the last election and not get so much as a pat on the wrist from his Republican patsys.
The only bad faith argument here is the one you are supplying.
>- a man illegally came to the US from El Salvador... committed no crimes / has no criminal record
Illegally entering the US is itself a crime.
Such a deep, introspective response. Thank you!
Illegally entering the US is a crime, you are correct. And luckily we have a court system that adjudicates crimes like those, and that court system determined that Mr. Garcia was to be granted a stay of removal. Since you are, obviously, both a legal expert and a stalwart defender of the rule of law, you must be aghast that our very own federal government has so blatantly violated the laws of the country to remove someone that the courts had already deemed legally allowed to stay in the country.
The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and no matter whether the law in question is convenient to them. But the left has been undermining the rule of law of decades now, both in general and regarding immigration in particular (sanctuary cities, "no person is illegal", etc.). Heck, I've been told right here on SSC that, whilst illegally entering a country might technically be a crime, it doesn't really matter, because the whole concept of national borders is unjust anyway and people should be allowed to live wherever they like. Things like the Garcia case were always a likely outcome, partly because people tend to lose respect for the law when they see the other side ignoring it with abandon, and partly because, when you let a system fall into chaos, it often takes harsh and extreme measures to restore order. So whilst I am indeed a great supporter of the rule of law, I'm also a supporter of looking at the world we live in rather than the world we wished we lived in, and the world we live in is one in which the rule of law in America started ailing decades before Trump came onto the political scene.
"The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and no matter whether the law in question is convenient to them."
This is not true. There's a big range between pretty good rule of law and most people having no legal recourse.
To me, "rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it" reads to me as an attempt to capture a specific concept that's hard to express.
Suppose the state tries to enforce that if you give me 100 ducats, I have to give you a cart of rice; I can't just promise it later; I can't give you a cart of barley instead; or a cart of good rice with bad rice or straw hidden beneath; or a non-standard tiny cart full of rice; et cetera. A law for that doesn't project a force field that bars me from trying that anyway; it just authorizes the state to do something to me that I'll hate badly enough to prefer to just give you a cart of rice (or decline the trade).
It also says I can't use the law to sue the state for doing what it's authorized. But again, there's no force field; I could try. And in general, I could resort to OSS Sabotage principles and make that trade horridly unpleasant, gaming every rule I could, as long as I get your 100 ducats. Knowing that, you rightly take your business elsewhere, but if every rice dealer decides that's the way to sell rice in this town, that's bad news for you, and if every dealer of anything decides likewise, that's bad news for trading anything at all - even if everyone's scrupulously following the letter of the law.
So "rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it" reads to me as "society only works if its members choose to believe that its laws are there to coordinate norms, and that they want those norms badly enough to follow them even if the law weren't there". And there's a range, aye, in that society doesn't immediately collapse if one person jaywalks, but the more people treat laws as things to game around rather than benefits to themselves in return for some sacrifices in turn, the more costly that society is to operate, until it's bankrupted on its own internal friction. (This is true whether the people are wretches trying to steal without being caught, or the laws are so unjust that they obstruct everyone.)
But "society works only and to the extent that its members believe in and follow the content of the society's laws even if those laws weren't formalized" is more of a mouthful.
That’s a lot of words to just say you don’t really believe in the rule of law.
"The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and no matter whether the law in question is convenient to them."
It sounds like you are as much as admitting that you DON'T believe in the rule of law. Of course not everybody is going to follow it all the time: if they did, there would be no need for an executive branch.
The executive branch exists exactly because the government's power is (quite deliberately) limited in scope and reach, and even given clear laws and clear interpretation, it needs active human decision making to know *when*, *where* and *how* to best go about enacting and enforcing those laws. Different executives are (of course) going to have different ideas about where and how their limited resources are best spent: that's why we vote on them in the first place. And of course we have separation of powers to make sure even those limited resources are kept in check.
Your underlying claim is that previous executives[1] making decisions on how and where to spend their resources is somehow antithetical to the rule of law simply because the laws that *you personally* find the most important sometimes got deprioritized[2]. Which is ridiculous on its face. Other people also get their say on which priorities the executive should have. When it applies to the cities they live in (and you don't), they get all the say and you get none of it. That's how democracy works. You are, of course, free to think that illegal immigration is such a deep and terrible and unconscionable sin against...something?...that the executive paying any less than the maximum possible attention towards it is a dereliction of duty. And insofar as other people agree with you, you may often get executives elected that reflect that belief. But people who *don't* think that sometimes electing executives who *don't* place that priority ahead of all others is not, not, not "undermining the rule of law." Be serious.
And when an executive commits an *actual*, quite flagrant violation of law in the service of your pet cause, and you shrug it off for such unserious reasons, it's pretty hard to believe that "respect for the rule of law" is any part of your motivation.
[1]Some of them at not even close to the same level as the federal government, making an already quite false equivalence even more preposterous.
[2] And really, saying the were "deprioritized" is giving your position too much credit. Biden and Obama both kept border security in place, kept ICE active and deported *no small number of people.* They just weren't as sensationalist or performatively cruel about it. And yet even here on SCC, you *frequently* see conservatives claiming that Biden era policy was "open borders."
With respect, you obvious don't understand your opponents' position at all well if you think they're only, or even mainly, concerned about different Presidents prioritising different things. Indeed, one of their main complaints is precisely that Presidents often aren't allowed to enact the policies they were elected on, at least if those policies lead in a rightward direction, e.g.,
"Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called “The Resistance,” and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, “resistance” is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous – indeed incendiary – notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the “loyal opposition,” as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.
A prime example of this is the Senate’s unprecedented abuse of the advice-and-consent process. The Senate is free to exercise that power to reject unqualified nominees, but that power was never intended to allow the Senate to systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the President from building a functional government.
Yet that is precisely what the Senate minority has done from his very first days in office. As of September of this year, the Senate had been forced to invoke cloture on 236 Trump nominees — each of those representing its own massive consumption of legislative time meant only to delay an inevitable confirmation. How many times was cloture invoked on nominees during President Obama’s first term? 17 times. The Second President Bush’s first term? Four times. It is reasonable to wonder whether a future President will actually be able to form a functioning administration if his or her party does not hold the Senate.
[...]
Let me turn now to what I believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separation-of-power principles generally, and Executive Branch authority specifically. I am speaking of the Judicial Branch.
In recent years the Judiciary has been steadily encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency. The Courts have done this in essentially two ways: First, the Judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between Congress and Executive, thus preempting the political process, which the Framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the Judiciary has usurped Presidential authority for itself, either (a) by, under the rubric of “review,” substituting its judgment for the Executive’s in areas committed to the President’s discretion, or (b) by assuming direct control over realms of decision-making that heretofore have been considered at the core of Presidential power.
[...]
The Travel Ban case is a good example. There the President made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well has his Constitutional national security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes. The common denominator of the initial countries selected was that they were unquestionable hubs of terrorism activity, which lacked functional central government’s and responsible law enforcement and intelligence services that could assist us in identifying security risks among their nationals seeking entry. Despite the fact there were clearly justifiable security grounds for the measure, the district court in Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit blocked this public-safety measure for a year and half on the theory that the President’s motive for the order was religious bias against Muslims. This was just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration.
The Travel Ban case highlights an especially troubling aspect of the recent tendency to expand judicial review. The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a police officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant. And just last term, the Supreme Court appropriately shut the door to claims that otherwise-lawful redistricting can violate the Constitution if the legislators who drew the lines were actually motivated by political partisanship.
What is true of police officers and gerrymanderers is equally true of the President and senior Executive officials. With very few exceptions, neither the Constitution, nor the Administrative Procedure Act or any other relevant statute, calls for judicial review of executive motive. They apply only to executive action. Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an Executive official’s “real motive” — often after ordering invasive discovery into the Executive Branch’s privileged decision-making process — have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge’s real motive for issuing its decision. And courts’ indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the President’s constitutional prerogatives.
The impact of these judicial intrusions on Executive responsibility have been hugely magnified by another judicial innovation – the nationwide injunction. First used in 1963, and sparely since then until recently, these court orders enjoin enforcement of a policy not just against the parties to a case, but against everyone. Since President Trump took office, district courts have issued over 40 nationwide injunctions against the government. By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued a total of two nationwide injunctions against the government. Both were vacated by the Ninth Circuit.
It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every major policy of the Trump Administration has been subjected to immediate freezing by the lower courts. No other President has been subjected to such sustained efforts to debilitate his policy agenda.
The legal flaws underlying nationwide injunctions are myriad. Just to summarize briefly, nationwide injunctions have no foundation in courts’ Article III jurisdiction or traditional equitable powers; they radically inflate the role of district judges, allowing any one of more than 600 individuals to singlehandedly freeze a policy nationwide, a power that no single appellate judge or Justice can accomplish; they foreclose percolation and reasoned debate among lower courts, often requiring the Supreme Court to decide complex legal issues in an emergency posture with limited briefing; they enable transparent forum shopping, which saps public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary; and they displace the settled mechanisms for aggregate litigation of genuinely nationwide claims, such as Rule 23 class actions.
Of particular relevance to my topic tonight, nationwide injunctions also disrupt the political process. There is no better example than the courts’ handling of the rescission of DACA. As you recall, DACA was a discretionary policy of enforcement forbearance adopted by President Obama’s administration. The Fifth Circuit concluded that the closely related DAPA policy (along with an expansion of DACA) was unlawful, and the Supreme Court affirmed that decision by an equally divided vote. Given that DACA was discretionary — and that four Justices apparently thought a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful —President Trump’s administration understandably decided to rescind DACA.
Importantly, however, the President coupled that rescission with negotiations over legislation that would create a lawful and better alternative as part of a broader immigration compromise. In the middle of those negotiations — indeed, on the same day the President invited cameras into the Cabinet Room to broadcast his negotiations with bipartisan leaders from both Houses of Congress — a district judge in the Northern District of California enjoined the rescission of DACA nationwide. Unsurprisingly, the negotiations over immigration legislation collapsed after one side achieved its preferred outcome through judicial means. A humanitarian crisis at the southern border ensued. And just this week, the Supreme Court finally heard argument on the legality of the DACA rescission. The Court will not likely decide the case until next summer, meaning that President Trump will have spent almost his entire first term enforcing President Obama’s signature immigration policy, even though that policy is discretionary and half the Supreme Court concluded that a legally indistinguishable policy was unlawful. That is not how our democratic system is supposed to work. "
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-19th-annual-barbara-k-olson-memorial-lecture
I hate to whataboutism, but dude you're talking about the party that basically stopped Obama from doing anything during his term. Or have we already forgotten that Garland should've been on SCOTUS? Is your position that actually Obama should've been able to do whatever he wanted over the objections of the Senate? Was the Senate acting "obstructionist" from 2008-2016? Frankly, it's hard to imagine a more bullshit take than "Trump wasn't able to execute on his promises because of the government apparatus" -- o, it was the judges that made it too hard? even though the GOP controlled the house Senate SCOTUS and presidency? There was simply nothing that you could do besides *checks notes* authoritarianism? The simple reality is that Trump's own cabinet stopped most of Trump's agenda, because his agenda was and is absolutely insane. Every single person who worked with the man, from Rex Tillerson to MadDog Mattis to his own veep have said that Trump is bad for the country. And they were right! The tariffs are just the most obvious example, but even considering attacking Greenland/Canada/Panama is insane! And I have no reason to believe Trump didn't float these and other terrible ideas in his first term.
But even if I take your position seriously, and there really was some truth in the accusations of "obstructionism", this is the system is working as intended. The federal government is designed a bit like community notes -- it only gets things done when there is broad agreement from a lot of different people. This is why states exist -- rather ironic that I have to explain this to someone who is supposedly advocating for the party of states rights. Though of course the GOP is more accurately the MAGA party now -- that MAGAs preferred solution is "fuck that compromise shit, my way now" speaks a lot more about the nature of the current MAGA party than anything else.
Said very eloquently. Strong +1. The only other thing to add is that 45 is and has been in violation of so many laws both in his personal life and in his capacity as a government official (national secrets in the bathroom anyone?) that it blinks at reality to say that man ever had respect for rule of law "but for the mean lefties"
Trump himself might not have had much respect for the rule of law; voters in general used to, and the erosion of this respect over the past sixty years was a necessary precondition for Trump being elected.
> The rule of law is one of things which can only exist if everybody follows it
Part of the law is that there are specific prescribed punishments for particular crimes. In Abrego Garcia's case, the law is that he's protected against deportation since he arrived when he was 16 in order to flee death threats. Allowing him to stay is not violating the rule of law, it is following the rule of law.
Also if you don't like "sanctuary cities" blame the conservatives on the supreme court, who pioneered the idea of "anti-commandeering doctrine", that the federal government can't force states to enforce federal law.
I even doubt he'll be able to make it through his current term.
There's no chance he'll be able to run again and win in four years.
Out of curiosity, why? He’s not going to be impeached; republicans are favored to keep control of the senate, and the probability that enough republican senators could be swayed to impeach him is approximately 0. Betting odds give him an 8.5% chance of getting the republican nomination in 2028. That’s not even counting the potential loophole where he runs as VP then the presidential candidate resigns upon winning.
But what’s the legal impediment? A Supreme Court ruling saying ‘you can’t do that?’ He can just ignore those. Ordinarily the consequence would be impeachment, but that would require Democrats to win 2/3 of the senate which is impossible. The only real impediment to Trump doing whatever he pleases is losing the next presidential election (at least for now), and betting odds give the GOP just shy of 50% chance of winning in 2028.
Donald Trump can ignore Supreme Court rulings the same way I can ignore all the constitutional and statutory law that says I'm not the President of the United States of America. I can take a tour of the White House, probably get away with making a mad dash into the Oval Office before the Secret Service can stop me, and say "I'm now the President, bwuahahaha, bow and obey!"
In order for Donald Trump to *actually* be President on 21 Jan 2029, the Republican party will have to put his name on the nomination paperwork, the election officials in most of the fifty states will have to put his name on the ballot, close to a hundred million Americans will need to vote for him, election officials in states totaling 270 electoral votes will have to officially certify that a majority of their state's voters did in fact vote for Trump, those 270+ electors will need to in turn vote for Donald Trump, Congress will need to certify that the electors did so vote, and a judge will need to swear him in. That's a whole lot of people who *aren't* Donald Trump, who all have to do some very specific and probably mostly illegal things in order for Donald Trump to be President.
And if the plan is for him to be Vice-President and then have J.D. Vance immediately resign, then all of those same people have to do all of those same things *and* J.D. Vance (who doesn't really like Donald J. Trump and almost certainly does want to be President himself) would have to resign.
The odds of all those things happening are very very small. And without all those things happening, Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office on 21 Jan 2029 saying "I'm the President, bow and obey!", means exactly as little as it would if I were to do that. There is no part of the process by which a newly-elected candidate becomes President, that in any way requires the previous President to relinquish the office. He automatically becomes Not The President the minute his term expires.
I cannot seriously imagine he won't make it through his current term, short of dying prematurely or the entire country falling apart as a political entity. He's doing broadly unpopular things, but that's nothing new. Legally removing him would require either 2/3 of the senate or his entire cabinet to get on board, and neither of those seem remotely plausible, even after the midterms.
Reminder: in the second case, the 25th Am case, you also need 2/3 of BOTH Houses of Congress (assuming Trump pops up and says "no I'm not unable to serve").
>have already found plausible loopholes that may allow Trump to do so
What's the plausible loophole?
JD runs as president and Trump as VP, and then on the first day JD resigns and gives the role to Trump (or does so defacto instead of dejure)
Isn't that straightforwardly ruled out by the Twelfth Amendment? "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
Funniest possible consequence of such an approach would be Dems running Obama as Veep
I have heard that Trump would be constitutionally prevented from running for VP because the constitution sets the minimal requirement for VP to be qualified to become president. So you need a more complex loophole. Speaker of the house, maybe.
There's debate here, enough that the Trump admin will jump on it. Supposedly there is one place in the Constitution where it says "elected" and another where it says "serving". Obviously, this is a stupid distinction, but it's enough for the willful and the naive to claim cover
Note that plausible should really be put in massive air quotes. Everyone understands that in a sane world this would not fly. But we are not in a sane world. The law is not an ironclad rule of the universe, it is a social technology that functions only as long as people have respect for it. As we are seeing, an executive branch without respect for rule of law can quickly show that laws are just words on paper, obstacles to be overcome through hook or crook
Indeed. It is central to that scheme that the 22nd Amendment as written states that no person can be "elected" president more than twice.
It is obviously not true that the authors of that amendment, and the federal and state legislators who debated it and then ratified it, intended to allow someone who's been elected twice to just find a way back into the chair besides being literally "elected". Trump, Vance et al know this. They don't care.
I believe that precise scenario was raised by somebody during debates of the amendment, and was not considered worth a rewrite. One imagines that it was traded off against the Cold-War notion that we might lose both POTUS and VPOTUS and the office would devolve down to some Cabinet member like Kissinger who they did not want to exclude for birthplace reasons.
I don't think even hard-core MAGA people would go for it, precisely because it seems like an unseemly loophole and because Trump will be 82 by the next election. If Vance still seems worthy of election, they will want him to pick a running mate who can take his place in eight years.
"that precise scenario was raised by somebody during debates of the amendment, and was not considered worth a rewrite."
That's accurate. That rubber hit the road during the Senate debate, which was going on and on fussing over competing versions of the wording for the proposed amendment. They more or less ran out of steam and decided to pass the wording we ended up with so as to get it done already.
"the text of the Amendment was probably shaped most decisively by the impulse for compromise..."
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1908&context=mlr
In discussing the "elected/served as" wording issue some senators were thinking of someone who'd assumed the office without election to it due to some cataclysmic event, i.e. a cabinet officer. None of them even imagined a scenario of a scheme to deliberately put back into the Oval Office, someone who'd previously been elected to it twice. How the SCOTUS today would end up viewing that Congressional-intent history is anybody's guess.
"and the office would devolve down to some Cabinet member like Kissinger who they did not want to exclude for birthplace reasons."
(a) The natural-born citizen requirement has always applied to someone who would otherwise be in line to assume the office, and neither the 12th nor 22nd amendments has any effect on it. Article II's wording is clear, it says "eligible to the office of" not "elected".
(b) The Article II eligibility requirement for POTUS does not require having been born on US soil and never has. It does not say "native-born", it says "natural-born". Someone born to at least one US citizen is eligible to be POTUS regardless of where the birth took place. A good summary of the history on that is here:
https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-128/on-the-meaning-of-natural-born-citizen/
I also can't imagine for a moment that JD Vance is going to go along with it, nor that anyone would trust JD Vance to go along with it.
It's an implausible thing to worry about, in a world filled with real things to worry about.
Also, just to really put this into perspective, many of the people who were arguing that Trump would not be too damaging to the country when they voted for him explicitly drew bright lines like "I'd vote against him if he tried to run for a third term / ignored an order from the judiciary / ignored an order from SCOTUS / started imprisoning or deporting legal immigrants / started imprisoning or deporting citizens". All of these bright lines have either been crossed, or are actively in the process of being crossed. If you are one of the people who thought any of the things above and ended up voting for or supporting Trump on the condition that he would not cross those lines, now is definitely the time to start speaking out
In my experience most Trump supporters who are now expressing skepticism are doing so because he’s taking too long to release the Epstein files
If you're an amateur playing poker against a Daniel Negraneu, and on the river he says "Sweet I have quads," your best chance is to change nothing about your play.
Every word out of a Trump voter's mouth is similar- it encodes nothing about their state of mind, principles, holdings or conditional future actions, it's just a memorized play, recieved from their favorite "news" source, that on expectation will help fuck you over.
The problem is sometimes he is ‘just’ trolling and sometimes he means it or decides later that he actually ‘meant’ it and there is no way of knowing which case it is.
[ETA: when I first read this, I missed the critical word "voters", as in I thought the statement was 'Every word out of Trump's mouth is similar, it encodes nothing." The actual comment is about Trump VOTERS. My reply is incoherent as a result.]
Sorry, I think this is insane.
Your argument is obviously hyperbolic, but first I'm going to take it literally: you said that there are zero bits of information coming from Trump, that his words literally do not indicate anything about the entropy of his behavior.
This is trivially wrong. If Trump says the word "tariff" he is clearly obviously thinking about tariffs in that moment, and not, say, what the weather is in Indonesia. As far as I am aware, he is not literally a puppet, capable of mouthing the words of his handlers while thinking about random other things.
If I try to formulate a less hyperbolic version of your sentiment, I think it quickly falls apart. Why, exactly, should I not take Trump at his word? There are a few reasons on face why I think I should:
- first, in the past, when Trump has said he will do X, and other people have confidently said he would not, the latter group was wrong. cf 'stop the steal', j6 pardons, immigration, tariffs, doge. (Some of the people I am talking about above drew brightlines that have already been crossed like "he wont implement global tariffs". Now that he has, have these people updated their priors? Or has the goal post shifted?)
- second, assuming that you do not literally mean there is 0 bits of information coming from Trump, Trump saying "I will do X" obviously increases the probability that he will do X. A politician who never mentions that he is going to put global tariffs on the entire world is far less likely to put global tariffs on the entire world than someone who talks about how they are going to put global tariffs on the entire world every day!
- third, this is not a poker game. My hand is not, like, some pot that I can buy back into; its my life. I have one life, and thats it. So it is always worth hedging against the downside outcomes in the overton window. And 6 months ago, the most inconvenient thing that I would expect from the US Government in my personal life is "I have to deal with long lines at the DMV". Now its "my friends and family might get deported, I might lose all my money, and I need to make backup plans to avoid getting shipped to Salvador".
Also, if you really literally think that Trump is 0 entropy, there is no reason to support him! He's a total nonentity! Yea, sure, he _says_ he's going to make the economy better, or stop immigration, or whatever, but why would you believe him on that? It's much more likely that he's lying about that too, and is just going to make himself richer and give himself more power instead. Surely that is significantly worse!
Whoops, you are so right.
Considering a paid sub but when I look over the archives I don't see any paid posts including the recent ones? Is that a setting specific to this blog/newsletter? Does Scott or anyone else have a full list of currently paywalled posts (excepting the hidden open threads) so I can know what to go look at if I pay? Probably going to do the annual if so.
A subscription to ACX, like an investment in OpenAI, should be thought of as more of a donation.
In particular, some substack writers put a paywall halfway through some posts (in which case unpaid subscribers can see the post but not the later part of it). Scott doesn't do this, which means his paid posts aren't obvious.
(He also has much fewer of them; most paid substackers go for 50% or more, Scott just does them as an occasional bonus).
I prefer the way Scott does it, I hate those "you want to read the rest? pony up for a subscription" methods because they are teasing, be it Substack or mass media. Yes, the idea is to hook you so you want to read the rest so you pay up, but it frustrates me and makes me so annoyed I make a point of *not* subscribing.
It's like going to a restaurant, ordering a meal, and after eating quarter of the dish the waiter whips it away and says "pay up or you don't get the rest". Come on now! If I order the meal, of course I intend to pay for it (I don't dine and dash). Letting me eat only a few bites would make me go "you know what, keep it, I'm going elsewhere".
Yes, paywalled posts aren’t shown if you aren’t paying for a subscription. The subscription drive posts have a list of paid posts.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked
Huh, realized something amusing from the AI 2027 forecast: the bad ASI in that is motivated by doing research. But wouldn't want an AI motivated by that intrinsically want to preserve humanity? After all, lots of research fields are about humans and their activity. Psychology, sociology, economics, political science, medicine. Wouldn't a research driven AI want to keep making progress in those fields, thereby having a drive to keep humans around? It's true that it could keep us around in some mangled state for some of these fields, but some of them need keeping us happy and free, I think.
Could be. Actually, the end condition of the race scenario,
>There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.
seems like a very close miss to preserving humans. If Agent-4's drives were just a _tiny_ bit different, it would have kept us around. The Agent-4 + Agent-5 system certainly is in tight enough control of the situation that it has nothing to fear from humans!
( If there are somewhat heterogenous collections of AIs, I do expect that the odds that at least one of them will have a _hobby_ of keeping some small number of humans is pretty large, albeit the _number_ of surviving humans from this effect could be many orders of magnitude fewer than our current population. )
Given our stupid control mechinisms they would be mere human-like animals that couldnt pose a threat
That implies that the research goal that the AI is driven by still has a human centric focus. If it turns out that the AI desires to study specific organ cancers for example, well you don't necessarily need a brain to get in the way right? And a lot of soft science research is specifically restricted by both ethics and lack of ability to do interventions. Removing either seems really, really bad for the subjects.
I think I remember there is a field in psychology focused on flourishing. The training runs for an AI could be more selective about what research they dump into it, maybe for psychology sticking to stuff that replicates, but being permissive for the literature on flourishing.
There's also the fields of biology and ecology, you'll want to preserve the biosphere to keep making discoveries there.
> Adraste: All of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.
So therefore one should self-censor and remain silent about important things one knows to be true? If not, exactly what is the suggestion here?
> We wanted people to question p-hacked psychology studies and TED talk experts telling them the Nine Ways That Science Proves Merit Is Fake. So we punctured some windbag experts, then woke up one day with an anti-vaxxer in HHS ...
Is there actually a causal link between speaking the truth about the former and the latter political developments? The dialogue just assumes there is, but that assumption is highly dubious. The causal influence of rationalists speaking frankly on Trump winning was approximately zero.
Rather, the association seems merely psychological in a loose, affiliative sense. "I said something that uses some of the same words as things said by a tribe I don't like, and now I feel bad." Sorry, that's just a horrible way to handle and express ideas. If you think and act that way, you really do become one of the bad people.
