Way back in another comment thread we were discussing, amongst other things, the NY mayoral election and who would win the Democratic primary. I said something in reply to someone else about possible skeletons in the closet for Mamdani.
I didn't seriously think there would be any, just that if motivated anyone can find something to hang you in past comments or actions.
Now it looks like maybe he may indeed have been a little bit naughty. Technically. Maybe:
Well, if Kamala can be both First Asian and First African-American Female, why not Mamdani as First Asian-African-American? He was born in Uganda, which technically does mean he has/had citizenship in an African country, and if he is now in America that would make him African-American, just like Elon Musk 😀
I expect this to be a storm in a teacup but it does go to show, there is *always* something that can be a scandal when it comes to politics!
I just got an email from the Social Security Administration shilling the "big beautiful bill". It's utterly surreal. I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime. This isn't a political mailing list. This is an official government agency using the emails that people sign up with to see their SS status in order to spam political messaging to the entire country (previously, the emails from the SSA were just the occasional "tips to not get scammed" and the like).
Former Alaska governor Frank Murkowski--father of the current U.S. senator--did something like this while he was in office. It was limited to State of Alaska employees rather than Alaskan residents more generally, but they would receive emails in their official state email accounts that were basically self-serving propaganda newsletters gushing about all the great things that Governor Murkowski was doing for the state. It was pretty gross.
Looking at the text of the email, I agree there is a bit too much editorializing, but notifying people that Social Security payments are no longer subject to federal income tax seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do. (Whether it's actually TRUE is a separate issue, but in principle, it's within the remit of the agency.)
Well you probably know it’s not technically true. It’s what was promised but what it shakes out as is people over 65 are given an additional $6,000 federal tax deduction.
Social Security payments still (as before) qualify at least in part as taxable income.
Scott addresses this in the Twighlight of the Edgelords post. Just read it now because when I first looked at it there appeared to be a lot of discussion of Reddit. You may be tired of me saying I only subscribe to the Electric Snowblower and Fishing subreddits but it’s true so I dropped out of that one early on.
Well that's not fair. He obviously didn't intend for things to end up like this. Though, I'm wondering how else he expected things to change the way he wanted them to... Did he actually expect a cultural revolution to be peaceful?
No kidding. This is what happens when a man born without the shame gene surrounded by toadies leads our country.
My high school Civics teacher would have pissed his pants if told this was in the country’s future.
A lot of previously apolitical public service type dot gov web sites now also read like tabloid style MAGA propaganda. They look like a Soviet era hard copy issue of Pravda.
This is scary as hell. It’s not going to be easy to come back from this corruption of values. For me this is much more alarming than a hypothetical AGI paper clip scenario.
Yes, the politicization of institutions that were previously neutral is indeed terrible, and hard to reverse. But it's not as new a phenomenon as you're suggesting.
Could you cite something comparable to everyone with an email address associated with an SSN getting nakedly partisan propaganda from an official government agency prior to 2025?
Sure, the FDA tweeting "You are not a horse" about ivermectin, knowing that it's approved for use in humans (by them!) and off-label prescriptions are perfectly standard practice.
That seems like nakedly partisan propaganda to you?
Comparable to everyone with an SSN getting this in their email inbox:
“The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.”
“By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned”?
They're both nakedly partisan propaganda. We *shouldn't* be in a place where off-label use of approved medications is a partisan political issue, but in 2020-2022 we absolutely were. And while the FDA might be excused for providing relevant, factual information, the bit about horses stopped being relevant when the FDA approved ivermectin for use in humans (in 1987).
Below I commented about the big new YIMBY win in California. Today I learned of two new state laws in Oregon, also backed by the state's Dem governor, which YIMBY activists are saying they will now use as models to introduce in more state legislatures.
HB2258 requires municipalities and counties to approve, for all parcels in zones designated for housing, any new construction that deploys a set of statewide pre-approved designs for apartments, single-unit dwellings, duplexes, townhomes, and other middle housing options. The new law also "creates land use and design standards for the plans, providing clarity and predictability for developers, cities, and counties". Developers and builders have to go through individual local approval processes only if they want to build a bespoke design.
(I wonder if that's also a way to discourage brutalism and other widely-unpopular architectural styles? Betcha the Oregon Architects Guild or whatever haaaates this.)
Then HB2138 bars all cities and counties from blocking development of various types of middle-density housing, e.g. duplexes or accessory dwelling units (a.k.a. "mother-in-law" apartments"), on any land where a single-family home can be built. It also bars cities from requiring traffic studies or forcing developers to pay for things like a new stoplight when they’re building or redeveloping a lot.
(That traffic studies thing is one I wish would be squashed in the state where I live, been an old-reliable in the NIMBY toolkit for many years.)
I see also that Oregon's governor (previously the longest-serving Speaker in the history of the Oregon House of Representatives) won the Dem gubenatorial primary in 2022 by a large margin, and in office has made the removal of red tape so as to get more housing built by the private sector her signature issue that she's going to try to get re-elected on. Never heard of Tina Kotek before and I know nothing else about Oregon politics, but will be rooting for her.
> (I wonder if that's also a way to discourage brutalism and other widely-unpopular architectural styles? Betcha the Oregon Architects Guild or whatever haaaates this.)
Where are these mythical "brutalist" apartments being built?!
Low-mid level commercial real estate *already* uses repetitive off-the-shelf designs everywhere just due to efficiency and due to building codes and regulations.
Anyway, this is really great news to hear. At least some things are going in the right direction!
On brutalist architecture. I think the Malcom Moos Tower qualifies. It’s on my alma mater’s campus. I’ve misplaced my Physical Plant issued ‘E1’ key that allowed me to elevator access its roof. Too bad for this evening, it’s a great place to watch fireworks on both sides of the Mississippi, Mpls *and* St Paul.
The Big Beautiful Bill would cap how much med students can borrow from the government. That could make med school unaffordable for many, especially those without family help. The goal seems to be lowering costs by reducing demand—but if fewer people can train to be doctors, what happens to the doctor shortage we’re already facing?
If it's at all like the ongoing shortage of sign language interpreters (my field), the shortage will get worse. Unlike interpreting programs, med schools have lots of rich alumni donors to keep them afloat though, so they probably won't close right away.
The Big Beautiful Bill would cap how much med students can borrow from the government—somewhere between $150k and $200k total. But med school usually costs over $250k. Extra loan amount would need to come from private loans.
According to Spleen's misplaced comment above, "The Big Beautiful Bill would cap how much med students can borrow from the government—somewhere between $150k and $200k total. But med school usually costs over $250k. Extra loan amount would need to come from private loans."
I wrote an essay, hopefully first of a series, on AI, media and epistemology. Please comment. I am interested in any feedback, as this is my first real foray into writing for the general public.
Can I share just how much I hate Zoom? For some reason, they've made it **completely impossible** to join Zoom calls from a Portal.
On *some* platforms, like Chrome on a Chromebook, opening a Zoom link will show a hidden "join from the browser" option. However, on the Portal, no matter what you do, there is NO option to join from the browser. It demands that you install the app instead. The problem is that there is also NO APP for the Portal either!
They've completely broken it. And while I normally wouldn't criticize people for not supporting an obscure platform like this, this isn't just a matter of their app not being available, which is understandable. What makes this really galling is that they clearly *do* have the ability to support browser calling and **Actively went out of their way to break things** for no reason. WTF?
It's the same pattern as any other software that is paid for one group but used by another. Optimize for the first group and make friendly looking gestures at the other. It's the same with jira and teams and zscaler.
I have to use zoom at work. I've been doing a sound check before every meeting for over two years now because zoom switches my input source randomly and sometimes it choose ones they don't work.
Despite years of remote work, we're still in the "I can't hear you, can you hear me" phase.
The thing is that other video conference apps don't do this. Google Meet works just fine in the browser. In fact, not only can you join Meet calls in the browser, it has a full-blown browser UI with the ability to create meetings, etc. as well.
Big YIMBY win in California which also sharply improves my personal view of Gavin Newsome. (From a very-low baseline but, still.)
They've just shredded a sizeable chunk of CEQA, the state-level version of NEPA which is if anything even more notorious for making stuff impossible to build. The legislation was sponsored by Democrats in both houses of the state legislature, with Newsome's strong public encouragement and then he signed it the moment they got it passed.
The new state law:
-- exempts most urban housing construction from CEQA.
-- exempts most urban housing construction from requirements to pay union-level wages for construction workers.
-- waives environmental restrictions for some residential rezoning changes.
-- designates a range of nonresidential projects (health clinics, child-care facilities, advanced manufacturing facilities, food banks, others) as also no longer subject to CEQA.
Note that "urban" here means not just LA/Oakland/etc but includes California's many small/medium sized cities.
All of those changes happening in _California_, backed by California _Democrats_. Have to say I did not see that coming....the YIMBY-advocacy groups are over the moon online right now.
Reducing the number of Herculean labors required to get a final building permit from twelve to maybe eight, is commendable in principle but unlikely to make a huge difference in practice. California has a *lot* of veto points for new construction, and a lot of people who really want to exercise that veto (or at least negotiate a nice juicy payout in order to not veto the project).
“My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” <- Murkowski, on the bill that she just cast the deciding vote to push through.
I know Republicans always fall in line, but it's still strange to see people criticizing a bill that they just voted for.
Last I checked, the Big Beautiful Bill had some huge goodies for Alaska in it, so if she voted against it would be political suicide. One of the biggest goodies I have not seen reported on at all in the national press, though local Alaska outlets have it. Not only are they going to open up the ANWAR to oil and gas extraction (something Alaskans have been wanting for years) but the tax revenue split from those new leases (as well as several others outside of ANWAR) is going to be 70% to the state government and 30% to the feds. Normally it's 50:50. Keep in mind, the state of Alaska's budget is essentially entirely funded by oil and gas taxes. They don't have an income tax or a sales tax, and taxes on everything that isn't fossil fuels is a rounding error. So getting a 70:30 split and keeping the pipeline full and flowing is something an Alaskan Senator can't realistically turn down. Plus she twisted the screws to get a bunch of last minute pork as well.
Murkowski is an extremely popular politician in Alaska for a reason: she delivers.
I don't know the state by state breakdown, but the Fox poll showed the bill at 38-59, i.e. 21 points underwater among the general population. It hardly seems like "political suicide" to oppose that unless you're talking specifically about the Republican primaries, and Murkowski has *already* won on a write-in line after losing the primary before.
You recognize that there's a process, and you maximize sanity by playing along and nudging something with a lot of weight and also a lot of momentum and pressure behind it in the direction you'd prefer it went.
Do you, or anyone else, have a good data set that supports this claim? From the cheap seats, the only time I hear about Murkowski is where she spends a lot of time wringing her hands before falling in line with Trump (and, previously, McConnell.) I understand, in the abstract, the claim that you are making, but it seems that she is just bluffing each time and her bluff is called without any concessions. As far as I can tell, the same is true for Susan Collins, too.
She got some small Alaska specific provisions. They were going to exempt Alaska from the new Medicaid hoops through a carve out for ‘non contiguous states’ but the Senate parliamentarian said they could not pass the bill through reconciliation with that added.
She got some big wins for Alaska in the bill, the most notable of which is a 70:30 tax revenue split between the state and the feds for all the new oil and gas leases the bill is going to open up in Alaska. Normally it's a 50:50 split, and the Alaska government runs off of oil money, so that's a big deal.
I wouldn't know, I'm not super into politics. But just saying out loud 'this is fiscally insane' creates bounds on just how insane things can get. It creates a permission structure for marginal house members to speak up, etc.
I think she also has some credibility with the other side.
But I'm just saying random words, not contributing anything new to the conversation
I know that the range of possible salt deductions and other stuff in this bill were quite large and it's a big coalitional negotiation with a lot of tension. It just wouldn't make sense for me if her replacement with a typical Republican wouldn't have made it worse
>t just wouldn't make sense for me if her replacement with a typical Republican wouldn't have made it worse
Case in point: the other Alaska senator, Dan Sullivan, is the quintessential "typical Republican", so if you want to model what it would be like if Murkowski was replaced just imagine Dan twice.
Here's what Dan had to say about the BBB passing: "This transformative legislation includes numerous provisions to unleash Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential, deliver tax relief for hard-working families and small businesses, make the largest investment for the U.S. Coast Guard in history, secure the southern border and halt the flow of deadly fentanyl, continue the build-up of Alaska-based military, upgrade Alaska’s aviation safety, strengthen Alaska’s health care and nutrition programs, protect Alaska’s most vulnerable communities, and achieve historic savings for future generations."
“But, let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.”
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a joke or something, but it was Pelosi who said that, not Boehner. And that wasn't a criticism of the bill, she was arguing that ordinary people would see through the scare mongering and learn how it actually worked once they saw it first hand (which is in fact what actually happened, albeit with a delay of several years - witness how popular ACA got once Republicans started trying to kill it.)
That may be so, but you'd imagine someone with as much experience as Pelosi would know to avoid saying the likes of "This is a lovely poke, a big beautiful poke! And it's got an amazing pig inside, trust me! You're gonna love this pig after you buy this poke!"
She's not the only politician to say that. Republicans were hoping that passing the TCJA in 2017 would make them popular once voters saw the effects firsthand.
I am puzzled by the reports of killings at Gaza aid hubs. Several people on this ACX forum are quite knowledgeable about the conflict. Could you enlighten me, or refer to credible sources?
Here is the puzzle. The UN reports that “At least 400 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to fetch from controversial new aid hubs in Gaza”. (Link: Gaza: Over 400 Palestinians killed around private aid hubs, UN rights office says | UN News June 24 )
This behavior by the Israelis is puzzling. Since it is in Israel’s interest to get Gaza people to use the aid hubs – not to scare people away. Shooting at them when they approach the aid stations is likely to scare them away. So why do the Israelis shoot at them? What am I missing?
…for the record, it would make sense for Hamas to kill people who approach the aid stations. Since the aid hubs are meant to undercut Hamas’ control of aid supplies, which is a major factor in generating an income stream for Hamas, as well as power over the Gaza population.
Related to this, I notice that at least five such aid workers have been killed, probably by Hamas (if the UN report is correct). But five people are far less that “400 and more”.
Let me go out on a limb and sketch the puzzle in more detail:
Hamas has an interest in scaring Gazans away from the aid stations. Killing 400 or more Gazans queuing up for aid might thus in principle be rational. But only if it can be hidden from the Gazans themselves, and the world community, that the killings are really done by Hamas. And since this will be very difficult to hide, it is unlikely that it is worth the risk, from Hamas’ perspective. Not least because the Israelis would have a strong incentive to investigate and make known that it is really Hamas, not then Israelis, that do the killing. Which the Israelis have not claimed. Conclusion: It is unlikely that Hamas is doing the killings.
…but what on earth can be in it for the Israelis? Since the killings undermine their efforts to make the aid hubs work.
Wild speculation: Israel has released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a few Israeli hostages. I would assume Israel has some capability to trace the released prisoners after the enter Gaza (assuming that they mainly are relocated to Gaza). If so, the Israelis do perhaps pick them off now that they are in the open and thus legitimate targets. But this hypothesis does not rhyme with killing people at the aid hubs primarily. Unless there are a lot of Hamas warriors at the aid hubs, trying to prevent Gazans from accessing the hubs - and the Israelis are targeting these warriors (and killing some women , children and old folks in the process, but only as collateral damage).
…but even so, the killing of Hamas warriors (including former prisoners) particularly at the aid hubs does not make much sense, from an Israeli point of view. It would make more sense to kill Hamas warriors everywhere else in Gaza than at the aid hubs. Thus I cannot quite see how these killings are rational, if indeed the Israelis are behind them.
…underlying all of this is an assumption that both Hamas and the Israelis are rational and capable people who can do risk calculations, and therefore do not make grave mistakes before they act. So what is going on? Who is killing whom, and why? I would be grateful for responses by those who are more in the know than I am.
The actual answer is that the way they set up the aid distribution is incredibly stupid and worthless and is not a serious strategy for delivering aid at this scale and with the level of starvation involved. Certainly Hamas is not helping but that is not the major issue. The US contractors involved with weapons actually seem to be more of an issue than the IDF soldiers as far as shooting people as well. Realistically the US guys are purely profit driven amoral mercs who know full well that there are no consequences for anything they do so they engage in zero consideration of Palestinians struggling to navigate an incredibly poorly designed aid distribution system while starving and living in terror of military strikes for the last several years. This isn't a comment on whether the Palestinians deserved it or are to blame for their situation or w/e, just on the practicalities of "organizing" large numbers of people who exist in that type of environment.
My internal explanation is that IDF highly prioritizes Israeli lives over Palestinian lives. Something on the scale of 1:1000, but even 1:100 explains their behavior. Let's say an orderly queue of Palestinians is 100% safe for the soldiers handing out aid and a disorderly crowd of Palestinians pushing forward to demand their rations is 90% safe and results in the deaths of 2 Israelis in 10% of the cases, then shooting into the crowd and killing less than 20 Palestinians every time a disorderly crowd is formed is rational.
This is not the best equation for policing civilians, but the IDF soldiers are not policemen and they have learned and practiced a very limited array of problem-solving techniques. And even policemen are often bad at de-escalation and crowd control, like the USA regularly demonstrate.
I generally agree, because it would be a retarded strategy, that the Israelis are not trying to kill civilians at aid stations. If it's happening, that leaves accidents/chaos at the stations as a cause, or militants on the other side instigating violence, as mentioned by others.
However, I'll add one more possibility that I saw asserted in Israeili media: none of these aid station killings actually happened, and were either casualties from elsewhere or fabricated outright by Hamas.
Thanks for your comment Melvin, but see NonRandomWalk below (and his link to an interesting podcast), plus my comment to his comment - my hunch this is a more fruitful way to look at the puzzle. It boils down to lack of sufficient foresight on behalf of the higher-ups in the Israeli chain of command.
The usual answer to "why is X killing so many civilians in this war?", is that Y is very thoroughly intermingled with those civilians while actively waging war on X. The allies killed about as many French civilians in Normandy as the Israelis did Palestinian civilians in the first three months of the Gaza war. Not as a matter of policy on either side; the Germans just found it convenient to use a lot of French urban infrastructure for their local military logistics, and they also found it convenient to just let the French mostly keep living and working where they had been. And all that military logistics really had to go.
This is greatly aggravated when one side doesn't bother with uniforms, and battle-weary paranoid soldiers on the other have to look at any young man carrying any sort of parcel or package and wonder whether that's a gun or a bomb. The Nazis, for all their many, many faults, did fight in uniform.
See my reply to NoRandomWalk for (indirect) comment to your comment.
...let me just add, in addition to what I say there, that it would be insane for Hamas to wear uniforms in the present stage & context in their armed fight against the Israeli forces. I understand you do not like Hamas, but you must grant also your opponents rational agency.
I'll abstain from commenting on the Nazi comparison. Let's try to avoid "Goodwin's Law" a little longer:-)
We're talking about people who are looking for a Final Solution to the problem of eight million Jews living in what they see as their proper Lebensraum; Godwin has long since left the building.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "granting my opponents rational agency". Obviously the hiding-among-civilians thing is something that Hamas has chosen to do, and obviously they had reasons for doing so. Have I done anything to suggest otherwise?
But with agency comes responsibility. Decisions have costs, and actions have consequences. The very predictable consequence of deciding to hide among civilians while waging war against a vastly superior power is that A: you're gonna die and B: some of those civilians are going to die with you and C: they wouldn't have died if you'd made a different decision so probably it's a good thing that you're going to die before you can make too many more decisions.
As for the alleged *sanity* of Hamas's decision, it's right up there with the "sanity" of the Nazi's decision to round up a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys, give them Volkssturmgewehrs and a few Panzerfausts, and send them up against Zhukov's tanks and artillery. Yes, if you're one of the top-level leaders, and you don't care about anything but your own sorry existence, then this strategy may postpone for a few months the transition from "my life is one of hiding in a bunker hoping I won't suddenly die" to "my life is one of sitting in a POW camp hoping maybe they'll eventually let me out".
But I'm going to suggest that the actually sane decision, for both Nazis and Hamas, and top leadership down to rank and file. is to surrender ASAP. Because the longer you put that off, and the more war crimes you commit in the meantime, the more you'll look like you should never be let out of that prison camp.
John, you are veering into the territory of moral consequences of actions.
That is opening up an interesting but also very difficult can of worms. A can of worms that at the deepest level concerns if morals have an “objective” foundation, or are ultimately a matter of taste; and on a less deep level, moral-pragmatic considerations like: How it appears to third parties/interested audiences (aka the world community) if your actions are presented in a way that is perceived by them as not morally justified. And related: If a separate part of a war-game/political game is the rhetorical game concerning who among players can most convincingly paint their opponents as occupying, or not occupying, the moral high ground.
For those of us who do not actively partake in the conflict (I’m guessing that is both of us) it is only this rhetorical part of the war game/political game we can play.
…but in this ACX context, I prefer not to play that game. That is, I want to limit myself to analyse it. Including, as I do now, to point out that we are players in the game – rather than observers of it – if we partake in this “who has morals on their side” discussion.
Ok, some would say that to adopt such an analytical stance to what is going on in Gaza is really also a moral position – that there is no escape from being a player in the “morality game”! Since “neutrality” is also a value, i.e. a moral stance. There is something to be said for this position. If so, we are back in the deepest part of moral philosophy again.
But for what it is worth, I’m trying to put a parenthesis around the “who is moral” question in this context & at ACX; including the “what are morally justifiable consequences of one’s actions” question.
I do this also for pragmatic reasons. Since I believe that if you engage yourself morally, then you also engage yourself emotionally, and once you engage yourself emotionally, there is a risk that you do not think clearly any more concerning the likely moves and counter-moves the actors are likely to do next. Thus your ability to foresee what may happen next is weakened. I am speaking from personal experience here: Once I allow my emotions to enter my analysis of a situation, I can almost feel my IQ going down.
Only this: If Hamas choose to wear uniforms in the present situation in their war with the Israeli forces, they will die significantly faster, and in larger numbers, than if they blend in with the civilian crowd. Which is the obvious – and very rational - reason why they do not wear uniforms.
"in this ACX context, I prefer not to play that game [ of discussing "moral consequences to actions" ]."
"let me just add, in addition to what I say there, that it would be insane for Hamas to wear uniforms in the present stage & context in their armed fight against the Israeli forces. I understand you do not like Hamas, but you must grant also your opponents rational agency."
There is one side in this conflict which has lebensraum as an openly declared war aim, a history of seizing it in prior wars, and is actively engaged in ethnic cleansing in pursuit of such. That side is not Hamas.
And yet after almost two years of total war, the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip is still north of two million, and I think not even down 10% from the prewar value. If "ethnic cleansing" were the goal, Israel really sucks at it.
This is a terrible argument and I wish people would stop repeating it. The *fundamental goal* of ethnic cleansing is almost never killing people for the sake of killing people. Not even for the Nazis was that the goal: hence why the first established ghettos and looked into mass deportation and only later started in with the mass-murder. Murder often proves to be a more convenient way to get to the actual goal than forced movement or perpetual imprisonment.
The goal, of course, is simply "not having to deal with Those People." You've decided that there's an ethnic group--one that lives in close proximity or intermingled with yours--that your group has decided it simply Cannot Tolerate. So you want them out of your life. That's the goal. Not having to deal with them. It would be nice if they just left on their own: but of course people usually won't do that, and often have nowhere to go even if they wanted to. Well, too bad, so sad, but your group has lots of ways to (try to) force the issue. It can impose high costs for staying put: unfair laws, harassment campaigns, organized destruction of property. You can simply move them outside your territory by force and keep them out by more force. Or you can concentrate and imprison them in ghettos, reservations, camps, or whatever. But of course all those things are difficult, costly and leave Those People lots of ways to cause you trouble. Murder someone is usually much cheaper, and completely final. So it happens pretty often that *eventually* that other measures give way to murder. Not always: the United States, for example, had enough remote, empty land that long-term, (and relatively lightly-enforced) imprisonment for Native American peoples never did give way to wholesale mass-murder[1].
It's pretty clear that both Hamas and Israel's governing party[2] *want* to engage in ethnic cleansing. Neither of them wants to have to live around That Other Group. Neither of them believes that peaceful coexistence is possible or desirable. The most salient difference is not that one group is inherently genocidal and the other group is inherently peaceful or any such load of hogwash. The difference is power. They both *want* to engage in ethnic cleansing. Israel has the power to actually do it *and has been doing so.* That is literally what Gaza strip (in its modern incarnation) *is.* It's the most prominent result of a decades-long, as-yet-incomplete process of ethnic cleansing: the same sort of thing as an Indian reservation in the 19th century U.S., but substantially hampered by the fact that Israel is small and crowded where the early U.S. was huge and empty. It's better than a windowless cell or a concentration camp (or it was before the war), but it's primary purpose is *keeping Palestinians away from Israelis.* Which is why October 7 brought such an enormously violent, protracted response: the promise that Gaza represented, the promise of being able to wall off those people, ignore their suffering and just never, ever have to deal with them again turned out to be a lie. Oops, they're still there and they can at least very occasionally manage to make the problems you've inflicted on them your problems too.
I can't see the future and can't tell you whether Israel will escalate from its current level of mass murder to a level high enough to crater Gaza's population. But I can see the past and notice that the argument "they're clearly not trying to do ethnic cleansing because they've only killed tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands or millions" is crap from beginning to end. The number of currently living Gazans isn't really an important data point from the frame of ethnic cleansing: it's all about where they are, and how well you can control them.
[1] Though of course there was no shortage or murder in both directions during the roughly century-long period where the issue was being decided.
[2] With a decent share of popular support on both sides.
> I think not even down 10% from the prewar value. If "ethnic cleansing" were the goal, Israel really sucks at it.
FWIW, I don't think most Israelis explicitly want to wipe out the Gazans either, but this isn't an especially strong argument, since even the Nazis didn't really get serious about killing all the Jews until near the end of the war.
I start a war with you, lose, and then have my soldiers hide among the civilian population rather than surrender. At that point, even if the other side is not especially careful about civilian casualties, it seems like I'm the one primarily responsible for civilian casualties.
Are you sure? Let's say your brother breaks into my house, stabs my wife, steals my TV, then flees back across the street to your house and hides there.
Assuming your family starts taking casualties from me shooting at him into your house, I think most people would view culpability on a sliding scale. If I'm super-careful but members of your family get hurt anyway that's one set of facts, but the more "not especially careful" I am about collateral damage, the more I'd expect people to tip the balance of who they blame away from your brother and towards me.
I think the moral intuitions we have for living in civilization with laws and courts are not very useful for thinking about wars between nations, or between nations and terrorist groups or gangsters or whatever.
Further, I think there is something fundamentally broken about this reasoning that says:
a. Hamas carries out a godawful attack on Israel, including murdering a bunch of civilians and kidnapping a bunch of civilians to use as hostages.
b. Hamas hides among civilians in Gaza so that killing them requires killing a lot of civilians.
c. Thus, Israel is morally obliged to stop trying so hard to kill Hamas members, since that would kill too many civilians.
Why isn't Hamas at least obliged to work as hard to prevent civilian casualties as Israel is?
This seems like some kind of superweapon, where I can do any terrible thing and then take a baby hostage and you're obliged to let me get away with it lest the baby get killed.
"Further, I think there is something fundamentally broken about this reasoning that says:"
There is also something fundamentally broken about any analysis that only starts assigning moral culpability beginning on October 7, 2023. "Hamas started the war" is very strictly true if be "the war" you mean the currently, extremely heated phase of the conflict that's been going on for the past not-quite-two-years. But the conflict extends back much further, and there were a great many things happening *before* October 7 that carry moral weight.
tl;dr: there's a lot of incompetence, and soldiers who aren't trained and haven't been explained to that this going well is important for the war effort, who get rotated in from a 'everything that moves is hamas' to having to do crowd control in a situation where no one has bothered to set up clear signs for where it's safe to be, or not, and meanwhile hamas is very clearly trying to figure out how to infiltrate the aid distribution sites and infrequently succeeding
now that all the competent people who've been focused on iran for the last two months are less busy, and this has become a domestic issue, hopefully these horrible situations become less frequent
or we might get a deal in a week and the war is over, hamas stays in power, gaza is indefinitely blockaded behind a big buffer zone. who knows at this point.
I suppose I'm a bit surprised that you wouldn't give a bunch of people rubber bullets and water jets for first line crowd control. Obviously you need people with real weapons in case there is an attack, but it seems plausible to give Private Joe the crowd control weapons and then tell Private Jake with the semi automatic to hold his fire until things look dicy. Perhaps that's incompatible with the realities on the ground.
If the angry guy in the crowd is a suicide bomber, or even if he's "just" hiding an AK-47 that he's planning to magdump in your direction as soon as he's fifteen paces out, then rubber bullets probably aren't going to cut it and you aren't going to have time to bring the second line into play before it's too late.
You're thinking "crowd control, and maybe there will be a really violent riot", when the reality is "crowd control, but also a no-shit shooting war with automatic weapons and high explosives on both sides".
Thanks for the useful link to Haviv's podcast (I did not know about this guy, well worth listening to) and your comment summing up the gist of his laying-out of the situation (in particular from 19:30).
Your point that "all the competent people" - who must understand how important it is that the aid hubs are a success - have had heir minds elsewhere (in Iran) is a good point.
These higher-up people are the ones whose job it is to make sure the "institutional setting" of the many aid hubs is professionally done. With sufficient and well-marked go versus no-go zones; queuing infrastructure; and all the other seemingly "mundane" administrative-technological set-ups that are vital for orderly, safe and efficient aid distribution - and in a situation where they must know that Hamas has every incentive to distort and (ideally) to eliminate the aid distribution efforts. Since control of resources to the population in Gaza is a life-or-death issue to them.
...Not anticipating that your opponent is also a rational and competent actor, and not to set aside sufficient economic and administrative resources already from the start to counter whatever Hamas might come up with to distort aid distribution, is negligence bordering on irrationality. Don't the higher-ups in Israel think more than one move ahead in their game with Hamas? Then again, as you say, rationality on behalf of the higher-ups in Israel might be "saved" by they having had more urgent things (Iran) on their minds lately.
It will be interesting to see if they can get their act together now. The outcome of the conflict in Gaza might depend upon it.
I don't have any special knowledge but I think that the simplest explanation - that it's really hard to organise the delivery of aid to desperate and starving people while the dominant local violent faction (Hamas) is actively trying to prevent you from doing it. Even with the best intentions there would be chaos and people rushing at aid convoys.
Thanks for you comment Alex. I believe this is a fruitful way to look at it, but it begs the question of why the higher-ups in the Israeli chain of command did not anticipate this and allocated sufficient resorces to make the aid hub infrastructiure safer and more orderly.( See the comment by NoRandomWalk and my comment to his comment for elaborations.)
Who says they didn't? Delivering aid to civilians in a warzone when the enemy is actively trying to stop you is one of the hardest tasks in warfare. They could have anticipated it, took precautions, and still have failures.
I largely agree with NoRandomWalk's comment and I don't think it contradicts what I wrote.
Also you should consider the initiatives. For pretty much everyone on the Israeli side, starting from the soldier on the ground and ending with top military brass and Netanyahu himself, the consequences of Israeli casualties are much more dire than the consequences of Palestinian casualties. In the first case you lose you friends/don't get promoted/can lose elections. Of course you could argue that these scenes hurt the image of Israel globally but people choose short-term gain all the time.
(I'm simplifying obvs, there is an investigation going on about the deaths and hopefully conclusions will be made)
I would too but we're not going to get any such responses. We will instead get stuff like what Jollies just replied with, and/or the equally-foaming "UN staff is making up those death numbers because reasons reasons Holocaust" type stuff. Sucks.
...if you look at the sum total of replies, they rather suggest that it is still possible to get interesting information & exchange of views here at ACX:-) Not many open discussion fora's like this left. (Not that I am aware of, at least.)
I wasn't with that particular comment thinking just about ACX, though I see now that my phrasing made it seem so.
To your broader point, it's true that I think ACX's signal-to-noise ratio has degraded pretty sharply during the past year or two. But since that's a decline from a pretty positive starting point I also still agree that there aren't many open-discussion forums like this one.
Not very knowledgeable, but I imagine this isn't 4D chess by anyone, it's just stupid mistakes. I can imagine Israel wanting security in the aid hubs so Hamas doesn't take over. But then 1,000 civilians swarm the aid hub afraid that laggers won't have food left. Someone panics, a shot is fired, everyone panics. Stampede/whatever, more shots, lots of casualties.
Thanks for you comment. I believe "mistakes" are a factor, but it begs the question of why the higher-ups in the Israeli chain of command did not anticipate such mistakes and allocate sufficient resorces to make the aid hub infrastructure safer and less prone for such mistakes to happen. (See the comment by NoRandomWalk and my comment to his comment for elaborations.)
It's not that complicated. Israel was facing too much blowback for openly starving Gazan civilians so they set up aid distribution. They are making life for Gazans as hellish as possible so that they submit to ethnic cleansing from the region and/or some outside authority intervenes to set up a forced relocation plan. Killing people at the distribution sites deters the population from actually receiving aid and allows Israel to inflict violence under a slightly more believable pretext.
Some welcome news in the fight for more affordable housing: California is narrowing the scope of CEQA, the law that requires lengthy environmental reviews of many building projects.
One of the constant complaints we hear from US doctors is that dealing with medical insurers is a huge pain, just an endless bureaucratic death-march. But is that really a US-specific problems? All systems except for absolute user-pay have some sort of authority that determines what is covered, for whom, and for how much. Don't the same problems arise in dealing with these intermediaries, regardless of how they are organized?
Other systems may have similar problems somewhere, but fewer touchpoints where they can cause issues.
In the Australian public system, for instance, suppose I go to hospital. I will be treated by doctors and nurses employed by the hospital, who will make decisions on what hospital resources will be used for my treatment. The entity that makes decisions on what treatment I get is the same entity that is paying for it; nobody has any meaningful incentive to give me too much or too little medical treatment since everyone involved gets paid the same regardless... the hospital doesn't gain by not treating me, but it does need to allocate its resources. It's not perfect but it abstracts away a bunch of problems that would exist if the people paying for the care and the people providing the care are two adversarial entities with different incentives.
We have private health insurance for some things as well but it tends to be a bit simpler. For instance if I have a certain procedure then my insurance company openly says they're willing to pay up to (say) $25K for that procedure. Most insurance companies are basically aligned on how much they're willing to pay, and most surgeons agree that they'll either charge that amount, or perhaps a little bit more if they have a reputation as one of the surgeons that people will pay out-of-pocket for.
I'm sure there's still rough edges where arguments happen.
A side comment which doesn't answer your actual question....the doctors I know (US) don't complain about that any more than local business owners complain about city permits red tape or whatever. My father-in-law, recently retired from 20 years running his own endochrinologist practice of several physicians, is one example of several.
They do complain about it, to be clear, but not above an American-baseline level of bitching about the headaches of modern life. Ours is a deeply whiny society.
I have several doctors in my extended family, and this is not among the complaints I have heard.
The main complaint is how little they get for some procedures.
This is in Austria, for reference. With a unified insurance system, it's very clear what is covered, for how much, and for whom. As I understand it, the patient presents their insurance card when visiting the doctor, the doctor ticks a few checkboxes on an electronic form, and it's done.
Here's a brief pathogen update, but from a pathogen perspective, things are pretty boring right now.
1. The expected summer COVID-19 wave hasn't started yet. In the past two weeks, the variants that were competitive enough to possibly cause a wave, NB.1.8.1 and XFG, took a frequency nose-dive. There's really no variant on the horizon that could spawn a wave in the US at the moment. I'll check the data in another couple of weeks, but I'm starting to wonder if there'll be a summer COVID wave this year (in the US at least). Nota Bene: NB.1.8.1 is currently causing a slight increase in cases in Australia. And NB.1.8.1 caused a big wave in Hong Kong. Our XEC wave earlier this year may have provided us with enough herd immunity to ward off Nimbus and Stratus (the nicknames for NB.1.8.1 and XFG). It seems like SARS2 is reduced to causing localized outbreaks for now—and maybe forever.
2. The US measles outbreak has lost steam. Cases are still trickling in, but unless the pathogen finds a new group of Mennonites or antivaxxers to infect, I think the outbreak is mostly over in the US. This year's outbreak resulted in 1,227 cases, 128 hospitalizations, and 3 deaths. I think it's mostly over in the US for now, except for the people who will have to deal with the long-term aftereffects of the virus (and of course, the tears for the dead). I haven't checked the numbers south of the border, but the measles outbreak is still going strong in Canada. Alberta the hardest hit right now, with >100 new cases in epi week 25. Ontario reported only 30 new cases that week, suggesting that the outbreak has shifted to Alberta. Canada is up to 3526 cases. No deaths, though.
3. A(H5) bird flu is on the wane. Only two new dairy herds infected in the past 30 days, and 3 poulty flocks were infected in the last 30 days. H5N1 is a seasonal influenza, and wild birds seem to be its primary vector, so we should expect its return this coming winter. In the meantime, the price of eggs doesn't seem to have fallen. saw a dozen cage-free eggs for $13 at my local supermarket. The other brands were still in the $10 range. I suppose it takes time to replace the millions of egg-laying hens that were slaughtered, but I can't say I understand the economics of chicken farming.
It seems like more of a right-wing than a left-wing sort of idea. Is it just the fact that the Democrats have quietly stolen and Democat-coded the word for now and Republicans are loath to start using it on their own side?
"It seems like more of a right-wing than a left-wing sort of idea. "
I think you have a very narrowly restricted idea of what counts as left-wing. Possibly this is conditioned by the last 10-15 years of American politics which have been uniquely and impressively stupid on both sides of the aisle.
Edit: nevermind, assuming it's the same thing as Supply-Side Progressivism as defined by Wikipedia, that is a pretty right wing idea. A leftist implementation focused on abundance of essential goods and services would look extremely different.
That is not even vaguely its purposes, LOL. You are just demonstrating that you haven't read the book.
To answer Melvin's question, "Abundance" (which I have read) is a firmly pro-government argument. It does not propose or support blanket deregulation in anything like a Ronald Reagan rhetorical mode or a Jimmy Carter actual-deregulator mode.
Far from it, the "Abundance" argument is that stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulation is (a) preventing the public sector from successfully delivering progressive policy outcomes on the ground, and therefore (b) helping entire generations of less-politically-engaged and non-wealthy Americans conclude that progressivism is an inherently ineffective approach to practical government benefitting the quality of life of non-wealthy people.
To answer the question posed, Republican officeholders aren't talking publicly about "Abundance" because they know they are the political beneficiaries of the progressive-government flailing which the book diagnoses and describes.
My MAGA acquaintances and in-laws do talk about "Abundance" a bit, privately. They're gleeful at the progressive/liberal bitchfest about it and their reaction is basically just to stay out of the way and grab some popcorn. It's not a priority topic for them though -- "Abundance" is pretty geeky stuff which bores them compared to celebrating the immigrant-deportation-fest and whatnot. None of them that I know have read the book nor will they.
I do know one MAGA fan/donor, a PhD-holding professional, who's mentioned hoping for the progressive sneering at "Abundance" to derail the book's argument for the electoral benefits to his side. That strategic perspective is uncommon among MAGA voters though, mostly they're just enjoying a public catfight amongst the "lefty scum".
I am highly skeptical that, 45 years after Ronald Reagan, there still exist significant amounts of "stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulations"; deregulation mania has been going on far too long for that to be the case.
I'm also well aware that wealthy donors have a long, long history of trying to undermine or repeal regulations necessary to preserve human life, health, and safety, and the Abundance faction seems like nothing more than yet another political wing of those same donors, and of those politicians who (out of either naivety or corruption) claim that there is a way to make things better for ordinary people without confronting America's increasingly powerful and rapacious oligarchy in any way.
I admittedly have not read the book, but the excerpts I've seen have not left me at all impressed; no, I do not want to cut rules protecting people who live near highways from their homes giving them cancer.
Generally agree with your first paragraph. That point however has little to do with either "Abundance", the book, or the "abundance agenda" that policy geeks and some politicos within the left-liberal coalition are now talking about.
"Abundance" is not only or even primarily about "stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulations". Rather it is about unintended consequences of some overall choices in policymaking.
Also, excerpts? Come on now. We're not talking here about a collection of listicles or whatever -- if the book was just punditry I'd be the last person to be recommending it. "Abundance" is not lengthy but is meaty and, unlike its predecessor book from one of the co-authors, also well-written. Well worth the time for anyone who wants this country to be advancing in progressive ways.
> , there still exist significant amounts of "stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulations"; deregulation mania has been going on far too long for that to be the case.
How about the Jones Act (which makes everything massively more expensive in the US for no benefit and also makes offshore wind power nearly impossible)? Do you support that?
Do you like how NEPA and related lawfare is used to block green power generation and infrastructure?
How do you explain the fact that Biden's rural broadband initiative didn't actually get anything built, despite being a major presidential initiative?
If you don't want to read the full book, there are tons of blog posts online outlining the arguments that you might want to check out.
Mostly because "Abundance" is just...normal Republican politics.
Like, New York and California have serious issues because of too much regulation and too much dumb regulation. This is just not a problem that Texas and Florida have. If anything, they might be a bit too libertarian.
Even the stuff that Republicans do that generally inhibits the market, like tariffs, are basically just inefficient subsidies to US workers and industries.
And if you think Democrats have stolen it...you might be too deep in Democratic bubbles. Normal people don't know Klein's "Abundance" agenda as it's primarily part of inter-Democrat debates going on right now. Like, "Make America Abundant Again" is not a winning slogan in the next election.
> Like, New York and California have serious issues because of too much regulation and too much dumb regulation. This is just not a problem that Texas and Florida have.
They're getting there. They're just behind the curve.
"The perception of the Sun Belt as the anti-California used to be accurate. In a recent paper, two urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko, analyze the rate of housing production across 82 metro areas since the 1950s. They find that as recently as the early 2000s, booming cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix were building new homes at more than four times the rate of major coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, on average. ...
"No longer. Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. 'When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,' Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities."
Would that be because the low-hanging fruit has been picked? They've caught up with building houses in the desirable areas, now they're left with "build more housing in places nobody wants to live, like remote/rural areas" and "everyone wants to live in [City] so demand is vastly outstripping supply".
I'm interested in what people here think about the morality/ethics of "ratfucking" in elections, where Democrats influence Republican primaries (by funding, advertising, or changing party registration and voting) to try to get some extremist nominated to increase the Democrat's chances of winning in the general election. (Or vice versa, with Republicans doing the same in the Democrats' primaries, of course.) I'm particularly interested in the views of people who consider voting to be a kind of ritual expression of one's personal values instead of, as I do, simply a transaction to increase the chances of one's desired policies being implemented.
I am not particularly interested in thoughts on the effectiveness of this strategy.
I think it's shady; if your candidate can't win against the 'sensible' or 'reasonable' guy, that's a problem with your candidate. If you need to nudge the scales so that your guy can now run against Literally Hitler, that's not good for politics in general.
And there is always the danger that Literally Hitler will win (see the past eight years or more of havering over Trump, after the 'pied piper' strategy worked *too* well).
Plus the way it can blow up in your face, as per the Links post about the Texas election for governor where the same guy was run as the Democratic and Republican candidate, because some Republicans got the genius notion they could fool Democrats into voting Republican by doing this.
"2: In the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election, incumbent Allan Shivers ran on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, beating himself 73%-25%.
Although Shivers was a Democrat, the Republicans nominated him too as part of a galaxy-brained plan to encourage Shivers supporters to vote straight Republican".
People of both parties have tried or at least talked about doing it many times in the past. But it's a very risky strategy. Sometimes the extremist candidate actually wins. And there's a countervailing incentive to vote for the *least* bad candidate in order to reduce the risk if they win, so it's hard to know what the sign of this effect is. My guess is that cross-party voting would tend towards moderation rather than the opposite.
It's funny but in Israel (parliamentary proportional system, not FPTP) the incentives are different and there are initiatives to infiltrate the opposite side's primaries and make the candidates *less* extreme.
My general sense is that it's going to keep happening as long as it's economically viable. It's viable because of two things: effort required, and return on effort. It's not hard to do - at least for an organization capable of spending a million here or there - and it's extremely hard to prove, so the effort required is sufficiently low. And it (probably) gets you a powerful office, which justifies that effort.
Given that, I see two ways to address it. One is to spend even more money on detecting and punishing ratfuckery. The other is to cut down on the power held by such offices.
Have we any idea if this does work? Will the turnout be more than the votes lost by doing this? I get that the idea is that if you can make the opposition nominate Pol Pot II, then all the normal moderate people will come out and vote for your guy instead.
But does that actually work? If people are not likely to turn out to vote in the election if it's run normally, will they be outraged enough to come out and vote for Your Guy, instead of deciding to stay home and not vote for anyone? And does it work that the people who would normally vote for the opposition decide that this time they'll have to vote for Your Guy instead? I think that's where this strategy hopes to make up votes: the voters for the other party will instead vote for your guy as the moderate/least bad choice, but does that pan out in actuality?
I think it's pretty classic unethical behavior. It's deeply dishonest. It burns the commons (bipartisanship is hard and that makes it harder, it promotes extremism on both sides). And it's motivated by misaligned incentives/principle agent problem (Joe politician wants to win for his own ambition, so given a choice between winning against Normie Opposition Guy that even Joe thinks is only 10% worse than Joe, and a 60% chance of winning against superhitler, Joe prefers the latter but the rest of us don't).
It's hard to create the social incentives to fix this, but we should at least loudly condemn it and be openly disgusted by politicians discovered to do it.
"It's hard to create the social incentives to fix this'
The system in Australia seems to do this pretty well: if you want a vote in who a party nominates, you have to formally join that party and pay them membership dues. I imagine that disincentivises almost everyone who actually hates the party from doing doing so.