Trump speaking minutes ago at the White House:
===
President Donald Trump said Monday that he is open to deporting US citizens who are considered violent criminals. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” the president said in the Oval Office alongside El Salvador President’s Nayib Bukele, adding that Attorney General Pam Bondi is studying the laws “right now.”
“If they’re criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90-years-old and if-if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island — Brooklyn. Yeah, yeah that includes them [citizens]. Why do you think there’s a special category of person? They’re as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones too,” Trump said.
Trump said he’s “all for it” because, he claimed, with the current partnership with [El Salvador President] Bukele the US can do things “for less money and have great security.” He praised Bukele’s handling of a large number of prisoners, saying he does “a great job with it.”
Trump added that the US is also negotiating with “others.”
“And I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people. Really bad people. Every bit as bad as the ones coming in,” the president added.
===
Earlier in the same press conference Trump said:
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“I just asked the [President Bukele] — you know it’s this massive complex that he built, jail complex. I said, ‘Can you build some more of them please?’ As many as we can get out of our country that we allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden, through open borders,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with Bukele.
Trump distinguished between just “people” and those who are violent and have committed crimes in the United States. “We have millions of people that should not be in this country that are dangerous — not just people, ‘cause we have people — but we have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers,” Trump said.
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> President Donald Trump said Monday that he is open to deporting US citizens who are considered violent criminals. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” the president said in the Oval Office alongside El Salvador President’s Nayib Bukele, adding that Attorney General Pam Bondi is studying the laws “right now.”
Very curious what the AG's conclusion will be when she's completed her studies.
Via the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision (https://interstatecompact.org/sites/default/files/pdf/legal/Compact_Preamble.pdf) convicts can be imprisoned in another state outside the one where they were convicted. There are also some bilateral treaties allowing prisoner transfers between the US and some other countries, but those are generally for the benefit of the prisoner being allowed to serve their sentence in their home country and (I think) require the prisoner's consent.
Ignoring the deportation rhetoric - they couldn't be deported, only sent overseas for the length of their sentence - and considering just the base question of whether the federal government and/or states could do something similar to ICAOS with other countries, I'm honestly unsure about the answer.
Practically it would be difficult and be the source of endless lawsuits but assuming the best case scenario - treaties / legislation to allow it put in place, facilities in line with US standards, US oversight available, etc. - I don't know that it would be impossible. Another win for globalization.
The slope is getting steeper.
The administration seems very big on nasty sticks and not so big on carrots for getting people to leave. You'd think they could afford a few carrots with the DOGE savings, because there are still plenty of Biden era immigrants who are in the country with no intention of leaving.
By the way, there's another consequence of relying only on sticks, and then the really nasty ones: if I were an immigrant living in a Salvadorian community, I would now seriously consider organizing into a gang with an explicit purpose of resisting ICE. Or, barring that, seek to join an existing gang. Since you're going to end up in a torture hell regardless of your actual behavior, might as well put up the resistance.
Ironically, if I were to commit a murder, the local law enforcement will arrest me and put me into an American prison. Which is not picnic, but better than the Salvadorian nightmare, AFAIK.
Surely the reasonable thing would just be to pack up and go home?
He was here legally. He also has a wife, a US citizen, and a child. He had a proper job at a steel plant. FFS the guy was a poster child for what I thought conservatives wanted for this country: a working man, a father, complying with all immigration laws after the initial violation! ICE openly admits they removed him by mistake! Jesus, forget all this political shit, do y’all feel no compassion for the man? His wife? His child? What fucking American Greatness is being made again here?!
Unless cruelty is the point. Then sure, everything makes sense.
"He was here legally. He also has a wife, a US citizen, and a child. He had a proper job at a steel plant. FFS the guy was a poster child for what I thought conservatives wanted for this country: a working man, a father, complying with all immigration laws after the initial violation!"
Wife alleged he committed domestic violence in 2021:
https://abc7chicago.com/post/kilmar-abrego-garcia-restraining-order-wife-deported-maryland-man-jennifer-vasquez-sura-said-he-hit-2021-court-docs/16187365/
"In the 2021 documents obtained by ABC News, Vasquez Sura noted two past incidents, alleging that in 2020, Abrego Garcia hit her with his work boot and that in August 2020, he hit her in the eye.
The protective order was dismissed a month after it was issued, on June 17, 2021, after Vasquez Sura failed to appear in court, according to a signed order of dismissal by a judge.
ABC News also obtained documents submitted to a Maryland court in August 2018 by a man who claimed to be the father of two of Vasquez Sura's children. In a five-page motion for an emergency hearing, he said he feared for the children's lives, in part, "because she is dating a gang member and attempted self-harm," the records state.
The man did not include the name of the individual he alleged is a gang member. It is not known if he was referring to Abrego Garcia."
So maybe this is the origin of the claim by ICE that a confidential informant alleged Garcia was a gang member.
He also does not seem to have been in the US legally, at least before the stay on the deportation order in 2019. Again, I have no idea if the claim that he was in fear of his life due to a gang in his home country is true or was a convenient excuse to stop the deportation. A large part of the problem with this case is we don't have solid facts on any of the acts by any of the parties, everyone is spinning things to support their side of the argument (he is an innocent little lamb!/no he's a violent gangbanger!)
So if the danger to his life no longer exists, would the original deportation order be legitimate again?
“So if the danger to his life no longer exists, would the original deportation order be legitimate again?”
We can ask the courts, can’t we. And we did. And the courts said “bring him back so we can follow the process”.
I don’t know how many other ways I and others can say “this was a mistake and Trump admin refuses to fix it”. That IS THE PROBLEM! Stop trying to weasel “was he really here legally, oh someone said he was a gang member”, etc ad nauseam. This. Was. A. Mistaken. Deportation.
If he had a US citizen wife then why not apply for an Immigrant Visa for a Spouse of a US Citizen? https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/family-immigration/immigrant-visa-for-spouse.html
Why should anyone feel more compassion for a law-breaker than for the literally billions of law-abiding foreigners who would like to move to the United States but are not willing to break the law to do so?
This is where just taking a look at a description of a legal document should make you pause and ask yourself: really, why not apply for an Immigrant visa of a spouse, why is this obvious to me, who knows nothing about US immigrant laws, but somehow evades the people in the middle of it? What if I actually don't understand the process at all?
So: you apply for a visa from outside of the country. Inside, you apply for what's known as "adjustment of status", which is not a visa, and is a completely separate process. One can linger in that process for years, all entirely legal, but incredibly complicated. AFAIK the guy was in the middle of this process, but it's always complicated when there are infractions in the past, anything can derail it and set it back for years.
Of course now that's he's outside he could just apply for the spousal visa. Sure. If this Bukele sadist fuck lets him out of his concentration camp.
Yes, we can always condemn any person to unimaginable hardship and shit, because there are literally billion others, bla bla fucking bla. Do we... have to? Do we always fucking have to fuck people up even when they jump through every hoop to atone for one infraction? Do we think that there's "a spot" opened for another "deserving" person to come in? Do we think our immigration system is that rational?
Are you going to tell his wife: sorry hon, get another husband, we're going to let this one rot in hell because we don't feel like fixing a mistake.
Tell his child, you know, your father made one mistake years ago, coming here illegally, but we also made a mistake, throwing him into a torture hell, and he tried his best to fix his mistake, but we can't be bothered, really, who needs a father anyway, get a grip kid.
Oh, and then lament the "absentee fathers", if only these irresponsible coloreds could marry their baby mommas and stick to it. Ha!
Sorry, this really makes me fucking stewing mad. I just picture the anguish of his wife, and the mental torture of knowing that this is all a huge mistake, and they just refuse to fix it. For her, this was the day her life was destroyed. For those Trumpy fucks, it was Tuesday.
Conservatives are for hardworking immigrants that still take jobs from the natives and drive up housing costs. The new reactionary populists are not. Their compassion for men like this is limited when millions poured over the border in just a few years.
What fucking jobs from natives? The guy was working at a steel plant, have you not heard business owners complaining they can't hire competent help no matter what? The natives can't pass a drug test, FFS.
I am for hardworking immigrants, regardless of their legality, having a pathway to citizenship. That is the promise of America symbolised in the Statue of Liberty. I’ve been heartened that the Trump admin haven’t gone as hard on the deportations as they initially threatened to.
That said the left kinda dropped the ball on this one when they turned a blind eye towards hundreds of thousands of fentanyl deaths, violent Latin American gangs taking over apartment complexes, etc. Did you know 150 House Democrats voted against deporting illegal immigrants who had committed sex crimes?
Fuck the left, can we just not destroy this one guy's life by mistake? What's he's got to do with "the left"? Why does he and his family have to be destroyed to make some abstract "left" pay? Do you think Hillary Clinton cares? Do you think "antifa" are inconvenienced? BLM?
Cruelty is the point, and this is as a stark illustration as any.
Forming gangs to resist ICE might make the sticks nastier. They aren't rounding people up particularly fast right now, so plenty of these guys might prefer to just take their luck assuming they won't get caught.
Yes, this makes sense for now, stay low and hope the lightning doesn't strike. If the pickups intensify AND people keep getting sent to CECOT, then it's a tough decision time.
Reminds me of what a self-defense instructor taught about trying to disarm an assailant with a gun: if he just wants your wallet, give him the wallet, don't be a hero. Now, if you're being taken at a gunpoint, your chances of survival that ordeal are like 20%, so you have a split-second decision to make...
There aren't any DOGE savings. Well, maybe enough for a bag of carrots at a local walmart. OTOH it's entirely likely that on the net DOGE has resulted in an increase of the federal deficit.
"A bag of carrots at walmart" percent of the federal budget is all you'd need.
The federal budget for 2025 is projected to be higher than it was for 2024. The budget for 2026 is projected to be higher than 2025. It's not even plausible for DOGE to reverse this: it's nothing but theater.
The loss in 2025 budget comes from a loss of tax revenue, not because DOGE is making existing government services more expensive.
Apparently you need to re-read what I wrote. "The federal budget for 2025 is projected to be higher..." Not the budget deficit. The budget. Period. The amount of money spent by the federal government. This has nothing to do with revenues.
If this is a surprise to you, it really, really shouldn't be. DOGE isn't making existing government services more expensive, but it's not making them meaningfully cheaper, either. It can't. Most of the budget is in areas that DOGE isn't even touching. Increasing spending in those areas can trivially overwhelm even the most flagrant and irresponsible cuts to payroll (which is a tiny fraction of the whole).
I meant a literal bag of course, but I do like your optimism!
Back in his sane days Rod Dreher spoke of the Law of Merited Impossibility: "this will never happen and when it does you bigots will have deserved it". The MAGA set seem to have adapted it wholesale at this point.
> if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90-years-old
Like Paul Pelosi? I recall DT laughing at that
Really, is it so unclear to many that this is a massively disturbed person?
Well that was actually an attack with a hammer to Paul Pelosi’s head rather than a baseball bat and Trump did in fact use it as a line to get a laugh.
How’s Pelosi’s husband doing?
<Laughter from the audience>
Yeah, I think he is one sick individual.
>President Donald Trump said Monday that he is open to deporting US citizens who are considered violent criminals.
Deporting them? Or having them serve their sentences in El Salvador? Because those are not the same things (not that I support either one).
From the video I think the journalists were asking about simply deporting them sans trial as the administration is doing with noncitizens. It's not clear whether Trump in answering was talking about that or about transferring US convicts, nor whether he views those two things as different.
Yes, one can never be sure what he means, or even that he knows himself.
I also don't know what it means to "deport" a US citizen. That makes no sense, unless it is supposed to mean revoking citizenship, but the Supreme Court decades ago held that is unconstitutional as punishment for a crime.
Regardless, the quote I saw was "if the law allows it ." So maybe there are bigger fish to fry.
Worth noting perhaps that none of the US residents thus far seized and sent to the El Salvador dungeon had been tried anywhere in the US, let alone convicted of, any violent crimes.
Also, the totality of the evidence yet offered for the idea that legal US resident Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang is that in 2019 outside a Home Depot he was among a group of men scooped up by local police. One of the other guys said Garcia was in MS-13 based entirely on his wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. That informant claimed that Garcia was a member of MS-13 in a different US state from the arrest, one in which Garcia had never resided and still hasn't. The police report noted that the cops on the scene did not believe this claim. Garcia was released without any charges and has never been charged with any crime.
[When he lived in El Salvador, Garcia had testified in public court against the Barrio-18 gang. In 2019 a US district court judge barred his deportation because gangs in El Salvador were a threat to his life.]
Okay, but what about non violent crimes? It’s essentially undisputed that this guy illegally entered the United States (which is a crime), and that he is from El Salvador. I fail to see how sending him back to El Salvador is some crime against humanity, even if there is some technical procedural reason why it shouldn’t have happened.
The "technical procedural reason" is that he fled El Salvador because of gangs who threatened his life, which he did in 2011 when he was 16, and the law in the US has protections against deportation in situations like that.
Some of us here believe that the consequences of your actions matter. If you ship him to El Salvador as a gang member, then the predictable consequence is that he will be locked up there in some human rights violating prison without even the pretense of a trial (and likely on the US governments dime).
Sure, you can claim that this is not the problem of the US. But by that general principle, you should then also be fine with sending a woman from Afghanistan back to her abusive Taliban husband for driving over the speed limit, or with a ship captain removing a stowaway from his ship in the middle of the Atlantic.
Those both sound reasonable, yes.
Just to get this for the record: you’re saying that you’re fine with throwing a stowaway into the ocean and certain death?
Man, it's really sad to know people like Melvin have sway of world affairs jfc
Simply "sending him back to El Salvador" for crossing our border would be one thing.
Sending him in chains to be dropped directly into a prison built to house the most-violent criminals without possibility of parole, based on a single vague accusation five years ago which the police officers who heard it didn't find credible, without his having had any opportunity to defend himself from the accusation, is a different thing.
Also: sending him back to El Salvador was a violation of a US court order as the administration has acknowledged ("administrative error" is their spin on it). Declining to now lift a finger to retrieve him or even determine whether he's still alive, is a violation of two subsequent federal court orders (one of those being from the SCOTUS).
In this country of ours you don't decide if someone has committed a crime. A judge does. The judge in this case ruled Garcia can stay in this country legally while due process is being applied.
Your undisputeds and fails-to-see have zero legal meaning.
I think you are philosophically confused. If someone breaks into my house and steals my TV, they are a robber. I don’t have to wait for the trial to conclude and a judge and jury to convict before I go online and complain about all the crime in my neighborhood. I don’t have to feel bad if the guy invading my house falls down the stairs trying to steal my stuff. Crime is a property of the physical actions and mind states of the people who commit the crime, not a property of which particular individuals have been adjudicated by the justice system.
You do, though. Have to wait, that is. That is what "due process" partially is. Waiting for the process to run its due course.
You're philosophically (and civically, though not a word) confused.
Crime is a property of which particular individuals have been adjudicated by the justice system. That is what a justice system is for. The adjudication of crime.
If there has been no adjudication by said same justice system, you cannot know if a crime has, in truth, happened or not happened.
You can assert, allege, infer, imply, insinuate and other such measures, but you cannot know, claim, declare or dictate.
Continuing, you may assert that someone you find in your house touching your TV is a criminal. This assertion is fine to make.
You cannot, until the actual facts of the case are established, know if this is so or not so. Crime, being partly a property of the physical actions and mind states of the people who commit crime, the context in which they reside and the actual specifics of specific cases, does not rely on you making a judgement simply by the immediate intuitive jump you come to by looking at something.
Rather famously?
Justice is blinded by a veil.
>Crime is a property of which particular individuals have been adjudicated by the justice system. That is what a justice system is for. The adjudication of crime.
No, that's wrong. You may say that the justice system is for controlling _what punishment the government may inflict_ on someone, but the moment e.g. a thief steals someone's wallet, they are a criminal, even if no police report is ever filed, nor arrest, trial, or conviction made. If a hit man kills someone in a forest, where there is no policeman to hear, would you claim there was no murder? There is a corpse.
> I don’t have to feel bad if
That's the problem. It isn't about feeling bad. It is about
1. Doing the right thing, ie, obeying the law; and
2. Ensuring that the guard rails which prevent govt encroachment on the rights of everyone stay intact.
>Crime is a property of the physical actions and mind states of the people who commit the crime,
But that is irrelevant. In a just society, people are punished not because they have broken the law, but rather because the govt has proven, in a fair trial, that they have broken the law.
>1. Doing the right thing, ie, obeying the law; and
The left has been undermining the rule of law on immigration since before I first became involved in politics -- sanctuary cities, no person is illegal, all that stuff -- so I hope you'll pardon me if I say this sudden concern for obeying the law comes across as rather insincere.
I think you are legally confused. In this country a court decides who is a criminal and who is not. Not you. Not me. Not Trump. Not a tinpot dictator of a Central American shithole.
This is a major philosophical debate, are you using "legally" cynically or litterally?
"Send him back to El Salvador to live his life as a citizen thereof" is very different from "Send him to El Salvador and pay the government to imprison him."
(Also, as Paul notes, he fled the country to avoid being killed by the gang he testified against. While it might not violate any laws, "Send him back to El Salvador for a gangland execution" would still be a morally bad outcome.)
It probably does violate the law, since a judge apparently granted him withholding of removal in 2019.
yep, this is so frustrating. "But he is a criminal actually" says the rando who clearly never practiced law and thinks he decides who is and isn't a criminal.
Yeah, this is stuff that most people have figured out in elementary school.
A rational society which is opposed to violent gangs from a foreign nation entering its border to do crimes, might perhaps place some _value_ on a person from that nation who was willing to testify in open court against such a gang. Might perhaps _not_ want to discourage others from doing similar things.
On the Edgelords post someone made an off-topic comment complaining about the name X and how much they hated it. I and a few others replied, there was a back-and-forth, and then suddenly the entire comment thread was gone. The thread itself was of laughably trivial importance, but this is really disturbing me because in the past if someone deletes their comment it does NOT remove the comments replying to it. If something on Substack has changed such that this is no longer the case (and you can potentially write a long well-reasoned refutation of someone and if they don't like it they can delete your comment as well as theirs) this is so terrible that I may well quit using Substack as a result.
If Scott is reading this, can he please clarify whether he deleted that thread (it was stupid and off-topic after all) so I can rest assured that only the blog owner, and not whoever happened to make the top level comment, can erase an entire thread?
EDIT: Thanks to Vincent Mango for letting me test this here. I deleted and reposted this comment and I can still see his reply. Can everyone else?
Someone may have blocked you. When that happens, Substack hides all threads that the person who blocked you appears in. It's a really bad way of implementing that feature.
Log out (or use incognito mode) and see if you can see the thread.
It's a subscriber post, so I can't. Not without paying for a second subsciption.
But this sounds like what must have happened. At least comments aren't being deleted.
What possible justification is there for, when A blocks B, that affecting what *B* can see? Why doesn't it just stop A seeing it?
And I'll never understand the kind of petulant child that blocks someone for disagreeing, but that unfortunately doesn't need any explanation.
Wait, I can block anyone I want and then prevent them from reading any comments on any article?
Eremolalos claimed to have blocked me, and there was supportive evidence in that her responses to me didn't show up in my substack notifications. I could still see them in the comment threads, though.
I think so, I'm not totally sure. Maybe it's only threads the blocker creates that get hidden. Probably it hides their comments and any comments which descend from them. But I did still get notifications when other people replied to my comments in the blocked thread, which is kind of maddening.
The whole blocking feature is (was?) a huge mess anyway.
There's one commenter on here I've blocked for writing exclusively inane and irrelevant comments; I've still seen their posts and threads and everything months later.
Lately I haven't seen any of their comments so perhaps they've fixed that issue but my money is on "it's as broken as the rest of substack's comment section"
Someone on the "Purpose of a system" post deleted comments I'd responded to, and not only are mine still visible, but a third party responded to them.
That's the purpose of Substack
I still see Vincent Mango's reply down below
I don't see any replies to this comment. As far as I can tell I'm the first one replying.
Sorry, to clarify, there should be a "comment deleted" with a reply at the bottom (or top if "oldest first" is on) of the page.
Ah ok! Yes, I do see it.
Is there a set of genes that can reliably encode for an intelligent species that actually uses its intelligence primarily for gene propagation? I think the answer is no, specifically through the process of natural evolution because the incentives required to keep the species alive initially end up subverting the incentives that encourage gene propagation through intelligent workarounds.
I go into slightly more detail here https://open.substack.com/pub/virgilverne/p/the-original-alignment-problem
I'm curious about whether I've missed something that disproves the idea.
If that's true then the intelligence genes would have disappeared. The fact that the most populous mammal species is also the most intelligent seems to me to be prima facie evidence that intelligence aids gene propagation.
It does but only to a certain extent at which there is a peak then a decline like most of the world is experiencing right now. The idea is that genes cannot utilize the full capabilities of intelligent beings for gene propagation no matter what incentives they encode, at some point a wall is hit.
Population count isn't a good metric; only small organisms can ever be winners. You want biomass.
In a really strict sense, you'd want mass of DNA, but go with biomass.
By biomass, plants overwhelm animals, and earthworms overwhelm vertebrates. There isn't an objective metric evolution is optimizing against; what survives, survives.
Of course there's an objective metric evolution is optimizing against; I already mentioned it. It's amount of DNA.
The point of the theory of evolution is that the mechanism "what survives, survives" necessarily optimizes for copy count.
If so, here's the winner of evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Pelagibacter_communis
They beat *Homo sapiens* by population (1e28 vs. 1e10 individuals), biomass (1e14 vs. 1e12 kg), total number of genomes (1e28 vs. 1e23 cells), and total amount of DNA (1e34 vs. 1e32 base pairs).
It's not a good metric across classes or phyla, but within one I think it's ok. Hence most populous mammal.
Certainly it's appropriate in the context of this thread.
I think all the genes which are universal in humans which separate us from our most recent common ancestor with other hominids were increasing the inclusive fitness of our ancestors (because otherwise, they do not become universal).
Furthermore, some of these genes likely increased our intelligence, because we are smarter than the MRCA.
The trouble with humans, from evolution's perspective, is that we recently broke out of the ancestral environment when we invented agriculture, and are way out of equilibrium, with many of our adaptions being actively harmful to our inclusive genetic fitness.
If you give us another million years or ten without changing the environment further (or us messing with out genes directly), then we will likely display disgust to sugar and become uninterested in non-reproductive sex. But for almost all of our evolutionary history, sugar was actively helpful and having a sex drive reliably lead to reproduction, so there was no need to add machinery to limit the sugar intake or add a specific preference for reproductive sex, so evolution did not bother.
Relevant reading: Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers
"If you give us another million years or ten without changing the environment further (or us messing with out genes directly), then we will likely display disgust to sugar and become uninterested in non-reproductive sex"
That's where the problem lies, theoretically natural evolution would adapt to these problems but you can't really freeze humanity for a million years without direct intervention. By the time reliable birth control and mass entertainment come about, you're on a steep technological incline that leads to subverting the process of natural evolution within a few generations. Any adaptations for dealing with these issues would need to already exist beforehand, which is very unlikely to be possible since they would contradict what's necessary to survive in nature.
Thanks for the Less Wrong article, i hadn't been able to find relevant discussion around this idea.
There's this idea that evolution is only about gene propagation and nothing else, but that's just not true. Natural selection also selects towards "evolvability" and "niche fulfilment", both of which are related to intelligence.
"A" is not losing here by propagating less, "B" is becoming more evolvable and fulfilling more niches due to its improving intelligence, which allows A to survive longer. Now, that doesn't necessarily refute your point about the fermi paradox, only that it's not necessarily a form of misalignment.
True, B becomes very resilient and capable through technological progress borne out of intelligence, but A has a very hard time ;using this resilience and capability for further gene propagation past a certain extent. I suppose you could say that it's a worthy tradeoff but that does refute the idea that A would like to but can't come up with a B that pursues both.
It seems like it goes fine until the creation becomes smarter than the creator, at which point the creator is no longer able to predict how incentives will be fulfilled. The linked article uses humans as a case study, but I would say the 'problem' with humans is not that the incentives must always be wrong but that evolution wasn't smart enough to make them right. There's plenty of examples in the natural world where animals will spread their genes even if it means death, for instance Pacific giant octopus mothers who will starve themselves to care for their eggs. Or even just humans 400 years ago were a lot more aligned with evolution's goals. (Aristocrats had lots of kids.) Maybe in another few hundred years we'll see lots of people around that just have an innate desire to have lots of biological kids.
As much as I hope we do eventually become unaligned from evolution, it's too early to declare that as having already happened.
I was pretty upset by the description of EA in this article (under "Accelerationist"), but the author is very well connected in DC power circles and I trust that she is describing what she's seeing there. Are there any lefty EAs left on the east coast or after SBF did they all either leave EA or go hard right?
https://made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io/five-attitudes-towards-climate-change-and-the-impact-on-our-society/?ref=made-not-found-by-danah-boyd-newsletter
She describes both a before and after. The 'before' (that is, the EA we all know and love that says you should donate towards malaria nets in Africa and suchlike) goes:
"Initially, EAs believed that the smartest people in the room (yes, that's a eugenics notion) should use their smarts to maximize capitalist returns (yes, that's a part of accelerationism) to have significant capital to "give back" to society. For the most part, they were in the Carnegie school, meaning that they thought that the public was too dumb to govern its own money and that the smart people should allocate wealth strategically for the good of all (yes, that psychotic)."
I don't know how she managed to come up with such a bad take, and I see no reason to believe her thoughts on 'after' are any better. She seems to be just generally hostile to the entire philosophy.
On to looking at the 'after' section... I was going to list specific errors I could find, but looking more closely the whole thing appears to be one large error. Now, I do not have the connections to DC to know what is going on there, but I suspect the answer is revealed at the very end. She describes Elon Musk as espousing this view. But it would make much more sense if that is actually backwards, and she got to that view by simply putting together a slightly warped view of Musk's (Edit: replace {and only Musk's} with {and also some of his friends' I guess}) philosophy.
I was actually going to quote that excerpt, too.
Also:
> There were intense debates among people who thought that the next phase would be communism (in the Marx sense) while others firmly believed that a post-capitalist world would be fascism. They intensely disagreed over which was better. But there was a segment that believed that the key to getting to that post-capitalist state was to accelerate capitalism. This could be done through financialization, by pushing capital to the brink. Over the last 20 years, discussions of accelerationism have re-ignited, not simply to achieve the communist/fascist outcome, but by power players who wanted to ensure a seat to the table.
So she is throwing the e/acc's in the same pot as the fascists and commies who saw capitalism as a state to be overcome (and were wrong about it -- 100 years later liberal capitalism is still extremely successful).
While I love to bash e/acc's as much as the next guy, I would rather bash them for what they believe than this obvious straw man. Commies and fascists wanted to speed up capitalism to bring about its "inevitable" collapse, e/acc's want to speed up technological development (in particular AI) to bring about an utopia, which is thought to benefit all humans. If we are playing fast and loose with the facts, why not throw in the evangelicals in the same pot as well? They also want to speed something up (the 2nd coming of Christ) to achieve some utopian outcome.
Then there is that label of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL which is not a self-description but a hostile ascription, much like "woke snowflake", "entartete Kunst" or "deplorables". The definitional article she links is trying to pack rationality, EA, AI doomers and so on into one package, then points out that the key members of these movements have voiced heretical thoughts about the heritability of intelligence and are therefore all evil eugenics. (Still, that article shows at least some willingness to engage with the beliefs of its subjects, even if it is painting EA as mostly longtermist. The same can not be said of that climate change attitude article.)
In conclusion, I think that Danah Boyd should apply for an opinion column in the Guardian. She matches their style of ill-informed hit pieces. I mean, just read her article:
> The new EA-accelerationist combo platter is extra special. To protect the species, we should speed up capitalism to extract and hoard as much wealth as possible. That money grab will cause significant financial harm to individual people, but the "smart" ones will cope. The next move is to invest that capital into advanced technology. This can't play out in a slow way - this must be a massive economic push, akin to the buildup of going to war. (Or, maybe, just maybe, going to war will help this along.) Along the way, we need to find the smartest and most fertile people. (This is where the natalist eugenics comes in. And one branch of anti-trans procreation panicking. And the weird natalist but anti-IVF crowds.). Cuz soon, we are going to need to send people to Mars.
Few share Musk's Mars obsession. Anyone in EA with two brain cells to rub together (which includes just about all of them) can see that for the forseeable future, the most viable biosphere for humanity will be Earth. Going to Mars to escape climate change is like jumping from the frying pan into the acetylene-oxygen fire. (There are reasons to expand to Mars, but they are orthogonal to climate change, e.g. x-risk from asteroids.) Also, I highly doubt that the people working for the Against Malaria Foundation are just like "I guess climate change will kill most of the people, but as long as we can make the Herrenrasse escape to Mars, everything is fine. Pass me another bed net, will you?"
And in her last parenthesis, she goes fully in hallucination mode. The ratsphere has been quite trans-inclusive afaik, with Scott's article on the Categories and all that. And what rat-adjacent "crowds" are supposed to be "anti-IVF", pray tell? I remember the superbabies article on lesswrong, and if anything it was enthusiastic about the possibilities of embryo selection in IVF.
How in the world is "the smartest people in the room," a eugenics notion? Is, "the tallest person should change that lightbulb" also eugenics??? One could say that the "smartest person in the room should invent the next great thing." Of course, that will happen whether or not you actually say it.
I agree that even the before description does not align with what I see as "main stream" EA, but I chatted with her about it she's not building the impression just off Musk, but from the crypto-MAGA crowd and others in DC that at least claim to be former EAs.
Are you on the east coast?
I am in the midwest and not in physical proximity to any EA or accelerationist groups. My familiarity with EA comes from reading Peter Singer's book that started the movement, from participating in it myself, and from following rationalist, EA-adjacent blogs (first Yudkowsky's and now Scott's, with sprinklings of others) since 2013.
After rereading this and looking at a few of her other pieces, I'm sensing that her goal in writing is narrative-building (like in the humanities) rather than truth-seeking (like a nerd). The goal of the article is to make the globalist view of global warming look good and its opponents look bad. The former is done by gathering all sensible ways to oppose global warming and putting them under the label "global worldview". This is done reasonably well and she has enough familiarity with the matter to avoid obvious factual errors. The latter is done by sorting the people who oppose global warming into groups and then describing them in a way that comes naturally to humans talking about their outgroups - that is, it comes across as very hostile despite probably being intended to be only a little bit hostile. The second section, "The Hedonist Worldview" appear to be her long-time opponents whom she understands well enough to portray with factual accuracy. The other three sections are in her own words what she's trying to make sense of, and describe groups that she is not very familiar with.
The section on "The Evangelical Worldview" appears to describe at least one actually existing Christian whom she has talked with for long enough to get an understanding of, however she either is unaware or is downplaying that the view is generally considered fringe among the larger body of Christians. The more common view is that God will take care of the Second Coming on His own terms, and that Christians ought to be doing good works all the time so that when Jesus returns he will find them busy doing good works. As for global warming there is a split between those who believe that humans are too small to make significant changes to the entire climate (this was my pastor's view back when I was a Christian) and those who believe that God has tasked man with stewardship over the Earth, which includes preventing global warming.
I have less to say on "The Xenophobic Worldview" because I do not know much about it. It reads to me like trying to take Trumpism and shoehorn it into a global warming narrative. In theory the environmental concerns about population could logically lead to an anti-immigration policy, but I haven't personally seen the same person advocate both ideas. These appear to be separate and unrelated groups, with perhaps a few individuals of overlapping membership.
Then all that's left is "The Accelerationist Worldview." Probably people here are already aware of the many ways the Effective Altruism description is inaccurate, but just in case, the philosophy Peter Singer pushed was that you would ruin a suit to save a child you see drowning in a pond as you walk by, so you should also be willing to donate the money and forgo buying the suit if it can save the life of a child in a third-world country. Central tenets of EA philosophy are that some charitable donations do much more good than others given the same amount of money (e.g. combating tropical diseases vs funding a school field trip vs your tax dollars sending troops to Iran, yes, if she thinks the public governs its own money well then she must think that was a good choice), and that to find out which is best you can use numbers including on things that we traditionally taboo putting numbers on (a life saved, a pretty sunset). These ideas have now spread far enough that they are no longer associated with EA but are seen as just common sense. Some major groups include Giving What We Can, a pledge to donate 10% of your earnings to helping others, GiveWell and CharityNavigator, which try to sort out the legit charities from fraudulent or corrupt ones and figure out their real-world impact, and 80,000 hours, which encourages people to either work a job that helps people directly, or a job that pays well so you can donate more to helping people. That last one has been a bit controversial because some people (such as me) worried that trying too hard to maximize your earnings may change you so that once you have them you no longer want to use them to help others, however EA did tend to lean pretty far on the side of supporting it. But then SBF happened and now it's become the face of the movement as seen by the world at large, whoops. We should revert to putting more emphasis on jobs that are helpful directly, but it may be too late.
Ok, but that was all about the Effective Altruists without covering the Accelerationists at all. Accelerationists (sometimes Effective Accelerationists, but abbreviated as e/acc and never as EA) are generally former Effective Altruists, who believe that we can and will develop a super smart AI that will quickly find a way to bring everybody up to a first-world standard of living and then some, likely going on to cure death and disease and set up a post-scarcity utopia. Logically following from that belief, they want to create that AI sooner rather than later so that it can help the people who need it right now. These are again usually former EAs, and current EAs tend to oppose them due to the concern that a super-smart AI may wipe out humanity rather than usher in a utopia. One thing that sure isn't the case is that these people think most people will die of climate change. Rather they think that it will be extremely trivial for a super-smart AI to solve climate change by just adding in solar panels and carbon capture to the utopia it'll build. To be clear, I am very much not part of this group and consider the plan batshit insane, but at least I am passingly familiar with the reasoning.
Oh, I am sure that there are more people than just Musk. Crypto-MAGA people do not sound maximally EA adjacent, but I guess some people who will do one thing which is considered weird will also do another.
And given that rationality even had a (trans) fringe group which turned into a murder cult [1], it would be strange not to have some people who went from EA to crypto-bro.
The problem with the article is that she is maliciously painting all of EA with the Musk brush. The message is very clear: you are weird, you smell of heresy, we don't want you and we will burn the epistemic commons to harm you.
If I wrote an article on the character of the Italians, and my main source were the biographies of the Mussolini government, or if I wrote an article arguing that female writers spread their vile slander by distorting the truth beyond all recognition, and based that only on the person of Mrs. Boyd and a few Guardian commentators, I would commit that very same sin.
[1] https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-zizians-and-the-rationalist-death
I am a lefty former EA, and I took my money and got out when when SBF was getting his laurels from the community.
I think EA is still a good organization at the moment, but thinking like a long termist myself, the trend line is going in a bad direction such taking away my name and check book made sense as a vote, given that the politics of the people who decided the politics of the organization are so sub Rosa subsumed that they are impossible to discuss, as they are convinced they have no politics somehow.
DISCLAIMER: SAMPLE SIZE OF ONLY THE PEOPLE I COULD TALK TO
I'm old enough to tell when a social organization gets past the capture tipping point; unless organized EA does some authoritarian values based purges, its going to be dead or an esoteric conservative club in a couple years.
What do you think are the indicators that an organization is getting captured?
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Do you still donate money inline with (original) EA principles? I give money to GiveWell... it doesn't seem have those political problems?
I guess I don't think of EA as "an organization" so much as a bunch of different organizations and an overarching philosophy....
No. I no longer trust the research any EA umbrella organization does to prove effectiveness, and I don't trust them to judge a specific cause as altruistic or not.
that's not to say that their research is bad and their altruism isn't, but the threshold for trust on this type of thing is high on my end.
I donate less often now, but I donate about the same amount. Im from Central america, and there are plenty of causes there that might be a bit less efficient by the dollar then some EA charities, but I can call my buddies to go there and physically verify that eg. stagnant pools have outlets dug in them.
Yeah this is my approach to charity donations too. I can help this person right here. Not send the money into a botomless faceless well of giving.
I really enjoy the card/strategy game Splendor, and have played a ton both online and in-person. I've been thinking about some house rules to spice it up, and possibly make it more strategic. I've been brainstorming with ChatGPT some, would love to brainstorm with any fellow strategy game nerds here too. I think what would make the most intuitive sense is keeping with the card game motif- stealing ideas from existing card games. Basic idea:
Players are dealt or can choose a hand of private cards at the beginning of the game. (Maybe even a private noble?) They can purchase these normally, same as cards on the table
Elaborations:
Instead of dealing these private cards, players pass around the Tier 3 card deck at the beginning of the game, look at 3 cards, keep 1 of them in their hand, and shuffle the other 2 into the deck. Then, pass around the Tier 2 card deck, players look at 5 cards, keep 2 of them, etc.
Or
Stealing an idea from poker, the game has a 'river', with some of the cards on the table hidden and then flipped over 1 at a time
Any other good ideas? Anything else we can steal from existing card games? I would prefer to make the game more strategic and less reliant on luck/winning by just getting lucky cards
I’d like an alternate or additional mechanism to Nobles, maybe something less valuable but also easier to get?
The game is really well balanced as it is, so you have to be careful not to wreck the economy.
Have you played Splendor Duel? It adds some interesting mechanics that spice it up a bit.
As Splendor is a card game, there is only so much you can do to reduce luck's role in the game. How you reveal cards to the players is important in changing the luck factor.
One thing you can do to reduce luck's impact is how you refill the market of cards. This idea is inspired by the game Powergrid. Instead of flipping over a new card that was previously unseen, you can have one or two face up cards that are not yet available for purchase (either face up on top of the deck, or set next to the deck) that will be the future cards added to the market. That way all players know the upcoming cards to be added when cards are removed. This does mess with the games mechanic that allows you to reserve the top card of a deck, but you can decide how you want to handle reserving cards that are not yet available in the market.
I don't think Splendor is overly reliant on luck. The aleatory element is just that the cards available on your turn can depend on what was just drawn from one of the three decks. The game has a mechanic for combatting the swinginess already, in that you can reserve any card on the deck for later. I think players having a hand of hidden cards, even if they were drafted, would feel more random as the game would no longer be wholly open info. Players would be blindsided by someone appearing in the endgame with the perfect card in their hand.
The last time I played, I had the biggest gem engine, I was raking in a free card every turn by the late game, but I still lost to the player with the smallest gem engine who had been more strategic in saving up for a few high value point cards. Her win felt earned.
> but I still lost to the player with the smallest gem engine who had been more strategic in saving up for a few high value point cards. Her win felt earned.
Those cards are generally pretty easy to identify (there are few high-value cards that are valuable to, and plausibly purchasable by, a given player), and you can block the win by taking them. Theoretically, this is correct play.
From a systems perspective it's a disaster; you're playing worse in order to make someone else do worse by a greater margin. I don't like mechanics like this. It's at its most blatant in Settlers of Catan, where if you're winning the right move for other people is to refuse to trade commodities with you because you're winning.
This is the kind of thing that might lead people to believe you can win a trade war with tariffs.
I agree that that's not that fun game design. But I think in Splendor, as you're typically playing with 3+, it's usually not in any one person's interests to waste a move soley to block a player if in doing so the other players get more momentum. As there are almost always multiple high point cards to go for, it's usually better racing to get one you want, and reserving it if you think someone will snipe you.
> But I think in Splendor, as you're typically playing with 3+, it's usually not in any one person's interests to waste a move soley to block a player if in doing so the other players get more momentum.
This analysis is incomplete. There may be 3 players, but if you're handily beating one of them and close to the other one, you should be playing to hurt your rival regardless of the gain to the hopeless one.
I once dated a girl whose father is a radiologist at the most prestigious hospital in my state (part of a T20 medical school).
I was surprised to learn he had a living will that specified that if he was incapacitated and on life support, he should be transferred to the (less prestigious) Catholic hospital across town.
Apparently he thinks his prestigious hospital is too quick to pull the plug on patients.
Is this common practice among medical professionals at public hospitals? Or is he just an odd duck?
Perhaps this is also the result of workplace drama. Maybe he knows one of his co-workers would plug him right now if they could.
Ha, entirely possible!
Did you explicitly hear from him that the prestigious hospital pulls the plug too quick? Because sometimes doctors instead avoid hospitals that take too long to pull the plug. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
The choice of a Catholic hospital suggests that the worry is more likely to be "top quick" than "not quickly enough". The impression I have is that Catholic doctrine allows withdrawing life support under some circumstances, but advises more reluctance to do so than is the norm in secular hospitals.
I heard secondhand through his daughter that his reasoning was based on not wanting the plug pulled prematurely. I should've pulled that thread more, but we're not in contact anymore.
One would expect that some hospitals on average pull the plug too early, and others too late, and that sane individuals disagree which hospitals fall in which category.
I agree with Erica Rall that a Catholic hospital seems unlikely to fall into the "too early" category. There can be disagreement over some hospitals without there being disagreement over every hospital.
Can cats develop bipolar disorder? Some of you may remember my cat, the Warrior Princess. A couple of years ago, she became increasingly reluctant to come inside for dinner and stay inside for the night without yowling and complaining. She went AWOL for a couple of weeks before I found her injured, hiding under a neighbor's car. The vet gave me a drug to "calm her down" while her wound healed. I forget what it was, but half the recommended dose knocked her out. After she recovered from her wounds and I discontinued the kitty downers, she became a house cat who showed no interest in going outside for a few months. But then she started cycling back and forth between a manic up phase, where she was reluctant to come inside at night, and a depressive down phase, where she didn't want to go outside at all.
She came out of her depressive phase a couple of weeks ago, and right now she's at the peak of her manic phase. She allows me to collect her and bring her inside for dinner, but when I bring her in for the night, she gets restless and yowls at the door until I shut myself in my bedroom. and she gives up. And she'll skip any breakfast to go outside.
And I'm wondering if something like small doses of lithium salts might help her. Are there any animal behavioral psychologists in the SF Bay Area who might have a VMD that could prescribe something to level her off? My old vet has retired, and the current crop of vets who took over the business seem to be greedy bastards who are more intent on maximizing their income rather than helping animals (the first thing they ask is: how are you going to pay for this? — not what seems to be the problem with your pet?).
I've lived with a lot of cats and this just sounds like a cat to me. They're changeable beasts. Absolutely do not give human medication to a cat.
Considering how lithium salts are notorious for kidney/liver problems in human patients, and how cats are very fragile toxicology-wise, lithium dosing would be risky. You would probably want to look at anything else which might help first.
I'd be interested in Scott's thoughts on yesterday's NYT article on ADHD: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/magazine/adhd-medication-treatment-research.html
My personal experience somewhat tracks the gist of the article (to the extent the article has a gist). I was diagnosed in early 2023 at 40 years old. I tried coaching, etc., with mixed results. I went on methylphenidate (20 mg) in February 2024. The first dose felt like a miracle. I was suddenly just keeping things organized and doing my job. No hacks, no special effort. Over the next few months, the effectiveness of the medication waned, and last September I was bumped up to 40 mg of methylphenidate. I still subjectively feel more productive medicated than unmedicated, but I sometimes wonder if it's more feeling than fact. I'm definitely not as laser-focused as I was that first week or two that I started the medication. I wouldn't say my personality has become flatter, but I do enjoy the feeling on days I don't take the medication. The r/ADHD subreddit seems mostly against the article, arguing either that it's anti-medication or that it dismisses the experiences of those on ADHD. I'm not thinking about stopping my medication any time soon, but I think the article is a useful contrast to the "medication is always the answer" position that I see from most of the ADHD community (that I trust).
This article is... kind of annoying.
Some big points that bug me are:
- ADHD is on a continuum, and this is really hyped up, as though it suggests something profound. But so are lots of disorders. Depression. Anxiety. Intelligence is a continuum - that doesn't mean low mental ability isn't real.
- Similarly, we haven't found one ADHD gene, just some stuff that contributes. Again, so what? That's true for a lot of things. The brain is really complicated. There's no one intelligence gene or depression gene.
- The thing about students not learning more is kind of funny. They take stimulants and do more homework and yet they haven't learned more! As though this is a scathing critique of stimulants. Maybe it's not a selling point for them, but maybe this just shows that homework is useless bullshit?
I will say I think the article hits the nail on the head in one way: as a person with ADHD who takes Adderall, I occasionally find to my surprise that I still *can* do hard stuff without it, when I really have to. But it sucks so much. I feel incredibly bored the whole time. Meds take that away. That is a huge win for me.
They have some quotes from kids who took meds and got some benefits but didn't like how they felt. I'm sure that's a real thing, but they obviously didn't try to include any people who had a positive take. A huge chunk of my social circle and my immediate family all have ADHD and, to a person, they will tell you that stimulants fucking rule. They make the fog lift, they make the squirrels in your brain go away, they make it possible - not guaranteed, but possible - for life to not be such a horribly boring slog all of the time.
And yes, you should not just throw Ritalin at every kid who fidgets, sure. If somebody actually has serious issues, you take them to a professional and get them tested properly and see if there are other causes. But a lot of this article is just cherry-picking and reasoning fallacies in service of an old cliché about a common form of mental illness.
"I will say I think the article hits the nail on the head in one way: as a person with ADHD who takes Adderall, I occasionally find to my surprise that I still *can* do hard stuff without it, when I really have to."
For me its about timing, quality and consistency. I wasn't diagnosed until I was in my late 20s, and didn't get (effective) medication until my mid 30s, and of course I still did plenty of hard stuff between the ages of 15 and 35. But I had a lot less choice about when and how to do it. My default mode for doing anything that I didn't want to do was "do it in a huge rush once the deadline is close enough that the urgency overcomes the inertia." That was how I did homework. That was how I hunted for jobs. That was how I did the subset of job-related tasks that difficult to engage with otherwise (things like writing reports). I was lucky to be smart enough that even with this pattern, I could still do a lot of things quite well by most objective standards. But the overall result was me spinning a fairly impressive suite of knowledge and cognitive talents into a painful mediocre and banal set of life outcomes.
Of course I was somewhat aware of the pattern and its negative impacts even before suspecting I had ADHD and getting a diagnosis. Maybe one day in fifty I would have the mental clarity and motivation to try to do something about it, but every such attempt was of the "well, this might work well for a non-ADHD person (who didn't really need it)" variety.
I've only been on a useful dose of methyphenidate for a few years, but in those years I've actually started to get substantially close to the sort of life outcomes I want. Which, to be fair, is also partly lucky timing: starting the same medication a few years earlier might have simply meant waiting a couple years for the right opportunities. But I've definitely seen a real shift in how I'm able to interact with unpleasant-but-useful tasks. I still don't feel like I'm doing great at planning and scheduling and starting things early, but even doing somewhat better makes a pretty big difference.
I've been using modafinil for my ADHD for the past several years, and I am very happy with it. It works differently than classic stimulants: it's a bit more subtle, and it's more helpful for sustaining focus than initiating a task relative to Ritalin or Adderall.
It also has the big advantage of being less controlled than classic stimulants. Amphetamine-class meds are Schedule II in the US, while modafinil is Schedule IV. Practically, this means I can get a prescription for 90 days at a time rather than 30 and my medication management appointments can be telehealth instead of in person.
Chronically elevated dopamine upregulates the kappa opioid system, which in turn suppresses the release of dopamine and NE in the PFC. There are ways to address this, but unfortunately this seems to be a blind spot in standard psychiatric practice. Good luck.
In every other context, people recognised that if you take a stimulant every day then its effects are going to taper off, you're going to build tolerance for it. A lot of ADHD people (especially in online communities like Reddit) think that stimulants have some special curative function for ADHD, rather than doing the same thing they do for everyone. There's a narrative that they don't work on non-ADHD people, but that's not actually true (see for instance, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395918301567).
I'm not a doctor, but the classic advice for you here would be to take a break and start up again once your tolerance is lower, or just use them on days when you have work to do. Same advice I'd give to someone with a ten-cups-a-day coffee habit.
When I was on Ritalin as a kid, my doctor recommended skipping or taking half doses on weekends or holidays for tolerance reasons and also to mitigate potential side effects.
This advice is more applicable to children than to adults, as adults are more apt to have tasks that need completing on weekends. It's also probably specific to inattentive-type ADHD, as hyperactive-type often causes difficulties even when you don't have any work to do.
One of the real irritations I've had with depending on a controlled substance (methylphenidate) is that getting a prescription for some lower-dose pills and some higher-dose pills at the same time just doesn't seem to be possible. I've sort of managed to muddle through just by shifting the dose up and down a few times while still having pills left over from the previous dose, but it's irksome that I can't just get the prescription written for the pattern I actually use.
For me it's less about weekday vs weekend as just how I feel from one day to the next. I seem to have (somewhat infrequent) higher energy periods where taking the larger dose is actively unhelpful, but the rest of the time I'm better off with it.
That's weird. My prescriber has me on 40 mg of methylphenidate per day, but she also gave me a prescription for 10 mg when either I need to do something at the end of the day and my dose has worn off, or for when I don't want to take a full dose on weekends but I need to do something in the afternoons.
If they're instant-release tablets, you can break them in half. There's often a score line on the pill to facilitate this. You can often do this with your fingers (my technique is to start by pinching the pill between thumb and forefinger on either side with my thumbnails pressed together against the score line), with a sharp kitchen knife, or with a pill cutter.
If they're instant-release capsules, you can theoretically divide these by pulling apart the casing and dividing the powder or beads inside of it, but this a messier process that is trickier to get approximately correct.
If they're extended release pills, then sadly you're probably out of luck. ER tablets usually rely on the layers of the pill dissolving at a certain rate or not dissolving until a certain point in the digestive tract, so breaking the pill in half with mess that up. I'm not 100% sure on the details ER capsules, but I've heard dividing these is also recommended against.
Yeah, they're ER capsules and can't be subdivided. Also I'm not generally going for quite that large of a decrease anyway: I'll go from 60 mg to 50 or 40. I think I'd likely feel quite tired if I were to go as low as 30 most days.
Mind taking a moment to educate me on what difficulties hyperactivity can cause when not trying to get stuff done? I'd naively expect it to be helpful since so many modern humans need more exercise.
Impulsive behavior and nervous energy, mostly.
You may be interested in the writeup Scott has done on various kinds of ADHD medication for Lorien Psychiatry: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/adderall/
Thanks. I think I've read most of what Scott's written on ADHD, but I wasn't sure if any of the more recent studies (to the extent they're even accurately reflected in the NYT article) have caused him to change any of his opinions.
Does anyone have more information about OpenAI's providing an option to use the whole of one's past conversations? There was an article in the Vergehttps://www.theverge.com/news/646968/openai-chatgpt-long-term-memory-upgrade which says that it exists, but not anything about how it works.
I've unsuccessfully searched for e.g. a technical paper from OpenAI about it.
Does anyone know whether this is a substantial step towards online learning???
Presumably the sum total of one's conversations don't fit in the context window, so being able to exploit them without having to rerun pre-training (which I presume isn't being done, since it would have unacceptable costs) is a _big deal_ .
a) Anyone have any idea what they are doing, how it scales, and what the limitations are? Journalling plus a summary step? Journalling plus retrieval-augmented-generation? Journalling plus fine tuning?
b) One of the advantages of AIs over humans is being able to "clone" an AI and populate an organization with copies - and therefore much simpler and more reliable communications than humans have. One concern about online learning is that it would partially negate this, with AIs which have played different roles in an organization having been updated differently. In this new development, is there any indication how easy or hard it would be to _merge_ the results of online learning in AIs which have played different roles, and learned different "lessons"?