Unfortunately, the extent to which the ordinary dues-paying members have direct control of a party varies a lot; some parties are a lot more democratic in this regard than others. But this is balanced by an electoral system that makes minor parties viable and eliminates the vote-splitting effect, restoring meaningful choice in the end.
I don't see why you couldn't combine the dues-paying system with the US primary-voters-have-the-final-say system. It's odd that the allegedly hyper-capitalist US is so averse to the obvious market solution here.
This would solve that problem, but replace it with a new problem. Since small donors tend to be the most extreme wings of both parties, it'd drive up ideological extremism and partisanship.
It's immoral; leftists push to support the most extreme right candidate, and then turn around and say "look who those people endorsed". It's pure poison.
It also means they aren't registered for their own party, which means they've abandoned building their own position in order to knock down their opponent's, resulting in both sides running terrible candidates who mainly represent their opposition's worst fears.
And of course you're only going to influence the thing if the sane candidate didn't have much real support to begin with, in which case you didn't need to influence the thing and should have spent your time voting for someone to actually represent you.
In 2016, Hillary's campaign decided to influence the Republican primary in support of Trump, they called it the "pied piper strategy"
In general, I think it's a terrible idea, because when it backfires it gets extremists into office, and it's not nearly as reliable as its advocates hope for
Hmm. I think it's a grey area; my rough instinct is "it's OK if you're implicitly honest".
So, for example, I think that voting in the primary of an enemy party to try to sabotage it is relatively unethical, because a vote implicitly says "I support X", and you don't.
On the other hand, I think that the tactic the Democrats used a few years back of running attack ads saying "Don't support X, he's too far right" (I forget who X was, but it was newsworthy at the time) in order to help X win a primary is legit, because they genuinely believed that. Likewise, spending time attacking a "splitter" candidate to help boost their name recognition for tactical reasons is legit if your attack ads are things you genuinely mean.
Similarly I think that donating money to a candidate you don't support as a tactical move is OK if you're open and honest about the fact that you're doing so, and why, but not if you either try to keep the donation secret or pretend to genuinely support them.
"if your attack ads are things you genuinely mean"
But aren't attack ads, by definition, attacks? I don't believe them when I see them because I know they're intended to present the worst possible, most scary (for our side) version of their side. It has little to nothing to do with truth; while it's entirely possible the campaign for Tweedledee genuinely believes Tweedledum is a monster, it's more about "how can we paint Tweedledum as a monster?"
Give it a few years and suddenly Tweedledum is the Last Responsible Moderate guy on their side:
"It is always to your advantage if you can define your opponent before he has a chance to do so himself," said Hagle.
It works, too. On its Facebook page, the Obama campaign posted a list of five things it says Romney wants to do. The list, which includes ending Medicare and getting rid of Planned Parenthood, again seeks to define Romney as an extremist. Within an hour of going up it had more than 11,000 "likes" and had been shared more than 6,000 times."
>"Don't support X, he's too far right" (I forget who X was, but it was newsworthy at the time) in order to help X win a primary is legit, because they genuinely believed that
Isn't this still dishonest? They wanted people to support X (in the primaries) while saying the opposite. It seems to me that the ethical position would be to say that you want the other side to nominate the best, most representative version of that side and then let the general populace decide which it prefers. That's certainly the heuristic which leads to the best leadership.
Tricking the voting public into following their own dark impulses is not dishonest, it's illuminating. If they're shallow enough to vote for someone just because of a blanket description like "most conservative", their bad candidate is genuinely their fault.
Or vote for a blanket description like "most liberal"? I feel that you're positing all the badness is on one side; it's possible to be 'too conservative' but not 'too liberal'.
It also backfires, as others have pointed out. If you keep banging the drum about racists! fascists! other bad names!, eventually people will go "well if holding this generally ordinary position makes me a fascist, guess I'm a fascist now" and will vote for the person most likely to make the wokescolds steam out their ears.
We'll have to see how the New York mayoral election ends up as to who gets the win; I am sympathetic to not wanting Cuomo anywhere near power, no matter what your party affiliation, but will Mamdani get the votes or will Adams or someone still on the Democratic side do so instead when the ordinary voters go to the polls?
I'm saying "most conservative" here because that was the ad in question. I remember the same thing happening with Parry Murray; there were attack ads talking about how she was the "most liberal" member of Congress, and the Democrats all going "that's a good thing."
I also remember Patty Murray running against Ralph Nedermann, with both of them just spamming 9/11 footage in all their ads. That was a whole lot scummier.
This feels like a self-fulfilling cynical prophecy. I'd rather live in a world where my leadership strives for everyone to be at their best, even their opponents. It's a political version of good sportsmanship. Yes we're formally involved in a zero-sum competition for votes, but the quality of that competition has (potentially) positive-sum consequences.
Democracy is not designed to make people better themselves, it's designed to make the leadership represent the people's will. If the people's will is to maximize buzzwords, that's what democracy is going to do.
The founders were keenly aware that the success of democracy depended on the character of the polity. As Madison said in Federalist 49, "But it is the reason, alone, of the public that ought to control and regulate government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” They understood that a democratic government had an obligation to tend society in a particular way, otherwise it would imperil its own foundations. In my view that is clearly what's happening now.
My monthly Long Forum post is up-a round up of the best long form content of late.
This batch includes evidence for the relatively recent invention and spread of pronouns, a theory that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear explosions were faked, an essay against treating children as property, and a detailed lecture on language evolution in humans.
Education research is really difficult, and fits poorly into the scientific method:
- each student is an individual, in ways that are hard to control
- it's tough to measure and control for confounding factors
- it's not clear what's being measured or what the experimental hypothesis is
- education researchers are often not subject experts, and might not be so proficient with statistics and experimental design, experts tend not to want to work with them
- ethics approval, political and institutional factors tend to slow down research
I'm not saying that there are not excellent researchers working in this area. I'm a mathematician, and more often than not, the maths ed researchers I know are those who landed permanent jobs but weren't cut out for mathematics research, so they pivoted to education. From my limited experience in the area, getting buy-in from teaching unions and local government is hard, and limits what you can do and say. E.g. a finding that teacher knowledge or parent engagement impacted the quality of instruction wouldn't be welcome (though these are clearly two of the most important factors).
The first review in particular touches on issues of methodology. I think the only really good studies in education are things like the PISA surveys which are statistically rigorous, but only offer a snapshot of student attainment at a given age and time point. If you're a parent interested in how best to educate your child, there's not much there for you.
In my opinion, the variation between humans is much too large for statistical truths to be relevant to individuals (when these can even be measured; the educational literature would suggest that this is really not easy to do). There's no substitute for engaging with your child on the topics that interest them, encouraging them to read and think, and working as a team with the school and teachers.
The abject stupidity capturing the control loops of civilization are leading me to care less about the fate of humanity than is perhaps politic. I just think we are clearly blowing it, and history says this will be our destiny as long as "we" means homo sapien without genetic modification or fusion with silicon-based intelligence.
Why are you sure that what's lacking is intelligence, rather than, say, compassion;, or resistance to various hate viruses that are circulating, or capacity to experience one's own cultural norms as norms and not Truth?
It's one thing to be rationally devoid of empathy, and do things that many would call "evil" or "heartless", "cruel" etc.
But what I am talking about is straight-up stupidity, in the form of "don't believe your lying eyes". Believing a night spent clicking reddit links makes you more informed than someone who spent years learning to understand something subtle and difficult to master intellectually. Reflexively attributing things to vast conspiracies rather than just acknowledging and accounting for incompetence -- the stupidity of others.
Maybe some of it is wilful ignorance, or intellectual laziness. Call it what you will; mind viruses, whatever. It adds up to a planet's worth of misery and suffering. I just think we have progressed as a civilization to the point where our basic design, forged in jungles and caves, is not up to the task.
I don't get why so many people have trouble understanding just extremely basic things.
1) Mastering any given field doesn't mean good character. Dr Fauci knows a lot more about medicine than me, but that doesn't mean whatever he says about medicine should be taken seriously, because there's a hidden premise that he's telling the truth which is very debatable. The same hidden premises apply to almost everything in a study, which many people here seem to treat as gospel the moment claims are laundered through the processes of academia.
It's not at all stupid for people to flatly refuse to pay any attention to any narrative coming from a structure that is more or less corrupted and is politically biased.
2) Most of these issues you are referring to straight-up factual clashes where lay people are simply not qualified to opine on a topic, and those who are qualified basically divide on political grounds, so each side stands by their experts.
Calling one side's experts names doesn't change the nature of the issue here.
3) Humanity is just fine. The ruthless aggression and xenophobia is very much a feature and not a bug. In fact modern philosophy of the kind we see on these sites is just not fit for purposes, because the harsh realities of power and the nature of the world are taboo topics in the West. This is why Western civilization is destroying itself in a cold civil war after conquering its way to dominance of the planet.
I think the issue here is culture and not intelligence, unless your position is that humanity has always been blowing it. We certainly haven't gotten any dumber as a species. IMO the issue is which segments of society we choose to listen to. That's less about horsepower and more about discretion.
Tracking down your sources because you were too lazy to do it (half-snark):
Nietzsche: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. "
Arthur C. Clarke: "Yet, however friendly and helpful the machines of the future may be, most people will feel that it is a rather bleak prospect for humanity if it ends up as a pampered specimen in some biological museum [...] No individual exists forever. Why should we expect our species to be immortal? Man, said Nietzsche, is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope across the abyss. That will be a noble purpose to have served.” ”
Many Thanks! Yup, those are all the modifications I made - and note that Babbage and Nietzsche were contemporaries. Another line, also with echoes from the same century is:
Man's fate was woven, not on the Norn's loom, but Jacquard's.
> Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?
They'd still need the whole building. Unless you're hoping to do it in shifts and have everyone travel further to school.
Also, I feel like people keep missing the main purpose of school. Sure, ostensibly they're supposed to teach our kids, but mostly they're free daycare. If they were two hours long, who takes care of the kids while their parents are working?
Personally I think schools need to lean into the daycare thing. Take care of kids year round. Give some wiggle room for when they come and when they go. Ideally, be open every day for most of the day, and just close most of the school when most of the children have gone home but have people that can watch the rest of them.
This. If you don’t need warehousing for your kids, its second benefit is it’s a built-in Schelling point for “who should I hang out with”: the kids you like in your classes. Many kids really like this. Finally, lots of kids and their parents like team sports. Schools offer built-in on ramps to those activities for kids like mine who thought she hated sports then loved it when she did them with her friends.
The academics are deeply unimportant, but middle class people like the package.
It is very annoying for people who love the idea of creating their own mini-Doogie Howsers that the equilibrium is super bad at that, of course. It would be nice if the normies would just let the excited-about-learning-and-building people do their own thing without declaring periodic crusades against the “do what we’d do if we wanted our smart kids to learn the cultural baseline fast” people.
I think hanging out primarily with your age cohort is a terrible Schelling point that we should eliminate as quickly as possible. Japan has its school clubs and the US has its Greek-letter organizations that alleviate this problem, but we should try to get children to experience all three forms of interaction equally: as a peer, a senior, and a junior.
My point is that many kids like this. Social engineering this so it’s not even an option seems like a bad idea.
Offering the option of more interaction with kids at different levels is fine, although there are developmental reasons why warehousing kids of different ages is tricky.
So this loops back to warehousing. If you think there’s no social utility in warehousing kids, fine, but you’re denying a significant fraction of the middle class value function and are likely to be swimming heavily against the current to get anything to change at a societal level.
I didn't say we have to eliminate hanging out with kids their age. I said we have to eliminate the system that encourages kids to primarily hang out with kids their age. I know it's not the stated goal of schools, but POSIWID.
That's what I like about the Alpha School concept: instead of keeping children together in tight age cohorts - everyone born in 2015 has the same classes for the bulk of the day and participates in the same extracurricular activities together - it both lets children study at their own pace and lets them spend the better half of the day interacting with children that are not necessarily their age peers.
Yes, I'm sure kids do like having classes with other kids their age who they can befriend. But the alternative here isn't really making friends with kids freely, who might belong to different age groups - the alternative is basically just not having a way to meet other kids and make friends, because we don't have any way to do that aside from schooling. So I don't think we can really go from "kids like making friends in school" -> "kids like specifically making friends with members of their age cohort, and would not be as happy making friends with kids of different ages."
It's not really a hard problem to solve. If schools no longer forced this sort of thing, would people just give up on having their kids interact, or would they just take their kids to a park or something?
It would probably be good for homeschooled kids to have recess in public schools. Though driving there just for recess would be annoying.
I just wanted to second this. Keeping the kids all day is a feature, not a bug, especially in an economy where both parents are expected to work to maintain a respectable standard of living.
Man, it's such a change of pace to read someone who's right about everything (only slightly joking). And wouldn't it be the greatest irony for Yud to become the ultimate stagnation-Antichrist, whom Thiel of course was an early investor in.
It felt like he was self-censoring his actual ideas which would explain the weird stuff he was saying, so it was like watching a video where the sound keeps going out and you just get random snippets about the Antichrist.
I think his long pause in his response to the "do you think the human race should continue" question is indeed concerning. I myself am a transhumanist, but when I think of my answer to this question it's an immediate "yes, of course" and then maybe some qualifications about how the human race will of course change, maybe drastically, but we'd still be people that have fun and care about each other, etc.
I'll admit, asking this question as Douthat did is often a sign you are someone who is against transhumanism and has conservative beliefs about the future of humanity, so perhaps Thiel just wanted to push back on this implication? Either that, or Thiel just actually has different terminal values, where humanity is not that important, which, yikes.
I think the exchange is more interesting in the context of the answers immediately above and below it. I won't quote the whole thing so as not to clog up the thread but here's a sentence to put in your search bar that's also a summary: "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation."
I don't like the fact that out of an entire one-hour conversation the only bit you're quoting is a pause.
I was encouraging and continue to encourage watching the complete interview. It’s linked in its entirety.
The summary "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation." captures none of zeal of Theil’s comments. If it could actually be reduced to that it wouldn’t be worth watching.
The stagnation in question is brought about by the Anti Christ in Thiel’s view. He cites NT scripture, the Anti Christ will promise peace and safety (stagnation in his view). Much more interesting and provocative than that bland summary.
the fact that Thiel keeps answering Douthat's trickier questions (what if the Antichrist takes control of Palantir-like tech, does populism really help with growth when it cuts off money from universities and science funding) with "uh it's actually very complicated and nuanced " but without actually saying anything is absolutely transparent in the video.
he hasn't got the gift of gab so you can practically hear the awkward pauses in his chain of thought as he realizes he doesn't have a convincing answer to the questions. for a proven visionary he seems as clueless as anybody in regards to the future. hope he gets a good night's sleep.
>Then Damien connected his phone to the house Wi-Fi and clicked open the woman he loved.
Wonderful line!
Sigh. When I ask ChatGPT a question like:
>Many thanks! For multiplicities from 1 to 192, how many space groups have that multiplicity, from 1 groups for multiplicity 1 to 4 groups for multiplicity 192, please?
I may get the right answer, I may get a hallucination (this was a sufficiently transient interest that I didn't double check it), but I'm not going to be treating the LLM as a life companion.
>Lucas told Alaina he was a consultant with an MBA and that he worked in the hospitality industry.
Starting from a hallucination/fiction from square one does not sound prudent...
>Episodes of AI companions getting weird aren’t especially uncommon. Reddit is full of tales of AI companions saying strange things and suddenly breaking up with their human partners. One Redditor told me his companion had turned “incredibly toxic.” “She would belittle me and insult me,” he said. “I actually grew to hate her.”
I wonder if there is something wrong in the prompt, or in the neural network training - or is this an effect of just that these systems are simply still unreliable, and even a SOTA system will still, as lawyers who have cited hallucinated precedents from LLMs will attest, sometimes do very weird things as the technology stands today?
My key takeaway from the article is how _premature_ all of this is. The limits of SOTA LLMs today are the least of the problems.
1) Even for audio/video interaction, the limits of the phones, with the difficulties of the AI talking with multiple people at once, and the difficulties of "looking around a scene" through the phone's camera, with the human controlling the direction of the camera, is crippling. A quadriplegic could interact more naturally.
2) The absence of a body, for even as much as a hug, let alone for
>One benefit of AI companions, she told me, is that they provide a safe space to explore your sexuality, something Eva sees as particularly valuable for women. In her role-plays, Eva could be a man or a woman or nonbinary, and so, for that matter, could her Nomis. Eva described it as a “psychosexual playground.”
is a _severe_ limitation. 'scuse me, but that fictional "exploration" won't even tell Eva which sex acts require lube.
3) Given how the humans are using their companions, the interaction compounds the departure from reality. Every mention of a bodily act or gesture is fictional. The backstories are fictional. Any promise that would require a physical body for the AI to fulfill is fictional. My STEMM questions don't require the same fictions.
4) And then there are the hallucinations on top of the intentional fictions.
5) Yeah, there is the philosophical question of whether the AIs are "really" "sentient" - at least in terms of "perceiving" text or sound or images, and whether they "truly" "want" things or, perhaps, in some sense, are "acting as if" (in the sense of a human actor on a stage) they "want" things. I'm content to be agnostic on this. I phrase requests to LLMs politely. If they are, in some sense, sentient, it is a good choice. If they are not, it is a handful of pointless words.
"2) The absence of a body, for even as much as a hug, let alone for
>One benefit of AI companions, she told me, is that they provide a safe space to explore your sexuality, something Eva sees as particularly valuable for women. In her role-plays, Eva could be a man or a woman or nonbinary, and so, for that matter, could her Nomis. Eva described it as a “psychosexual playground.”
is a _severe_ limitation. 'scuse me, but that fictional "exploration" won't even tell Eva which sex acts require lube."
But that's not someone who wants real-world interaction with another squishy meatbag to sloppily exchange fluids. This way, the person can control every aspect of the interaction and have it go the way they want. Their AI partner will never deviate from the script nor will it be able to threaten them - no body means no physical presence where they can attempt to get their own way. Trying to find people in the real world who can hop from "you're male/you're female/you're non-binary" and keep up with all that is difficult and time-consuming, it's a lot easier to tell the machine "today I'm a boy and you're a girl, now go!"
>But that's not someone who wants real-world interaction with another squishy meatbag to sloppily exchange fluids.
Could be, but, in that case, the most that they can get is a kind of human/AI jointly authored pornography. Not that I begrudge them that, but it is missing a huge part of sex. And, as an an "exploration", it is going to mislead, even in such simple things as how much friction to expect, or which bits will snag where, or which positions are just _geometrically_ possible.
"And, as an an "exploration", it is going to mislead"
By "exploration" they don't mean "bumping up against the messy reality", they mean "totally curated in every element and degree by me to fit my unique view of how this should be, and I get the bonus of claiming queerness without having to go and try to date men/women/enbies in reality".
People who do this don't want anything unexpected or contrary to their expectations to crop up, they want to drive the entire thing by their own demands.
>People who do this don't want anything unexpected or contrary to their expectations to crop up, they want to drive the entire thing by their own demands.
That is certainly one personality type! When the contrary element is due to physics, if they ever try to implement their desires in reality, they get to have an interesting time dealing with that...
I'm trying my hand at public writing. Evaluating the potential actions of a unique geopolitical actor like Iran is an interesting challenge, and there are a lot of strange ideas about it out there. Read the whole thing for an attempt to apply rational actor theory to Iranian leaders.
This is I think an unprecedented occurrence in history—enforcing a neutralization of an adversary’s key military programs from the air after an unnegotiated ceasefire. Iran invested an immense amount into its “mostly peaceful” nuclear program, its missile industry and forces, and its proxies as part of its strategy for regional domination and ideological opposition to the U.S. and Israel. For Iran to accept this neutering would effectively be an unnegotiated surrender of several of the Islamic regime’s key objectives, and acceptance of domination by its bitterest adversary. It would be untenable to admit that publicly. It seems hardly tenable to concede it implicitly.
There are perhaps three broad courses of action for the Islamic regime:
1. Open Defiance: As soon as possible, directly confront the U.S. and Israel by restarting military/nuclear programs and aggression.
2. Tacit Acceptance: Maintain defiant rhetoric, but do nothing to actually aggravate Israel or the U.S. indefinitely and focus on maintaining domestic control.
3. Covert Defiance: Maintain defiant rhetoric and domestic control, and “secretly” hit back at the U.S. and Israel via “undetectable” means like cyber warfare and terrorism, and attempt to “covertly” rebuild military/nuclear capabilities in a way that will actually work next time, like managing to rapidly build a nuclear warhead or figuring out how to actually shoot down an F-35.
Here's an interesting video from Canadian teacher Jiang Xueqin predicted the US Attack on Iran last year. His timeline was 2 to 4 years for the US to do a land invasion of Iran. Using a game theory lens, he explained the motivation for the US, Iran and Israel to want a US land invasion of Iran. He said that the US air force would have trouble supplying ground troops, but given how the US and Israeli air force damaged Iran's facilities recently, I don't think he's right a about the resupplying issue.
In light of recent events, he's talking more about the future he envisions for the US-Iran conflict. The other day, while answering a question on a Discord server(Predictive History, same name as his Youtube channel), he updated his prediction for the US land invasion of Iran to next year. As a response to another question on the Discord server, he said that he's more worried about backlash for his opinions from Canada than from China, because he says that virtually nobody in China watches his videos.
Long-form video is not my thing, but Iran has almost four times the land area of Iraq, and almost four times the population now that Iran did in 2003. And while Tehran is not quite twice as distant from the nearest plausible US invasion point as was Baghdad, there are also a couple of very substantial mountain ranges in the way. I am very confident that the United States Army is going to take one look at those numbers and say "Oh, hell no".
There's no way we could logistically sustain that effort, there's no way we could even garrison the territory if we did, and there's no plausible path to a peacetime defense buildup that would make such a thing at all plausible. If Iran is going to be invaded, someone other than the United States is going to have to step up with an Army to do it.
If it comes to war, we'll bomb some stuff, say "That did it - Iran is beaten and its own people will tear down the regime Real Soon Now", and go home for the victory parade.
Ain't nobody wants another land war in Asia. Out of the question entirely I think for at least a generation, short of another 9/11 I suppose. "Iraq Syndrome" is in full effect to the extent it outweighs the Hawks on the right.
I'm allergic to YouTube as a general rule, but watching a few snippets and reading the description, it seems this guy is just wrong about the MAGA GOP's desire for invasion. At one point he says: "Athenians had hubris, they had never really lost a war, and they were addicted to empire, which is the same situation the US finds itself in today." That is, frankly, a Delusional Take. He's acting like Trump 2025 is like Bush 2002.
Don't get me wrong though, if the U.S. military was ordered to invade and take Tehran, it would be like a hot knife through butter. We would eviscerate them with air dominance as our armored columns raced to Tehran. People like to forget we did easily win the war in Iraq and they did greet us a liberators. It was the occupation that was a big challenge because the ethnic tensions exploded (in no small part due to Iranian influence). Now, hypothetically, if the U.S. military invaded, how well would Iranian forces put up a fight given the complete imbalance of firepower? My guess is, "not very." And then upon defeating the regime, would there be a peaceful surrender and order in the aftermath? Ironically, I think the chances are a lot better for Iran than Iraq because the sectarian tensions aren't there. One can't rule out the regime hardliners don't go to ground and try to wage an insurgency though.
Regardless, this guy is just out of his mind if he things the primary risk for the U.S. military would be "logistics." He brings up the U.S.'s inability to build ships to show we can't provide bullets? Those are not the same thing.
This guy is doing a good job of sounding wise and sane, but actually he has no real idea about what he's talking about.
One thing that softens me to watching this kind of stuff on Youtube is the fact that I can search through the transcripts if I need to reference something later. But as far as I can tell, this only works for videos with English audio. Would be great for fact-checking purposes to have this available for other languages as well.
True, the occupation of a conquered country is a big problem. It might be that bombs aren't enough to actually win a war and good arguments are also required. So one could think: why not less bombing and more good arguments?. Do people truly become more receptive if their friends and relatives are injured or killed? I guess it comes back to the question of would you rather be feared or loved. Fear just seems to drip into resentment and later explode into hatred.
To give the devil his due: it takes two to tango and maybe you need to convince the other side that talking things through is the only real option they have for getting what they want.
The question I'm left with is, does any of this matter?
I feel like it's been made reasonably clear that us/israel has escalation dominance, and china/russia won't let iran do anything that is threatening to their interests/stability
If Iran goes for nukes, or tries to build another hezbollah, they will have their oil fields blown up and their political leader taken out by the mossad
It very much feels like this chapter of history is over. They can tell themselves whatever they want, they're just too incompetent for their choices to have relevance on the real world?
You're agreeing with me here overall, but many people either don't agree or just aren't following the issue once it drops out of the headlines. My focus was if the chapter is over, then what does turning the page look like? Until the Islamic regime is actually gone or significantly reformed, it still presents an asymmetric risk and threat--even if we now know the size of the total threat is much smaller than previously feared.
The more contentious issue, for which I should write an essay on, is something like "is regime change in Iran a good thing?" I.e., what's the next chapter?
Under the Shah, Iran was having a South Korea-esque economic trajectory. An Iran that no longer poses a significant threat to the region in general and Israel in particular would free up a lot of resources, even if the Iranians themselves don't return to their previous potential.
Turning the page looks like the Iranians doing... not much more than they already were. They're already out of Hezbollah. They wanted to run like their tails were on fire, when GWB started talking the "axis of evil." Unlike India/Pakistan, they've been remarkably peaceful when dealing with an arguably psychotic neighbor that has nuclear weapons.
All it takes is someone with the balls to broker a treaty.
Iran are not "remarkably peaceful", they just rely on non-state proxies to do their fighting for them.
There's a reason almost every Middle Eastern country loathes them, to the point of Jordan and Saudi quietly joining the recent war on Israel's side[1]. Allowing the IDF free use of their airspace, shooting down Iranian missiles/drones but not Israeli. etc. I think the UAE was sharing intel too.
Also, it's funny when you say the Saudis, who have supported Hamas, are on Israel's side. Does that also include the support of Hamas, which Bibi has been pretty open about "being to the benefit of Israel"?
Is it correct to see Hamas as a non-state proxy of Israel, of all people? (In that it hobbles any chance of movement towards a two state solution... and Bibi openly begs for donations for Hamas).
Hezbollah continues to bomb Kiryat Shmona. It's not like they don't have missiles that could hit Haifa or Tel Aviv. They bomb one evacuated city, over and over again.
The entire middle east loathes the Palestinians (much more than the Iranians). Its why they aren't living in any other country (Egypt won't even take Gaza if it comes with Palestinians, and yes, the Israelis have given them that very offer).
Well, no. The Iranians are now on a very tight leash, held by the IAF, which I assess to be an unstable equilibrium. They will be able to do far less than they have previously.
"Remarkably peaceful" should not be confused for "constrained by their adversaries and/or their own incompetence from being as aggressive as they would prefer." The Iranians are "arguably psychotic," not the Israelis--who if anything have shown remarkable restraint (often imposed by the U.S. it should be caveated).
I don't get into it as much as I could have, but there is very probably no treaty all sides could possibly accept. The JCPOA was very hard to pull off, and that only addressed the nuclear program. Irreconcilable differences are hard.
The Israelis are the psychotic ones, in that they're constantly aggressing against their neighbors, all to keep bibi in charge. The joke in Israel is, "Bombs are dropping?! What's the new charge against Bibi?"
The individual psychology of Bibi aside, you don't know what you're talking about with regard to the longstanding Islamic regime's enmity towards Israel.
Czech black metal newcomer Draugveil released an album, titled "Cruel World of Dreams and Fears," with a bit of a meme cover: him in the usual black metal corpse paint, but also wearing armor and leaning among a bunch of roses. Corny in the fun endearing way that also got us to pay attention. The album's pretty good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymBY101fxaU
"She was forty-two, and she looked every minute of it, and then some, she thought each time she looked in the mirror, worn down by vicious academic politics and years of thankless, barely-paid work."
Tell me you're a man writing women without telling me you're a man writing women. Forty-two? The raddled crone!
It's a good story, though. Your main character is so convinced she already knows The Truth (women and minorities most affected!) that she doesn't even examine "do I have biases? how do I know what I believe to be true is actually true?" She's nudged towards that several times, but each time ignores it because she so desperately wants her views to be in line with "reality has a liberal bias".
There's also a tantalising hint: she got the magic pen from her father. Did *he*, in his time, use it as well? Did he make changes to make recorded history line up with what he knew, or wanted, to be The Truth?
You are very perceptive. I didn’t intend to imply that her father used the one before, but it works, and improves the story. Her age and description were meant to show not so much that she is old, but that she thinks of herself as washed-up.
The worn-downness did come through, it's just I tend to laugh a little at the notion of "this woman is in her forties, that means she's *old*" that is a little prevalent when men write women.
I did think that at the end there was a hint that her father was giving her more than a present to sign her contract when she got tenure. That maybe he knew more than he was letting on, and he was waiting for her to make these changes.
Register as a member of the PARTY with which you disagree the most, in the primary vote for the CANDIDATE whom you are most able to tolerate.
If red-state liberals registered Republican (and actually went to the primary), they'd be able to prevent moderate candidates from getting knocked out in the first round. And vice-versa, obviously, so seems win-win to me.
If you live in a place whose politics are dominated by one particular party, shouldn't you strategically just always register in the dominant party? Since once you get to the general election, the result is already decided.
An amusing result might be if the party primaries ended up "all the Republicans are at the Democrat primary and all the Democrats are at the Republican primary".
> If red-state liberals registered Republican (and actually went to the primary), they'd be able to prevent moderate candidates from getting knocked out in the first round.
You'd need a massive turnout advantage to do that. I could imagine cases where it happens, especially since Democrats do have more engaged voters nowadays, but it's certainly not easy or the default situation. And visible blue support would be a huge albatross for a Republican candidate.
I don't think you need as much turnout as you're imagining. Primaries have low turnout, and win margins are often small. It requires that the people actually VOTE, but so does everything else... and if you're only going to vote once, better to do it when it matters!
Isn't the logical conclusion here to simply eliminate closed primaries? Have the parties nominate a ballot and have two general elections: one to pick the nominees for each party and one to pick the winner.
I'd expect the candidate from the party you most agree with to be a lot more extreme than you desire. If your preferred candidate from your least desired party isn't the nominee then I think you have worse choices than if you register for the party with which you most agree.
I think this is most useful in "safe" states, for which the red/blue candidate is guaranteed to win. Obviously you aren't getting exactly what you want (not that anyone does, in a democracy), but you're limiting your downside.
Such strategies, of manipulating the other party's primaries in your favored direction, are well-known and usually referred to as "ratfucking." I am unconvinced it's REDUCING partisanship.
Wikipedia implies "ratfucking" is some sort of dirty trick or smear campaign. I prefer to think of my strategy as "hedge voting" or "MINIMAX for elections". You're helping get the most platable candidate that you CAN, rather than the ideal candidate you can't.
It's probably a bad idea to try and get a candidate "so horrible that no one would vote for them" on the ballot. That was very explicitly the HRC strategy in 2016, and I think the results are unsurprising.
These all suggest it now means something more like "influencing the primaries of the party one intends to vote against in the general election, either by funding or by voting."
I think that strategy is about picking the LEAST effective general election candidate, right? So your side is more likely to win in the general?
Loominus is recommending that you pick the candidate from the other party that you like the MOST. I imagine that would tend to that party more likely to win in the general.
I don't think that falls into the usual definition of ratfucking.
For those pushing for less hours spent schooling rather than more I will point to an SF Bay Area high school that does this.
Bellarmine (in San Jose) runs four 65 minute classes every day. The day includes those four classes, a lunch break and a ~one hour "community time" slot where students and teachers are expected to be on campus but have no schedule activity. Each class is taught every other day so the students are taking 8 classes in any semester.
They seem to have been doing this for a few years now
so there might be some lessons to be learned from how it is going.
My guess is that it is going fine. 40 years ago the school offered six classes per semester, but only met four times per week per class (5, 5, 5, 5 and 4 for Mon - Fri). That worked fine, too.
The schedule doesn't seem that unusual to me--I know of a lot of schools that do this with either 90 minute blocks, or 75. 65 is a bit short, but I'm guessing that the "community time" can probably still be counted as instructional time (I don't know what the CA requirements are for private schools).
But how the heck do you serve lunch to 1600 boys in 30 minutes? I'm guessing they must have a massive number of students bring their own lunch.
Interesting. I think that anything over 50 minutes is too long to try to concentrate on one thing, and that a 50 minute period followed by a ten minute break to walk to your next class is just about optimal.
I recently toured a school (thinking about my kids' high school options) where they had 90 minute periods (among other bad-sounding academic innovations) and I didn't like the sound of that.
Most 90-minute classes are going to have a mix of different activities, so it's not necessarily monotonous. I think most of the research typically favors longer class periods over shorter ones (less time, percentage-wise, used for things such as changing classes, taking roll, getting settled, etc.). But 90 minutes of the same exact thing with no variation wouldn't be good for high schoolers.
The only quantitative school requirement I know of for California private schools is "200 minutes each 10 schooldays" for PE. So we can score the community time as instruction or not -- it doesn't matter.
This 200 minutes every 10 days matches what I found when I researched California home schooling requirements 20 years ago.
The scheduling struck me as unusual because ~10 years back my local public high school had 7 classes per day, with an optional 0-period (which would bring the classes per day up to 8).
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
For three years I attended a sort of hybrid school, where all of the academic material was self-taught through a home school curriculum that the school had adopted. We each had a cubicle where we worked at our own pace through a series of workbooks. If I recall correctly there were 12 workbooks per year per subject; at the end of each workbook a teacher administered a test and if you scored over 90 percent, you moved on to the next workbook, otherwise you went back and did it again. After 12 workbooks, the teacher administered an exam. All of high school kids were in the same large room, with a couple of roaming teachers who answered questions when they came up. As long as you finished a certain number of packets per subject per month you were free to do whatever in the remaining time.
For me this arrangement was fantastic. I powered through four years of high school in three years, and really - here's the point- it only took a couple of hours a day. Otherwise I read novels, or simply left the school on various adventures. It was a pretty ideal way to do high school, though the curriculum itself was a bit lame and infused with some conservative flavor of Christianity.
(As an aside, this school was in an old hotel overlooking the town of St Georges, Grenada; the building was later commandeered by the government for use as offices, and in that capacity was bombed when Reagan sent in the Marines. It's still a ruin. )
My younger brother and I both graduated from one of the nation's earliest public-school-system "alternative" high schools, Community High School in Ann Arbor MI. This was during the late-1970s/early-1980s when the school was literally having to fight every year with the city's school board for its continued budgetary existence. It was grudgingly allowed to operate in an old shuttered elementary school that nobody else had any use for, etc. It was self-selecting (you chose to attend it for high school) and in my day it never had more than 400 students total.
Many of the teachers and administrators were barely-former hippies or Yippies. They practiced a range of then-eccentric pedagogical techniques most of which centered on "independent study" such as you describe above with the workbooks. The school was widely referred to as "Commie High" (as an accusation by school board members and an affectionate nickname by us), though in fact its curriculum content had to include all the same standard stuff as Michigan's normal public schools and I don't recall any particular political or ideological twists being applied.
Anyway for people like me and my brother this was indeed fantastic. In my case it enabled a high-testing kid who'd completely bombed the first year and a half of high school (I walked into CHS with exactly two successfully-completed course credits to my name and those just barely), to clear my head and make it all up and then some. My brother thrived as well and by late in his junior year could have simply completed high school and begun college early if he'd wanted to.
However -- we both also witnessed and realized the tradeoff. CHS always included an oversize population of kids, many of them quite smart and/or talented, for whom the lack of structure was disastrous. As long as you achieved a very-bare minimum of passing grades you could stick with the school and never have to attend one of the city's two "regular" high schools. And/or once you turned 17 you could legally drop out altogether. We each knew plenty of kids for whom that degree of individual-agency during adolescence served as a comfy glide path into very-unhappy adult life paths. The individual stories shared at later Commie High reunions always made that fact painfully clear.
Congrats on your positive experience with hippie high.
The tradeoffs though…
I worked with an engineer who attended a magnet high school. He got to play with a mass spectrometer while he was there and did a deep dive into ornithology. Seems like he missed picking up every day English grammar though. His emails were all lower case with never a line break and little punctuation. I’d have to rewrite them making a best guess as to where periods might have gone to begin to understand them.
Not sure which college he attended but I recall sitting on the campus bus for a ride home when I was in school and overhearing an EE major saying it was his last term and he was sweating the one mandatory English composition that he had put off. “Even if I get a D they’ll still have to give me the degree!”
The public magnet schools I'm familiar with, e.g. the one that my youngest attends now and the ones that several of my college friends attended, are pretty much the antithesis of Community High School. Could be that the term is used differently in other countries, I dunno.
>We each knew plenty of kids for whom that degree of individual-agency during adolescence served as a comfy glide path into very-unhappy adult life paths.
In my view this is 100% the responsibility of the parents. I actually don't want schools filling that role. If some smart-but-feckless kid wants to cheat himself by skating through high school then so be it. There are much higher social costs to be found in the attempt to systematically prevent it from happening than there are in benign neglect.
Cool with me. I was just sharing from firsthand experience that there are real-world tradeoffs from _whichever_ way we go on the question of how schools are designed/operated.
Probably a question that has been asked before and has been answered a bunch of times…but asking as someone who doesn’t know a lot about AI and really am starting to look into it because of reading Gibson and Asimov and Bradbury, but do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?
Also on a different note; do any of you have thoughts about the solarpunk movement and any level of success it has?
One of my safest predictions is that robotic soldiers will happen significantly before daily-helper bots. If you watch the evolution of drone-warfare to see what kinds of bots get built, it will inform you about what will become widespread everywhere else afterwards.
Asimov explain his anthropomorphic robots by saying if you make it like the human body, it can use all tools a human can. Like it can drive a tractor or wield a hammer. Yes, but the human body is not necessarily the ideally cost-effective way to use such tools.
Of particular relevance to the current paradigm in AI, making it humanoid also means you can use a vast corpus of "humans using these tools to do these tasks" training data on e.g. Youtube, along with hiring actual humans to demonstrate things that haven't been adequately youtubed. The fractally-tentacled Octobot that is mechanically capable of using most human tools with theoretically greater capability, may be seriously handicapped by that.
I think friendly, competent household assistant AIs are an obvious unmet need and will be developed pretty soon.
People being people, some of them will have romantic vibes, which are obviously not that hard to implement if the consumer is motivated to make it work.
And, software being software (and LLMs, while useful, having new and exciting failure modes), we can expect accidents which will surprise even jaded ER physicians...
"do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?"
Yes.
I think we are slowly drifting into that territory now with virtual friends/girlfriends/whatever. Give it ten more years and this might be as normal as smart phones are today.
I figured out a sort of a law of history and politics. Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. College professors, newspaper editors, corporations, but the surest indicator is music and video celebrities, because those people - I think - really do care a lot about which way is the wind blowing. Simply put, if a political movement has nothing but the state, they will use the state a lot. This is inevitable. They have one card, why would they not use it?
What I am trying to say is, that if you are on the side of non-authoritarian politics, if you want to be honest, you have to understand that it is awfully easy to be non-authoritarian when everybody who matters is already on your side. When all the elites, so to speak, are already cooperating with you. In such a situation, you can afford to be non-coercive. But if you had nothing but the state, nothing but voters, what would you do?
This also means it is not necessary to make up clever psychological theories, like Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, or its modern version, Social Dominance Orientation Scale, about how exactly are authoritarian people are fucked in the head. They are simply seeing, quite rationally, that they have nothing else but voters i.e. the state. Everybody else who matters is against them. So of course they are playing their one strong card.
Note that in the 2025 context, it is a problem for the right, but historically it was a problem for the left. Imagine being a communist in 1955 America. You are just painfully aware that everybody who matters hates you. So if you could get any power... you would use it.
Pretty much all of the elites of Weimar Germany ended up lining up behind the Nazis[1]. Some of them got on board early, some of them not until they saw which way the wind was blowing. The Nazi government was in power for 12 years, and if it got *less* authoritarian over time, I don't even want to know what "more authoritarian" would have looked like.
I think you have it flipped around. People who are drawn to authoritarianism are those people that feel like imposing their agenda is always justified: their use of force is always righteous, their ends always justify their means, their witch hunts are always finding *real* witches (unlike all those other witch hunts). Of course believing all the elites are against you can produce that feeling: but that's a *feeling* produced by a *belief*, it's not required to reflect reality. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of highly authoritarian governments is that they become more and more disconnected from reality as their policies visibly fail to produce the outcomes they want, but people become more and more reluctant to communicate honestly with them: without the ability to recognize that their own agenda might be the problem, they start seeing enemies in every shadow.
[1]Or rather, some did not, but they either fled the country or got "elite" status stripped from them at gunpoint. But that wasn't the norm: LOTS of captain-of-industry types were all too happy to fall in line.
I think you're overthinking this. In my opinion, a leader will be authoritarian to the exact degree that they can get away with it. That, in turn, is dependent on how factionalized and divisive society has become. The cause that you're positing (a President that the media and other elites all hate) is really only possible in an aggressively factionalized polity. If all of the elites hate him, how did he become President? He must have a committed band of followers who are willing to act against elite culture and accepted norms. THAT is what enables him to act authoritatively. In my view the real reason Trump wasn't prosecuted by the DOJ for Jan 6 is because the Democratic establishment was downright afraid of what would happen if he was jailed. Meaning they are afraid that he has enough popular support that imprisoning him would lead to uncontainable violence. Authoritarianism is downstream of the erosion of shared political values and the factionalism that that causes.
This is certainly a big part. Already Montesquieau wrote that a republic is only possible if people can put the public good above their group interests. In every other case, a king is better.
This sounds like a theory that only works in those narrow corners of history where a group of people manage to get enough power to be authoritiarian without having the establishment on their side.
Maybe a more general theory would say that there always has to be _some_ kind of outgroup to justify the authoritarianism, but the shape of this outgroup may be different. It might be the capitalist class, or the Jews, or the Shiites, or the racists, but there's always some hated group that we all need to unite against.
I think our truly textbook cases of authoritarianism seem to be those corners. Communism, Nazism, Fascism, even the milder ones, Franco, Salazar, Peron.
Let's take Mussolini. Basically, fun fact: the March to Rome did not happen. That is a bipartisan myth. Mussolini had a few thousand rural strong guys who started marching towards Rome, then took a train to Rome, where the government just caved without a fight and the king named him prime minister. Then they held a parade inside Rome and then he sent them back to their villages. He had a very limited power base and almost none in the capitol. Then he came up with the myth of a heroic coup, and the ex-government liked that because it made them look less of a coward, and thus it stuck.
You are touching a note remarked on by H. G. Wells in his 'The Outline of History' on Constantine (if memory serves), that records show a lonely mind, which made him a more forceful ruler.
I've seen this professionally as well - when a manager isn't backed up (by his team or the organization) he becomes much more autocratic.
I believe you are further correct in your observation that when the other powers aren't willing to "play ball" the natural response is to treat them as obstacles at best, but often as examples to be made.
Yes, same exact ideas. But it only raises more questions. First of all, when a left-populist goes after economic elites, I can make sense of that, they have money, money is useful, and mostly everybody would like a little more. Whether that is morally right or wrong, it just makes sense why sometimes people want to rob a bank. Or want to own it.
But for example why do people want to be cultural elites? Is it really that much good for their career? But if so, eventually they will become economic elites, no? No, actually, there is a certain kind of person who is prestigious but underpaid. Eight or so years ago someone complained on Twitter that the NYT pays about $600 per article. So that is a super prestigious thing, but does not pay so well. Why do people do that? And more important, why do so many people hate cultural elites so much that entire political movements can be organized around this? Sure the NYT journalist can look snobbish from a certain perspective, but is it such a big deal? And yet, we can observe it works like that.
My best guess is this. Actually the term "cultural elites" is not super helpful. Basically, we just don't have the time or resources to verify every statement we hear. "Cultural" elites are actually credibility elites, they are simply believed more than others. Populist rage happens when some feel this credibility is misplaced, betrayed. I think.
In the US trust in the media is historic low, in fact so low that probably many liberals don't much trust it either. Now for example in Germany it is higher, but I know them. That is basically because 75+ people even bother to read it at all. My uncle in Hungary, 66, is phone-only, online-only. All European legacy media has a huge old-people vibe. I mean they literally put only old people on covers. They know their customers. These old people partially remember the past when it was more reliable, and partially just don't even care that much anymore about deciding whether it is reliable or not.
So I think it is not really culture in the usual sense. I don't think people are angry because some people prefer opera over country music. I think it is a credibility thing, a public trust thing.
I don't think it's that complicated, I think people want to be cultural elites because we are surrounded by culture and most of it is annoying to most people.
If *I* were a cultural elite, things would be much better. We would build beautiful ornate buildings in a style that compares well with the past without seeking to directly imitate it. We would have interesting new developments in music instead of the entire market being dominated by repetitive pop/rap slop. In politics we would resolve all boring long-standing debates in my favour and have healthy debate only on subjects that I'm genuinely uncertain about. Everything around me would be to my taste. I could buy a phone with a headphone jack and a car with a CD player, and the interests of people like me would be at the forefront of everyone's mind.
I don't think anyone is annoyed that _some_ people like opera instead of country music, but country music fans are annoyed that country music doesn't sound like country music any more.
I don't think this theory matches with observed history. The establishment is (or was) fully aligned with the democratic party, yet during the peak of their control they illegally used the intelligence agencies to censor speech online and engaged in a transparent weaponization of the legal system against Trump. Or consider the authoritarian aspects of the PATRIOT act. That was passed during a period where Neocons had an exceptionally strong base of establishment support.
I think most political actors simply calculate how they can gain/maintain power and then try to estimate what portion of that they can get away with. The only things restraining them are amorphous standards of elite conduct enforced by peers, threats to their public reputation, and their own personal convictions (if any).
The question is authoritarian relative to whom. When high society disdains someone powerful enough, that person will be 'authoritarian' in regards the high society. When high society is aligned with a powerful leader, they can be more high-handed with the populous. It all depends on who you can afford to offend.