Gwern has a better response, but I just want to add that yeah I agree with him.
I doubt OpenAI is doing online learning (at least per-user). RAG is the obvious way to add "memory".
If they really want to sell it as "active learning", I can see them doing LoRA on top.
Many Thanks!
OA has, as usual, explained little about how it works. So far the anecdotal reports indicate that it is *not* doing any kind of lightweight finetuning / dynamic evaluation / online learning, because fresh sessions don't seem to know anything about a lot of your sessions. The prompt hacking suggests that what they've done is combined a fairly standard RAG with a slightly novel summarization approach; one person tells me that you can extract ~5 'reports' about yourself summarizing different things, which presumably get injected along with RAG extracts. This is genius because people are highly narcissistic and love hearing about themselves and you get the Forer effect and more of a chatbot buddy, even though you aren't getting the real benefits of online learning from this. Presumably they hope to keep going and at some point get some real online learning.
Many Thanks!
>The prompt hacking suggests that what they've done is combined a fairly standard RAG with a slightly novel summarization approach; one person tells me that you can extract ~5 'reports' about yourself summarizing different things, which presumably get injected along with RAG extracts.
Ouch! And I was hoping for something that would allow incremental "on-the-job" learning...
>This is genius because people are highly narcissistic and love hearing about themselves and you get the Forer effect and more of a chatbot buddy, even though you aren't getting the real benefits of online learning from this.
Ouch, OUCH, _OUCH_ . Does this count as "dark arts"? I wonder if this update includes fine tuning to a fortune teller spiel...
Damn, the gravity of AI 2027 finally sank in, some days later. I trust Scott, and I've never seen him go out on such a big limb as that (maybe the kidney stuff is similar). He even gave an interview!
While Scott may not have managed to convince me to give my kidney away, he has convinced me to invest heavily into AI. After all, while there is some probability of the Singularity / end of the world, there is also probability for other outcomes in which we live and money is still meaningful. In particular, I personally consider it likelier that some portion of the economy gets automated, but not all of it, and the Singularity fails to materialize, and if so, you can make a serious killing by investing into AI now. I think the least likely outcome is that AI fizzles out (I give it probably 5% that happens).
Can't decide whether to dump 50% or 25% of my cash into it (I have enough I can do that without noticing it), and need to figure out if the choice of AI index fund is important. Main reason I might dump 25% instead of 50% of my liquidity into it is Trump: bastard is such a wildcard, he could totally decide to nationalize AI one day, for example.
Anyone else making big investments into AI and have tips to offer? Anyone think this is a bad idea? No idea how a potential revolution or dictatorship factors into all this: another way Trump could shake things up is by installing himself as dictator, or generating such a backlash that a revolution or civil war happens.
I doubt this is what you are interested in and I am rather embarrassed for asking, but if you are looking to invest in AI, you could invest in me. I am a professional engineer, and amateur AI researcher, that is currently pretty severely down on his luck. I've had some ideas for things I have wanted to try with ML models - specifically applying certain transformations to the underlying math that will not change the result of the model but which could expose symmetries or structures in the underlying math. I can't say for sure what implications these symmetries could have for ML, though I strongly suspect they could point to ways that could cause minor (or who knows, possibly major) savings in compute required to run them, by highlighting regions of the matrix multiplication that could be skipped. But I can tell you that, in general, symmetries are important. My background is in physics, and in physics symmetries can often be exploited to make problems vastly easier to solve. In fact, certain parts of physics can pretty much be formulated purely on the basis of symmetries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem).
I had been hoping to take advantage of my current unemployment by finally doing this work, which I have been contemplating for years but too busy to pursue. But alas, I've discovered that my computer isn't sufficient to run even the smallest language model.
I won't try to insult your intelligence by trying to convince you that this is a particularly good investment from a traditional perspective. But it would be an opportunity to invest in AI while also investing in the ACX community, and making a substantial difference in my life for only a few thousand dollars. You wouldn't have to send money - just buy me a high-memory GPU.
And for anybody wondering how any sane amateur could possibly think they could contribute to an industry with billions of dollars of R&D funding from the largest companies on earth, well, sometimes an outsider with a totally foreign perspective can come up with ideas that the insiders are simply missing.
I might be interested in this if you pivot to mechanistic interpretability after doing this research. Email me at antidyatlov@gmail.com so we can talk more about that and what exactly you need.
I believe the standard way of betting on AI progress is to buy stock in companies that are either making cutting-edge LLM models (Microsoft (owns 49% of OpenAI), Google, Meta, and maybe Amazon) or which makes hardware that anyone making LLMs needs to buy (Nvidia).
If you aren't going all-in on this, and I recommend you don't, then you can still invest significantly in AI by buying index funds. Those five companies make up about 14% of VTI (a total stock market index fund), 20% of VOO (an S&P 500 index fund), or 30% of QQQ (a NASDAQ index fund).
Disclosure: I'm moderately bearish on medium-term AI progress. Most of my assets are in index funds, but I hold a chunk of Microsoft stock left over from when I worked for them, and I don't plan on diversifying out of it in the next few years. One of my reasons for holding it is a hedge in case I'm wrong about AI and Scott is right.
I think you should always have diversified investments and that still applies here:
- If AI does go to the moon and you only make half a killing you'll still be fine
- If AI dramatically accelerated economic growth, your other investments will also pay off
Hyper-focusing your investment portfolio on one thing is risky. As much as people here don't think so, there could still be another AI winter and you could lose big.
Are the US's egg problem entirely down to bird flu? We don't have an egg problem in the UK, and we do have bird flu but as I understand it it's particularly bad in the US. No opportunities for egg arbitrage?
Egg prices are not particularly elevated anymore. It was largely culling flocks in the waning months of the Biden administration that did it. Once the post-cull chicks grew, supply grew and prices eased.
Eggs in Philadelphia recently. Farmers' market-- Amish seller, stable at $7/dozen.
Fancy charcuterie shop, $7/dozen.
Trader Joe's (sort of fancy, sort of bargain) $5/dozen, but limited to one dozen per shopper per day. I don't know how effectively they enforce that, especially for cash sales. Couldn't someone buy several dozen per day by going through the checkout line more than once?
Report from friend in DC: $11/dozen.
This is all on the high side.
Huh? Do you even buy eggs? Prices have been steadily rising for several years and have just started to fall from peak. My most recent grocery trip they were $5 a dozen, down from a peak of $6. Pre-2022 when prices started going up I thought they were expensive when prices would surge over $1 a dozen. This isn't a transient response to culling in the last few months of 2024...
Do you live in California, perchance?
California has an animal welfare law that affects egg-laying hens, passed as a ballot measure (Prop 12) in 2018. It's illegal to sell eggs in California, regardless of where they're produced, unless the farm they're from complies with the law. It went into effect in 2022. This presumably raises production costs somewhat, and consequently would increase prices. It also limits the ability to ship eggs in from other states if there's a California-specific shortage due to something like the bird flu flock cullings.
I do not live in California.
It's mostly caused by market manipulation. It takes about 5 months to go from newborn chick to laying hen, but prices aren't going to go down any time soon unless there is government action.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation
Maybe this is relevant?
"This is why Canada has plenty of eggs — and the U.S. doesn't"
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-record-prices-usda-canada
Another case for decentralization
> No opportunities for egg arbitrage?
I wouldnt think this year is the year to try for undoing the intentional europe/americian food systems separation
Europe? People keep trying to smuggle in eggs from Mexico. There's not a shortage there either.
That seems more reasonable to me(no ocean) and I think mexico and america have more flow of foods in general, op just was talking about the uk
I keep reading news articles about how the UK government keeping seizing and burning American candy because it contains banned ingredients and then literally yesterday I saw a store selling said banned sweets. They're doing a pretty bad job at this apparently. Eggs would be presumably a lot harder to smuggle in though.
I wonder if that happened because nobody along the line, including some custom official, thought to check if a candy bar is banned.
Candy is shelf stable, eggs have different contradictory safety mechanisms of one of the major source of food poisening
Trumps trade war, even if undirected at europe; probaly effects this market and its been historically controlled(I want cheap goat cheeses, its not a currentyear policy for europe and america to not share food)
Where are all the great new indie games that have been made possible by AI-assisted coding?
There are many great games that were developed by a single person - RollerCoaster Tycoon, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc.
I imagine that powerful coding tools would allow more people to make these types of games, but I didn't see any widely recognized game declared to be "made with the help of AI". (There are many cool Claude-generated demos on Twitter, but it's always a demo, not an actual finished game.)
Is it because indie game developers dislike AI use and wish to do things by hand?
Or maybe there ARE a lot of new games made with the help of AI and their creators don't talk about it?
There are many great games developed by a single person. But it's a tiny drop in the overall ocean of games. Most great games are not made by a single person. Most games made by a single person are not great.
There are around 40 new games released on steam every day. The number of new indie greats on the level of Stardey Valley or undertale rounds to zero, we don't even get one of those per year.
So the base rates are not looking great (I hope you can forgive me not calculating the actual numbers, in this case it appears unnecessary).
The point I'm trying to make - the probability of a new great is by default is very low. Now, we should expect AI to help accelerate making new games. It's debatable if that's good for quality or not. But let's assume it is.
Even in that case, how big would be the effect?
Most people, even those who want to make games, are not visionaries who are only constrained by resources. Some are, and some of them might use AI for coding, though they would be smart not to admit it openly, giving the vibes.
But coding is merely a part of making a good game. You need to make so much more! You need to create good game systems. For many genres, you also need a story that does not suck (though yeah, in some cases that can be avoided). For many genres, you need good visuals (you'd have to be exceptional among every other dimension to succeed with minecraft level of graphics). You need decent sound, at the very least (but I notice that all games I consider great have way above average soundtrack and sfx). You have to know how to market the end product. And even after all that, there's no guarantee that you will gain traction.
AI coder is not solving any of these problem, and generative AI can only partially help with some of them, with a huge drawback attached - a lot of gamers do NOT like gen ai in their games. So this is not offering much of speed up. And you'd need a lot of speedup to notice anything given the base rates.
AI isn't writing the game I'm making instead of getting a real job.
It's showing me code samples of how to do obscure things (some of which actually work, mostly), it's advising me (half-wrongly) how to configure Godot so I can get this game out there, and I wrote a program in Python (with its help, as I didn't know Python, and it's particularly good at that language) to query ChatGPT for every word in the English language to generate a taunt about the word to display to the user when they guess right/wrong.
I've never made a game before. (Well, before the 1980's). I don't think I could have done this in twice the time it took. But AI isn't in evidence here on the outside--except for the obvious fact no human being could be bothered to generate a taunt for every English word. The fact of the game is the only evidence.
Also the potential for negative blowback -- e.g. maybe Claude helped you write a tool for generating dungeons, and ChatGPT gave you concept art for your sprite design, but if you say "my game was made with AI!" people will think the entire thing is just a one-shot AI slop generation. Using AI is a negative signal in creative communities, I think.
Games are still spectacularly complex endeavors with a big portion of them dedicated to visuals, input, sound and how it all tickles human monkey brains. All bits that the AI has no way of automating for now. It can most likely put together a MUD or a simpler puzzle game, but at least for now the rest is out of reach. In general, programming is only a subset of all of the work that goes into making a videogame. A sizable one, but far from the only. Even if you generate all the visuals and audio, making a cohesive whole is currently pretty rough, but at least on the concept art level things are getting better fast.
Also keep in mind that AI is understandably frowned upon in the games industry, so even if it were being used, people would try to avoid parading that fact due to the backlash.
You probably don't hear about it for the same reason you don't hear about games being made with Emacs or Git. It's a tool, some people use it, some don't, the customer doesn't care either way. I think AI could become very interesting for new types of procedural generation (imagine every shopkeeper, every guard, every random NPC having their own backstory, skills, goals!) but that would either require an LLM that runs locally (which I don't think is up to the task yet), or an always-online system (which is the domain of big studios, not indie devs).
I suspect if you got today's AI to do that, you could come up with a system like Oblivion's AI that was a lot deeper in terms of characterization (plus could be voice acted without having to use actual voice actors), but if you actually decided to pay attention to someone's story, it would turn out to be nonsensical.
Also, one character would turn out to have some combination of traits that read as super-racist, and people would immediately find that person and make YouTube videos about them.
>(imagine every shopkeeper, every guard, every random NPC having their own backstory, skills, goals!)
You mean like Watch_Dogs, from 2015?
In which a homeless man could be shown to be making $100,000 a year?
More specifically, most customers don't care, but there's a large minority that do and HATE anything AI related. So if you're using it there's very little upside to saying so but a big downside.
AI has only been really good enough at coding for significant speedups for a year or two. Stardew Valley took 4.5 years for make. I think it's currently in a place to be a small but nice boost to productivity for complicated projects with large codebases. Indie game development is so fraught with pitfalls that a game like that that takes off is still going to be incredibly rare.
You still have to be able to dev yourself to use AI assistance, particularly for a game, so the barrier to entry hasn't been lowered.
> Is it because indie game developers dislike AI use and wish to do things by hand?
You guys realise that A.I. is producing nothing in its own right now. Probably any software that’s been produced in the last year or so has had an A.I. assist though.
> Probably any software that’s been produced in the last year or so has had an A.I. assist though.
I still dont use chatbots more then once a month to test them
I think everything would be ai dungeon; expensive and still not quite there. Basedcamp is apperently working on one.
Its coming, but it may need special hardware... oh and some part of 4chan has a distributed horny ai chats.
I went shopping for jeans this weekend and thought about the timeline of blue jeans, and how they probably aligned with the development of chemical blue dyes.
Is it possible that jeans were originally seems a somewhat tech-forward or futurist, sort of like the first iPhone with its glass & metal look. Sort of a “look what we can do now?” aesthetic?
Jeans are dyed with indigo, a natural dye.
Traditionally, yes, but synthetic indigo entered commercial mass production in 1897, right around when jeans started being blue. Levi Strauss started selling his jeans in 1873, but for the first couple of decades they were made of brown duck cloth (another form of cotton canvas, this one derived from sailcloth: the name "duck" is a corruption of the Dutch word for sail) rather than indigo denim. Levis started offering the latter as an option in 1890 and phased out the brown duck cloth in 1896, just before synthetic indigo became available.
Interesting, I didn't realize synth indigo was a thing! But jeans actually have existed for centuries, the word "denim" came from "de Nîmes", "from Nimes, France, and it was a common work clothing material as far back as 1600's. This source is fascinating: https://issuu.com/artsolution/docs/cat._maitre_toile_de_jeans_a
edit: look at this painting! https://issuu.com/artsolution/docs/cat._maitre_toile_de_jeans_a/6
True. The defining feature of Levi-style jeans was the use of rivets to reinforce the seams, not the use of blue denim, since as already mentioned they were brown duck cloth originally.
The next question, I suppose, is how widespread the older indigo denim styles were, and consequently, to what extent the early 20th century explosion in popularity of Levi-style jeans was replacing vs augmenting the older styles which they, by that point, resembled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans disagrees.
Does anyone know a way of making perfume smell stronger? The smell of every perfume I've used on myself dissipates in about 10 minutes, I've tried the usual tricks to no avail
Don't put it on your body, just keep an open container of it. Like an air freshener.
Since (I think) most people but perfume on their neck and wrists it really makes sense to have jewelry that contains a slow release reservoir of perfume.
Your senses just get accustomed to it.
Trust me, we can smell it (and many of us would rather not).
So THAT explains the people I pass in the street who are somehow not retching from the smell of the half-bottle of fragrance they recently poured over their head. I did wonder.
Get an eau de parfum
All perfume questions lead to Luca Turin, https://lucaturin.substack.com/
Stronger and longer are two different things.
> All perfume questions lead to Luca Turin
On why you might want to listen to him, he's a biophysicist with a lifelong passion for scent, who literally wrote the book on various perfumes, has consulted for most of the big scent houses, and routinely comes out with gems like this:
Après l’Ondée (Guerlain)
“Divinely named [“After the Rainshower”], a prototype of the cold and melancholy fragrance, this stunning creation is the counterpart—the brighter, fresher younger brother—of the mysterious L’Heure Bleue (Guerlain). Après l’Ondée evolves only slightly with time: its central white note, caressing and slightly venomous, like the odor of a peach stone, imposes itself immediately and retains its mystery forever. Its simplicity, its keen nostalgia, and its unadorned beauty make this an anomaly for Guerlain.”
Python (Trussardi)
“The absurdly named Python is a poverty-stricken sweet-powdery affair, a very distant relative of the wonderful Habanita (Molinard). It belongs in a tree-shaped diffuser dangling from the rearview mirror of a Moscow taxi.”
Rush (Gucci):
“The first sniff gave me a shock of recognition, like a long-forgotten but familiar face, and I spent a few busy minutes dredging my memory for the original impression . . . Dioressence! Not all of it, mind you, just a bit I loved, which in the original happened two or three hours into the story and felt like a warm breath whispering crazy things in my ear. That breath is back, now strong, loud, irresistible, a sultry wind fit to keep everyone stark awake and plotting indiscretions. . . . The charm of this perfume is entirely man-made, no mention of Nature, e.g. flowers, etc. This thing smells like a person. To be exact, thanks to the milky lactone note, it smells like an infant’s breath mixed with his mother’s hair spray. . . . What Rush can do, as all great art does, is create a yearning, then fill it with false memories of an invented past . . .”
My sense of smell sucks. I mostly just try to stay clean, I do like some perfumes on women. My grandmother (RIP) will always smell like channel #5 to me.
Are you sure the perfume is fading and not just your sense of smell? We adjust to smells that are constant, our brains just filter them out. That's why your house smells weird to you when you return from vacation.
There are grades of perfume, and unless you're using the most expensive, which is the strongest, then it will fade. As well, skin chemistry means that for some people (and I'm one of them), scent just does not last.
https://jasmine-perfumes.com.tr/perfume-concentration-levels/
You say you've tried the usual tricks, so you probably know about layering and so forth.
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Earlier this year marked the 1,000th day of the Russia-Ukraine war. By then, Ukraine had spent around $300B ($300M/day), while estimates put Russia’s cost at $1T ($1B/day).
Based on historical records,Is offense generally more expensive than defense—often by a factor like 3x or more?
Keep in mind the Ukrainians have filled their armies with conscription, while the Russians have avoided conscription (after some initially) in favor of paying people ridiculous sums of money to enlist.
Early last year CSIS issued a report (https://www.csis.org/analysis/cost-and-value-air-and-missile-defense-intercepts) where they showed that defensive capabilities are roughly 2X as expensive as offensive ones. Why do you think CSIS’s assessment is the opposite?
That article is specifically comparing the cost of offensive and defensive missiles, but a war is a lot more than missile strikes. Missiles won't take and hold a city, and missile interceptors are not the only way for your troops to survive missile shots.
Even if you restrict the analysis to just weapon systems, I think the most common weapon on both sides is artillery shells and not missiles.
I found this defense publication (https://rb.gy/9p4kck) that confirms 3:1 ratio for conventional wars. page 42 says " For traditional high-intensity battles, we have a pretty good understanding of the physics and physiology of combat. The Army, for example, has planning factors that suggest that a 3-to-1 ratio of attackers to defenders is necessary for an assault to have a reasonable probability of success."
I think Russia-Ukraine war even if you include blended warfare taking place, it is still closer to 'traditional' one.
I wonder why the economics of it flips for pure modern warfare like missiles, drones etc. in favor of the attacker. i.e. the attacker can have much cheaper arsenal but the defender has to spend much more to deter.
It flips for missile warfare because the offensive missile has a big, slow-moving target (a warship or a building), and the defensive missile has a tiny, fast-moving target (an incoming missile). So defensive missiles need much more expensive guidance systems.
(Although an expensive defensive missile is still cheaper than whatever the incoming missile was aimed at, so it's still worth using.)
I believe 3x is the traditional wisdom on `minimal numerical and material superiority needed for the offense to prevail' (ceteris paribus).
Of course there is also Napoleon's dictum that `the moral is to the physical as three is to one.'
I looked up that quote and I stumbled on this article. It’s quite fascinating.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1916/november/some-underlying-principles-morale
IIRC the attacker typically needs a 3x advantage in numbers over the defender to win a battle, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also need 3x more materiel and supplies.
Thanks for linking. I'd actually also like to add it depends which "heterodox centrists" you are referring to. If you mean ppl like you -- certainly not. But probably Brett Weinstein would also see himself as a centrist and he's .... smth else altogether. That being said, I still think it's the fault of existing institutions for giving ammunition to ppl like him.
As a complement to all this, I think MattY's latest post is good
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-troubling-rise-of-hitler-revisionism
If I could add one thought to the conversation -- I kinda think both Scott's take (centrists criticizing elites may have been responsible for the rise in populism) and your take (it was good to criticize elites, the elites did dumb things and are at fault for the rise in populism) misses a more obvious and imo more impactful explanation.
There has been a concerted effort over the last, say, 30 years, to fundamentally decentralize knowledge dissemination, ability to communicate, and ability to get visibility and transparency into previously obscure systems. This massively increases the surface area for potential sources of misinformation, while simultaneously making it harder for the elite class to "fail gracefully".
In that environment, any individual contribution -- from Scott to Hanania to Catturd -- is just part of a larger inevitable macro trend. Like, what, we expect elites to be perfect all the time and to never go viral for saying something stupid? We expect individuals to continue trusting the NYT when "their friend's cousin" swears by raw milk, times a billion? Move fast and break things moved fast and broke things! Our prior way of being, and possibly the way we were built evolutionarily, wasn't equipped to handle this.
So maybe the tech billionaires mattered more than you think, but not in the way that you think.
This is true, but it doesn't explain the incredible persistence many members of the elite & expert class show by repeatedly making the same mistakes. The thirst for humiliating their enemies, the vanity, the reckless indulgence in sentiment: none of those things were mere lapses, they were habits of mind, ways of being.
Joseph Heath wrote an article that probably should have gotten more attention in this discussion: https://josephheath.substack.com/p/moral-responsibility-for-backlash. From his conclusion:
> I’ve just been astonished over the past few years at the willingness of people who have objectively unpopular views, or who claim to be defending the interests of vulnerable minorities, but who happen to occupy a position of some influence and authority, to engage in what can only be described as rage-baiting the majority of the population. In some cases, their moral sanctimony is so great that they probably fail to perceive it this way. In other cases, it just seems to me a clear failure to think strategically about their policy goals.
Sorry, I still think this is massively increasing the importance of 'elites'. It should be noted that even GOP 'elites' have been basically totally sidelined -- Paul Ryan, Romney, Cheney, those guys dont even have a party anymore. I think Heath is right but also missing the point -- there are always people in the 'elite' class who have held wildly unpopular views, this is not meaningfully different than it was 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago (see, for example, how many elites of the 50s-90s were very pro communism, or those in the 20s and 30s who were surprisingly pro nazi!). The main difference now is the extremists in the elite class are getting massively signal boosted while the more sane elites are not (which is the reverse of how it used to be).
You're missing the point. I already agreed the game has changed, since at least the dawn of Twitter. The elites are responsible for their own behavior in this new information environment, so it doesn't really matter what it was like 20/50/100 years ago. This isn't going away!
No one forced Laura Helmuth (the former editor of Scientific American) to post a profane rant on Twitter about Trump voters, and no one made 1000+ public health professionals write the infamous George Floyd protest letter. (Just to pick two examples - I can find dozens in minutes on Twitter and BlueSky.)
Emotional discipline has always been part of the job if you're an elite, but now that involves a new dimension: you have to resist the urge to raise your profile by posting toxoplasma and gloat over victories.
To answer your other point, I'm not sure exactly how important the 'elites' are here: I think it's likely they are the main reason we got Trump instead of a generic Republican, but not the only reason.
> Emotional discipline has always been part of the job if you're an elite, but now that involves a new dimension: you have to resist the urge to raise your profile by posting toxoplasma and gloat over victories.
makes sense, I agree.
Its unclear that this is actually possible, both in terms of human psychology (there are enough elites that its possible to nutpick pretty easily) and in terms of natural incentives (appealing to political extremes does raise your own star and potentially catapults you into being an elite in the first place, even as it makes you more toxic to 'the other side')
Yeah, that's depressing and likely. There are lots of people that hate the limelight, but as long as there are broad incentives that promote engagement, that's what we'll get.
I haven’t read Scott’s piece because I’m a shameless freeloader, but I read the answer and I think you are articulating an extremely underrated explanation.
I'm not a subscriber here, so couldn't read Scott's original piece, but while I broadly agree that if Scott is your central example of a centrist edgelord, then they're not really the problem, I think there's still a question about the relationship between the good edgelords and the bad.
I'm not sure quite how good the analogy is, but I'm sure there are many law professors who write about critical race theory in a measured way who were... less than thrilled at the way their ideas escaped containment from academic circles and went mainstream via social media.
I think it's roughly true that the modal person who worried about "white privilege" in 2008 was a sociology professor thinking about the racial wealth gap, and in 2020 it was an angry teenager explaining why it's good to burn down police precincts and if you think otherwise you're racist.
Suppose you buy my characterize of the elite version of these ideas as more moderate and nuanced... How much blame do they deserve for the intemperate, crazy version that went viral in the late 2010s?
How much does the exact mechanism of transmission matter, or the role of those moderate professors in spreading their ideas?
What would you wish that the moderate, academically informed woke professor had done to oppose the bad, viral version of their ideas, in order to exculpate them?
Thinking about that feels like a good start to figuring out how we should feel about the moderate, smart centrists being responsible for the stuff the nutcases do.