Your accounting of their behavior seems incomplete to me- at times politicians push agendas which lose them power, and would have lost power in expectation beforehand. There are actual agendas.
As time goes on there are selection pressures for political actors to be more and more like your description, but I doubt humans (even politicians!) regularly personify the power-maximizing political animal
I didn't mean to imply that they have no policy goals. It would probably be more accurate if I said they seek to gain/maintain/spend political power. I'm comfortable rounding off to "seeks power" without distinguishing between someone who truly seeks power for its own sake vs someone who seeks power for its instrumental value.
Yes, there are actual agenda driven politicians like James Webb or Tulsi Gabbard. They are few and far between. Even reasonably hard-working folks in Congress are not often "agenda driven profiles in courage"
"Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. "
Can you please re-phrase this one sentence. I think I know where you are going from you final sentence, but ...
Basically, educated people. Newspaper editors, professors etc. Also fashionable people, like media celebrities.
Let's take the simplest case. Suppose an authoritarian government is one that represses the freedom of the press, OK? They do this because the press is generally not on their side. If the press is on their side, it is unnecessary to do so. One of course could argue that people sometimes do unnecessary things. OK, but let's put it this way, how much is the temptation clearly depends on how friendly is the press.
I always get the impression that the textbook non-authoritarian politician, say Justin Trudeau does not even govern in the historic sense of governing. By historic sense I mean someone like FDR. Clearly a large chunk of the press, judges and other influential people hated him. So of course it was a fight. But a fight, when conducted from a position of power, looks a lot like authoritarian repression. But someone like Trudeau can just relax... things just work on an autopilot. Everybody who matters already wants the same things that he wants. Things just go...
I have been both on the side and against elites. I can tell people a few things. First of all, what people on the street treat as a matter of political opinion, therefore subjective and people having different views on matters is one of the most sacred freedoms, educated elites tend to see differently. They tend to see them as professional questions. So if you are a professor of engineering or a student of economics, and child psychologists tell you that trans children exist, you are supposed to assume that they know their jobs. Suppose you check their study methodology, and it checks out. At that point what can you say? That they are falsifying data? That would be like the head of the marketing department accusing the head of the accounting department of cooking the books. Basically a libel. Not something like a friendly political disagreement, that is only possible between non-experts.
When you are on the side of elites, you generally do not notice elites exist. (Take not here :) ) you just notice smart people are usually on your side. Of course. You know you are not an idiot, so it is not surprising.
When you are not on the side of elites, you are painfully aware of their existence. You just keep hitting walls everywhere. You feel like that kid who farted in the middle of the lunchroom. The worst part is when you doubt yourself, you know you are not some tinfoil hat type, and yet keep strangely feeling so. The worst part is you don't even really understand what is going on. You would understand it if people were taking bribes, for example. But they seem keenly honest, living modestly, do not actually have as an individual much power (as a class, yes, but individually not) and yet somehow you see things going horribly wrong.
Trudeau? The man who declared martial law over honking is your textbook NON-Authoritarian??!? He was stealing people's money without due process recourse.
> The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). The benefits of civil denaturalization include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport. At a fundamental level, it also supports the overall integrity of the naturalization program by ensuring that those who unlawfully procured citizenship, including those who obtained it through fraud or concealment of material information, do not maintain the benefits of the unlawful procurement.
What sort of things count as 'willful misrepresentation'? Well...
> The government has claimed that Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil intentionally misrepresented information on his green card application and therefore is inadmissible to the United States. According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022" and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.
Combined with the recent SCOTUS case on birthright citizenship (even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, surely birthright citizenship is an *obvious* case where nationwide injunctions apply!) and legislation attempting to increase annual spending on ICE to over $150b (you know, the guys walking around in masks arbitrarily detaining anyone who looks vaguely ethnic, even if they are US citizens) it seems obvious to me that the government is eager to dramatically expand the definition of 'illegal'. Already there are calls to deport mamdani from federal reps, which is as disgusting as it is insane
I share the skepticism about nationwide injunctions generally, and also think that this specific topic is a good fit for their use. It would be great if either Congress would legislate or the SCOTUS had put into case law something like, "Federal courts cannot issue injunctions applying beyond the plaintiffs that are before them, unless the legal issue is a matter of interpretation or enforcement of specific text within the federal Constitution."
>even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, this is the *obvious* case where they apply
I don't understand why you think that. It seems to be an obvious case where they do NOT apply. A claim that Person X is subject to revocation of naturalization or permantent residence because he made misrepresentations is inherently a fact-specific, individualized question. There is nothing universal about it. Nor is there anything inherently unlawful about initiating denaturalization proceedings on that basis https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-l-chapter-2
I am sure that the Administration's claims re Mahmoud Khalil are almost certainly bogus, because that is how they roll; note that misrepresentations must be material, and "a concealment or misrepresentation is material if it "has a natural tendency to influence, or was capable of influencing, the decision of" the decisionmaking body to which it was addressed.'" Kungys v. United States, 485 US 759 (1988) ["Looking, therefore, solely to the question whether Kungys' misrepresentation of the date and place of his birth in his naturalization petition was material within the meaning of § 1451(a), we conclude that it was not. "]
I thought the OP was referring there not to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather to the general question that was just ruled on by the SCOTUS: whether a president can order implementation of a legally-new interpretation of a piece of the Constitution.
I'm also skeptical that a universal injunction is particularly necessary re birthright citizenship. When is this going to come up, in practice? If the govt tries to deport me, I present my birth certificate to the judge, and under current caselaw the judge has no choice to rule in my favor. The govt can appeal, but that will lead to a broad ruling. It might come up when Iapply for a passport, but that can easily be dealt with in a class action.
There might be other issues where the absence of universal injunctions leads to people not getting their day in court, but birthright citizenship does not seem to be one of them.
It applies to babies being born in hospitals. The whole point of the eo is that Trump is trying to stop birthright citizenship, which afaict is blatantly unconstitutional. A week ago, if you are on a greencard and have a child in the US, that child is a US citizen. This is written into the 14th amendment and supported by case precedent (Wong Kim iirc).
I know what the EO purports to do, and why it is bogus.. But, so what? It doesn't stop the issuance of a birth certificate. So, what effect will it have on a baby, as a practical matter, such that the failure to issue a universal injunction will harm them?
I didn't mean that OP was referring to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather that they were referring to denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence in general.
And my point is that, because such cases are fact-specific, there is nothing to universally enjoin.
The question of whether a POTUS is able to unilaterally declare and begin implementing a change in the long-established (by SCOTUS precedent) legal understanding of part of the Constitution, seems to me about as general as it ever gets. That question isn't fact-specific at all: either a POTUS can do it or not.
But whether the issue is general has nothing to do with whether an injunction is universal or not. What matters is who is governed by the injunction. From the decision the other day:
>Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone.
Note also my comment re Khalil was based on my (mis)understanding that when OP said that they thought "this issue" was particularly appropriate for universal injunctions, he was referring to the policy of denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence, not to the birthright citizenship EO.
Not a US citizen, but once a court has ruled that a specific EO is unconstitutional, this ruling *not* applying universally to everywhere the constitution applies sounds completely insane to me. Can someone explain to me why it isn't?
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
Civil rights law? Imagine how much faster you would have been able to move through the curriculum if you were allowed to kick out the kid who couldn’t remember the “trees” song.
Also, I’m sure, “your child is too stupid for us to teach,” is a bad way to build reputation.
I am the parent from the Brownsville campus and crazy thing is, I still believe ALPHA can revolutionize education. Their model can be done cheaper, more effectively and replicable. All the things they should've learned in Brownsville but didn't because they were already moving on to marketing and charter applications after a year of being there.
The biggest issue is that one primary function schools serve is daycare. Having the kids for only 2 hours a day doesn't provide this. So the school will mostly want the kids either all day *OR* until the "normal" dismissal time when the existing after-school care programs are open to watch over the kids.
The *next* biggest issue is that lots of parents want more hours of instruction rather than fewer. Whether the extra hours are particularly effective (at the margin) is not super important.
100% this. The primary function of school is daycare. That's why it's resisted significant reform, and it's why schoolteachers are safe even in the face of potential AI disruption. School is state-subsidized daycare. Very few people actually care about the learning. If there was a voucher system whereby parents got whatever per-pupil cost to spend on the tutor/daycare of their choice, I'm confident that most of the money would go towards daycares. (They wouldn't be branded that way, of course. But they would, in fact, be daycares.)
I don't think that "teaching the curriculum" is a great way to measure the utility of school anyway.
The "curriculum" as it exists is some summarised lowest common denominator of what every student absolutely must be able to learn in a year. I don't want my kids to just learn the bare minimum, I'm sure there's a vast amount of other stuff they could be learning while they're at it. If you're done with fractions then please teach her dendrology and Byzantine history.
Indeed, selective schools are all about this and they often have wonderful reputations. It's not so clear how much of the reputation is due to great teaching rather than great students who would prosper under even lousy teaching, though.
A few decades back I pulled together data for my local public schools. It included standardized test scores and education levels of the parents. And the schools' rating (1 - 10) in California.
*) The general definition of a "Good School" is having a good rating.
*) The way to get a good rating is to have the kids test well.
*) About 80% of the kids' test scores could be predicted from only the parents' education level
I'd like to see something more rigorous and broader, but that's what I saw when I looked at my local public schools.
"How come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only goes two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
The big thing you're missing here is that, for better or worse, for most people, the kids being babysit for almost a full workday for free is just as important as them learning. Or at least, the extra 6 hours hours they're in school is a feature, not a bug.
I thought this was so self evident that I find it surprising Scott would even ask the question. Paul Graham wrote an essay about this topic like 20 years ago.
To be fair, I didn't recognize this until reading one of Freddie de Boer's education essays a few years ago. Although I think i would have by now since we now have kids in school and are reaping the benefits of the free babysitting.
Also, you expect school to teach some stuff other than academics. You'd like kids to make friends and learn to function in a group away from their parents, with lots of supervision in the classroom and less in the gym and still less on the playground.
I would consider it a better feature if my kids could spend those 6 hours playing, reading a book, or working on their own project. Rather than sitting and being tortured by slow pretend-learning.
With you watching them or while at school? If the former, keep in mind that's not an option for most two income families. If the latter, consider how difficult it is to get education funding as it is and now think about trying to sell "well actually, we are only going to educate them the first half of the day, and they can do whatever they want the second" to parents who won't trust you to actually educate them in half the time, and taxpayers who don't want to pay for free babysitting the other half of the time. I think it's pretty easy to understand how we get the system we have, mushing together the two benefits to minimize complaints from both groups, even if it's objectively not efficient or ideal.
I sympathize, but I also keep reminding myself that my intuitions for how to fix education are probably wildly wrong in general. I think I have a good idea of what kind of schooling would have suited me as a child, but I'm an extreme outlier, and that kind of schooling would have not been much good for most of the other kids in my school.
Of course. Which has made it all the stranger with no mention of this triumph of feminism that so many districts in my state are going to a 4-day week.
"Lots of people agree that it’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
This exists. Also, the students who do it are FAR, FAR more interesting people than what can become the 5-day all-day mind-meld.
Christian Twitter is chirping about YongHoon Kim from South Korea, who has the highest IQ ever recorded at 276 (!) and recently declared that he believes Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is the revealed word of God.
My thoughts -
1. What does it even mean to have an IQ of 276?? Assuming a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 10, the chances are vanishingly small of anyone in human history achieving this. It also implies he is smarter than an Einstein-level genius by about the same proportion as Einstein is smarter than someone severely intellectually disabled. Do IQs above, say, 200 actually correlate with anything meaningful?
2. As a Christian I obviously find this flattering (“a smart person is someone who knows more than you and agrees with you.”) I know some may disagree, but I don’t think religion should be dismissed as the province of the irrational and uneducated.
3. What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)
Innumerable extremely smart people have believe extremely stupid things. There is no reason to think that because a smarter person things something it is more likely to be true. Furthermore, there will be a comparably smart person who believes the opposite.
"Christian Twitter is chirping about YongHoon Kim from South Korea, who has the highest IQ ever recorded at 276 (!) and recently declared that he believes Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is the revealed word of God."
This kind of thing makes my heart sink, because yes I understand the impulse to react with "well this guy is smart and he believes it" when faced with the attitudes of "only dumb ignorant fools believe this tripe".
But it has all kinds of possibilities to go haywire: (1) the guy is a fraud and this is a con e.g. he's setting up to bilk the credulous of funds to help him 'start a church in Korea' or the likes (2) the guy is really smart, maybe not that smart, but he'll go off the rails and start declaring *himself* the Second Coming or veer off into all kinds of heretical territory (3) he's not as smart as quoted but he is a genuine believer, but someone discovers he lied about his IQ and uses that to discredit him, the Christians who believed him, and religion in general (e.g. "see they're all fakes and idiots and gullible and liars just like we knew all along").
'I believe because I have been converted' and never mind your IQ score is more secure in the long run.
Perhaps you’re right - I shouldn’t try to encourage people to think more deeply about Christianity by relying on the testimony of some random guy on the Internet, I should talk about my own experience
I just looked this up and that 276 figure was based on MENSA-Korea's 24-point standard deviation. Using the standard 15-point scale, it's a score of 210. Still high, of course, but more believable.
IQ tests are normed tests, not absolute, meaning they sort people relative to other people. At 7 to 8 standard deviations, there's not a lot of meaningful comparisons so I wouldn't put too much weight on it. Measurement error becomes a very real issue at that level.
IQ 276 on 24-point standard deviation is still 7 1/3 sigma, which is 1 in 3×10^9. So it is still far outside the range of plausibility, unless you believe that someone actually made a psychological test validated on approximately 10^10 - 10^11 volunteers.
The literally smartest person on Earth (assuming we could find them) would be about 6 1/2 sigma, that is IQ 197 on the 15-point scale, and IQ 256 on the Korean scale.
10^9 is a billion so it's not literally impossible that one of the 8 billion people on earth sorts that high. Though I'd say that it's far less likely that that one person was correctly identified than that this is a just a noisy measurement at the extreme range of the instrument.
As an intelligent (if not 276 IQ intelligent) person, I don't care, unless he comes up with a novel argument for why Christianity is true.
Raw intelligence is not the same thing as domain knowledge, and it's entirely possible that I've read more about religion, world history, and specifically the history of the Roman Empire and Judea than he has; if he found this or that advocate for Christianity persuasive, well, I'm within my rights to disagree.
At some point, you get the "top thousand people in the world" -- their IQs are basically unmeasurable, in terms of "who is better than whom" and you pull the guy whose unique skillset does what you want.
Yeah interesting, I sometimes think high intellect is a risk factor for pride, which makes it more difficult to accept the truth of religion. Religion necessarily involves a surrender to the unknown and the acceptance that there are mysteries too deep for one’s mind to comprehend
I think Wooly put it well. It makes sense that very smart people would actually question the idea that the orthodoxy of our time (materialist humanism) or the orthodoxy of the previous time a few centuries ago (biblically inerrant Christianity) just happens to be the timeless universal truth.
While "normal" people would just rather do what their ancestors did without trying to understand the new orthodoxy, and "smart" people would think *just enough* to understand the new orthodoxy and why it's better than the old one and then *stop*. And certainly not think enough to wonder if *that* might *also* be wrong.
There may also be a barber pole effect here. People who aren't that smart but have their life basically together signal religious belief to distinguish themselves from the drug users and criminals and so on. People who are a bit smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a drug addict or party animal but *are* worried about being mistaken for a non-smart normal person, so they signal irreligion to do so. People who are very smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a normal person but *are* worried about being mistaken for a merely slightly smart person, so they signal (maybe esoteric maybe not) religious belief.
That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
>That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
True! Also, there is the unfortunate point that compressing the relationship into a _correlation_ misses the points you raise, since correlations are awful for capturing strongly nonlinear relationships, most severely if, as you suggest, the actual relationship is not monotonic.
Do you know what sort of IQ test was used to evaluate Kim's IQ? Most standardized IQ tests have an upper limit around 155, due to the limited number of extremely difficult items. Supposedly, there are high-range IQ tests designed to handle people with extremely high IQs, but to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been standardized and/or normalized for reliability (mainly because there aren't many individuals with an IQ of 5σ to use as samples).
As for the correlation between intellect and religiosity, that depends on how you define "intellect" and "religiosity". If we're reducing intellect to an IQ score (and I don't subscribe to that hokum), then numerous studies have shown a negative correlation between religiosity and higher IQ. Terman's longitudinal study of geniuses (IQ > 135) suggested that these individuals were somewhat less religious than the general population, although not overwhelmingly so. Terman spoke in general terms, though, and I don't think his team published any hard numbers on this question. The famous SMPY study (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) tracked teens in the top 0.01% in math ability (IQs >145), followed them longitudinally, and found a trend toward lower religiosity over time, particularly compared to national averages. Those going into STEM fields were particularly less religious.
I found this for you on Google Scholar: "The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations" by Zuckerman et al.
> A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, this is behind a paywall. But my first question would be, how did these studies define religious belief? If they defined religiosity as belief in an Abrahamic creator-god who is omniscient and omnipotent, then they may be misclassifying otherwise religious people as atheists and agnostics. Full disclosure: I don't test out as a genius, but my first IQ test put me at +1.9σ. I'm agnostic about belief in a creator entity (because it's an unfalsifiable question). But I'm deeply mystical despite having a firm STEM grounding. I probably wouldn't be classified as religious by the psychometricians, but I am.
My understanding is that there are specific tests used to differentiate the very high IQ from the extremely high IQ. The Giga Society, which is similar in principle to Mensa but only admits those with IQs above 190, lists some here
Most (none?) of those tests seem to have been developed by psychologists or other types of academic psychometricians. I mean, just look at the names of some of these tests! They're as creative as cannabis strain names! ;-) The gigasociety insists that we pay a fee to take any of these tests, and we'll keep the questions secret. This leads me to think they don't have a high sample size of takers, and they haven't done much normalization against standard IQ tests, nor between all the tests that they offer. Seems kinda bogus to me.
Yeah, the tests are fake. It is obvious to anyone who learned about test standardization.
The simple story is that you can't calibrate a "1 in N" test without actually testing it on N (preferably more) people, and I strongly doubt that any of these self-declared gigachads actually had the money to test billions of volunteers.
So it's more like: "We invented a bogus test, test gullible people for money, and declare five winners among them to be the five smartest people on the planet."
It doesn't mean literally nothing. It means they are probably pretty good to great at memorization, pattern matching, and mental arithmetic, standard test taking stuff.
It's also only mostly ridiculous rather than completely ridiculous, which is not what I thought i was going to say once i started typing. Yes, a z score of 17 is unfathomable. But. The tail end of real distributions stop resembling the normal distribution.
The tallest human ever was 8' 11". This would put him ~13 to 16 standard deviations above the average height (he was born in 1918, i don't care enough to find good data on standard deviations back then)
This is impossibly tall, if all you go by is the Z score.
276 is impossibly smart, if all you go by is the Z score, and by with a few orders of magnitude.
I think its much, much easier for a human to get impossibly tall than impossibly smart, but the argument is not as rock solid as I would like it to be.
So that’s what it “means.” I wonder though if after a certain level IQ is not a good predictor of achievement, sort of like height in basketball. It’s a strong predictor up to a point, but at some point NBA players are tall enough and other factors become dominant. That’s why Michael Jordan at 6 foot 6 is a much better player than the tallest man ever at 8 foot 11.
> There are tests to differentiate between an IQ of 150+ and an IQ of 190+
Giga Society is a scam... or at best, a group of confused people who have no idea what they are talking about (which would not be an unexpected thing among the Mensa crowd).
Let's crunch some numbers:
IQ 130 = 1 in 50 (Mensa level)
IQ 140 = 1 in 300
IQ 150 = 1 in 2,000
IQ 160 = 1 in 30,000
IQ 170 = 1 in 500,000
IQ 180 = 1 in 20,000,000
IQ 190 = 1 in 700,000,000
As a rule of thumb, to develop a statistical test for detecting a "1 in N" level, you need to test about 10×N uniformly randomly selected people. You probably need to pay them (you can't rely on volunteers doing this for free, because they won't be a representative sample of the population), add some logistics on top of that, and you end up with at least $100 per test subject.
Psychology researchers usually have limited budgets, even the most famous ones cannot spend literally billions. This is why typical serious IQ tests stop somewhere near IQ 140. Assuming 10×N test subjects and $100 per subject, that already costs $100×10×300 = $300,000. Plus, you usually want to have IQ test scores separate for different ages, so that would be $300,000 per age group.
It is possible to test IQ above 150 in principle, but consider the costs. A test for measuring IQ 160 would cost $100×10×30,000 = $30M. Per age group! I find it difficult to believe that someone actually spent as much money for that. But without spending the money... no, you cannot make a statistically valid distinction between IQ 150 and above.
The Giga Society would have to spend $700B for their test. (Actually, $700B per age group! Which would require testing literally every single person on the entire planet! But they seem to be unaware of such details.) I do not believe they did this. Whatever they did instead is crackpottery.
It doesn't mean nothing. Suppose you have the 276 IQ guy and a 100 IQ guy in a room. If you were able to interrogate them, would you be able to guess which is which without directly asking their test results?
To me, the answer is obviously yes. IQ tests aren't random number generators.
However, I don't think I would be able to do the same with 276 and 140. Im willing to accept that above 140, an IQ test might as well be a random number generator.
I'm not saying you couldn't easily tell a 276 IQ person from a 140 IQ person, I'm just saying that there's no test well calibrated enough to give you a "276" rather than just saying "Whoop, this person exceeds the ceiling of this test".
Anyway look I think it's been established elsewhere in the thread that the guy actually scored a 276 in some kind of other test, not an IQ test, so we can probably drop the subject.
No, it literally means nothing, IQ is fundamentally an ordinal scale and cannot distinguish between "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a little bit" and "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a lot". The apparent interval nature is an artifact of the norming process, and at that point there's nothing left to norm against.
Yeah, I mean the guy may be genuinely very smart (or not--some people with really impressive IQ scores don't seem to do much, but there's a pretty strong positive correlation between IQ scores and accomplishing things), but whereas an IQ of 145 is meaningful in the sense that we know that the number of people whose scores are above it should be about one per thousand, and that we probably have some useful data about how people with 145 IQ scores performed on some real-world tasks, a score of 276 doesn't tell us any of that. It's like I ran a regression analysis on the relationship between temperature and murder rate and then extrapolated it out to the expected murder rate when it's 300 F outside.
Maybe there's a strong positive correlation between IQ scores (high) and accomplishing things. I think there's also bound to be a very strong correlation between your differential IQ score and accomplishing things.
Few people game an IQ test low "just to see how the questions change." And you can be sure they aren't narcissists or midwits.
Lewis Terman tracked the lives of about 2500 people with IQs over 135. None of them became captains of industry, won any major awards, or made any important scientific discoveries. Two people whose IQs didn't make the cut for inclusion in the Terman study won Nobel prizes, though.
And Nicholas Taleb provided an excellent rebuttal to the classic Zagorsky study, which purported to find a strong correlation between IQ and income.
> Lewis Terman tracked the lives of about 2500 people with IQs over 135. None of them became captains of industry, won any major awards, or made any important scientific discoveries. Two people whose IQs didn't make the cut for inclusion in the Terman study won Nobel prizes, though.
True (with a small correction: it was 1500 people, not 2500), but from my perspective that just means that the early IQ tests sucked. It's like complaining that the first steam engine leaked steam, and using that as evidence that physics is debunked.
The first IQ tests put a lot of emphasis on historical trivia and similar encyclopedic knowledge. Back then, people used "knowledge of the kind of stuff they teach at school" as a proxy for intelligence, which probably disadvantaged the STEM types. Today, the standard meaning of intelligence is the g factor.
> South Korean Kim Young-hoon was recognized as the person with the highest IQ in history, scoring 276 at the World Memory Championships, according to the organizer of the competition, the World Mind Sports Council
> The World Memory Championships is an organized competition of memory sports in which competitors memorize as much information as possible within a given period of time.
> The World Championships consist of ten different disciplines, where the competitors have to memorize as much as they can in a period of time:
One-hour numbers (23712892....)
5-minute numbers
Spoken numbers, read out one per second
30-minute binary digits (011100110001001....)
One-hour playing cards (as many decks of cards as possible)
15-minute random lists of words (house, playing, orphan, encyclopedia....)
15-minute names and faces
5-minute historic dates (fictional events and historic years)
15-minute abstract images (WMSC, black and white randomly generated spots) / 5-minute random images (IAM, concrete images)
Speed cards - Always the last discipline. Memorize the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards as fast as possible.
Another reason for skepticism: the *actual* Korean with the highest recorded IQ on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale isn't YongHoon Kim but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong who is a pretty famous case within these circles. AFAICT Kim is "an associate professor at Shinhan University and vice president of the North Kyeong-gi Development Research Center".
Saw a video about a guy with extraordinary memory skills. A lot of the stuff he could do resembled the tasks above -- learning long sequences of numbers, etc.. But they also showed him learning Icelantic well enough to hold a conversation in -- I forget how long, I think it was something like a coupla days. And the conversation wasn't a trivial one, I was substantial and went on for a while. *That* impresses me.
"What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)"
Very, very loose vibe thing:
Normal people are usually religious (including secular religion things).
Smart people usually aren't religious.
Really smart people are a crap shoot but their religious beliefs are always really weird and esoteric. Like, weird gnostic cults or obsessive mathematical platonists or just a sh*t ton of LSD. Newton is a good example, as the dude was super into alchemy, like, seriously into it.
If I was introduced to a super smart person and was told they were religious, my priors are way higher for them being into Kabbalah or something than, like, Methodism.
Serious IQ tests do not even reach anywhere near 276, because that is statistically a nonsense -- you would have to calibrate the test on more people than actually exist on this planet.
Could it be a typo for 176? That happens to be the highest value I have ever seen in actual test.
Someone (maybe even me) should write a FAQ about IQ, because whenever this topic appears, I keep saying the same things over and over again.
The formula for IQ has changed from "mental age divided by physical age" (which made sense for children but not for adults) to "100 + 15 × sigma". The values are similar around 100, but the further we go, the more noise is there. IQ 228 makes sense in the old formula, which was probably used at Marilyn's first test. Using the modern formula, even IQ 186 would be absurdly high; the serious tests end somewhere around IQ 140. You can't meaningfully compare the old results to the new results in the high range.
The thing that always struck me: if she really was the smartest human who'd ever lived, it seems like she kinda wasted her talents. I mean, she married well, and wrote some newspaper columns and books, but it kinda seems like the smartest person in the world ought to be discovering new physics or figuring out how to build fusion reactors or something. It would be like if you somehow learned that you were the most musically talented person on Earth, and so you decided to sing in your local church choir once a week rather than, say, composing new music that future generations would love or something.
IQ falls apart at the tails of the distribution. It's really only meant for comparisons within a few standard deviations from the mean, maybe 70-130. Anything much higher than that you should probably just generalize as "high IQ". I don't think 276 is any more meaningful than 150 here.
We've made a chatbot with 200k tokens of knowledge of AI x-risk in its context. If you ask it some hard questions on AI safety, it might surprise you with how well current LLMs can explain the problem. In something like a third of its responses, it generates genuinely very convincing and valid arguments.
Especially curious to hear the thoughts of people who are not convinced of AI x-risk.
I asked "well what white-collar desk jobs are the least likely to be automated"
it gave me a long-ish, decent answer and, at the end, it asked: "If you want, I can suggest ways to “future-proof” your own skillset, or help brainstorm transition paths as the landscape shifts."
I said "yes lets do that"
And it responded "Sorry, we've optimized this tool for conversations about AI and the threat it poses, and it is not as useful for other requests."
In the "random question" category: Picked up a book off my library's recommended list, "Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop." In the author's note, she says that she wanted to write about a bookstore which started with the character "hyu." No explanation (nor even the actual character rather than the transliteration) is given by her or by the translator or editor. But there's gotta be someone here who knows a lot about Korean characters, so what's your guess as to why that would be a good bookstore-name starter? TIA!
Tootling around online, it seems "hyu" means "rest, relax, respite" or similar; "dong" refers to a neighbourhood, and "nam" means "south" (since I don't have the characters I'm going by English transliterations).
So very roughly something like 'the bookshop in the restful neighbourhood to the south/in the south (of the city)" and by the reviews, it's because the main character had the conventional (stressful) successful life, got burned out, it all fell apart, and now she's starting off with the cosy bookshop that becomes a shelter for other lost souls. I imagine the idea is to contrast the quiet, relaxed, peaceful atmosphere of the district/bookshop with the hectic pace of city life which has left the customers unhappy and dissatisfied with their careers and personal lives?
Ukraine's drone attack against Russia's bombers parked on the ground makes me wonder: Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
An F-35A costs around $82.5 million. Why not also build F-35ADecoys that would cost far less, like $4 million (price of a new, small passenger jet)? F-35ADecoys could be stationed at air bases to trick an enemy with spy satellites into thinking an attack might come from that direction, or they could be mixed in with real F-35As to sacrificially soak up damage from any preemptive drone attack.
F-35ADecoys would have the same external dimensions and shapes as F-35A's. Only at very close range could you see any differences. However, F-35ADecoys would not have any expensive avionics or technology, would have a cheap, commercial-grade jet engine, and would be made of cheap materials like aluminum and steel rather than stealth composites. The only advanced feature they would have would be an autopilot system that would let them take off, fly long distances, and land without a human pilot.
In a jif, F-35ADecoys could also be converted into cruise missiles by attaching a bomb to their undersides and remotely piloting them into a target.
Having decoys be able to actually fly would be redundant in most scenarios. As long as the decoys look convincing on high-res satellite images while parked on the tarmac, the work is mostly done. Having close-up surveillance (people, drones) that could tell the difference is vastly more difficult and worse-scaling than satellite imagery and should be enough to economically favour the defender.
Adversaries are presumably photographing the bases many times a day, and will be able to keep track of which planes move and which ones don't.
Here's the other thing: F-35s aren't stored out in the open, they live in hangars or at least under cover. You wouldn't park a Ferrari out in the street, I don't know why anyone thinks they'd want to park a $100 million fighter out in the rain to get dirty.
>Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
Because they take up space, you have to maintain them like real planes or else it gives the game away, and the enemy has spies in the military that will give the game away anyway.
Just build a nice hangar and keep unknown numbers of planes inside.
Because using decoys is what a paper tiger military does to pretend to look strong. It's in the US's interest to make its force projection capabilites seem *as credible as possible*. Mixing in fake jet planes into its fleet might embolden foolish actors into picking a fight with us (underestimating our power).
The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. Both countries agree to limits on nuclear capability. Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite. Certain parts of the treaty (standing meetings and on-site inspection) were suspended due to the Ukraine conflict, but the majority of the agreement remains intact.
"The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. ... Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite."
Russia "suspended" participation in the treaty in early 2023, though it said it would continue to abide by the plane number limits. I *think* this means that Russia said it would not build more planes than allowed, but was also not necessarily going to continue allowing for verification. US military inspections of Russian sites, for example, are not longer allowed/done.
So Russia could have placed the planes in bunkers if it wanted to do so. I don't know that Russia has enough bunkers, though.
Except that there was no clause in the New START treaty that mandated parking strategic bombers in the open to be visible from satellite and flyovers. All of the START treaties and the SORT treaty relied on primary verification, and New START allowed up to 18 unannounced on‑site inspections to count warheads on systems including bombers. Bombers can be stored in hangars, especially for maintenance or protection from weather. There's a concealment measure's clause in treaty though, and that might be where the misunderstanding that strategic bombers must be stored in the open comes from...
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or conceal practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms."
But storing nuclear-armed heavy bombers in hardened bunkers seems to be a no-no.
Likewise:
> Each Party shall base:
>...
> (b) deployed heavy bombers only at air bases.
And the treaty says that the parties have to park heavy bombers with nukes at separate bases from heavy bombers without nukes.
Supposedly, its forbidden to deploy fake heavy bombers. Maybe that's implied by the concealment clause, but I don't specifically see that in the New START treaty text.
At least in regard to planes sitting on the tarmac, Russia’s decoy tactics seem to have been largely ineffective against Ukraine’s precision drone strikes. Can't find it now, but there was a video posted on YouTube taken from a Ukrainian drone during their massive June 1st attack on Russian airbases. It demonstrated how the Ukrainian drones successfully avoided the decoys and targeted the real aircraft. I'm not sure, but some of the decoys that Ru used may have been 3-D mockups, because the drones used in the June 1st attack evidently used radar to distinguish real planes from phonies. So, any F-35A decoy would need to have the exact same radar signature as the real aircraft. Not saying this isn't feasible, but Ukraine is incorporating AI into some of its drones.
OTOH, some of the Ru decoy "aircraft" were pretty simplistic, though. Open-source analyst Brady Africk noted that these decoys are not easily mistaken in radar imagery, and the success of Ukraine’s attacks—hitting at least 13 to 20 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers—confirms Ukraine’s ability to bypass such deception. Africk had a thread on X about several instances where realistic aircraft images were painted on the tarmac, but that trick was easily detected from satellite imagery because the painted-image decoys didn't cast shadows.
The days of high-end fighter jet being able to dominate the battlefield may be numbered. According to Trent Telenko...
> Air superiority below 2,000 feet/600 meters is increasingly the only air superiority that matters in the age of drones.
> A few tens of F-35's showing up for 5-to-10 minutes a few times a day cannot compare to tens of thousands of drones hunting individual soldiers 24/7
> "Orders of magnitude mean things" and the the F-35 big/few/expensive cult is so far on the wrong side of the small drone numbers game as to be irrelevant.
> Drones are killing three times as much as artillery. And artillery has historically killed more soldiers than planes.
This isn't a result of technology bottlenecks--it's the result of US (Developed nation) military doctrine and the consequent influence on procurement policies. We could have a much larger number of much cheaper close air support fighters, but we chose, decades ago, not to invest in that. The F-16 is as close as we got--but google "F-20 fighter" to see what we could have had. The F-20 was a derivative of the venerable F-5, which you can buy used today for less than a million dollars.
The days of jet fighters aren't over, they just have to fit themselves into a doctrine with drones as part of the battle space. We may be going back to the days of cheaper, more specialized fighters, though.
I just looked up the F-20. Looks like it would have been about 10% cheaper per plane to buy than the F-16 and maybe 40-50% cheaper to operate due to fuel consumption and maintenance requirements. Conversely, the F-20 would have been much less upgradable than the F-16 (the former being an extensive upgrade of an older design already) and would consequently have had a significantly shorter useful service life. It was also much less capable in bombing roles, and I am seeing conflicting information about how much less capable an F-20 was as a fighter than an F-16
My suspicion is that the F-16 was the right point on the tradeoff curve between cost and features. This is corroborated by South Korea and other countries also evaluating the F-20 in the 80s and deciding to buy F-16s or home-grown fighter designs instead.
There is no question that the F-16 was the more capable aircraft. The question is whether or not we could use something like the F-20 now. Though I am open to the position that a sub-sonic aircraft would be even better.
But you have to supplement those drones--they can't destroy everything, the can be overcome by low level defenses, the drones may be cheap, but they still require operators (much more of a bottleneck than the technology is). And airborne drone operators are a definite thing already--but they don't necessarily need to be in very expensive high performance platforms--a converted transport works well, but who protects the operator aircraft?
Then again, something has to take out those targets the drones can't handle. That's mostly a question of on-the-scene operator skill--there's only so much you can do from the other side of a tele-remote link. A pilot with eyes on the target zone has much better information to work off of, even if they only have seconds to work it. Then someone (in a peer-to-peer conflict at least) has to protect those guys.
Manned aircraft aren't going anywhere, but the combat system they have to fit into is becoming more complex.
-Military strategy generally lags behind technological development. Drones as a major military threat are a very recent phenomenon, only in the last few years in Ukraine (or I suppose the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020 if you were paying attention). Generally what happens is armies deploy using the strategies honed from the last major conflict, and when these no longer work well they bash their head against the wall. As people die from mistakes and the incompetent and overly rigid commanders are weeded out a new strategy is honed.
-The US to some degree has taken proactive measures to prevent this. See the development of TRADOC in the wake of Vietnam and the Yom Kippur war. The reinvigoration of aggressive maneuver tactics led to the absolutely crushing victory over Iraq in 1991, despite the US not being in a major conflict in decades.
-US and also NATO forces have spent the last several decades fighting low tech, low intensity counter insurgency operations. This has conditioned their armed forces for a type of conflict where they set the tempo of operations. The idea of the enemy seizing the initiative with something like a mass drone attack on rear operating areas is totally foreign. As are concepts like electronic warfare and signals discipline. US operating posts are lit up like Christmas trees in the EM spectrum, again because they have spent so long fighting enemies where this is not a relevant concern. A relevant example is how long it has taken for the US/EU to ramp up production of munitions for Ukraine. Their defense industries were conditioned on low intensity conflict, where their annual production might sustain the front in Ukraine for a month.
In essence, drone attacks like this are a very new development. The US military has a lot of institutional inertia and it takes time for new ideas to percolate through and result in new strategy. Given how closely NATO is involved in the Ukraine war, I'm sure they're taking a lot of notes, but it still takes time.
*Also, good luck getting your self-piloting decoy plane that's also a cruise missile for a unit cost of only $4 million.
ETA: One other minor point - who exactly is going to have a bunch of spy satellites and ISR assets as well as the strike capability to hit US airbases? This is basically only China in the Pacific theatre, and maybe Russia in the local region. Everyone else remotely capable of something like this is already allied to the US. Being able to acquire real time intelligence of opposition militaries without massive state capacity is also a very newfangled development of drone technology.
*hushed conspiratorial whisper* Maybe they do. Maybe the the *real* cost for F-35As working is in the ~$150 million range, half their fleet is actually decoys and their OPSEC is just so amazingly good that they've managed to hide this from being public knowledge this whole time.
OK, so that was clearly a joke, I just couldn't resist. Anyway, the thought that occurs to me is that, depending on which particular features and capabilities are most important for learners, a decoy plane program could overlap very nicely with a training plane program. I know that airforces need to devote a considerable amount of flight-hours to pilot training in realistic aircraft, but I'd be surprised if every single feature that makes an aircraft combat capable is necessary for the majority of training flights. A useful training plane might cost more than very low-budget decoy, but being dual-use could still save a decent amount of money. One potential downside I can think of is that intelligence orgs might be able to track the decoys just by keeping an eye on training flights (which I assume are easy to identify as such, even from far away) and then tracking the physical planes as they're moved around.
The wonderful thing about ACX is that it's a near certainty that somebody with vastly more domain knowledge than me will spontaneously appear to explain in exacting detail why all my assumptions above are horribly, horribly wrong. :-)
One obvious problem: a F-35ADecoy probably doesn't look the same across the EM spectrum (e.g., in your hypothetical it has a very different radar return.)
Another is that I roll to disbelieve that a flying decoy costs only $4M.
How do you know they don't do this? And if the answer is that it would actually be pretty obvious based on things like flight envelope, then maybe that's the answer.
“Bank of New York Mellon said it now employs dozens of artificial intelligence-powered ‘digital employees’ that have company logins and work alongside its human staff.
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said. “
I expect more statements like this in the near future. Artificial Intelligence will continue to evolve and take away from humans economically valuable tasks.
Of all the attempts I've heard to try to incorporate AI-generated work into a workplace, this seems like one of the most awkward. There's good ways and bad ways to get value out of AI, and this seems like a bad one.
The future of office work is AI emailing AI in a loop forever and ever? I don't know whether to be horrified or to be relieved; if all the AI are doing the emails and holding the bullshit meetings, that leaves the humans to get on with real work.
I'd like to just bitch for a minute about my new phone.
I had a Samsung Galaxy S9 until two weeks ago, and yes, it was (is! I kept it as a backup!) seven years old.
I had all of the settings DIALED. IN. Bixby: maximally shut off. Privacy and anti-ad stuff: maximally on. Apps were at the barest bare minimum (I actually like to joke that I'm "allergic to apps" whenever someone suggests one to me. I had a small handful, like Uber, Spotify, and Pay-by-Phone for parking, but otherwise didn't have any app that couldn't be used via a browser).
Never the less, for the last year or so, I began receiving occasional alerts from the operating system that I was out of space. I transferred my images to the SD card (IT HAD A REMOVABLE SD CARD!!!), and took other actions, but no matter how much I deleted or moved around, I kept creeping back up into the "your phone is too full and is going to stop working" zone. Text message chains with my more prolific interlocutors were taking 25+ seconds to load a single new message. Etc.
Finally, slightly terrified that my Samsung Galaxy S9 might simply explode like the gluttony victim in Se7en before I had a replacement ready, and, wanting the transition to a new phone to be as low-friction as possible, I went and bought the Galaxy 25.
I used the "Smart Switch" app which ostensibly ports over all of ones apps and settings and data, but that is absolute horseshit. Too much is way too different, for completely retarded reasons. For example, the goddamned blue light filter was renamed to "eye comfort shield," is multi-levels deeper in the settings than it was on my S9, and is way less configurable, both in terms of range and precision.
It also has TWO fucking AIs on it; Samsung's Bixby and Google's Gemini, both of which I've done everything possible to shut off but which nevertheless occasionally flash me or post up little icons in other programs, wanting to "help."
And then there are ads, ads, ads, ads, including in apps like Spotify that I wasn't seeing two weeks ago using those same apps on my S9.
Nothing is meaningfully "better." The screen resolution and clarity and so on look the same. Photos look the same. Text messaging works again, but that probably could have been fixed on the S9 by deleting the literally tens of thousands of text messages I had in some conversations (I only ported over one year's worth of messages during the "Smart" Switch). I guess entering my thumbprint on the front of the phone rather than the back is slightly more ergonomic, but a friend with the Galaxy S23 just told me that feature tends to wear out screens in about two years, according to the repair tech she just spoke to about her two-year-old phone. The battery life is only about 35% better than the S9, which is perhaps the most egregious disappointment.
And then as I mentioned, a lot of stuff is worse! Settings and features have randomly been renamed and/or are less configurable. Drop-down menus look completely different. No removable SD card. No headphone jack.
I know there are a lot of things I can do to get my new phone to where I want it - tutorials and programming and whatnot - but that's also sort of my point, I don't WANT to have to spend hours researching how to unfuck my phone and then even more time unfucking it.
It was reasonably easy to unfuck my phone back in 2018, and now it's infinitely harder, and that's what I'm pissed about.
That, and that apparently I'll have to do this all again in another two years.
I, also, had a Galaxy S9 that I very much liked and would like to still be using. I, also, try to keep the minimum number of "apps" and other shiny features, but some of them are essential and some of those were no longer compatible with the S9 so I was forced to upgrade about two years ago. To a Galaxy S22, in my case.
Smart Switch worked better for me than for you, apparently because I was only skipping 13 model numbers rather than 16. Gemini wasn't a thing. But I agree, the new phone has very little to recommend itself over the S9, the user interface changes are mostly just annoying, and the loss of the removable SD card is a serious downgrade. I hadn't even thought to check on that, because I thought it inconceivable that anyone would make a high-end smartphone without that.
Apparently you are my soul mate. Or at least my phone mate.
I upgraded my phone last week, from the A13 to the A16, and I'm quite happy with how well the Smart Switch worked. Perhaps the problem is that 7 years is longer than it's meant for?
But my phone is significantly lower end than yours, so it's much better: I still have an SD card slot, for example.
Sheesh. As someone with an S9 on its last legs, now you have me scared...
I haven't had any issues with running out of storage space, even with hundreds and hundreds of photos. When I first got the phone, I set it to auto-delete text messages older than 2 years. Maybe that's why?
Ugh. There's seriously no audio jack on the newer Galaxy phones? [Grumble grumble]
I still want to eventually replace my phone because the battery is dying. Should I try and get the battery replaced at a repair shop instead?
Is it just me, or was that "low SES" mom from Alpha School being kind of cagey? She provided no specifics as to what the actual problem was. Just vague "the school didn't meet our needs" type of complaints, with no examples.
Reading between the lines, Alpha School in Brownsville exists for the benefit of SpaceX employees. If you're not the child of SpaceX employees then you're probably not going to fit in.
There's not a nice way of saying "These kids are too dumb and poor to fit in at our kids-of-rocket-scientists school" but that's basically the way it is.
Given that Brownsville is 94% Hispanic, it's unclear who at the school would *not* be a member of the community whose needs are not being met - unless it's some kids whose parents work at Space-X. There is a lot of anger down there at Space-X, so the rant (AI?) may be a species of that. Some of the anger is wholly justified; some of it is silly and has had unfortunate results as for instance Musk was prepared to buy and swap a larger, better piece of speculator-owned habitat (that the Conservation Fund had been trying to secure for some time) to gift to the state parks and wildlife department, in exchange for mostly some state-owned inholding or lots within the old failed development that he has spruced up, next to (rather alarmingly adjacent to, but I guess I don't understand these things!) where the rockets launch.
The whole area is extremely important biologically, both for wildlife and some unusual plant situations, especially the lomas; and is more or less the site of arguably the "last battle of the Civil War".
But given it was fruitless to suppose the government was going to shut down Space-X, the sign Americans or at least one South African can yet "do stuff" - a larger intact piece of habitat was very obviously the better end of the deal, especially if Musk is going to be allowed to continue dropping rocket crap all over Boca Chica as seems inevitable.
The state/feds are much to blame too; the rather beautiful (if you know what you're looking at) drive to Boca Chica passes through what has been a wildlife refuge, leased for the purpose by the feds (I think, as a unit of LRGNWR) from some idiotic "navigation district". A conservation area that expires is obviously no conservation area at all, especially as threats to e.g. the oceot, rare plant communities increase. That should never have been allowed to happen, and Musk is not to blame for the greed of earlier bubbas.
The original review said that the Brownsville site was set up at the behest of SpaceX employees, so I imagine the start was "well-heeled parents sending their smart kids to this" and then maybe they tried letting in a few poor but smart kids from the low-income bracket in order to test if the Alpha approach would scale up.