I'm actually quite confused about what "centrist edgelord" is supposed to mean? Either this is a common term on Reddit or wherever or Scott is using too much sarcasm such that it inteferes with clarity. (It wasn't defined in the post).
But I'm taking it to mean "actual centrist who is accused by extemists of being edgy for daring to not whole-heartedly embrace the trendy extremism" and if that reading is correct...
I see your point, and as someone who's very anti-woke I'm actually quite sympathetic to the woke professor types you mention. Even if they're *not* nuanced and are completely extreme, the fact that they've spent more than five minutes actually *thinking* about their ideas makes them about infinitely more worthy of respect that the average wokeist.
But having said that, I'd still suggest there is a *universe* of difference between "reformers calling for radical social changes need to be very careful they don't empower extremists on their side" and "moderates who criticise said reformers need to be very careful they don't empower the opposite side's extremists". When you set out to change society, you're responsible for the effect of those changes. When you set out to simply *oppose* badly thought out changes to society...you are not in any coherent sense responsible for an opposite set of badly thought out changes in the other direction (that you never endorsed) being implemented. That's just a non-sequiter. The most you coupd possibly be responsible for is the bad effects of stasis and a complete lack of social change.
Which is obviously not what anyone's talking about here.
I mean, Scott is very polite and well-reasoned and all of his critiques of specific policies were valid. However, he embraced in a broad sense the same rhetoric as a lot of people on the alt-right that the #1 problem in our society was wokeness. Not racism, economic inequality, the rising trend of fascist-apologists, or massive misinformation campaigns, wokeness. Specifically, woke capture of the government. And again, when he cites specific examples, they all make sense! But he would cite a specific example, and then end by comparing Wokeness to Christianity (he did this multiple times!) as this all-encompassing, undefeatable dogma that would probably still be victimizing us a thousand years from now. What does that say about his powers of prediction?
His prediction was a long game. Woke is on the retreat now, but it's hardly dead.
I think its dead. There will probably be some successor movement, and people will insist on tarring it with all the same excesses as the one that preceded it whether it manifests them or not, but this particular version, identified by its institutional capture, was already falling apart before the Trump election, and he's successfully destroyed whatever was left, at great cost to the actual functioning of our civic society. I don't think it was worth it, my guess is Scott doesn't either, but it was the trade-off a lot of people wanted.
There's a great deal of woke inertia and woke people in megacorporations, top universities (a lot of which has just rebranded in the wake of the administration rather than seeing any significant change), and the intelligentsia. The federal civil service is taking big hits, but I expect social justice people to attempt a rebound under a different name soon enough.
But having said that, I'd still suggest there is a *universe* of difference between "reformers calling for radical social changes need to be very careful they don't empower extremists on their side" and "moderates who criticise said reformers need to be very careful they don't empower the opposite side's extremists".
This is reasonable, but immediately restricts you to defending only those centrists who literally only confined their criticism of the elite to countering wokeness.
I think this probably already excludes Scott; I believe Scott was in favour of getting rid of affirmative action, for example, which is a social change reforming a ~60 year old feature of society. Maybe it's not "radical", but now everyone is just arguing over what's "radical". Or, as another example, I think Scott supports radical reform of the FDA; again a major critique of his against the elite is that it's too risk-averse when it comes to certain regulations.
But that immediately means that Scott and his ilk aren't just standing against would-be reformers, they're reformers themselves.
Your formulation seems to basically only allow someone who thinks American governance/society was basically just right from say,1995-2010, to count as the blameless sort of centrist edgelord.
I would also include Hanania and Yarvin in the Bad, Actually category. (Definitely not centrists).
Yarvin is obviously not a centrist, plus his whole schtick is just to use big words for atrocious ideas. Hanania is on the same path as Marie Le Pen and some of the Mitfords - once you start to think you can’t maintain fascist positions any more
Hanania's always came across to me like his positions were motivated largely by status anxiety -- he wants to be on the side of the "elite human capital", and since such people are mostly liberals, so is he. Granted I didn't follow him back in his far-right days, so maybe he was even worse back then.
It would be funny if despite all the scraping and groveling Hanania has done to try and win back favor of the liberal centrists, that he wouldn't be accepted.
As the British say, he wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
I've been following Hanania for a few years now and I've actually been really impressed by how much he's willing to change his mind based on new facts and arguments. Are there other writers like that?
Richard Spencer and Anatoly Karlin.
I think it's grift and not genuine.
I'm sure the Lincoln Project has the kind of people you're looking for.
Certainly the wokies won't have him.
One positive result from Trump is how thoroughly it exposed the faux-centrist "classical liberals." If a Romney type had been president, the Weinstein/Tim Pool/Dave Rubin types would still be taken seriously.
Yglesias's free post today is a nice companion piece to the Edgelords dialogue:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-troubling-rise-of-hitler-revisionism
As minimum, it suggests a more case-based approach than anything A, B, or C were suggesting. For example:
"But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism."
I haven't read the entire article, but regarding the quoted paragraph in particular, the problem is that stereotypes are, by and large, actually quite accurate: https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all So if we try and force people not to use stereotypes, we at best make it harder for them to build up an accurate picture of the world and hence to act rationally, and worst end up erecting enormous edifices of falsehood and obfuscation to try and hide the truth about differences in average performance between whichever groups we're concerned about.
I think it's worth being quite specific here, so forgive what may seem an obtuse point steeped in the specifics of social psychology.
An issue is that the statement:
" ... but regarding the quoted paragraph in particular, the problem is that stereotypes are, by and large, actually quite accurate... "
Is completely bogus to the point of incoherency.
Your logical seeming continuation ("... force people not to use.... make it harder to build an accurate picture of the world... erecting enormous edifices of falsehood... ") do not follow from your statement either, is an utterly unwarranted conclusion, has no basis in the discussion at hand and - as a little bonus - is a wonderful way of smuggling in some truly bad thinking. I would, err, caution against vague gestures towards "oh, but stereotyps are by and large actually quite accurate" ending in a conclusion that soomeeehooooowwwww seems to verge into, uhh, sorry, is this a sly implication that telling people that stereotypes do not always ring true is somehow tantamount to making them both unable to act rationally *and* lies, falsehood and obfuscation?
One might think you are engaging in motivated reasoning. It would be better for everyone involved if you simply stated your terms clearly. I believe they take the form of various racists screeds but I am very well be stereotyping based on limited information in light of a lack of individuating information, since I see your particular reasoning error so often in the world.
I phrase it like that because the article you link is not about what you are linking it to suggest it is about. To be clear: The research you linked does not indicate what you are taking it to indicate. It is a long format debate about the technical specifics of 'steoretype accuracy' as it appears as a term, for or against, in social psychology literature, is used by researchers, and, at times, manipulated in the experimental design of social psychology experiments. I am annoyingly familiar with this literature, and so I saw the web-link to SPSP and did a double-take.
I am going to take this chance to offer some insight, because I hope my stereotype above in what you are trying to indicate is not what you are actually trying to slyly hint at. Heavens knows, social psychology is a confusing field and reseach literature can be hard to understand.
So:
Your article.
It reaches the high bar conclusion that some stereotypes at times have r values = .5 or higher, when making judgements on information. That therefore "steoretypes" may be a replicable phenomena worth studying because they sometimes are used by some people in some contexts to evaluate information. This is in contrast with the often made claim that "stereotypes are inaccurate", prima facie, without any cited information why they might or might not be so.
This is a relevant and informative point about how stereotypes can at times be useful heurestics which one can study in many ways. It has categorically no bearing on stereotypes in aggregate being accurate or not, or in why telling people about how they may or may not be is tantamount to occassionally constructing an obelisk of misinformation. Sorry, an edifice of obfuscation. Sorry, a "enormous edifice of falsehood".
Being quite familiar with this research, owning to a poor choice of degree in parts of my past life, I went into the article looking for a point any social psychologist worth their degree would include, which will helpfully help underline my point.
I qoute now from the article:
" ... SPSR specifically points out that all or nearly all absolute stereotypes of the form ALL of THEM are X are inherently inaccurate, because human variability is typically sufficient to invalidate almost any such absolutist claim). "
+
" The evidence from both experimental and naturalistic studies indicates that people apply their stereotypes when judging others approximately rationally. When individuating information is absent or ambiguous, stereotypes often influence person perception. When individuating information is clear and relevant, its effects are “massive” (Kunda & Thagard, 1996, yes, that is a direct quote, p. 292), and stereotype effects tend to be weak or nonexistent. This puts the lie to longstanding claims that “stereotypes lead people to ignore individual differences.” "
--
This is the enormously and quite importantly salient point that undermines your logical continuation. It is factual information that steoretypes may at times aid judgement in abscence of other information. Because they can be useful heurestics used to arrive at reasonable conclusions. But specific individuating information massively overrules it, because specific triumphs over general.
You may refer to the further point, again qouting from the article, at length:
" But let’s consider the implications of their claim that most people’s stereotypes include little or no statistical understanding of the distributions of characteristics among groups. According to this view, laypeople would have little idea about racial/ethnic differences in high school or college graduate rates, or about the nonverbal skill differences between men and women, and are clueless about differences in the policy positions held by Democrats and Republicans. That leads to a very simple prediction – that people’s judgments of these distributions would be almost entirely unrelated to the actual distributions; correlations of stereotypes with criteria would be near zero and discrepancy scores would be high. One cannot have it both ways. If people are statistically clueless, then their beliefs should be unrelated to statistical distributions of characteristics among groups. If people’s beliefs do show strong relations to statistical realities, then they are not statistically clueless. "
I qoute this at length because it is the primary argument of the article restated and the primary argument of anyone engaged in psycological review of literature, along with the primary and most useful assumption about why steoretypes at times may be useful. That is: In the absence of individuating information, a steoretype can be a rough statistical guesstimate at some unknown value, shaped by a rough heurestic proces.
Luckily, the article also includes that the statistical correlation between people's judgements of group characteristics and their sometimes measured characteristics is higher than R = 0.5, which is to say, higher than a random guess some of the time. That is a thing worth studying and so luckily, social psychologists do study it.
This has absolutely no bearing on steoretypes generic validity either for or against, their accuracy in toto, or whether teaching people that not all steoretypes are not leads to 'erecting enormous edifices of falsehood'.
It is a technical point about a research construct used to design experimental investigations of people's social cognition.
You are, I am afraid, smuggling in unwarranted conclusions about stereotypes, the consequence of using them, their validity, what social psychologist research says about them and their utility, the consequences, the studies deriving information about them and the meta-reviews and analysis related to them.
I question your basic understanding of a single salient point of information regarding stereotypes, and I note that I find the possibility that you are using this as a coy way of gesturing vaguely at some enormously abominable, unjustified and unwarranted belief structures lurking like shrapnel or landmines in your cognition to be quite high, but I may, again, be steoretyping based on the cadence of your answer and so I welcome any individuating information that may massively alter my conclusions.
I note this because:
"... obfuscation to try and hide the truth about differences in average performance between whichever groups we're concerned about. "
Says more about your misunderstanding of the very research material you are linking than any steoretypes of average performances between groups.
I would recommend a basic handbook on social psychology and what correlations in statistical judgements mean, but having sat through that material myself I find it hard to recommend to anyone.
>I would, err, caution against vague gestures towards "oh, but stereotyps are by and large actually quite accurate" ending in a conclusion that soomeeehooooowwwww seems to verge into, uhh, sorry, is this a sly implication that telling people that stereotypes do not always ring true is somehow tantamount to making them both unable to act rationally *and* lies, falsehood and obfuscation?
Who said anything about "telling people that stereotypes do not always ring true"? I made sure to say that stereotypes are only accurate "by and large" precisely because they're not always accurate.
Since you've failed that point of basic reading comprehension, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of your rambling and emotional screed.
I did. Said something, that is.
That is what the words "verge into" and "sly implication" means. Traditionally they're meant to indicate a partial conclusion derived from information offered by someone else, which, hedging, someone is not entirely willing to ascertain is the total truth (because I cannot know that for sure, I can only guesstimate and ask for more information). Sorry, I thought I would be quite clear about this because your ability to read normal sentences seems as poor as your ability to read scientific literature.
I do not know where you are, so I cannot helpfully provide a dictionary to help you in your quest towards achieving basic ability to parse a sentence (= reading comprehension, I am insulting yours, again, just so we are clear on the matter).
We can both keep slinging little digs like this all day, and that can be quite amusing.
I'd be willing to go on. I think I can get in another six good digs about your patent inability to read a trivially basic paper from a social psychology journal, and you can get in a good few digs about my emotional valence (that's a word from psychology research, you'd know it if you understood it) which you have some ascertained using the power of . . . I . . . Assume . . . a stereotyped informational basis due to lack of other individuating factors. Well. At least that's keeping to the theme! I applaud the commitment to the bit.
But I don't think it will do much to improve the tenor of conversation around here, or be relevant. Since we both apparently, however, fail at reading comprehension, I can simply restate my writing clearly and I thank you for the chance to do so.
So: I repeat my request that you clarify what you are talking about, because your prior statements are incoherent in relation to the research and science you have linked, do not meaningfully relate anything and your somewhat strange statement that (qouting in full, to aid comprehension)
" So if we try and force people not to use stereotypes, we at best make it harder for them to build up an accurate picture of the world and hence to act rationally, and worst end up erecting enormous edifices of falsehood and obfuscation to try and hide the truth about differences in average performance between whichever groups we're concerned about. "
Do not meaningfully relate to anything in the on-going conversation.
It is, to be plain, a weird tangent. More insulting to any reader who passes by, it is a weird tangent that abuses the veneer of scientific understanding and dialogue in a field I happen to be acquianted with to lurch into a stranger tangent about some somewhat curious implications about falsehoods, erections thereof, acting rationally or not, and so on.
Luckily, this being a comment section of people who enjoy fairly reasoned debate, I thought pointing this out to you and requesting clarification would be helpful for us both. Unluckily, you seem to be more interested in failing to read and respond than actually responding. I note that you can seemingly link to (and fail to understand) several pages worth of social psychology. You can also respond to (and fail to understand) a few words on your comment. I applaud once again your commitment to the basic act of being an uninformed clown, that is, the bit. In both cases, you seem to have been unable to understand what you have read (= I am once again inferring your reading comprehension is poor, to be clear, as I do not wish for you to fail to intuit this fairly normal insult).
However, are we done sprinking petty insults in the middle of our conversations? Do we both feel we've gone through the process? From my side, it wasn't quite six, but at some point I feel keeping it up is just in poor taste. Perhaps I will stop sliding them in, though, well, they are quite amusing and I have to at least do six or seven or so because I think you'd fail to understand them like you fail to understand basic social psychology if I didn't repeat myself. To anyone else reading this: I plead true and neccessary, but I grant unkind, and I nod, imagined, and promise to be less sassy going forward.
So, Mr. X (original, the):
If my reading comprehension is poor, it may be because your ideas are hard to parse.
You rely on vague hand gesturing towards something that you seem unable to state clearly.
What does "forcing people not to use" stereotypes mean? Why would it make them act less rationally? What edifice of falsehood and obfuscation is being erected? What truth is someone trying to hide?
You can simply say these things clearly, if they are interesting things to say. You can even link to material germane to making such statements. I would be interested in reading it, but it does require you to have the basic competence of expression to express it.
When you do not do this, and instead, misunderstand the conclusions drawn from basic social psychology, I will take the chance to correct you. That is sort of how it goes around here. Something of ... community norm, I think? That is opposed to the activity you are in engaged in, which is, I think "failing to understand basic methodological scientific procedure"
I am willing to admit that I am being unfair and apologize for doing so if I am.
I can only repeat that it is very easy to jump to conclusions based on your writing and cadence, which may, indeed, be a heurestically vaiable stereotype that is "low brow irrational fool bent in the skull and not a single original thought in the empty void that is their cranium". That stereotype may be wrong. You could offer individuating information to help me come to a better understanding. That would relate to the science you have linked and the aside about stereotypical thinking you have started.
Since our reading comprehension is so mutually poorly, I will restate for clarity:
You're talking nonsense about a scientific field you understanding nothing about.
I am requesting you go read more primary sources and fill the yawning void in your ability to present an argument with something resembling a basic understanding of the subject matter at hand.
I am also requesting that if you find it a delight to gesture vaguely at erected edifices of falsehood of some conveniently ill-described but quite implicative statement, well, just be a moron out on main. Just state your ideological stance clearly. If you're going to be a clown, at least be willing to put on the make-up. Then we can discuss your routine for what it is: unsubstantiated screeds backed up by nonsense and held together by fundamental inability to parse scientific literature, and we may both learn something, through the joy of rambling, if reasoned, discourse.
Or maybe I'm being a snarky asshole jumping to stereotyped conclusions, at which point, as I've stated repeatedly, I'd love the correction and for you to facilitate writing what you actually mean.
Stereotypes may well be accurate and useful, but you can’t get around the fact that people tend to apply them inappropriately and quite casually.
It's quite frustrating that he starts off the post with talking about the history of antisemitism, then takes it in the direction of talking about how right-wing-coded racism should remain taboo, and somehow completely avoids the topic of the surge in left-wing antisemitism that's responsible for the large majority of hate crime. I get that he doesn't want to talk about that for partisan reasons, but I wish he wouldn't appeal to the topic of antisemitism that cynically.
That's now how I read it at all. My read was basically:
"Casual antisemitism was common pre-WW2. After WW2, everyone stopped doing this because it uncomfortably adjacent to the Holocaust. Now, many people are doing WW2-revisionism which is having the effect of making people comfortable doing casual antisemitism again. This is bad."
He specifically calls out Kendi-style racism as bad:
"In my opinion, it is completely correct to observe that dogmatic accounts of disparate impact à la Kendi are dangerous and bad."
Perhaps you were just hoping to read a different article.
The rise in antisemitism has nothing to do with WW2 revisionism, this is an obscurantist partisan lie.
But if his article is about casual antisemitism, it's just completely false (the vast majority of antisemitism is not done by right-wing WW2 revisionist edgelords). I was trying to read him more charitably than that, but in your reading he's just being deliberately misleading instead of using an awkward springboard.
It’s funny how the acronym WASP so accurately describes the behavior of that particular strain of humanity.
MY is arguing that, "the impulse in some quarters of the right to say that we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politeness norms is bad." Antisemitism is the example that he uses to illustrate the broader point.
As with antisemitism, though, I'm not sure "we need to become a ruder, crueler society that no longer observes politness norms" is an exclusively or primarily right-wing thing. Cancel culture is pretty cruel, and is largely a left-wing creation, and I've seen left-wingers happily be extremely rude towards members of disfavoured groups.
Lynching someone for looking at the wrong woman could be described as cancel culture taken to its extreme, don’t you think? No one has a monopoly on cancel culture.
I don't think this is an accurate view of the right-wing project on WWII revisionism. I'm reasonably confident that it's uncharitable and I'm not sure if it's intentional.
Simply, most of the right-wingers I've talked to on this issue are not arguing as a main point that "Hitler was not so bad." They are primarily arguing "Communism and Stalin/Mao were the worst, they are the fundamental evil of the 20th century." A side effect of this is arguing "Hitler was not so bad" because the current moral judgment of Hitler is that he's as close to pure evil as can be achieved. But you can go over the datasecretslox right now and bring this up, I've seen "Stalin vs Hitler" pop up enough there to know what people are arguing about.
And there's two level's to this argument. On the object level, the differences between Stalin and Hitler are...hard to weigh. You've got two mass-murdering psychos with tens of millions of dead on their hand in the support of fairly awful ideologies, plus Mao over in the corner with the highest kill total (1). How you weigh out who is "the absolute worst" is a pretty fine distinction.
But no one cares about actual historical facts, people care about propaganda value. Because there can only be one "Most Evil Guy Ever" and Hitler is right-coded and Stalin is left-coded, everyone will fight to make their outgroup associated with the "Most Evil Guy Ever". And if Stalin became the new "Most Evil Guy Ever" the way Hitler is, then a lot of people would look at a lot of Democrat programs, now and since 1950, in a radically new light. That's what people are actually fighting about.
And it's very clear from Yglesias' writing which side he's on, because he completely ignores Stalin and frames the debate as "Hitler bad" vs "Hitler good". Which is...an uncharitable framing. I'm not sure what arguments Yglesias would lay down on, say, utilitarian grounds that Hitler was worse than Stalin, I've never actually seen that argument, but I know his framing avoids that core argument.
(1) I have a little sympathy for Mao. For all his many, many horrific faults, I think there are two mitigating factors:
-He legitimately freed China from 100+ years of foreign oppression and arguably 300+ years of Manchu/Qing foreign rule. That's a really big thing for the Chinese people.
-The Great Famine was super bad but I've never seen evidence that it was intentional. It did legitimately appear to be a mistake.
So, yea, Mao is super absolutely not a good guy but I think he's pretty clearly in the 2nd rank of "Most evil people in the 20th century" arguably behind guys like Pol Pot, not in tier 1 competing for #1 with Hitler and Stalin.
At some point, the argument over which of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao was the most evil starts to sound like an argument over which of three houses is most on fire.
For most of us, it doesn't matter. Debating who's more evil is mostly just academic. The time will never come where we are forced to join Team Stalin or Team Mao. If it does come, it's because they're at war and whoever wins will be insuperably powerful, in which case our best option is probably the one taken by a character in a saga I forget: back the losing side until it starts winning, then back the other, and so on, until both sides are drained and manageable. (That, or invest so much into our own military that we could take both on at once, which I think reveals one facet of the American mindset.)
> [Mao] legitimately freed China from 100+ years of foreign oppression and arguably 300+ years of Manchu/Qing foreign rule. That's a really big thing for the Chinese people.
What did Mao have to do with removing the Qing? Sun Yat-sen is always credited for that. Mao wasn't doing anything at the time.
Mao gets credit for removing the Japanese, who hadn't been there for 100 years.
> The Great Famine was super bad but I've never seen evidence that it was intentional. It did legitimately appear to be a mistake.
How can that mitigate anything but the Great Leap Forward itself?
Note that the party line in China is that the famine associated with the Great Leap Forward was caused by the weather. They don't seem to feel that killing everyone unintentionally does much to mitigate the fact of killing everyone.
"What did Mao have to do with removing the Qing? Sun Yat-sen is always credited for that. Mao wasn't doing anything at the time."
Mostly continuity. It's hard to credit Sun Yat-Sen with removing the Qing because, yeah, the dynasty ended in 1912 but by 1913 Sun Yat-Sen had assassinated Song Jiaoren and Sun Yat-Sen had fled to Japan (1). And then, of course, by 1915 the Warlord Era had begun. And it's not like the foreign zones were gone during the Warlord era. Rather than a definitive end, the collapse of the Qing ends up as just another part of the long Century of Humiliation. This runs into some of my limited understanding of late 19th century Chinese political philosophy but my understanding is that, amongst Sun Yat-Sen and his contemporaries, the abolishment of the Qing was tied into the restoration of Han control over China, a return to the glory of earlier dynasties. A restoration that, despite the dates, doesn't come in 1912 but instead in 1949 when there is, inarguably, one single Hand Chinese government in charge of China.
"How can that mitigate anything but the Great Leap Forward itself?"
The same way that murder and manslaughter are the same outcome with different punishments determined primarily by intent. Like, I can't justify it from a utilitarian perspective but if one guy kills a puppy by leaving him in a hot car with the windows rolled up and another guy kills a puppy with a hatchet, I'm staying the eff away from the second guy.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Shikai
You wrote above that "For all his many, many horrific faults, I think there are two mitigating factors", and then listed the unintentionality of the Great Leap Forward as a mitigating factor.
I'm saying that can't possibly be viewed as a mitigating factor of anything other than the Great Leap Forward. That was only one of Mao's many, many horrific faults. The fact that it was unintentional mitigates it, very lightly. But that does almost nothing to mitigate Mao.
> but my understanding is that, amongst Sun Yat-Sen and his contemporaries, the abolishment of the Qing was tied into the restoration of Han control over China, a return to the glory of earlier dynasties. A restoration that, despite the dates, doesn't come in 1912 but instead in 1949
You have an odd view of how other people must see the world. Like I said, Mao is credited with removing the Japanese. In the eyes of the modern Chinese it is his primary claim to greatness. He's not credited with removing the Qing for the obvious reason that that's not something you could give him any credit for even if you wanted to be absurdly generous.
"-The Great Famine was super bad but I've never seen evidence that it was intentional. It did legitimately appear to be a mistake."
When you win top score for millions of people starving to death, your intentions should factor very little into the final judgment.
Arguably, it was a structural mistake. You set up a government with no feedback when things are going wrong, you get consequences.
Thanks for a reply that actually engaged with the ideas!
I'm happy to concede that different utilitarian frameworks can lead you to different outcomes on the "Who Was the Worst?"-o-meter. But I think that's a bit to the side of Yglesias's main thrust, which is that a pervasive norm that Hitler (due to the Holocaust) is a kind of unquestioned evil such that anything that vaguely resembles it should be avoided out of a necessary caution. It's about the specifics of the Holocaust as a deliberate, focused act of ethnic cleansing and extermination and not just the body count at the end of the day.
So worrying about whether Pol Pot or whatever was "worse" from a consequentialist perspective (or whatever) misses the point. Unless you're trying to argue that there's some alternative taboo that should be instituted for avoiding more Pol Pots and that, by instead focusing on the taboo for avoiding Hitlers/Holocausts, we're crowding out the hypothetical Pol Pot taboo?
>But I think that's a bit to the side of Yglesias's main thrust, which is that a pervasive norm that Hitler (due to the Holocaust) is a kind of unquestioned evil such that anything that vaguely resembles it should be avoided out of a necessary caution.