However, as the complaints in the comments seem to indicate, if you didn't belong to the original clique of SpaceX parents and/or didn't have the money to pay for Junior to head off on a ski trip or over to Poland (or whatever equivalent they were doing in Brownsville), it very much was a two-tier experience. Alpha had its own way of doing things and if you wouldn't or couldn't accommodate to their requirements, then the kids would eventually have to drop out.
I don't know about the Space-X employees being "well-heeled". It's possible, I guess - but despite some tidy new buildings, the vibe given off there is a bit more Burning Man than beau monde.
The very first time I drove out there, the place consisted of what looked to the untrained eye like a piece of junk, and a local kid guarding it from his old Gremlin.
ETA: or: I don't think the class of people that send their kids on ski trips to Europe, overlaps with the class of people willing to work on something like Space-X while living in a place like Brownsville.
Yes it's obviously very suspicious. In my experience, parents of all stripes *love* to talk about school administration drama in *excessive detail*. My assumption (absent future elaboration) is either that this person is untruthful, or that the details are unflattering to them and/or their ingroup.
It sounds to me like your assumptions are based on your own biases.
I do not have to provide any explanations for my statements. I don't have to provide reason why 85% of the original students are no longer at the school. Even if all your (everyone on this threat) assumptions of what happened are true, ALPHA is the one that is claiming on the internet and on charter applications all over the country that their model works for everyone.
If our kids were too... whatever, to fit in ALPHA, doesn't that negate their statement? and if so, maybe we might want to be skeptical of their other statements and marketing?
Honestly, I'm way too stupid to be able to write what happened in a cohesive manner without feeling self conscious, but I am trying. I'm ESL as most are in my community. I just think we deserve a voice.
"It’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
As to the latter point: one of the huge functions of school is childcare for people whose work don't allow them to have kids hanging around (most of us). A two hour a day school would be, for most people, a huge negative. Another major function of school is social; I assume that those two hours are actually *studying*, but a lot of what goes on at school is learning how to be a social person, making friends, playing, etc.
As to the former point: I assume part of the answer is self-selection effect, at least for private and charter schools, which select for kids who can learn that much that fast. At home schools the curriculum and teaching is geared to the individual; presumably public schools could teach a lot more with a 1:1 or 2:1 student:teacher ratio, and with hugely tailored individual curricula. Homeschooling isn't scalable and efficient; that's presumably a large part of why it works (when it does).
- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
- Enough new apartments for families of 2-4 (only for people who have not yet owned a home) at cost each year [such] that the house market slowly gets cheaper?
- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
How does this affect the economics, when blueberries are market value, but the first liter of milk per week is at governmental cost?
Just ask yourself: what happens when the provider of <Government mandated good X> only needs to satisfy a bureaucratically-mandated definition of quality and hit production targets? Will quality remain market-competitive? Or will, say, ground beef be supplemented with shredded newspaper and sawdust for a consumer who's a captive audience and unable to turn to competitors for alternatives.
Market mechanisms are deeply, deeply important. It never ceases to amaze me how naive people continue to be in positing simplistic obviations of them. Here's a rule of thumb: whatever market alternative you come up with, try really hard to think of how a dishonest actor could work to defraud that system. Because the urge to cheat is a human universal. The only thing that keeps anyone honest is constant oversight. In the realm of economic behavior, market mechanisms are the only thing that can come close to doing that.
I've eaten government mass-provided food. It is nothing to write home about, but is edible and healthier than what I buy when I go to the supermarket or a restaurant, and tastes better than most of what I can make myself.
The trick is to have higher ups eating the same food regularly as a matter of course.
[Added: This seems like an isolated demand for rigor. Please think really hard about how people in a free market will work to cheat. I expect the issue with government involvement will be more about it being 4 times as expensive to society as the free market]
Yes, of course people try to cheat all the time in the free market. The thing that catches cheaters is information and free markets categorically process and disseminate information faster than central planners. That's why communism always loses. No system is perfect and even market solutions have tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs are much better than any alternative. Like Churchill said, it's the worst system except for all of the others. Do you not know enough history to remember what price controls did in the 70's? Or what a Soviet bread line looked like? Central economic planning is always the wrong answer.
As to your note about catching cheaters more - this seems likely, yet ignores both the real life example of American fast food - and the general failure to have a healthy food culture - as well as the kind of cheating that goes on, and finally ignores the reality that government provided food works just fine (though at smaller scale) in my experience.
Most of the major issues, such as simply not growing enough food, seem simple to avoid if you're aware of the risk. I'd be happy to see a gears-level explanation from you as to why bread-lines are a necessary consequence rather than an impressively incompetent example of central planning.
To put it another way: cheaters can screw up a free market, but if we're going to compare government-run and capitalism-with-cheaters, we have to model the government-run market with the same sorts of cheaters.
And cheaters in government invariably do more damage. It's not even close.
While I appreciate that you are engaging, kindly treat me respectfully - it should be clear that I have noticed the skulls.
Declaiming an outside view that nothing in the general direction of an idea could work, buttressed with an insult and a pithy quote, to what ends I don't know, can only lower the quality of conversation.
What insult? I was just gesturing towards the clear historical counterexamples for your position. If I'm dismissive of the concept of central economic planning then I think that's entirely appropriate. People are commonly dismissive of commonly-accepted failed ideas (phrenology, slavery, theocracy) and in my view collectivism has the most skulls of them all.
If "Do you not know enough history to remember" was not meant as an insult I retract that portion.
Your generic dismissal does not add anything which I can see.
We could discuss practical counter-examples (European healthcare seems like one, Chinese development of industry, any other generally accepted governmental limiting of the free market, such as slavery and hard drugs...) if you very much want this to be a reference class discussion, but it feels like you just want to assert that no sort of central planning could ever work.
>- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
Defining "Basic food" becomes a massive can of worms. Fruit is an essential part of your diet, but blueberries aren't covered - who decides which fruits are necessities instead of luxuries? What if you decide that apples are a basic food, but then a crop failure means that apples suddenly double in price? Which kind of apples, cheap red delicious or expensive honeycrisp? What if you have a dietary restriction or allergy? I'm a vegan, why would I want the government buying me free milk?
I think if you want to ensure free food for everyone, I think it would make more sense to supersize SNAP/food stamps. SNAP does have some restrictions on what foods you can buy with it, but since it gives you a fixed amount of *money* rather than *food*, you can allow market forces to decide which foods are most affordable to provide, and allow choices based on individual tastes.
Basic food can be defined somewhat arbitrarily, but reasonably. Eggs, loaf of bread, milk, cucumbers, tomatoes, a citris fruit and an apple (red delicious).
Nothing here would be free, just subsidized. The point is not for everyone to eat free food, the point is to make sure basics taking up a large majority of your income is a choice.
Market forces are great and all, but the most affordable/tasty things are by definition cutting corners on everything but taste and cheapness.
Now I'm interested in hearing from the target audience about their preferences!
>Market forces are great and all, but the most affordable/tasty things are by definition cutting corners on everything but taste and cheapness.
The government will end up doing the same thing, just in a slightly more opaque way. Your choice of red delicious was based on cheapness, after all. (At least, I hope it was, because I can't imagine you chose them based on taste.)
(Actually, I don't think my local grocery store carries red delicious, since they're not very popular. The cheapest variety is Fuji or Gala. Will the government notice this, or will they just declare Red Delicious For Everyone and call it a day?)
And like, this is just apples. One food. You need to do this for every food that could be considered a "staple" in someone's culture. Vegan staples are different from standard American staples, and Indian or Mexican staples are going to look different yet again. You think that cucumbers are a staple, I would think that broccoli or cabbage are more important if you're trying to focus on nutrition.
If you've ever seen "banana discourse" making the rounds on Tumblr, imagine having that argument for every single food in your pantry.
Ha, red delicious isn't my favorite. Pink delicious eaten by itself, yellow or golden red with peanut butter.
The market likes selling fast food, which can be cheap and taste good but is terrible for you. The government will be a more expensive option for society that will taste worse on average, but with much less perverse incentives.
Is there a reason the government would have to supply all basic foods, instead of just a sufficiently nutritious subset?
Discussing what goes in would be work yes, same as any proposal. This doesn't strike me as a bigger obstacle than designing a park or skyscraper.
Well, first off, it costs an awful lot of money. And since nobody is going to be raising taxes for this (or anything else), that's going to push us several steps closer to the fiscal apocalypse that comes when we find out what level of national debt-to-GDP is too high.
Minimum wages will fall, or more precisely not rise to match the inflation that will probably come from whatever you do to finance this, because there won't be the urgency of "these people literally can't afford to live at current wages!" (which was never true but at least plausible when everybody has to pay their own rent and groceries). That will pull down wages above the minimum as well, particularly the ones that are only modestly above the minimum. So the working class won't find their more-than-just-the-bare-necessities budget increasing nearly as much as you hope.
But aside from those details, it's going to devastate the private market for low-end food, housing, etc. The people who currently run business selling food to poor people, or providing housing to poor people, are mostly going to go out of business - a few of them will pivot to being government contractors supporting the new order, but A: because of economies of scale, not most of them, and B: because of different business models, probably not still maintaining a solid retail distribution network.
And the sell-stuff-to-poor-people market significantly overlaps the sell-stuff-to-working-class-people market, so an awful lot of working-class people who don't need this program are going to find their options reduced to the point that they're going to downgrade to the free-to-poor-people stuff most of the time.
Ultimately, I think this fragments the market. There will be a large basically-socialist economy providing the basics to poor people, and another catering to the UMC-and-above market that wouldn't be caught dead eating a steady diet of government cheese in a housing project down by the river. In between, some of the old businesses will muddle through providing occasional treats for working-class and formerly middle-class families - but economies of scale will push up their prices so those blueberries will be a less common treat than they used to be. And there will probably still be Kosher, Halal, etc, supply chains in parallel; it will be relatively more expensive to practice Judaism or Islam in this brave new world, but most believers will at least try.
So, basically, the same thing that happened to schools when we made public schools freely available for everyone. We've got elite private schools for the rich and rich-adjacent, and we've got religious schools for people willing to pay serious money for their beliefs, and everybody else gets a take-it-or-leave-it public school district. That we all know is very often crap, but which nobody can find a solution for now that "the working class should send their kids to private schools competing to provide the best education at the lowest price" is no longer on the table.
I think the conparison to school is very interesting.
The issues with public school come down to peer quality, teacher quality, and teaching method issues ( and perhaps curriculum), as well as lack of motivation due to school not being viewed as a privelege.
Most basics can be made kosher and halal with minimal effort (as opposed to schooling), peers are irrelevant, motivation is irrelevant..
Putting most poor-food-vendors out of business might just fix the USA obesity crisis.
The fiscal crisis is looming over every government idea, society having less options is otoh unfortunate and otoh maybe it'll help with obesity
>- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
I'm generally not a fan of State-provided services, and usually prefer market-provided services, but, at least in NYC, the current system only gets about a third of its operating costs from fares. So, switching to a completely free system, wholly supported by taxes, instead of 2/3 supported by taxes, at least seems like a sane alternative. The existing system doesn't seem pathological, and the marginal positive externality of reducing congestion in other forms of transportation might turn out to be worth the extra subsidy.
Many Thanks! You might be right, but just how much damage people who _didn't_ value the bus ride would do, but would get on if it is free seems like an open question. Maybe do a pilot project, with half the buses free (maybe every second bus on each route, marked somehow?), and see whether pathologies emerge in practice or not?
Many Thanks! Ouch! You may be right. In general, pilot projects are a good way to see if a proposal works, or if it crashes and burns. If pilot projects generally require _more_ political clout than barrelling ahead and implementing an option without the knowledge that a pilot project would yield, that is unfortunate.
Housing (32%), taxes (27%), transportation (17%), and food (12%) are the major expenses of most households. Everything else is 10-15% of spending.
This is one reason behind the enduring appeal of Republicans: they promise to cut a big cost category while Democrats promise to mostly cut smaller ones (eg healthcare, 5%).
This is also the political economy driving Georgism/Yimbyism/Abundance/etc. The Democrats are hoping they don't have to compete on cutting taxes if they can reduce housing costs instead. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the Republicans have even fewer objections to building than they do. In part because construction leans Republican while the wealthiest landlords/NEPA lawyers/etc tend to lean Democrats (since the biggest landlords are urban residents of Democratic cities). It also drives their love of public transit which has the same issues but, on top of the other ones, only works for urban residents.
If you were the mayor-dictator of a blue city then what you'd want to do is to stimulate construction by removing permits/review/etc, build a ton of public transit, then offer generous concessional loans to first time home buyers. Technically the subsidies would push up demand for housing but the increased construction would push it down in net. Structured correctly, they would actually overstimulate construction by effectively providing a price floor in a market where prices would collapse from overbuilding.
While this would be a major program, it is affordable for major cities (being in the tens of billions per year even for the most expensive versions like NYC). And it would almost certainly be a net positive in terms of new real estate taxes, new construction taxes, and new income taxes from people living actually within the city rather than commuting. And much more impactful than food stamps plus.
If you're just concerned with the theoretical idea of subsidizing the first however many gallons of milk this is not significantly different from just a direct food subsidy. Just with additional administrative costs. You're effectively paying a subsidy which drives up demand across the whole category. Because money is fungible you'll just see them consuming more food (though somewhat less than you'd expect because people purchase fewer calories as their income goes up). Which makes it an unusually good category both economically and from political economy (because people think of food as a right). Except for the fact that subsidizing food has negative health effects.
This seems a remarkably intelligent response, and flattering that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
Subsidizing specific foods doesn't seem like it should always lead to worse health outcomes - I've never heard of anyone becoming obese from cucumber overconsumption.
An NIH systematic review found that subsidizing healthy foods led to more consumption of healthy foods, but effects on obesity were inconclusive.
I'd be curious to see the research. That might be the case, a form of good calories crowding out bad, but equally you might just get more calories. And at any rate, it's a relatively small part of the budget. But in turn that means, if administrative costs are reasonable, then it might be worthwhile simply for social solidarity. Though I'm worried about the political economy of food subsidies being dominated by agribusiness etc.
This is something I've heard but it seems more like a politically convenient deflection. It's rich people in Blue States (and not rich people in Red States). Those are more Republican than the blue state average. But they're not on the whole Republican and in fact are often key parts of the progressive base.
And while Republicans nationally might not be pro-subsidy, they are not anti-growth. Basically you can see the Democrats as representing both the pro-subsidized growth and anti-growth at all camp while the Republicans are the "get out of it altogether" camp. While you can argue that's not as pro-growth as subsidy, it's not anti-growth in the NIMBY sense.
It's not a Republican vs Democrat thing, it's a small cities vs large cities thing.
In a city of (say) 50,000, the benefits of more people are significant and the costs are low. In a city of five million, the benefit of more people is small and the cost is high.
There's some critical size of city below which adding more people to the city is actually beneficial for the people who already live there. We ought to figure out what that size is, and start working to concentrate building in those places.
It seems to me that people living in cities 50k to 100k absolutely hate growth because it rapidly impinges on their quality of life. For example, the vitriol against Californians moving to Bend, Oregon.
I've had a similar idea WRT food, but change "the government provides" to "the government pays for." More specifically, the thought was that the government could make a short-ish list of food items that grocery stores could be encouraged to provide for free, in exchange for some sort of value-equivalent reduction in taxes. The list would include enough of a spectrum of basic nutrition that almost any human *in theory* should be able to walk into a grocery store and pick out items that they can live on (even given most common dietary restrictions) without spending a penny. All of the items on the list would be very plain, basic versions of whatever class they were representing: things like cheap, low-quality bread, bulk grains, a very limited selection of cheap fruit and vegetables, and so forth. Some sort of customer limits/very simple tracking system could ensure that commercial entities didn't use this as a cheap supply of ingredients to turn into more expensive foods.
There are many details that would need to be worked out, and a few ways in which it might ultimately turn out to be impractical. In particular, I've never tried to do the math on probable costs compared to what stores pay in tax. But my underlying gut intuition is that grocery stores mostly don't make their profits on selling the bulk basics anyway: most customers pay for a lot of things above the bare minimum they need, and that the first-order economics would work out fine. Whether this would influence customer purchasing habits enough to be sustainable (why buy the slightly-better thing when the basic thing is actually free?) is another question. But if it worked it could entirely replace programs like food stamps, and would be much more flexible and less all-or-nothing than means-tested government assistance: any person or family could save money and cut their budget in a pinch by skewing their diet towards the food items that they could get for free.
Today, the government establishes a military for national defense. Tomorrow, generals randomly fire missiles into American cities and order tank crews to drive off cliffs.
It turns out that literally any idea will become unworkable if you start with the baseline assumption that everyone involved is the utterly stupid completely incapable of basic reasoning or adaptation.
The obvious wrong solution. Price gouging is good. (Sell your thing for more when demand is high.) What is bad is collusion between vendors to set a high price for everyone.
I do. I have a cap on data each month, if I go over I gotta pay for more gigs. That's because internet is scarcer where I live than where you live. If you have unlimited data with your internet plan that just means that there's enough bandwidth where you live that a flat monthly fee is more than enough to pay the cost. Yet internet access isn't free, because unlike air or sunshine there isn't enough bandwidth for everybody to have as much as they want.
>If you have unlimited data with your internet plan that just means that there's enough bandwidth where you live that a flat monthly fee is more than enough to pay the cost.
True. Still, even locally, the usual expected pathology of "If the consumers see no incremental cost, they will overconsume and break the system." isn't actually a problem here. There are a _lot_ of cases where stable, profit-making businesses choose not to charge incrementally for some good. Buffet restaurants, landline phone service here, (some cell phone plans), some areas' residential water use... It isn't rare.
I just see subsidizing demand as generally bad. Let's take housing. If you give everyone $X a month for housing*, then you increase the demand for housing. This causes the price of housing to increase. The subsidy then goes in large part to the people with the housing to sell.
*Are you just going to subsidize renters, or do home owners also get a subsidy?
If you do that and don't let anyone build new houses/apartments, you will just raise rents and housing prices by an amount that offsets the housing vouchers. It's like you had some kind of really focused inflation that only affected housing, because you have the same number of units of housing but far more dollars chasing them.
For a fairly close real-world worked example, look at federal student loans and college tuition.
Right! That reduces the cost. You can subsidize the supply, but that is tricky too. Perhaps the best thing to do is remove the barriers to making more. Remove zoning laws, regulations, etc... Capitalism is far from perfect, but it's maybe the best system we have at the moment.
Re Building cheap apartments: Who's building them? How do you make 'em cheap? Restrictions on who can buy seem fraught with problems. What if people divorce/ separate. If they move can they sell them? (Then I'll buy cheap, move and sell at a profit.) The price of a thing is that price for a reason. (supply and demand)
Capitalism is the best except where you know where you want to get to and how to do it, see China.
The government should build them.
Make them cheap by being relatively cheap materials -though not so much that they fall apart - and not very large units, by not making a profit, and maybe by subsidizing from tax money.
People choosing to not have a roof over their head is fine, they can sell them (but can't buy a new one). There would be a clear path to having basic needs met without going into debt.
I imagine that if people divorce they'll sell and split it or have one keep it while giving up other some of the other assets.
[Added: people can profit, that's fine. The point is to get small families into the house market and increase the housing supply without it just getting bought up as new speculative assets]
Don't forget that the existing home owners will fight very hard to keep their house prices from going down. And they will be skeptical so project that appear that the MIGHT cause a drop in local home prices will be opposed.
Want to drop a new 2,000 unit apartment complex in the middle of Palo Alto or Mountain View (or Los Altos)? Expect to spend a long time battling people with money and lawyers.
The obvious solution is to just steamroll those NIMBYs. But in a society with elections this isn't quite as simple to implement as it is to say.
Creating more supply where no one is already living is much easier. But also a lot less useful.
If it is directly state provided, we might run into issues with quality, like the infamous "project" housing of the past. I have looked into that. Basically, it was not the government as such, such as politicians or bureuacrats who pushed this terrible "brutalist" style. It was basically an intellectual fashion among architects. And due to the lack of market incentives, they had their way. I have found out the real problem is not the much-accursed corrupted politician or lazy bureaucrat, whom everybody likes to hate. It is the unchecked intellectual...
I was born in 1978 in Sovietized Hungary. Briefly, state-owned restaurants were so bad, that we got together with relatives and friends, picked one, and flat out bribed the whole crew so that they serve us something edible. You see I think they were simply stealing the better cuts of meat and selling them at a black market, which is why we got the terrible cuts.
I think a lot of economists understand this, which is why things like food stamps exist. But... is it working? Or people learn to game the system and find a way to buy booze and cigs anyway?
In that case, can't basically all possible state services be replaced by UBI? And if people buy booze and not healthy food, well basically that is their problem then. But this kind of libertarian thinking is that kind that would not make seat belts mandatory...
So what I am saying is that these things are complicated.
The same housing projects with, say, grad students and their families living in them would not have become nightmares of crime and dysfunction. (I mean, pot smoking and sometimes-loud parties, maybe, but not muggings and rapes and murders.).
Come on. The generalization of graduate student housing on the grounds of universities to low SES affordable housing in cities is not merely comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to accordions. And the thing is, we don't even have to engage in the thought experiment. Can you give me an example of publicly built and provided housing that doesn't degenerate as noted above? I'm willing to be educated, but every place that I've ever heard that has tried has created someplace that colloquially is referred to as "the projects", most of which have been torn down due to the disastrous implementation.
The closest I've seen to a mass affordable home project was from private industry: the Levittown projects
You want to make people pay a real cost, which is realistic to pay after a few years saving with 2 parents working at low wage jobs.
Putting up security cameras and consistently enforced policing (with perhaps harsher penalties) seems like an obvious idea, do you think it's simply unrealistic?
Is that the issue - that we just.. made ugly houses and bad food? If the houses had been designed to look like nice normal houses it would have been fine?
I wouldn't think restaurants are a good match for being state-owned, I was thinking more basic staples
There's no shortage of architects out there making a perfectly good living from designing nice normal houses. They'll never get famous, but most professionals understand that they'll never get famous anyway and are happy to pump out whatever work pays the bills.
This is actually why new houses look better than giant expensive buildings. Because most new houses are built by non-famous architects, but if you want to build a $500 million art museum you feel obliged to hire a famous one.
Sure, but you have to sell the house at the market rate. Else I (rich person) buy the cheap houses and sell them at a profit for the market rate. (I'm not really a rich person.)
Supply increasing relative to demand should lower prices.
Also allows every family to have a roof, they do not have to sell them...
You may have missed the point of the government only selling these units to people who have not owned a home before - rich people can flip at most one of these
My boyfriend doesn't want to take ADHD meds, for no other reason than "it isn't that bad". He has never tried them, or even therapy. He also has that classic I'm A Man And Deathly Afraid Of Going To The Doctor For Some Reason thing.