The problem is that we've suffered serious "Holocaust inflation" over the last eight decades, to the extent that a politically and culturally important part of the population views such things as "The existence of majority-white countries" and "Expecting everybody in a country to follow the same set of norms and laws" as being too close to the Holocaust.
Yes, the alternative taboo is the primary point of contention. Just empirically, large groups of people in the hundreds of millions do not consistently hold multiple things as "the worst thing". There's only one Skeletor and he's the only villain that matters; no one cares about...Evil-Lyn (1). Shouldn't be that way but it is. And as long as there can only be one supreme evil, one Skeletor, then it matters a lot whether that's Hitler or Stalin.
And not, like, it would completely change all of America but...let's avoid modern politics and focus on the pre-2000 period. While Communism certainly was not popular during this period, and especially not during the Cold War, it was also never as absolutely verboten as explicit Nazism. And that mean that some leftist/socialist policies were within the realm of respectable politics while a lot of right-wing ones weren't. And that would have been very different is people viewed Stalin with the absolute moral abhorrence they currently view Hitler.
That, as far as I can tell, is the stakes of the actual debate and why people actually care. If Hitler is right-coded and Stalin is left-coded and only one can be the ultimate evil, only one gets to be as popular as Skeletor and the other is Evil-Lyn, then there's a decent real-world impact riding on who was the worst.
And the worst part is that it's not clear we would reasonably determine this and all the arguments around this are consistently depressing. Not like, "Oh, you're dumb". It's more like "Was the Holodomor an intentional attempt at genociding Ukranians or not?" and "is it worse to kill 5 million people via gas chambers than intentional starvation?" or "Well, even if the Holodomor isn't as bad as the Holocaust and even if we don't count all the Russians Stalin killed, how do we count the other genocides/ethnic cleansings Stalin did?" (2). "Does, like, the #2 and #5 genocides of the 20th century outweigh #1?"
And, like, I understand the arguments, I just don't want to have the subject level arguments because it's all insanely depressing.
(1) https://www.cbr.com/he-man-strongest-villains/ I wasn't joking, I had to go look it up. Off the top of your head, name any He-Man villain other than Skeletor.
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_famine_of_1930
"Off the top of your head, name any He-Man villain other than Skeletor."
Other than Evil-Lyn, which you mentioned: Beastman; Trapjaw; Triclops; Spydor; Whiplash; Clawful; Faker; Jitsu; Stinkor; Kobra-Khan. I won't count Hordak, who is much more a She-ra villain, even though he fought He-man at some point. Also, Man-E-Faces was briefly a villain, and Zodak was a kind of ambiguous rival IIRC.
(I used to collect these as a kid, and watched the cartoon endlessly. I am very much an exception to your rule.)
Interesting.
If that's your position, then I think the disagreement is about moral frames and not 'right' vs. 'left'. For many, the intentionality of setting up murder camps where folks from a particular ethnicity were killed assembly-line-style is horrific in a way that even mass-starvation-due-to-poor-planning isn't. This is where the taboo that MY was talking about comes from. I don't think it's the flavor of the politics involved.
Content Warning: links to graphic pics of war crimes
Yes, but this gets back to the circular logic of how we construct moral frames, which is the (underlying) impact behind the Hitler debate. We have not randomly or objectively chosen our moral frames. By moral frame, I very much mean the intuition that some crimes are dramatically worse even if we can't justify that on utilitarian grounds, ie "For many, the intentionality of setting up murder camps where folks from a particular ethnicity were killed assembly-line-style is horrific"
So let's pivot this a bit and look at a 3rd great group of WWII war criminals: the Japanese. Here's 3 pictures of war crimes:
The Holocaust (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust)
The Holodomor: https://www.themorningsun.com/2017/03/08/walker-spotlight-on-the-holodomor/
And the Rape of Nanking:
https://ca.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitxer:A_seven-year-old_child_bayoneted_dead_by_Japanese_in_Nanjing_Massacre.jpg
I think we can all agree that these are all horrific war crimes. But the Holocaust one feels different. Anne Frank feels different, although it's hard to justify why the tragedy of young Jewish teenager being sent to Auschwitz should feel more horrific than a 7 year-old Chinese boy being bayoneted to death for fun.
But if you were Chinese, you would feel the opposite. You would feel extra horror, that sense of epic wrongness, about the Japanese invasion and Unit 731 and all that. And, we can be reasonably confident then, that at least some of our horror regarding the Holocaust is a result of our unique cultural upbringing. And it's not that there's anything wrong with this, Schindler's List is a great movie...but it's also the best explanatory variable for why the Holocaust looms so large.
Now presume that moral frame can be weaponized and you'll understand the stakes. If:
#1 You can only have one supreme evil, if you can only inspire that moral feeling, the unique horror, for one person/group AND
#2 Who that supreme evil is carries political consequences AND
#3 The original moral horror was not assigned impartially
Then you've got the basis for the historicism fight. The right is, generally, trying to shift the moral horror from fascism to communism, and almost universally attempting to delegitimize the post-war moral framework.
Which, this whole things sounds pretty complex, but it's really just that there's a certain amount of relativity and discretion in establishing and maintaining social taboos and Yglesias knows this and knows which moral taboos he likes and which ones he doesn't.
There's also a question of whether the absolute size of the atrocity is the only thing that matters or whether the number of vulnerable people affects the evaluation. Pol Pot wrecked their own country, but it was a smaller country.
This strikes me as the opposite, *very* charitable. Skimming the article briefly he mentions Darryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson, where I don't think he talked about Stalin at all (didn't watch the broadcast but did read his extremely lengthy follow-up post) and his points included "Churchill was the real villain", "the Holocaust was really just a logistics snafu", and "wealthy financiers wanted WWII to continue". The whole thing was pretty batshit but also was, I would say, reverse-engineered to support the abandonment of Ukraine.
I have no doubt what you're talking about is also a take somebody has, but I suspect it's a different one than he's responding to.
This...might be fair.
I'm aware of Daryl Cooper but don't follow him. I did a quick check and it looks like he is pushing "Churchill is the villain, not Hitler" which is...certainly a take. I'm sure you can point to civilian bombing campaigns like Dresden to take some of the shine off Chruchill but...yo, Hitler and Stalin.
I'm reasonably confident that Cooper's take is not Yarvin's, Buchanan's, or Confas' though, mostly because I've heard discussions in these circles for awhile and it's a lot more Stalin focused that Churchill focused.
If Yglesias is purely focused on Cooper and his Tucker Carlson appearance, I'm wrong, my bad. I don't think he is but it's...not an absurd read of the article.
Nah, Darryl Cooper is extremely knowledgeable, fair and empathetic to all sides. He produces hours long podcasts where he talks in great detail about all angles of a conflict and is extremely anti war, having seen all its evils first hand. Of course he knows and has said frequently that Hitler is evil and antisemitism is bad.
People taking his snide comments out of context are the problem here. Have a listen to him on Rogan or check out his Substack. Here’s a post from recently where he calls out right wing anti-Semitism (and explains where his love of saying objectively outrageous things originated)
https://subscribe.martyrmade.com/p/the-road-to-hell?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Thanks for an interesting link.
Early social media wasn't all like the MMA he describes, which sounds like what I've heard about 4chan.
I hung out on usenet, mostly some rec.arts. sf groups, and they were pretty civil.
Yeah, admittedly I don't know Confas as well, so there might be a mixture of things happening here.
Pol Pot could plausibly compete for #1 though
"Pol Pot could plausibly compete for #1 though"
For rate statistics (% dead of population), but not for counting statistics (total corpses).
If we are going to go here, then the Great Khan might deserve some consideration for what he was able to accomplish with much less sophisticated technology.
Assuming that the title being competed for is `most evil person of the 20th century' (as in the post I was responding to) then the Great Khan is disqualified by having died seven centuries too early.
But if we are applying rate statistics and expanding to all of recorded history, then per Steven Pinker the crown goes An Lushan (assuming we assign him all the deaths from his eponymous rebellion).
>But if we are applying rate statistics and expanding to all of recorded history, then per Steven Pinker the crown goes An Lushan (assuming we assign him all the deaths from his eponymous rebellion).
Don't historians of China generally believe that a lot of those "deaths" are a statistical illusion caused by the weakening of the Tang and the post-war breakdown of the census system? AIUI Pinker suggests a death toll of 36 million, or two-thirds of the Chinese population, which is implausibly high given that the war lasted less than a decade and only encompassed three or four of the eleven or so provinces in the empire.
Its still claiming "Im actively being wrong, but look I have the moral high ground"; its not better because he's seems aware it makes him look stupid.
Objectively hilter was 3rd place. Any moral shrill objection to racism is falling flat. Wokes killed race blindness, and not all immigration filters such as crossing an boarder illegally may improve human stock.
Is it to much to ask that anyone to the left of me is able to produce an argument that doesn't annoy me? Either Im a super genius or y'all lack an edge and are wielding butter knifes in a gun fight, because I dont hear the argument "I believe I can estimate iq from 5 minutes of talkn, so you dont necessarily need to judge from skincolor"
If you want someone to give you a good counterargument, I'd suggested presenting a coherent argument to begin with.
Given:
p1) Censorship is inversely correlated with the truth.
p2) Rationalists should generally occasionally put forward a good argument on subjects they are interested in if they were aware of it. (i.e. They talk allot)
p3) I have not seen a good argument from rationalists against racism
p4) (known false) Rationalists are highly rational.
p5) racism is a censored topic
p1+p4=c1) if a highly censored topic exists, rationalists will discount its validity
p2+c1=c2) If a highly censored topic has no good rationalist arguments, rationalists will generally support the opposite conclusion, despite my personal feeling on the matter of arguments I can see from outside.
c2+p3+p5=c3) I should expect rationalists are unable to produce an anti racist argument
c3+p4) Rationalists are actually wildly racist.
(I see some gaps but dont care to list out a dozen premises or put some numbers and pretend to do bayes)
---
I believe not-p4 over p3 and that these are in conflict; realisticly I believe anti-racism arguments exist but they are all low class (because good arguments *require* engagement with the other side) and y'all are unwilling to touch "never ask a white extremists color of his girlfriend" type "proofs"
I'm not really seeing the weight of your complaint. I think a lot of non-rats who learn about this subculture are going to think that the rationalists are too racist. Scott's argument that he defended just the other month that most Africans have what the DSM would call "mild mental retardation" is not an argument that is going to be popularly received in polite society. The comment section here tolerates a lot of caliper users and Stormfront-adjacent types who would be blocked on sight in many other spaces.
> Scott's argument that he defended just the other month that most Africans have what the DSM would call "mild mental retardation" is not an argument that is going to be popularly received in polite society
I would consider scott boarderline anti-rationalist. I wouldnt consider core rationalists savable or worth talking to.
> polite society
> I think a lot of non-rats who learn about this subculture are going to think that the rationalists are too racist.
It does not matter what polite society thinks. At least to me. You should consider if my lack of caring will soon effect you with you know, trump in the white house.
I actually just hate politeness. Full stop.( has anyone been able to tell /s)
> The comment section here tolerates a lot of caliper users and Stormfront-adjacent types who would be blocked on sight in many other spaces.
Im far-right; even if the future is far right(it probably is), the fascists outnumber and out prep-for-violence me; there are possible futures where that becomes a problem. If you care about actual fascists taking power you should argue for liberal norms better then yarvin(; or prep-for-violence at an acceptable level to carry your weight.)
Ideally you should be able to watch "worse country on earth" start to end, talk kindly to a fascist on the subject(,then an indian). Thats likely to high I only lasted 30 minutes myself; but please at least try to contend with the *gasp* non-polite rather then the high pitch shrill I usually see, the god of the copybook headers with terror and slaughter returns.
Would a rationalist consider, going into a discussion, that racism is a prior? For example, if I am a white rationalist, and I go into an interaction with a black person while holding a statistically supportable view (apparently) that black people are not as smart as white people, will I assume the person I am speaking with is not as smart as me from the get-go?
(As an aside, I dictated this comment, and Siri capitalized black, but left white in lowercase. interesting…)
I grew up in northern Canada and then Toronto and moved to New York in 1978. I can’t say I ever really met a black person until I came to New York City.
(not entirely true because I spent about three weeks in Zambia when I was 18 years old, but that was completely different.) in NYC I soon sensed the cultural divide that existed. Then I spent quite a bit of time in Jamaica and met a lot of Black people but nothing like Black people in New York City, or so it seemed.
-(Siri is doing it again but I don’t feel like editing it.)
My take away is that a lot of the people I met who were black were smarter than me in some ways, but not in others. I would say in a general sense that they think differently..
Anyway, getting back to priors, I would say that coming into contact with Black people for the first time in my 20s, I had an unfounded fear of them and also considered them exotic. it took me some time to work through that. It gets back to what you said; let me talk to someone for a few minutes, and I don’t need to refer to their skin color to decide whether they’re smart or not.
Whatever you're arguing against, it isn't the post I linked.
> it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination
> mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions
Theses are arguments via moral shrill
People dislike Yglesias's proposed taboo for not noticing disparate outcomes because people have tried living that and noticed that, in practice, it just means suppressing whites and select successful minorities to the benefit of increasingly irate and ungrateful activist groups.
Also, it makes it harder to spread good practice when the only permissible explanation for disparate outcomes is "the more successful group is evil".
Employer pays $5. Employee gets $15.
6 -> 15.90
Etc
As with every subsidy, you need to make its not taken advantage of unduly.
This makes effective minimum $15 received, while subsidizing low skill labor instead of price controlling it, meaning you get more not less
Was this a reply to something else or its own top thread?
I've been supporting this idea for a while. At the very least, get to 0% on labor on the low-end, so a job that generates $11/hour of value can be filled by an employee making $11/hour.
Was supposed to be a reply under my thread
This seems to be the concept of the famous negative income tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax?wprov=sfla1
Yes. As a replacement for minimum wage
Has anyone had acid reflux so bad that it spilled over into other symptoms? I have what feels like moderate acid reflux, but in the past I've had problems realizing how bad my problems are until they went away, so it might be worse than I realize. PPIs have a moderate effect on it. Other symptoms I have include difficulty with stereoscopic vision, darkness in one eye, dizziness, waking up multiple times at night feeling like I'm choking, and severe brain fog.
- CPAP cured my acid reflux
- Acid reflux could be so bad that I would wake up having breathed in some of the stomach acid and the next day would be pretty awful
- Strange neurological symptoms FOR ME turned out to be too much time at the computer during the pandemic, doctors eventually settled on pinched nerves in the neck and upper thorasic vertebra
- Strange perception-based things were caused by thinking too hard, being too stressed, drinking too much, not getting outside and using my eyes to look at distances farther than 10', that kind of thing
- Brain fog in my case comes from being bored, over-stimulated, having no privacy (working at home and having a partner also in the home all the time)
It has been strange over the past few years to be unable to understand where these kinds of symptoms are coming from because they have no obvious cause like a stubbed toe or broken bone. Suddenly, symptoms just go away when winter is over, or when I reduced my drinking after the pandemic.
Drinking is pretty rough on acid reflux. I’ve been a fairly steady drinker for most of my life and mostly red wine. About four years ago I started getting acid reflux and it was directly related to red wine. My body just could not deal with it anymore. I drink whiskey and water now -much better. I also don’t drink as much, but still more than what is commonly perceived to be a reasonable level.
Ya same here! I mostly had to cut red wine
Aside of the mentioned sleep apnea, a whole bunch of neurological diagnoses could overlap, I would see about a detailed check up.
So I have done a cranial nerve exam and a neurovisual examination and to my shock both came back completely normal. I had to ask the examiner several times if he was sure. In retrospect I think the problem is the darkness in one of my eyes isn't total, and I was told that if I could see any the dots on the static perimetry test, even if faded, that I was to push the button and register them as "seen." I think the other problem is I'm only 35, so a lot of doctors I talk to just kind of roll their eyes and dismiss me. I've gotten a lot of condescension and "just try relaxing." It's hard to keep fighting for myself.
I absolutely know what you mean by the the dismissals. At some point it was bad enough in my case that they had to believe 😔
Did you get a head MRI? If not, I would insist.
Oh wow. What happened in your case?
I have not gotten the head MRI yet. How would I convince a doctor to give me one if I have no clinical evidence showing up on any other test?
PPMS which is hard to catch because without the relapses, it's often just a bunch of weird, not very specific symptoms. Only when it started to impact walking people stopped ignoring it. That was at least 6 years after the first clear symptoms (and possibly over a decade) :-(
MRI: depends on the health system, Switzerland they are easy to get (and quick) but I would simply try and insist they get to the bottom of it, visual symptoms sound like a good enough for an MRI indication for me.
Sounds like separate to acid reflux you might also have sleep apnea (surprisingly common)
Not all cases of sleep apnea need CPAPs a lot of people get airway improving nasal surgeries from an ENT and they aren't expensive and sometimes it's as simple as keeping up with your antihistamine or having better sleep posture or using one of those postural oral devices.
There are sleep apnea evaluations (which are usually needed if you want to get your CPAP covered by insurance) but other interventions you can just try and see if they make a difference after talking to your primary care doctor if you have one. Good luck!
So incidentally I have already been diagnosed with sleep apnea. The symptoms, especially the choking at night, actually get worse when I use my APAP. I also had turbinate reduction, which has helped me sleep better than before, but it's still less than I'd like.
Consider GLP-1 meds like Ozempic or Mounjaro if significant overweight. Will probably help with both reflux and sleep apnea.
Yup, I am on semiglutide - lost 20 pounds and went from a BMI of 32 to 29. I have definitely noticed something of a positive impact as I lose weight, but I have to take breaks on the medication as it makes gastric symptoms and reflux much worse.
Max Goodbird also responded to Twilight of the Edgelords: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/confessions-of-a-cringe-soy-redditor
Version 800,000,000 of the "rationalists think that they and they alone have the secret to rationality and think they're always right about everything with no humility and those things that I've hallucinated onto them are bad so they're bad" post. I always wonder if people who believe stuff like this, that emotional thinking cannot ever, even in theory, be systematically mitigated follow that thought through the obvious conclusion that they should disengage entirely from politics because their brains are a hopeless hive of the last 10 essays they've consumed. If there is no firm ground then what are they standing on to make this critique?
I didn't like it, the left itself played a much greater role in the rise of Trump than the edgy heterodox centrists. Sure Scott, wrote pieces that the MAGA shared among each other, they still spent more time sharing each other the worst excesses of the woke.
It's a very strangely written critique, where the author seems to think that any piece that gives the reader a reason to feel self righteous about dealing with leftist overreach is sinful.
I think it's less "sinful" and more "can't claim the virtue of objectivity."
Like, persuasive writing isn't inherently evil or anything, you can write persuasively in support of good causes, but if you do, you can't avoid getting caught in "arguments as soldiers" stuff. Your argument will be used as a weapon by whoever it persuades in favor of.
Scott may have intended You Are Still Crying Wolf as a "discourse policing" thing, only intended to push back on what he saw as overheated rhetoric, but there was also an object-level, persuasive argument being made, and he was wrong on the object level.
What object-level thing do you think Scott was trying to persuade people of with YASCW?
I don't think he was *trying* to persuade people that the people calling Trump racist were evil, and neither does the essayist.
>And so it doesn’t matter that Scott is emphatically not a Trump supporter. The essay made Trump supporters feel good about themselves. And so, much to Scott’s and no one else’s surprise, it made the rounds in a bunch of Conservative spaces.
So what? Is it really our priority to make Trump supporters feel *bad* about themselves? I'm not sure *any* ethical theory would countenance that, and I'm not seeing the purpose for it other than that it makes *you* feel good,
When a person is falsely accused of an offense they did not commit, and later cleared of that offense, they and their supporters will feel good about it, and about their support for the man wrongly accused. They're *supposed* to feel good about it, because it's a good thing.
And it's a good thing even if the person in question has done different bad things.
If the idea is that there should be a new norm saying "really bad people should be falsely accused of offenses they did not commit, and nobody should ever dispute that because it might make bad people feel good", then Oh Hell No, I don't want any part of the community that holds that norm.
And I'm glad that Scott has so long worked to keep this community away from that sort of odious nonsense.
Someone (unclear who) once wrote against almost exactly that norm: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/.
On the one hand I feel like when someone has posted a public response to your post, and made it a point of public debate, the proper thing to do would be to un-paywall on the original. On the other hand, such a policy seems rife for abuse, as a bad actor could exploit it to force Scott into giving up on all his supporter-exclusive posts, and therefore, decreasing the value of his Substack. Not sure how to think about this. (Maybe Scott should only un-paywall the article if he intends to publicly spotlight/counter-argue with a response, and he has no duty to un-paywall otherwise?)
I say the opposite; if someone responds to a paywalled article, use that as an advertisement that the paywalled article is worth the money to read, and reap the full monetary benefits.
Perhaps. But in terms of actually winning the argument in the court of public opinion, it seems detrimental that the refutation of your argument is out there, but only a subset of readers will have access to what you actually said.
(This is separate from my immediate concern, which was that this encourages treating debates like this as one-on-one arguments to which the average non-paying reader can only be a passive, partial observer — rather than public debates which anyone can weigh in on — which is part of the overall decay of the Blogosphere of yore.)
If public opinion was the concern, it wouldn't have been paywalled to begin with. These are things you're fine with most people not knowing.
An easy fix is to just not un-paywall when the response is by a bad actor
I'll develop this more fully later, as I am rushing right now, but a quick point here - the use of the term "elite/the elites" makes me grind my teeth, because while the linked response post probably does mean it in a good way - the most intelligent and capable - in practice, it gets conflated with "those of us who are in charge/I am SO SMRT!"
Like the editor of "Science" magazine, whom she quotes, pontificating that it was unacceptable for people to hold a particular opinion, that this should not be permitted, and by implication, that only the likes of him (the SO SMRT! "elites") should be the ones deciding who got to think what, and more importantly, what it was that they were allowed to think.
Which leaves the rest of us, like myself, down in the "moral gutters". Because I'm not part of the elite, whatever way you want to measure it (by raw brainpower, technocracy, or simply 'part of the people in charge') and unhappily that's the alternatives the response post gives us: the edgelords down in the moral gutters with the nasty sentiments, or the elites up there at the top being all - well, what, exactly?
I'm going to presume that the mass of us in the middle somewhere (not in the gutters but not the 140+ IQ elite types to be entrusted with the sevagram) have some place, and that is what she intends but never outright states?
EDIT: Okay, more time now, so let's get into it.
First off, I have to disagree with Ms. Teslo regarding elites; I find myself suspicious of the technocrats, particularly in government. She, on the other hand, very much believes in elites, but at least also believes in 'noblesse oblige'. My fears coalesce around the elites believing in their eliteness, and thus their natural superiority and thus that the rest of us, well we don't really matter, we're just there to do as we're told. I mistrust the self-anointed, and even where I accept such a hierarchy, I have the Pope already, I don't need a second one or more, and boy howdy everyone has seen by now how the Church can screw things up.
Time for a C.S. Lewis quote here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
There's a faint whiff of the elites looking down on the rest of us as domestic animals with the "moral gutters" part:
"I totally agree that a wave of unimaginable stupidity, racism, anti-semitism, hate against transgender people, misogyny and all the other stuff Scott talks about has been unleashed on X. It is very bad that so many people feel this way. But I have reason to believe, and this will become more evident towards the end of this post, that these sentiments will not become dominant among so-called “elites”. My prediction is that in the long term, they will remain confined to the moral gutters of society."
Are there bad views in that collection? Of course. But from another angle, one person's "hate against transgender people" is another person's "I don't think this should be made a legal obligation or else". If the correct and normal and natural views are the ones nice, good, moral, liberal people hold - then any disagreement, even in a small part or even "I agree with some but not all", must be tending towards the bad, the unnatural, the abnormal - the moral gutter.
And that's where I'm splashing around right now, because I'm dang sure I don't hold the same views to the same degree as the nice liberal types.
And this is how populism arises - not just because of the edgelords, but out of the over-reach by the nice liberal side which didn't rein in the crazy fringe and which did push ahead with the arrogance and over-confidence of 'after all, we are the elites' to points where the mass of us stodgy lumps went "whoa there now for a minute".
Centrism should be 'I agree with some of your points, I disagree with others'. It can be "I take 80% from the blue basket but 20% from the red basket where I agree with that" and vice versa. Right now, we're stuck on the polarised opposite sides, with the centre being treated as actively malicious. And I'm sorry, but "just let the elites take charge" does not convince me, because we need some compromise and "let my lot be in sole charge" is not that (whichever side it is).
I remember an old Tom Lehrer recording from the sixties where he mentions "these elites" (fans of folk music if I recall correctly) and does so with a sarcastic twang.
I think that at some point between the 1960s and the 2020s people forgot that they were supposed to use a sarcastic twang when they called people "elites" and accidentally started complimenting them instead of insulting them.
I'm disagreeing with the Lewis quote. While I agree that tyranny exercised for people's own good can be really bad and pervasive, tyranny driven by pure malice can be worse.
Lewis seems too optimistic about malicious people. He sees them almost as misunderstood edgelords, who will experiment a little with being bad, and then grow out of it. (As opposed to the moral busybodies, who are fundamentally unable to learn.)
"The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated"... yeah, correct, "may". Now, assign a specific *probability* to that happening, and calculate the *expected* harm.
By the same logic, at some point Hitler might get bored of sending Jews to the gas chambers. Yeah, he might. But he didn't.
I think the point is that the robber baron doesn't actively want other people to be poor, he just wants himself to be rich and doesn't care about others, whereas Hitler had gassing Jews as a terminal goal.
> whereas Hitler had gassing Jews as a terminal goal.
If I remember my high school history correctly, Hitler spent the first 6 years as Fuhrer trying to get them to emigrate, not trying to get them into a gas chamber. If his terminal goal was the gas all along, rather than just "not be in Germany", then sending them to a different continent where he couldn't access them would seem counterproductive?
Do you have any responses other than tiny yellow hand signals I can barely see? I think this is not supposed to be one of those forums.
I think at this point everyone on the political spectrum is mad at some set of elites, whether it be Trump/Elon, Soros/WEF/the “globalists,” Israel/the “Jews”, the oligarchy/billionaires, etc.
Covid really destroyed a lot of people’s trust in the system. When your life has been upended and you’re counting on the government/media/public health to keep you safe, you need accountability. If Fauci gets up early in the pandemic and says masks don’t work, then later on he says they’re mandatory, you feel owed an explanation of why he changed his mind. When he denies sending money to the Wuhan lab and you find out that was a lie, you become more suspicious. And when your aunt gets the vaccine and then ends up with breast cancer, posts about in on social media, and then gets her account disabled, you get angry.
I don’t actually think the Covid vaccine causes cancer, but I can understand why so many people do. It has become clear to a large swathe of the population that our information sources (social media, corporate media) have been compromised. Bidens mental acuity, or lack there of, was further proof. The intelligence agencies endorsing the lab leak theory 3 years after anyone sharing it on social media was banned and called a conspiracy theorist? Further proof. The corporate media serves a function, but that function is not to tell you, the average person, what is really going on. What are the elites really up to? Julian Assange went to jail for trying to tell us that. Who went to Epstein Island??
People want answers, or at least journalists who are willing to ask questions! So you have this whole alternate media ecosystem (with Joe Rogan at the helm) that frankly is the main reason Trump got re elected. I say this as an “elite” - we have to seriously question our dogmas. Academia, the source of our knowledge, has been badly damaged by the woke cult - our top journal (Nature) published a study supposedly refuting the lab leak theory in early 2020, and to my knowledge there have been no consequences. Scientists refuse to publish research that could cast doubt on the current model of gender affirming care for trans kids, and another top journal (the New England Journal of Medicine) recently published a takedown of the Cass review on transgender care that made elementary errors. This should be a scandal. It probably will be, in time.
I’m not saying all elites must support Trump, but they - we - have to face up to the public loss of trust in institutions and the fact that the public is right to be skeptical. Serious errors have occurred. People have been fired for telling the truth. We need to begin the work of getting politics out of our institutions. Rehire and compensate everyone who was fired for expressing a heterodox opinion or refusing a vaccine, get rid of noxious punishments for poorly defined “hate speech,” drastically reduce the number of bureaucrats in academia - we need to return to a time where science was an independent search for truth
> the use of the term "elite/the elites" makes me grind my teeth
The word "elite" conflates a few different things, such as:
* intelligent people
* educated people
* people in positions of power
* experts on a topic
In general, there is probably a positive correlation between any two of them. And yet, there are many people who are visibly one of them but not the other.
There are people with high IQ who say obviously insane things. Credentials mean that you have successfully attended the university, but not that you actually understand the topic. People in positions of power sometimes have selfish reasons to lie. Even experts on one topic can be overconfident on another topic.
It is generally better to side with the smart than with the stupid, with the educated instead of the uneducated, and with the experts instead of people who get their information from social media. But demanding obedience to any of these groups means demanding obedience to their worst (but vocal) members.
The "elites" that people decry are I think just the elitely well-connected; those with no particular abilities but who happen to have met and scratched the backs of the right people.
And with good reason. In every society (indeed in every large organisation) the people with elite talent compete against the people with elite connections for power. How well the organisation does as a whole is heavily dependent on who wins that competition.
I don't know if I am.elite or not. Im.certainly not in charge of anything. Im educated, but grammar and redbrick, not Eton and Oxford. Etc.
Being elite is a state of mind; either yours or someone else’s. If you get to the top of the game in some pursuit, there are going to be quite a few people who refer to you as elite.
Or you could just consider yourself a cut above, and be magnanimous about it. If you consider yourself a cut above and treat other people badly, then you are no longer elite, you are an asshole.
What would happen if you had hyperinflation at the same time as an AI-driven explosion in GDP? Would the two cancel each other out? How long could that last?
Indeed, why wouldn't governments choose to hyperinflate when the primary reason not to is suddenly lifted? I suggest that not only would hyperinflation be contemplated by governments (at least at the dawn of AGI) but that it would be sold as a "positive force, necessary to stabilize the economy" during rapid expansion.
The practical effect would be that early returns would be small relative to technological benefits, and we may not notice we're living through a revolution until after it's over. Perhaps the biggest side effect would be stabilizing government balance sheets in the near term.
NGDP = RGDP * price level
(Hyperinflation, a.k.a., price level growing at an accelerating rate) + (AI-driven explosion, a.k.a., RGDP growing at an accelerating rate) = NGDP growing at an increasingly-accelerating rate.
Would people continue to use money?
All goods won't change their cost equally. An AI explosion probably won't decrease the cost of eggs...at least not for quite awhile, and probably not all that much. So hyperinflation could easily lead to $500/egg. Not exactly an ideal situation.
"What do we need now, Mr. President?"
"An AI that lays eggs."
"Golden eggs?"
"No, just eggs."
If you have hyperinflation, doesn't that by definition mean that the expansion of the money supply hasn't been cancelled out by output growth?
What would an AI driven explosion in GDP actually mean? In reality, this mostly means people investing even more money into the stocks of AI or AI adjacent companies. If hyperinflation is occurring, AI would do nothing to stop or slow it down. People closest to the stream of printed money would just take it and invest it into NVIDIA stock or something else.
Or maybe it looks like established Public Choice politics. Robots put a million truckers out of a job so suddenly their votes can be bought. Robots automate picking and shipping so millions of Amazon workers demand special subsidies, or an expansion in the scope and mission of unemployment. Social safety net programs have always been the political process we pay to maintain market disruptions. Why should that change?
Hyperinflation would weaken the ability of social safety nets to meet people's needs and wants.
Yes, while hyper expansion strengthens it. The government becomes the largest consumer in an expanded market ... moreso than it already is. But it's not the difference between 2022 and 2025 sized markets, it's the difference between 1950 and 2025, or more. A chaotic adjustment period, to be sure.
Does anyone have an actually reasonable "nootropic" style way to deal with hangovers?
Dihydromyricetin
I've heard that prevention is a lot easier than a cure.
The most effective prevention is just to drink a huge amount of water, as alcohol dehydrates you, while the extra urination cleans out the toxins faster. I don't drink so often, but when I do I put a liter of water next to my bed, force myself to drink more than I naturally would, and this seems to reduce the effects of hangover's the next day. Another thing I've seen is to eat heavy foods beforehand, as this helps level out the absorption of alcohol into your system, making it easier for your body to deal with.
Best of all is to just reduce alcohol consumption a bit. Maxing out at 5 drinks instead of 6 might be the difference between a major hangover, and a slight headache.
ZBiotics sells a GMO probiotic that breaks down alcohol into less immiserating byproducts. Haven't tried it so can't vouch for it.
Is this just not drinking, but with extra steps?
No, the alcohol is what's intoxicating, not the byproducts.
Right, but if you break down the alcohol without it getting into your bloodstream, is this not effectively similar to not drinking alcohol or drinking lowe-proof alcohol?
Ah, I see what you mean. Looking at their site, it seems like the alcohol is absorbed as usual, then the byproduct acetaldehyde (which causes hangovers) is broken down into benign components by the genetically engineered bacteria. Based on this: https://zbiotics.com/pages/how-it-works
Got it, that makes sense.
I have tried it, and can vouch for it. It works!
If you've got the wherewithal to buy herbal supplements over the internet, you've got the wherewithall to just drink two pints of water before going to bed— the most effective way I've found of avoiding a hangover.
Hi everyone, I’ve recently launched an MVP for Popper, a public platform for stress-testing bold, falsifiable ideas. It’s inspired by Karl Popper’s philosophy of science: users post conjectures (e.g. "Free will is an illusion", "AGI requires embodiment"), and others attempt to refute them with counterarguments, evidence, or counterexamples.
Each idea must be falsifiable - no vague opinions, no tribal takes - and the platform supports tagging by domain (AI, economics, philosophy, science, etc).
Key twist: monetary bounties.
Users can attach real money to their conjectures to attract serious, thoughtful refutations. Think of it as rational discourse with actual skin in the game.
Why build this?
Science has tilted toward publish-or-perish corroboration rather than genuine falsification. Popper flips that: refutation is rewarded, not punished. It’s also different from prediction markets - not so much about betting on time-bound outcomes, but pressure-testing conjectures, potentially before they harden into consensus.
Who might benefit:
• Researchers and scientists seeking pre-publication scrutiny
• Companies challenging strategic assumptions
• EA orgs validating priorities before scaling
• Rationalists who want an open, high-signal space for intellectual "combat"
I would love your feedback:
• Is this useful?
• What would make it better?
• Any failure modes I haven’t thought of?
Open to questions, critiques, and refutations.
Site: https://popper.popadex.com
will you be making efforts to make it actually escapes rationalist spaces?
Yes absolutely. I would describe myself as more EA-adjacent than deep into the rationalist sphere, and I think most of the value of a platform like this would come from it being used by scientists and entrepreneurs. If it has any chance of succeeding though, it would have to have a core of early adopters, and rationalists may provide that.
Bug report:
When signing up I put my user name, selected my title as "lord", then display name settings as "full name and title", this did nothing.
Expected behavior: showing my name as lord monkyyy(maybe different colors) until I get bored
Thanks Monkyyy. I think you signed up with username only as I can't see your first and last name in the backend, which you would need in order to use a title. Of course, I'd appreciate it if you didn't abuse the nascent system I've just created :)
Cool idea.
A few things:
- It shows your email address publicly when you add to a bounty. That should probably be communicated ahead of time, or otherwise hidden. This is a one-way street to significant spam, and many people will find privacy issues.
- There's no verification or payment collection when setting up a bounty. If I put down a bounty, what's to actually enforce me paying that bounty should someone successfully refute the claim?
- What are the conditions for accepting a refutation? If the person who pays is the judge of whether or not something is refuted, you're going to get a lot of circumstances where people offer a bounty, but don't admit when something is refuted.
- None of the current bounties seem unfalsifiable, or are trivially falsifiable. For:
"Markets Are Efficient Information Processors
Financial markets efficiently incorporate all available information into asset prices, making it impossible to consistently achieve returns that beat the market average through skilled stock selection or market timing."
Wouldn't a wikipedia link to Jim Simons disprove this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons He made consistent outsized returns for literally decades, so apparently this is wrong.
For others it seems unfalsifiable or prohibitively difficult:
"Consciousness Requires Biological Substrate" Solving this in a way that could resolve a market would require creating a theory of consciousness, then testing against every possible way to create it without a biological substrate. Even if we had clark-tech that allows us to measure consciousness, and the computing power and knowledge necessary to theoretically create consciousness on a digital substrate, but failed to do so, we would find it difficult to say that consciousness ever "requires" a biological substrate, as the failure to replicate it somewhere else could always be a failure in technique, rather than possibility.
I think if this is going to work, it would need better examples showing what a falsifiable claim should look like, and strict criteria of what constitutes something that's been falsified. Maybe a good example is: "Malaria nets are the most effective charitable donation on a [age adjusted human life saved per dollar] metric." I can see some EA people putting a bounty like that up, and it seems at least in theory falsifiable.
This wouldn't be so much setting a bounty on argument though (which I think will not work too well as people are already intrinsically motivated to argue effectively yet apparently haven't been convinced), but might work for setting a bounty on "information" like the EA example. I.E. there is some base-level truth that is unknown, or debatable, but no one intelligent is putting in the right level of research. Basically, you'd be paying for Gwern-level research into random topics, only paid out when that research is done. If you want to have info on some interesting diet, like eating only potatoes (https://dynomight.net/potato-diet/), you create a bounty for someone to create a detailed n=1 (or more) study in the vein of these independent researchers.
I would take inspiration from Lesswrong's bounty list: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/bounties-and-prizes-active
It doesn't have much activity, but I imagine that's because it's little known, there's no enforcement mechanism (besides reputation), so it doesn't attract much interest as it's too inconvenient.
Hey, thanks for your input.
For context I deployed this the day before yesterday, it's very much still a "usable demo" to gauge interest before I commit any more time and effort to it.
Thanks for your point on privacy. I changed it so users can now choose the degree of anonymity they'd like to have on the platform, and launched the ability to add usernames, names, titles, and organisations.
Regarding the falsifiability criteria, this would have to be further defined. I think a bigger problem is moderating the payouts. Basically making sure refutations that meet the criteria are paid out. I think a mix between objective criteria and AI + human moderation might solve that.
I also haven't deployed the financial features yet - it's just numbers on a screen for the time being, but this won't be terribly difficult to implement.
Having said that, would you use this platform if I deployed the bounty system and clarified the falsifiability criteria?
Thanks for sharing the links. Another source of inspiration is the Change My View subreddit.
Personally, I can't think of any beliefs that I want falsified that I'd crowdsource an answer to. For any belief I hold, there's usually ample writing about that belief, and I don't see why prompting a random stranger to try and refute me would perform any better than finding the best existing writings on a subject. For more obscure stuff, I don't really have a strong enough belief to warrant it refuted, or otherwise it's probably unfalsifiable.
I like the idea of "set a bounty for intellectual work", but I think it will be difficult to translate this into something that works for an argument. Looking through the top r/changemyview posts this month, they all either seem political (and therefore a matter of opinion), obviously true (Ex. The claim they did not bring dire wolves back from extinction. They didn't) or unfalsifiable (Ex. Television does not have enough female anti-heroes). Looking through the comments on changemyview, it seems there's a very low bar for what is considered convincing. Almost no comments link to any sources, and the ones that do are quite clearly the first study someone found on google that validates the point they are trying to make. It seems more like an arena for making "convincing" soundbites, rather than intellectual argument, which is probably a fun game to play online, but in the era of ChatGPT I find it hard to see where the demand will come from to pay for refutations.
But I don't really know what people would be into. I think you'd get a better idea of what might work if you added real bounties that you think people might actually create themselves. Try it with live people, put $10 or so of your own money into bounties (after creating a payout system, Stripe is good for this) and see if you get responses.
Thanks, I agree with your points on the subreddit, and that's useful feedback.
One last question: Would you enjoy getting paid to refute conjectures?
It depends on the level of dedicated effort necessary. I already disagree with people online often enough, and I do that for free, and I can 100% imagine there are people out there who are chronically online, but quite intelligent, would would be quite happy for the opportunity.
If it was similar enough to what I already do, then I'd be more than happy to get paid to do it. If it required a lot of additional effort, I probably wouldn't.
I hoped ACX revisits discussion about Covid, here 5 years after the first lockdowns and almost every nations have essentially declared over. In hindsight, what actually works and doesn't? How about Delta? Omicron? The last article in 2021 is written right before those supercharged variants. I guess there's already the lab leak debate but that's different.
“Do you have a steelman for how the multiple strains coming from animal storage areas, etc, would work with a zoonotic outbreak?”
————————
“The most striking finding was the co-localization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and animal DNA/RNA on the same swabs or samples collected from specific locations, such as stalls, cages, and carts associated with the wildlife trade. Raccoon dog genetic material was found to be particularly abundant in some SARS-CoV-2-positive samples from the wildlife stalls. This discovery provided strong circumstantial evidence directly linking the virus to susceptible animals present in the specific market locations where spillover was hypothesized to occur, significantly strengthening the zoonotic origin hypothesis and directly countering the earlier claims that no such link could be established from the data.”
….
“The existence of lineages A and B so early in the outbreak provides strong support for the hypothesis of multiple zoonotic introductions of the virus into the human population, likely occurring at the Huanan market. Seminal work by Pekar et al. (2022) in Science used phylodynamic modeling and epidemic simulations to analyze the early genomic diversity. Their findings indicated that it was highly improbable that one lineage evolved from the other within the human population during the short timeframe of the early outbreak without leaving detectable intermediate forms.
Instead, their analyses strongly favored a scenario involving at least two separate introductions of the virus from an animal reservoir into humans. This implies that viruses ancestral to both lineage A and lineage B were likely co-circulating in the animal population(s) that served as the source for the human infections. The Huanan market, with its documented sale of numerous live wild mammals, provides a plausible setting for repeated exposure and multiple independent spillover events to occur over a short period.”
I would like someone to actually steelman the wet market evidence and go over the multiple strains coming from animal storage areas and how that would work with a lab leak.
It seems like in the zeitgeist of making zingers about the lab leak I’ve seen very little actually engaging with any of the science for years now.
If the lab leak happened then the Chinese Government covered it up, so I'm not sure it makes any sense to take any of the wet market research at face value.
"If the murder happened then the criminal covered it up, so I'm not sure it makes any sense to take any of the crime scene investigation at face value."
Virologists are not morons.
It's more like "If the police did the murder then the police covered it up so I'm not sure it makes any sense to take the police's own reporting on the crime scene at face value, and nobody else had access to the crime scene for the next three years".
Do you have a steelman for how the multiple strains coming from animal storage areas, etc, would work with a zoonotic outbreak?
Because it's the same hypothetical thing, except where you have the step "an infected animal comes through the back door in a crate, then coughs all over a vendor and/or some other animals and now they're all infected, cue pandemic", you have the step "an infected lab tech comes through the front door, then coughs all over a vendor and/or his as animals..."
Including, if you think it's necessary, a period where it spreads unnoticed within the market and does a bit of quick natural selection for its new environment before turning into a visible superspreader event.
A wet market is obviously a stronger attractor for infected wild animals than it is for infected laboratory technicians, so you should a priori be thinking "probably zoonotic", but not by such an overwhelming margin that other evidence can't shift the needle.
Obtaining a smoking gun requires on the ground work in Wuhan. Lab leak mania in the US thourougly burned those bridges. You're never getting any more data.
But if you accept there were probably multiple strains transmitting from areas of animal storage in the wet market , it greatly reduces the likelihood of the lab leak, which is odd considering how everyone has piled on the lab leak train in the last few years.
" Lab leak mania in the US" - really? what alternative universe is this coming from? The US I live in had a near-prohibition on the lab leak theory for the first two years of COVID, while China did everything to obfuscate COVID origins, including pretending it came form the US. We weren't getting any data then, so pretending that somehow now it's our fault we won't be getting any data is slightly daft (ok not slightly, it's fucking ridiculous).
We, the US, do all kinds of bad shit, but not everything bad in the world is our fault. China is perfectly capable of doing bad shit too, without any prodding from across the ocean.
Mania meaning exactly this kind of breathless reply I'm afraid. We had some good working relationships with scientists who worked there in spite of their government and ours, now it's much harder, particularly now we've fired all the Chinese postdocs (spies).
Yeah, when someone disagrees with you, calling the disagreement "breathless" is a sure win. I'm totally humbled.
A slow measured response then:
In 2020-2022 there not only wasn't a "mania", lab leak was officially banished from respectable discourse.
There was no data forthcoming form Wuhan, no cooperation from China.
All that time the Chinese were evading the questions and accusing the US of starting the pandemic.
What prevented the Chinese to provide the data back in 2020-2022 timeframe?
What "sort of works" is widespread vaccination. And it only "sort of works". We won't be over COVID, it's now endemic.
Agreed. This has been the obvious endpoint since around April/May 2020 - as soon as we started seeing community spread on multiple continents.
Vaccine eradication worked really well ... once, for smallpox. We got close for polio, but it's still not at 100% many decades into the effort. Maybe someday. Then this new disease comes along and suddenly everyone thinks we'll somehow get to zero cases just because there's a vaccine?
I remember when there was heavy censorship, and know-nothing journalists were promoting the idea of zero COVID, if only everyone would just practice social distancing ... despite the early evidence of spread in dogs, deer, and a dozen other species. Like what, you're going to vaccinate all the squirrels? Get stray cats to social distance?
> know-nothing journalists were promoting the idea of zero COVID
Yeah part of what motivates me was seeing comments lamenting that "if only Trump was doing this and that, we'd have zero COVID and skip all these suffering!" But seeing the data on China and all further variants, it seems like zero COVID was never even slightly probable and we should've focused on economy after all? I think I'm going too extreme in the other direction here, but that's why I was a sane summary.
By April, we knew who vulnerable pop was. Solution: 12m free grocery delivery and door dash for anyone over 65, plus ID nurses, docs, caregivers who are + for COVID antibodies, and pay them extra to cocoon the elderly.
The vax was great, but the EUA never should have been expanded to everyone.
Replace minimum wages with tapering subsidies to create same practical minimum.
Seems like a good bi-partisan compromise
I have a somewhat radical economic idea. But I'm pretty convinced it would work.
We have never had a truly free market due to the existence of captive markets. I propose regulating the captive markets (housing, food, healthcare) into non-issues. That would leave a free market for truly entrepreneurial efforts. The savings to entrepreneurs in their business costs (real estate costs, employee health savings, costs associated with unhappy employees, taxes associated with social benefits) would enable them to provide an actual living wage to all employees. Each person earning a living wage (similar to auto workers in the 50s) would provide all sorts of societal benefits--uncoupling spending power from marriage, type of job, and questionable ethical side effects. In this system there would be 3 classes, basically. The majority of people would be 'working class' to include everyone from fast food workers to skilled labor. They would all earn a living wage--enough for each single person to pay their expenses (housing, food, healthcare, education) and have some for extra spending and some for saving. The upper middle class would be for college educated/extremely skilled workers (tech/science, etc.) and also for military/firefighters/police/EMT in order to compensate them for extra risk. The uppermost class would have no upper limit and would be strictly entrepreneurial. Due to the potential stability and prime conditions for entrepreneurs to do their best work, they would be more prone to be benevolent and willing to invest in education and public works. It would be hugely to their advantage to have a K-12 system that produced educated, good workers.
This is just a basic outline of a system I've been working on for quite some time.
The state of our country/society is definitely what is called a 'wicked problem.' You'd have to change many things all at one time to make this work. Someone should give me some territory so I can try it and see if it works!
How are you suggesting we "regulate" these? I'm inclined to say this sounds more like basic income with extra steps.
Please explain how food and housing are "captive markets"?
Caution; This would subsidize and encourage jobs that use labor unproductively, eg : using via using unproductive or ineffective tools, methods, or processes. I don't like this.
I guess an example would help. Imagine a kitchen that doesn't bother to purchase a food processor and instead relies on knife skills. Or a workplace that has excessive beurocracy, because the company can now support more employees doing not very much.
Those businesses would still be operating in a competitive environment with each other. If it takes you $20 with subsidized labor to make a meal and me $30 with subsidized labor, you could support a business selling the meal at $28 and I can't.
I don't think so. It makes labor cheaper and therefore replacement capital is less efficient yes - but all else equal you'll still want efficiency.
Contrast with minimum wage, which incentivizes offshoring even at wasteful transport costs, due to low cost of human labor in other countries
Hmm, yeah, you are correct in that efficiency is still important, but it does impact capital to labor ratio on the margins.
Car washes are one of those things that are sensitive to that. Like if the price of labor is less then it's not worth investing in expensive machines and cheaper to go with hand washers.
If there's a specific type of machine you want produced or used you can subsidize that too.
In general I'm not sure this is a bad thing, when the labor is around - even getting rid of min wage laws by itself would likely have this effect, and would be good economically on this count
There’s very little evidence that increases in min wage increase unemployment.
I'll leave that argument to brighter minds than mine, though I prefer the apriori rationale.
Regardless, my claim is far narrower here
Could you clarify by expressing that as a formula?
Given target of $15, and a floor of $5:
X is how much employer pays
Subsidize (50-X)/5 dollars
Might be better to pick a lower or higher number to replace 50, and so get steeper/lesser increases before/at the roof of subsidized income
That sounds pretty exploitable. E.g. you and I employ each other for X=$0 and get $10 each from the government. At that point a UBI seems like a better solution.
you'd start with a floor ($5 for example), as you don't actually want to encourage labor that is worth $0.
Fraud is an issue yes, I don't think it's insurmountable. Fraud is always an issue when the government gives out money
I don't think it necessarily has to be fraud. It's just suddenly very attractive to pay one's spouse/friends/family $5 for things that one otherwise wouldn't have paid $5 for – and surely there is no law against employing someone because you want to help them out?
But I did coincidentally recently learn from an Italian acquaintance that in her country, subsidized employment is common, and that what happens is clear-cut fraud in that the employer pockets a substantial part of the subsidy and the employee ends up making below minimum wage.
Worst case scenario on the former, we've created a $10 UBI in some cases.
Still more attractive to have your friends work a job you or another employer would actually pay $5 for, but there would absolutely be some of this
The latter is an issue, your options are harsher controls, unions, or subsidizing more so enough goes to the employee (based on elasticity ratios or something).
I would think unions would stop that sort of thing
40 hours? or something like 10? 80?
Approved labor or does babysitting count?
Based on what you want to be normal in society. Probably more than 10, less than 80.
Same as what requires minimum wage currently, though I'm not sure
He could have run into a couple jerks. There are enough of them the in the world. It’s also possible he copped an arrogant attitude and security was responding in kind. I had a not so bright manager around 2000 who started getting sarcastic right out of the chute returning from Canada to the US and the encounter was less than pleasant.
I started reading that expecting some big tale of woe involving hours of detention, strip searches et cetera.
Instead it seems like the US border patrol asked a total of thirteen questions to ascertain what he was doing in Canada, briefly looked at the contents of his car, and then let him go.
This is in contrast to the Canadian border patrol, which only asked seven questions before letting him go. But then again, he was a lot more forthcoming with the Canadian agent, answering "I'm visiting TD Bank to sign some documents" to the first question whereas it took three questions from the US guy to get exactly the same answer -- why?
Maybe the border guards got bored and started a competition to see who could do their duty in the fewest questions. Canada's in the lead! Your turn, Americans!
Yeah, his horrific experience of totalitarian oppression even as a wealthy white cis het male boiled down to "border guards doing their job" because golly gosh, people do smuggle drugs and money across and back, and yeah "I don't live or work in Canada, I don't have a residence there, but I just went to open a Canadian bank account and deposit money" is in fact a suspicious activity, friend. If you don't want to sound like a money mule laundering drug money, then don't act like one.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-money-laundering-problem-trump-1.7450357
"The roughly 100 organized crime groups operating in Canada (including three groups dedicated to supplying fentanyl) are partly drawn to loopholes and lax penalties that allow fentanyl-related money-laundering operations to flourish, according to researchers.
"The discussion about fentanyl is closely tied in to money-laundering in two ways," says Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College and Queen's University and author of Dirty Money: Financial Crime in Canada.
..."As a result of the overproduction of fentanyl [in Canada], some of this spills over into the United States," said Leuprecht. He added that organized crime groups choose Canada because it puts them inside of what was, at least before the threat of tariffs, a free-trade zone. "That is not by accident. That is by design because it reduces your risk. It reduces your detection," he said.
...Canadian banks in particular are popular because they operate retail branches both in Canada and the U.S., making it easier for criminals to bank on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border using one institution and thereby reducing their chances of detection, according to Leuprecht.
A recent crisis at TD Bank, for example, saw the financial institution admitting that its lax anti-money laundering regime allowed fentanyl traffickers to launder $670 million through its American branches."
"What’s it going to be, fatass? You gonna arrest us for opening a checking account?"
If they had done, Mr. Smartass here wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Brave enough to make jeering remarks safely online, not so brave as to say it to the face of the guy with a gun. We can all be that kind of brave.
I agree, that was an incredibly disappointing anecdote.
Yea, actually those comments are all fair and had occurred to me by bedtime last night. I'm going to delete the original comment above.
All Debates Are Bravery Debates : https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/.
Ironically, "That thing you're talking about is bad but it almost never happens" is the standard anti/non-woke retort to most woke complaints. Sexism is bad but it "almost" never happens, Rape is bad but it "almost" never happens, and so on. It was traditionally the **Woke** position to argue that (1) $BAD_THING is nowhere as rare as we would like to believe (2) Even one instance of $BAD_THING is one too many (3) Why do you want to stifle debate about $BAD_THING anyway? Isn't that a bit suspicious? Say that Rape is rare, why don't we get to talk about it anyway?
I'm not calling you woke, but it's an interesting reversal (and one that woke apologists are all too willing to engage in) to be "Victim-Skeptic" against anti/non-wokes.
A similar reversal happened with micro-aggressions and lived experience. Traditionally, it was the woke who were in favour of employing these concepts, and the anti-woke who tended to dismiss them; now, it seems, unless you can provide statistical evidence that at least X number of people were fired specifically due to wokeness, any complaints you might have about living in a woke environment are groundless.
> they blew up excesses of wokeness out of all proportion to their frequency
It is quite difficult to guess the frequency, if the topic is a *taboo*. First it seems like it never happens... then one day it happens to *you*, and you suddenly update a lot in the opposite direction. (This is sometimes called a "red pill" moment.)
But tell me, is it really an epistemic mistake, as a policy, to update a lot when the supposedly rare thing happens to you? I mean, if the thing is very rare, then the probability that it happens to you should be very low, so the expected harm of updating too much is also low. I mean, suppose that something happens to one person in a million. When that happens, you may see 1 person screaming hysterically that it is everywhere around us, but still 999999 people who mostly don't buy it. That won't change the outcome of the elections. And if, let's say, 1% of the population gets "red-pilled" based on their personal experience, then the thing is actually *not* that rare... it happens to 1% of the population. (If being a target is correlated with having some traits, and you have those traits, then the risk to you personally is even higher.)
> 99% of the cases were just social disapproval with no material consequences on the speaker, compared to speakers facing deportation, imprisonment, or at least loss of federal funding and contracts like today.
Before Trump 2, it was not obvious to me that deportation and imprisonment were the thing that I was supposed to compare to. Losing federal funding and contracts seems comparable to getting fired, which happened to a few people.
And it was not just "if you say X, you can get fired", but sometimes "unless you write a convincing statement about your contribution to anti-X, you won't even get hired", which means that the number of people impacted was much greater than the number of people fired. (To compare, imagine a university that has 5 black students, fires all of them, and publicly makes a statement never to admit a black student again. The harm was done not only to the 5 students who were fired, but also to any who considered applying, but then they clearly saw that they had no chance. Reducing this to "only 5 students were fired, ever" would not describe the situation faithfully.)
> Wokeness never coerced people the way Trump is.
Yes. But again, before Trump 2, it was not obvious to me that "as bad as Trump 2" is the line where I am allowed to start complaining about something.
"Cancel culture was bad but 99% of the cases were just social disapproval with no material consequences on the speaker"
Do you really, actually believe this?
To put into perspective, the McCarthy witch hunts definitely affected a greater number of people in the entertainment world, the news media, and academia. Best estimates are that 10,000 to 12,000 people faced significant career damage (job loss, blacklisting, or being barred from their professionsn) during the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges.
While the highest estimates (even from conservative commentators) is that there were at most in the low hundreds of high-profile individuals who were publicly "canceled" or had their career opportunities curbed by the woke mobs. But the *documented* number who lost their jobs is less than a hundred.
Unlike McCarthyism, there was no formal blacklist or government role (despite what the rightwingnuts tell you). Many affected individuals eventually recovered or rebuilt their careers in the rightwing media complaining about wokeness.
And today, how many people have lost their jobs because something they said or did involved DEI? If we include the DOGE layoffs and canceled research grants, I think we're pushing at least 100,000 people who have been negatively affected economically by the Woke backlash.
How many people lost jobs or refused to apply because there were DEI-related statements they were required to submit in order to get or keep their position? How many got overlooked for promotions for the same? How many didn't go to college because college admissions overlooked their essays or other submissions because they did not reflect the ideology of the college?
I don't have answers to these questions, but it seems these numbers are going to be much higher than the verified numbers of people actively fired. "Being barred from their profession" seems to apply to most or all of these activities, which is honestly a pretty low bar for both woke and McCarthy.
Out of curiosity, who was documenting the people who lost jobs, and what was their criteria? I seem to recall that the Charlottesville rally had more than that, and the people who attended it were hounded and fired all over the country. I find it hard to believe that the number who lost jobs was lower than the number at Charlottesville, let alone multiple years of cancellations. I can definitely see it being hard to determine why people got fired and directly attribute the numbers to a specific cause - employers would be reluctant to provide that information at the least.
"How many people lost jobs or refused to apply because there were DEI-related statements they were required to submit in order to get or keep their position?"
Probably not many. Every single employer I've ever worked for has trivially required some level of either signing an agreement I wouldn't sign if it weren't required or speaking in ways that don't accurately reflect my beliefs as part of the conditions of employment.[1] Usually both. It tends to be utterly banal stuff like "don't say negative things about your employer while you're representing them." Even attending public school in the U.S. has often involved participating in patriotic rituals that (one imagines) many students don't hold with.
Nodding along with your employers next silly (but reasonably harmless) whim is a vital job skill almost everywhere as far as I can tell. In order for somebody to lose a job because of "DEI-related statements" specifically would require either them to be brand new to the working world and ignorant of this pattern (in which case they weren't going to get very far anyway) or to hold these *specific* statements as crossing some unacceptable line that doesn't apply to any of the other, similar bullshit that's existed for years and years. I'm sure long term exposure to the state-of-the-art petty conflict generation machine that is the internet makes if feel like the latter sort of person *must* be exceedingly common, but I doubt it's actually true.
[1] And that's not even getting into implicit social stuff like "don't say rude things to your coworkers even if you believe they deserve to hear them."
Maybe, but we're all just going to spitball numbers that sound correct to us. I think that's essentially the same source for the McCarthy numbers being compared - somebody doing some loose spitballing.
This would also vary considerably between the companies that don't really care but do it because that's what everyone else is doing (and then I would agree with you fully) and two other versions of the same. There could be the true believers that don't just want you to check a box, but publicly proclaim how much and in what ways you care about the subject. Then there's also the ones that measure how much you can regurgitate the appropriate shibboleths and you actually need to know the ins and outs of performatory language enough to fool true believers.
Can people still fake this to get or keep a job? Sure, but it gets a lot harder. We can imagine that a company that requires you to talk about how much you hate black people is going to have some people balk at that or fail to impress the hiring committee even if they're willing to lie for a job.
Well, we don't need to spitball the fact that roughly $1.1 billion in NIH grants have been canceled (per Reuters). Of them, 145 NIH grants dedicated to HIV research, amounting to nearly $450 million, were terminated (per the Guardian). And BTW, you may not care about HIV (because it's been mislabeled by the rightwingnuts as a "gay disease"), but there's nothing like an immunocompromising pathogen to turn humans into walking Gain of Function experiments for other pathogens.
And the NSF has identified over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion that have been cancelled. Although there were a dozen or so million dollars worth of grants that were canceled because they dealt with LGBTQ health issues (remember the transgenic/transgender mide?), the Chronicle of Higher Education identified that the DEI statements seemed to be the one variable was shared between all these grants that caused them to be cancelled.
Contracts between tenure-track STEM researchers and universities are for limited terms and often expire if there are no funds from grants coming in. Postdoc salaries are paid entirely from grants. Depending on the contract the institution has with the NIH or NSF between 30 and 50% of the grant goes towards salaries. So just spitballing it there's between $1 billion and $1.5 billion of salaries that have just been slashed. Researchers are losing their jobs because universities can't pick up the slack.
So, the anti-DEI witch hunt is obviously much more damaging to a greater number of people than anything the wokesters did.
+1. The number of people who chose to stay silent is impossible to measure with exactness, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. I personally knew many who kept their jobs, only because they didn't say anything beyond a few Green Grocer statements. The woke movement included a large number of people who could take the soapbox in public or in their organizations and companies, complain about injustice, command actual resources allocated to their complaints, and could declare opponents as heretics (and even today, now attempt to assert that they barely had any impact, despite their embrace by the entire Democratic Party for over a decade).
The McCarthyites were powerful too, in their non-social-media-saturated time. It's very possible that students of the McCarthyites learned the lesson of not sticking their heads up once a few examples had been made.
Well, if you can't measure it, it's just anecdata. I'd say the anti-woke backlash is much more destructive of people's livelihoods than anything wokesters caused. But feel free to complain that there's been a giant conspiracy against white males. No doubt it was George Soros's doing. But now the worm has turned, and the Whitehouse is pursuing MEI — Moron equity initiative — to ensure that the most unqualified white morons get posts in his administration.
I don't think there's a giant conspiracy against white males. I think there's a low-level distributed antagonism towards white males, reminiscent of low-level distributed antagonism towards lots of other groups of people throughout history. Reasonable people thought that sort of thing was bad enough to give it a name beginning with P, and don't think highly of people who think their particular target for low-level distributed antagonism is okay this time.
Jan 6 protestors, including some people who weren't even there.
Alex Jones, who was fined billions of dollars for being a dick.
Rudy Giuliani
There never were any right-leaning institutions with Federal funding, that's kinda the point.
Alex Jones - Extremely clear case of defamation. Also entered into default judgment because he repeatedly wouldn't comply with court orders.
Rudy Giuliani - Also extremely clear case of defamation.
Jan 6 - They broke into the capitol building!
Note that all of the right-wing pundits (Steven Crowder, Tucker Carlson, etc etc) who didn't blatantly break the law are still doing just fine.
Alex Jones was fined for repeatedly lying about people's dead kids and suggesting that it was all fake and they were all actors. People whose kids got murdered subsequently got harassed by people who thought this was true. This isn't just "being a dick", it's slander, and he ignored the incredibly predictable consequences of his repeated, broadcast lies, not mention how fucked up they were for people to hear about even if they didn't lead to harassment.
And that's not "a political view", it's just a bizarre lie. It might be a little right-coded but he was punished for doing something really brazenly illegal over and over again, to a group of people who had already suffered a terrible loss.
And lots of right-leaning institutions have received federal funding, they're called "religious groups". And abstinence-only sex education programs.
I agree it's a bizarre lie, but the media comes up with bizarre lies all the time. Can you reasonably argue that the damages here are larger tha any other libel case in US history? Millions I can imagine, but billions?
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/bigger-libel-payouts/
$1.4 billion dollars! The only one that comes close is a similarly Biden-era case against Fox News for $787 million. The third largest is a mere $177 million settlement between ABC and Beef Products Inc, and it seems plausible that the lie in this case really did cause $177 million worth of damage to the business in question.
Incomparable but interesting fact from that article, Lord Aldington was awarded £1.5 million (never paid) from Count Tolstoy (not that one, his grand^x-nephew) in 1989 for accusations of involvement in a war crime.
Alex Jones wasn't targeted for his political ideology. If he'd stuck to saying Obama or Biden was putting chemicals in our water, he'd probably still have his platform. As other people have pointed out, he accused people of making up the Sandy Hook shooting, deliberately called out all of the people who lost children as "crisis actors," for which many of them received death threats from his supporters and had to go into hiding.
I'm curious how A) you find a comparable "bizarre lie" from the mainstream media and B) how you even justify such a thing as ideological. Sure, the fact that children were shot was horribly inconvenient for the pro-gun lobby on the right, but the pushback against that "we still have a second amendment right" not "these people are making it up."
Again, if Alex Jones had just said "shame about what happened but I'll be damned if I let them take away our guns over it" he would not have been sued and would still have a platform.
Per Wikipedia:
- The final amount was $1.2 billion
- That was split between 15 victims
- $473 million of that was lawyer's fees
Also, Jones kept repeatedly making further claims DURING the trial, including that the suicide of one of his victims was actually a murder related to the Mueller investigation. And he repeatedly withheld evidence he was ordered to turn over. I bet if you count up the number of individual times he slandered/libeled somebody times the number of people he was lying about, or committed another crime related to this, it's in the tens of thousands.
Jones is a total sociopath who absolutely deserved what he got and was completely unable to be deterred by anything until he was ruined financially. He had so many opportunities to do better, and making him out to be some kind of martyr for the Right is, if anything, just extraordinary embarrassing to the Right.
None of them faced deportation, but Trump faced prison. Dozens of people working for Trump were imprisoned during his term. There weren't any right leaning institutions threatened with losing funding because leftists preferred to just threaten those 'right leaning' institutions into bending left. That is why you had Raytheon advertising pride month.
Trump's peeps went to prison for actual crimes. Not for advocating against Wokeness.
Various judges and juries were happy to acquit Biden and Hillary's people of various actual campaign finance crimes.
Hmmm. Biden was convicted of lying about his drug use when purchasing a handgun, and convicted of several felony charges for tax evasion. He had long ago made good on what he owed the IRS, and normally people don't go to prison if they pay up. As for purchasing a gun under false pretenses, I suspect half the gun owners in America haven't lied about their drug use.
As for Hillary, the special counsel declined to prosecute.
Now, tell me again how innocent people have gone to prison for being anti-woke?
> just social disapproval with no material consequences
Social disapproval is a material consequence. These social matters do not occur in a vacuum. Approval by those in power concerns matters of employment, commerce, political agency, etc. Is it any wonder, then, that people would seek to shift society to put themselves on top?
Where would you put practices like debanking on that list? Also, how do we determine what is correct when disfavored groups receive much worse punishments for similar crimes, compared to favored groups?
IDK, it seems to me that more people commit suicide over (perceived) (threat of) social ostracism than over being impoverished. Even in cases where somebody kills themselves after losing their job, the fear is more often "Everyone will think I'm a loser and I'll be a laughing stock to my friends and family" rather than "I'll have to make do with a smaller house and a cheaper car."
And why should anyone tolerate any of those?
Because insisting that other people not liking you is equivalent to being jailed is obviously insane, and would be much more coercive than cancel culture to enforce?
How is it relevant whether it's better or worse than anything else? I'm simply asking why the right should be expected to accept the status quo. Surely you would expect them to prefer not to be coerced at all, and actively work towards that goal?
If you are trying to work towards not being coercively punished for speech, then launching a massive government effort to coercively punish people for speech in even worse ways is not "working towards that goal."
A common way to decide whether someone should accept something is to compare it to other things that people are/aren't required to accept and then judge how similar the thing under consideration is.
If cancel culture is coercive and bad, and this is a strong reason to oppose cancel culture, then if you propose something even more coercive, that's good reason to believe it should be even more strongly opposed.
People should tolerate not being liked because there is no obligation for other people to like them: the only methods I can even think of for enforcing such a standard are so ludicrous that even if they weren't comically onerous they would be impractical anyway.
Like, what do you think is a reasonable response for someone on the right upon discovering that someone doesn't like them for their views that remedies this? What are you imagining here?
It’s fascinating that you think that. Do you know anyone who works in academia? Are you aware that the number of professors fired for expressing heterodox views over the past 10 years is higher than were fired for Communism during the McCarthy era?
It's worth noting that professors weren't the primary victims of the red scare; 3000 longshoremen were fired for example.
Overall, Wikipedia cites historian Ellen Schrecker for the claim that hundreds of people were imprisoned and on the order of 10000 lost their jobs.
So, one should probably account for that in comparing wokeness and McCarthyism.
Finally, even strictly comparing professors, you probably want to normalize for the number of academics in America; given the growth in the proportion of Americans who are college educated, I suspect the denominator is much bigger than it was during McCarthyism.
Not OP but I'm aware that a bunch of scientists and academics who grudgingly voted for Trump due to concerns about wokeness and deeply regretted it once Trump declared war on science.
I'm not sure he's declared war on science, just that science seems to be irrelevant.
I doubt Arrk will be convinced of anything, but for the benefit of anyone else reading along, here's the kind of thing we're talking about:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-happens-when-we-gut-federal
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science
If you read the articles, you discover Trump's objectives seem to be purging wokeness from academia. Clearly the purpose of a system is what it does, so the conclusion is, because of (not yet final) science funding withholding Trump must have declared war on science. :\
I object to your assumption that I cannot be convinced of anything, as I consider myself to be scientific-minded, and thus am swayed by evidence. But a scientific outlook also causes one to see how a proposed interpretation of something can be wrong, and then to determine which interpretation is the truth.
To be clear, I'm against cutting science funding, as it would be bad for the advancement of the country, and am especially against it the way it is being done in such a fast, heavy-handed, and apparently thoughtless way. My objection is simply to the "war on science" message, which sounds like the objective is to eliminate science.
He's significantly cut funding for a lot of important science research. And also tried to coerce universities by threatening to withhold research funding until they've made a sufficiently dramatic show of cracking down on wokeness.
That sounds like he's doing things of which you disapprove, but it hardly constitutes a "war on science". I would imagine such a war would include shuttering NASA, scrapping NSF funding, and maybe something like appointing non-science friends to posts like heading the FDA. And also some kind of edict like making it treason to collaborate with foreign scientists.
We, Trump _has_ proposed budget cuts on the order of 50% for a bunch of research areas ( _not_ limited to Woke ones). One research group head who has a channel that I enjoy made a plea, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABU06LDZpfY&pp=0gcJCX4JAYcqIYzv
so (very unusually for me) I wrote my Representative:
Dear Representative Timmons,
I am deeply grateful for many of the Trump Administration's initiatives, notably securing our borders against illegals, rolling back Woke, and ending DEI.
I am concerned, however, at the cuts being made in the science budgets of the Federal Government.
The United States has been a world leader in the sciences, earning 420 Nobel prizes, and I would like to see that continue.
One of the sharp cuts that is proposed is to NASA's science programs, cutting them by nearly 50%.
I'm particularly concerned by the two-thirds cut to heliophysics. That program can easily pay for itself if it even lengthens the warning time for a coronal mass ejection by as little as an hour. It could avoid many billions of dollars of damage when the next Carrington event occurs.
Yours truly,
-Jeffrey Soreff
> I would imagine such a war would include shuttering NASA, scrapping NSF funding, and maybe something like appointing non-science friends to posts like heading the FDA. And also some kind of edict like making it treason to collaborate with foreign scientists.
I don't know if you're joking or not, because he's **already done** most of those, and is hard at work on the rest.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/11/trump-climate-science-nasa-noaa-cuts
I’d like a citation for that one too. It’s possible I guess but seems improbable.
It’s true - see citation above. It’s very obvious to people who work in academia, or have friends or family who do.
I hope all the civil libertarians who found it intolerable to live under such a regime will be equally upset now that people are being kicked out of the country for criticizing Israel.
Adding my voice here as a fiercely anti-woke leftist (in the broadest sense) who holds Trumpism in the deepest pit of contempt I can summon.
I'm civil libertarian enough to be upset - to the extent I find the criticisms to be well-founded and not based on propaganda. If they're propaganda, well, that's still protected speech, but it's hard to sympathize when propaganda crowds out speech that isn't. If attention is scarce, I start to ask how it's being allocated, and whether speech from the pro-Israel side is getting the same protection.
(This is complicated from my perspective, which is someone who isn't Israeli, but knows a lot of them, plus a lot of American Jews, and have witnessed them getting lopsided treatment in the press (not in their favor) well before Oct 7. The picture I get post-Oct07, I know has to be incomplete, and I don't have a lot of experience assessing sources beyond simple rules like "any major newspaper in $Country is probably going to be pro-$Country". Reports like "Israelis bombed a hospital in Gaza" turn out to be false or burying the fact that terrorists set up a base there; reports that Netanyahu gets a lot of Israeli criticism seem more plausible. By consequence, I tend to treat assertions that the Israelis are committing genocide as unserious; assertions that the Israeli government is doing something terrible as more serious, but hard to check since it's often citing covert action.
So in general, can of worms, and since I'm not leading any projects over there, I treat it as none of my business and rarely voice any opinions about it.)
But you agree that even if people are just repeating propaganda, showing up in masks and dragging them into vans sets a bad precedent?
EDIT: to be clear, I don't actually have a dog in the Israel/Palastine fight. I criticized one person for saying that "Jews secretly run the government but make it a crime to say it" because that's Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit, but otherwise I don't claim to know enough about what's actually happening to make a strong judgement. BUT, I am very upset by people in the country I live in being kidnapped by the government for speech and then deported after what appear to be show-trials.
If.
That's the thing. I don't know. I'm on the other side of the planet when the dragging happens, and I wasn't following that person around before they got dragged, and I didn't have an opportunity to ask the draggers for their side of the story, and the only reason I even hear of this is because Someone told me, and if I don't know anything about Someone, FAIK Someone is a Shill for Some Side.
That tactic, of flooding the public square with fabrications and half-truths and then hiding behind the free speech principles of people who know better than to make those principles hard to defend, has been played enough times that I can't trust Someone anymore, unless I do the research that I would have done if I had time to interview the dragged and the draggers.
So, I withhold judgement. (And occasionally rant at anyone who insists I pick one or that I pick That One, Not That Other One. Even if it's about stuff they think is an open and shut case.)
There's plenty of evidence on this one. This isn't even a two sides thing where one side is giving a different version of events. TRUMP is saying that he wants colleges to report any non-citizens who protest against Israel directly to the federal government where they will be deported. He's saying he thinks he has that right.
Just to page in, yes I thought that was terrible and that the current happenings are terrible. I am baffled by people who don't share this very very obvious take.
Perhaps now that deportations for critics of Israel are happening, we can talk openly about who actually runs the government, rather than dully repeating the same propaganda from WWII ad nauseum.
Which propaganda is that?
The minority group that composes Israel is oppressed and does not run any government or industry outside of Israel and if you ever happen to insinuate that they do that is a very bad form of intolerance and you should therefore apologize publicly and if you do not you are probably a supporter of fascist Nazis and should lose your job ... that old chestnut.
Oh okay, so you're an antisemitic conspiracy theorist. Lot of those on this blog lately pretending to be rationalists. Maybe there always were, but they used to be a lot quieter about it.
https://lexfridman.com/greg-lukianoff-transcript/#chapter1_cancel_culture_freedom_of_speech
I want to give some context here. The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. It ended, by the way, in ’57 when it finally became clear, thanks to the First Amendment, that you couldn’t actually fire people for their ideologies. Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could. This guy is a very doctrinaire communist. “They can’t be just waited. I’m going to fire them.” They thought they actually could do that, and it was only ’57 when the law was established, so right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom, are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States and we’re still seeing these kind of numbers. During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on is I think this came out in ’55, and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being communists and about 90 something professors fired for political views overall that usually is reported as being about 100, so 60, 90, 100 depending on how you look at it.
I think the number is actually higher, but that’s only because of hindsight. What I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors who were fired as time reveals. We’re at 190 professors fired, and I still have to put up with people saying this isn’t even happening, and I’m like, “In the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired. In the 11 years of the Red Scare, probably somewhere around 100, or probably more.” The number’s going to keep going up, but unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I’m still dealing with people who are saying this isn’t happening at all, and it hasn’t been subtle on campus.
We know that’s a wild under count, by the way, because when we surveyed professors, 17% of them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or their research, and one-third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research. Extrapolating that out, that’s a huge number. The reason why you’re not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different conformity inducing mechanisms in the whole thing, and that’s one of the reasons why the idea that you’d add something, like requiring a DEI statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment, is so completely nuts. We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last, particularly since 2017, on campuses. We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with. Under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, “You know what the problem is? We have too much heterogeneous thought. We are not homogeneous enough. We need another political litmus test,” which is nuts.
Many Thanks!
Since a podcast is not a very good source, I tried to find the original source of these numbers, which seem to be this report by the FIRE organisation:
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire-attempts-sanction-scholars-2000-2022
Here's a reply; now you can just test the proposition yourself if you like.