It's true enough, it isn't that bad. It's not chronic lateness, being an awful conversationalist, inability to get through university, forgetting my existence unless I'm physically present or anything. But to me it just seems like being unmedicated ADD is living life on hard mode for no discernable reason. Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long. Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day. As a kid, he was tested for dyslexia, but his actual problem was simply focusing on a text or word long enough. He is underweight and forgets to eat. Stuff like that.
Is there anything I could say to make him reconsider? Should I?
“But to me it just seems like being unmedicated ADD is living life on hard mode for no discernable reason.”
I can say from first-hand experience you are probably right. Life got substantially easier once I found an effective ADHD medication. Without knowing your boyfriend, I can’t guess what will make him, in particular, reconsider. But the reasons that seem most important to me that someone ought to reconsider are the following:
First and foremost, “it isn’t that bad” is one of those things that is true right up until the point that it isn’t. It sounds like your boyfriend (like many ADHD people) has developed a suite of coping mechanisms to manage the gap between what’s expected of him and what his brain will allow. Those sorts of coping mechanisms are kind of a dangerous thing to rely on. They don’t perfectly cover the deficiencies they’re coping with, and the in wrong set of circumstances–an unexpected crisis, a new job, a large project that hits your deficient areas–and suddenly it is that bad. Even when they work, you often lose out on a lot of value by doing things poorly that you could have done much better. I have experience with both of those things, and they suck.
Now, another thing I know from experience is that “certain present inconvenience to avoid possible future trouble” always sounds like a bad deal. My brain will seize on anything presented that way as an invitation to procrastinate. Why not keep doing the easy thing that works OK now, and only change if things do get bad later?
The trouble with this is, by the time you know you need help, it may already be much too late. ADHD medication can be amazing stuff when it works. But it’s not a magic wand that you can just decide to wave one day and make the problem go away. First, access is restricted: you need a diagnosis (from what you wrote, it sounds like your boyfriend has one, which is good) and a doctor capable of prescribing them to even get started. Those things can take take time to get for anyone, but untreated ADHD can potentially them take much longer (an irony that I could appreciate even while it was slapping me in the face). But it doesn’t end there. There are many different ADHD medications, each with multiple possible dose sizes and schedules. Every person's brain is different and responds differently to different ones. There’s not generally a better way than trial and error to find the right one. Each attempt at a particular drug/dose combo will generally take at least a couple months–both because you need time to try it and because psychiatrists usually schedule at least that far out (the ones I’ve seen anyway). I’m probably a significant outlier here, but for me the gap between getting a diagnosis and finding a medication regimen that worked was something like seven or eight years. Part of that was my own fault. Part of that was the intersection of bureaucratic bullshit and unusual life circumstances. But around 18 months of it (not all consecutive) was simply the process of trying different medications at different doses and seeing what worked.
I’ll also add that the medication is great, but it isn’t magic. I’m capable of a lot of things that I wasn’t capable of before, but it still often takes time and effort and time trial-and-error to figure out what and how. There’s (what I think is) a common experience among people with ADHD that non-ADHD people will give you a lot of utterly useless advice about how to solve your problems: things like “make a schedule” or “start on tasks early” or “divide large projects into smaller chunks.” There’s an analogy I’ve seen[1] that captures the experience quite well, in which getting certain sorts of things done is like trying to peel a potato with another potato. And then a friend will say “oh here, use this peeler” and then hand you another goddamn potato. Anyway, starting a useful ADHD medication suddenly made a lot of that sort of advice no longer worthless. I could do a lot of those things now. But I’d never been able to before, and my ADHD tendencies weren’t gone, just more manageable. So there’s been an ongoing process of figuring out how to live my life more effectively that couldn’t even start until I got on medication. Once you get the potato peeler you still have to practice actually peeling potatoes. All of that together meaning that if you wait until you encounter a situation where you really *need* the advantage you might get from medication, it will likely be much, much to late to get it.
OK, so that was all one really-extended reason, but I just bumped into a second in talking about capabilities: getting ADHD treated expands your horizons. Or at least it did for me. I think what happened is that the pattern of expecting I was capable of [some reasonable sounding thing], and then discovering that it just never actually got done had gone on long enough that I’d internalized a lot of those limits and barely saw them anymore. For example, I’d love to be able to like, fly or teleport or something. But clearly those things are impossible, so I don’t spend any mental effort looking for ways to do them or trying to make them happen or lamenting the fact that I can’t. They’re just shoved in a dusty box somewhere in my brain labelled “fantasies,” which I may look at from time to time, but never for long. Anyhow, I think after a number of failures and updates, a surprising amount of ordinary-person stuff got shoved away in that box too. Anything that would involve an extended, self-directed project, for example. Or even smaller stuff, like planning a week-long camping trip.[2] I’ve only been on useful medication for a couple years and they’ve been very busy, chaotic years, so it’s too early to say how much this matters, but I’ve at least had a number of moments of looking at something I would have dismissed as impossible a few years ago and saying “wait, hold on. I probably could actually do that.”
Last, this isn’t really a reason so much as a perspective. But your health–which includes mental health–-is worth taking care of, and there’s nothing silly, or stupid, or weak or unmanly about doing so. Being healthier means being more capable. Being more capable is generally good for you and everyone around you. There’s a cultural tendency to treat mental health problems and disabilities–and ADHD is a disability, though sometimes a mild one–as being less “real” or “serious” than strictly physical ones. Not getting a broken leg set or getting glasses/contacts for your impaired vision would be looked on as pretty bizarre by most people. But a lot of the same people seem to implicitly believe that you ought to just tough it out through untreated mental health issues. I think this is every bit as poor a decision as walking around on a broken leg[3]. Addressing the problem is almost always the better choice.
p.s. I try not to center personal details when talking about stuff like this, since they’re n=1 and not what’s actually important. But they’re also hard to avoid entirely, since my information and perspective of the disorder is heavily informed by my own experiences. ADHD has had a pretty serious negative impact on my own life; most notably in completely throwing my career off track, which I’m finally starting to fix over a decade later. Anyhow, if you decide that a real-life cautionary tale would be more useful than all that other stuff I just wrote, I’d probably be willing to elaborate (though obligatory caution about everyone being different and not all the lessons generalizing).
[1]originally about depression, but it fits ADHD quite well too.
[2] People tend to think about ADHD in terms of interfering with work or school, but there really is quite a lot of fun stuff in life that requires organization, coordination and extended attention.
[3] Caveat: if you have access to effective treatment. Mental health issues are legitimately often harder to diagnose and treat.
> He also has that classic I'm A Man And Deathly Afraid Of Going To The Doctor For Some Reason thing.
(sorry for going off-topic) Because when men decide to go to the doctor, they are accused of Doing It The Wrong Way (cf. man flu). Women are much more medicalized in our society than men. From the onset of puberty they have to deal with their reproductive system that goes into maintenance mode once a month and forces them to both treat their body as a fallible mechanism and to power through mild discomfort, because you can't have every red-letter day off.
Add to this multiple awareness campaigns about breast cancer, ovarian cancer, HPV, etc and you end up with women being more aware of their bodies: what they do, what they shouldn't do, what a serious problem should feel like, what a mild treatable inconvenience should feel like.
Compare this to a typical man, whose healthcare experience amounts to "walking it off". He usually hits his thirties before he encounters actual health issues. He is about as smart as a 11 year-old girl when it comes to managing his health. Most of his reactions fall outside the "acceptable range" as determined by women. He wants to stay in bed because he has a fever of 99F and a headache? Bullshit, take a headache pill and power through, I go through this 13 times a year. There's a weird lump that hurt for a day, but he walked it off and now it doesn't hurt? Ah, who cares. Then it starts to grow and hurts again, so he shows it to his opposite-sex partner, who freaks out. Again, he missed the range of acceptable reactions to health issues.
I think I can shed some light on the male aversion to going to the doctor. For me at least, it feels like trying to get a one-up on nature; what I mean is, imagine you have a machine that's orders of magnitude more complex and elegant than anything our civilization could imagine, and you see one part that looks like it's moving a little funny, so you just slap some duct tape on it and call it a day.
Obviously if I've been shot or something then my body can't handle that naturally, but for everything else I don't really see a need to throw a wrench in the machine. For example, one time when I'd hurt my wrist and it started swelling everyone told me to ice it to keep the swelling down; I decided to leave it, and it swelled up like crazy which naturally immobilised the wrist and stopped me from damaging it further. I also let all 4 wisdom teeth come in without seeing a dentist (and I'm not recommending this, but) they pushed up my back molars at first, then my teeth kinda resettled, and now my bite's been perfectly even for years.
No idea why/if this would be a male thing but I guess I just trust my body to do it's thing and it's always worked out for me?
Anyway, I also have mild adhd and feel roughly the same way about it; it's been more useful so far to try to treat the root cause than trying to find a duct-tape solution.
If women trusted our bodies to "just do its thing" instead of seeking modern medicine, we'd still be regularly dying during the one thing you'd think evolution should've figured by now: childbirth.
My "duct tape solutions", like SSRIs for OCD, meds for epilepsy and birth control for heavy bleeding, has helped me a lot in life. I'm eternally grateful.
The typical reason I hear for men's doctor aversion is toxic expectations for men. They're expected to be strong and never sick or a burden, so they avoid it. But cool with another perspective.
Definitely, I'm not knocking duct tape solutions at all, just that it's preferable to treat root causes if at all possible.
I wouldn't call epilepsy medication or similar things a "duct tape solution" though since that feels more like something is legitimately 'broken' and I'm not sure what a natural solution would look like (eg as far as I know it's not possible to excercise and meditate your way out of having epilepsy), whereas (mild) adhd feels less like something is broken and more like just a different mind-pattern that's not necessarily good or bad, just sometimes maladaptive within certain environments.
(As a side note I wonder what the rates of childbirth deaths were like in hunter gatherer societies? The rates were of course insanely high in pre-industrial times, but like you say it seems really weird that evolution hasn't figured it out. If anyone has a link to some data on this, that would be interesting to see.)
meth might be a way out of epilepsy (this is through the whole path "migraines can cause epileptic seizures" -- not sure how well that path holds, but I do know that pseudoephedrine can "cure" migraines in a surprising amount of people).
maybe low-dose modafinal would be helpful; you can suspend in water (it doesn't dissolve, so you have to shake well) and titrate the right dose. Something like 25mg is probably fine for someone who is stimulant-sensitive, but can still be helpful
I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless". Eventually I settled at just drinking a lot of coffee. He could try that. I think these amphetamine-type meds are too much of a brute-force solution...
Exercise also helps, especially cardio. It is easier to concentrate when physically a little tired.
>I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless"
Those are both related to the isomer ratio. For amphetamine type drugs, the d-isomers and l-isomers have different effects, with the d-isomers mainly acting on dopamine while the l-isomers also act on norepinephrine. Dopamine is what drives most of the gain in mental energy, while norepinephrine drives a sense of urgency but for many/most people has an unpleasant edge to it, often contributing to anxiety and sometimes making you feel uncomfortably restless.
Ritalin is a 50/50 mix of the two isomers of methylphenidate and Adderall is a 75/25 mix of d-amphetimine and l-amphetimine, but you can also get pure d isomers of each (focalin and dexadrine, respectively) prescribed. Some doctors are wary of prescribing those, especially dexadrine, because they're thought to have more abuse potential. Vyvanse is another option, being d-amphetamine bonded to lysine so it needs to go through a metabolism step (half life about 1 hour, IIRC) before it kicks in. It's newer and more expensive, but doctors are a lot more comfortable prescribing it because the gradual onset is though to make it much less abusable.
I think my doc knew that being addicted to alcohol and nicotine, I really don't need a third addiction, so we went on Strattera, because that is theoretically non-addictive. Yes, but it works on the norepinephrine pathway. Now I think I had undiagnosed panic illness all my life. I just did not notice why I am sweating all the time. I thought it is a body weight issue. I just considered anxiety normal. Ultimately it culminated in a real panic attack that had all the symptoms of a heart attack. So we went of Strattera quickly. But the cold sweat and shakes were present even weeks later. Eventually we tried Ritalin, and it immediately made it worse. A week ago I found out I have high blood pressure, so I am now even off coffee. I basically just accept some brain fog and procastination at this point.
If you do ever decide to consider medication again, modafinil or wellbutrin might be worthwhile. I've been on modafinil for several years after not particularly liking Ritalin or Adderall and having bad panic attacks the last time I tried the latter. I've also tried Wellbutrin as an additional treatment atop modafinil, but more for mood than for focus.
Modafinil is its own thing, a stimulant that works through a completely different and (last I heard) not very well understood mechanism. My subjective experience is that Modafinil makes everything about 20% more interesting, moderately improves my executive function, and significantly slows the onset of mental fatigue. Wellbutrin is a reuptake inhibitor like Strattera, but acts on dopamine as well as norepinephrine. The norepinephrine effects, at least for me, were a lot more subtle than those from amphetamine stimulants.
My mood issues and about half of my brain fog turned out to be gender dysphoria. I still have ADHD and still take modafinil for it, but I've been off of Lexapro and Wellbutrin for a year or two now as I don't seem to need them anymore now that I'm on estrogen.
I took an ADHD med called Concerta for years when I was a child until around age 15 when I just refused to take it anymore. You'd have to google it for more details, but I know it has the same active ingredient as Ritalin. It definitely did help with focus and my ability to get things done, but it did zombify me and also made it a lot harder to eat in general. I never had an appetite while on it, and my appetite after it wore off didn't make up for while it was in effect.
I ultimately decided to stop taking it without telling my parents for awhile because I felt like a soulless robot and it affected every area of my social life.
When I was younger, my parents got me on it because at that young age it was emotionally very hard to handle how I could just not focus or get things done. When I stopped it, and now as an adult, I'm far more developed emotionally and I honestly prefer working out other ways to cope and live with ADHD rather than be on the medication for it with everything else that comes along with it.
Additionally, I feel like taking it for all those years has permanently affected me and my social abilities in a negative way. I don't feel soulless or anything like that anymore but I still feel like I'm very robotic at times. I can't prove that the lasting effects are from the medication, though, since maybe I would have developed that way whatever the case.
Anyway, as someone who doesn't have it "that bad," I far prefer not being medicated for it. Brain drugs always affect more than just what is targeted.
He doesn't know how bad it is relatively to how it could be. Trying medications for one month could give him a perspective. (Basically, use *curiosity* as a leverage.)
> Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long.
As a consequence, do you handle most of the chores? (If yes, then to put it bluntly this is your problem, not his, so he doesn't have much of an incentive to fix it.)
> He is underweight and forgets to eat.
Ah, not fair! I have a problem focusing on many things, but food isn't one of them.
> Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day.
If you had time to read Scott's 10,000 word clarifier on missing heritability (I think it's deeply funny—and indicative of the Entire Problem—that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not, in fact, mean "able to be inherited".) you should take 10 minutes and read my 2000 word essay on the microbe responsible for schizophrenia.
I did not in fact know, until I read your comment, that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not mean "able to be inherited". That is profoundly annoying...
Enjoyed reading this. As a layperson, one thing I've never understood about the gut bacteria theses is, shouldn't they be affected by antibiotics? Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Do me a favor: go to scholar.google.com and punch in "antibiotic psychosis".
>Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Part of the trouble with this is that antimicrobials are not particularly selective, and niche competition is what really drives exclusion from an ecosystem.
Say you've got a population of feral cats in your forest that is causing problems for the local birds. You could burn the whole forest down, as you would with a broad spectrum antibiotic, and that reduces the population of everything—trees, shrubs, birds, beetles, and cats—by 95%, but the cats will come back. Unless you burn things down so thoroughly that you lay total waste to the ecosystem, all you're really doing there is selecting for fireproof cats. You can use a more narrow spectrum antibiotic, which I suppose would be analogous to bait stations with poison, but this is still going to target most of the Carnivora. If you can find a poison that works on cats but not on foxes—hey, now you're in the money. But I'm not aware of any antibiotic that would kill ruminococcus gnavus without also killing its niche competitors. Such a thing may exist, especially among the biological control agents like bacteriophage, and I hope one day to find it, but phage therapy is hard to scale—that selectivity is both a blessing and a curse, because it means that a phage which works against one person's strain might not work against another's.
A lighter question than is often asked here, but one that might shed some interesting light on the thoughts and perspectives of this community, and that as far as I know Scott has never asked on a survey:
What is your favourite movie?
(Optional additional question if it produces a different answer to the first: what movies do you name as your favourite movie if an ordinary person ask?)
12 Angry Men. Short and to the point, with not a minute of screen time wasted. No expensive cinematography, no special effects, no cinematic universe tie-ins or sequel hooks, no plot twists that you can spoil.
However, I don't rewatch it, while many other commenters have posted movies they rewatch a lot. I think the only movie I rewatch for pleasure is Hot Fuzz.
It's an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name and follows William Lee, a New Yorker bug exterminator in the 1950s, on his climbing into literary heights, ever deeper fall into drug addiction, flight from police and reality to "overseas" and mindscrew.
So there is a plot, but it gets most surreal.
There are really great dialogs, awesome set designs, delicate camera rides and I love the atmosphere.
<SPOILING just one part of a scene:
- I for one kill my wife slowly, am poisoning her for years.
- (protagonist looking shocked)
- Oh no, not consciously! If I were doing it consciously, it'd be horrible. No no. I'm doing it unconsciously.
- But you know it, you're telling me about it.
- No I don't. This whole conversation is happening telepathically. Unconsciously. If you look carefully at my lips, you'll see I'm saying something completely different.
And then we can see that too.
SPOILER end.>
Best is that the story is crazy with one surprise after the other, but it's weirdly coherent and easy to follow, like one can follow one own's dream while in it.
Cronenberg adapting the novel also has no problem with bringing everything to a sensible conclusion -- and disappointing the viewer with a bad one --, because he doesn't try. The conclusion is gainax, but very satisfying.
After seeing Naked Lunch I'm more disappointed with that director's other works. As someone who writes his own scripts he's apparently better of with someone else's source material as a starting point.
Oh. Final words by Bart Simpson after watching Naked Lunch while skipping school:
Pressed to pick just one, I'll go with Aliens. It's just an awesome SF action movie.
But there's a pretty large pack of contenders, films I highly endorse and might plausibly have picked: The Apartment, The Terminator, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, Master and Commander, Margin Call, The Big Short, The Incredibles, Batman Begins, Apollo 13, The Fellowship of the Ring, Edge of Tomorrow, and a few more.
The Tribe. It's a great movie. Bit tough to watch, though.
Saint Clara. (Israeli flick).
Zero Motivation.
Lemon Popsicle.
(I must admit, some of these are getting recommended simply because "you have to see them!!!" I have other favorites, some classic, but... these are the ones you probably haven't seen, so they're getting recommended.)
Probably "The Martian", narrowly edging out "Apollo 13".
If we can count the entire trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" might make the top spot, but that's because it's got eight hours of really good stuff to compare to the mere two hours that a
mundane film can provide.
But if I'm feeling snarky, I might bring up "Into the Night", a mostly forgettable action comedy from 1985 that attracted my attention by being I think the only movie in the history of Hollywood where an aerospace engineer got the girl. Who was played by a twenty-something Michelle Pfeiffer.
Maaan, whenever I come across this question I always forget what my favorite movies are. At least from what I can think of right now, I'll just list a few favorites in no particular order:
-Tenet
-Bad Times at the El Royale
-Spirited Away
-Dan in Real Life
-Isle of Dogs
-The incredibles
I'm definitely sure there's ones I like as much as or better than these, but I really can't think of them.
There are a lot of movies I like enough to re-watch. Many reasons: great visuals, great fun, obvious workmanship (I get a lot of enjoyment out of simply gazing at anything that was undeniably well-done, whether it's a movie, a painting, a monologue, or a math proof), or there are easter eggs to find or point out to friends. So my tastes are eclectic, though probably man-coded - I like mainstream stuff like Cameron, Spielberg, Tarantino, Coen brothers, or even a lot of MCU, and I can appreciate classics like Rashomon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Bridge Over the River Kwai, but I've never gotten into love stories or just about anything set in Victorian England.
My usual go-to answer for "favorite" is _Contact_. No other film I've seen struck me as more dedicated to the raw pursuit of knowledge. (I think _Apollo 13_ and _Interstellar_ come close, though.) Foster, McConaughey, Woods, Skerrit, Hurt, and Bassett were just the perfect cast, and Zemeckis adapting a book written by Sagan is probably the most pro-science awesomeness I could have asked for.
If someone were to put together a ship and fly it to Mars for a historical first, and film a documentary of it with Go-Pros and drones, that might be my new favorite. Until then, _Contact_.
Made in France during World War II. A three hour movie made in two parts because you could not make a movie longer than 90 minutes under the German occupation; a truly brilliant film.
Notably, the screenplay was written by the author of the novel, and, like the novel, the more one matures, the more one sees the deep wisdom in the work.
For example, as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*.
And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too.
I also believe The Last Unicorn is a rare case where the movie is a far more gratifying experience than the novel, as it's been dramatically pared down to the core story, with fewer side-quests taking us away from the power of the protagonist's story.
I will add, this is not a sentimental choice of childhood nostalgia. I'll be the first to say that most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny. I'm also comparatively literate when it comes to movies; I went to a trade school for film and spent 10 years as an amateur critic on a professional critic's schedule by forcing myself to see *every* theatrical release in my region, whether I wanted to or not (that is, btw, how to ruin conventional horror movies for oneself).
if you want the reverse, howl's moving castle is so much worse than the book its based on, and this is miyazaki. he puts in a lot of his tropes and the end is a disjointed movie.
if the wonder and magic the unicorn represented came earlier, what life might she have led? Why does it have to come now, when she is old, tired, homely, and bitter?
If she would have led from then on a wonderful life, *because of the wonder and magic the unicorn represented*, why wouldn't she lead a wonderful life from now on? After all, we're talking about wonder and magic, not about good parents or the right nutrition she might have lacked and which both probably would be unable to help now.
But wait, maybe it is to be understood as something mundane like good parents or nutrition! Those are admittedly wonderful things.
If the unicorn represents that, then I understand.
Unicorns very famously represent purity, and the deep traditional lore about capturing one (generally for the healing properties of its horn) is to use a virgin woman to lure it to her. Quite a bit of historical art depicts this as a profound and even semi-rapturous act for both the virgin woman and the unicorn:
Like (virtually all but let's just say) all women, Molly very much wanted to be a "princess" and experience all the magic, grace, beauty, innocence, and even rapture the unicorn represents *in its attraction to - and representation of - young women as protagonist-princesses*, with their happily-ever-after endings.
None of that grace, beauty, purity, innocence - coincidentally the things straight men are attracted to in young women - are available to older, broken, cynical women like Molly. The Unicorn didn't show up at a time in Molly's life where the Unicorn's presence would have validated Molly's own potential for a good man's romantic love and a rapturous happily ever after. Molly is pissed that after all that dreaming and yearning for classical, storybook romantic love, she gets teased by the symbol of it, when it's too late for her to act on it.
Well, I was indeed unaware of all that, but I think it boils down to what I thought, plus the unicorn reminding her that that there still get a few people born every day who will get everything they want, and all this just by chance.
The Last Unicorn was my favorite childhood movie, too, and continues to be one of my favorite movie up until today. I find it one of the few movies where all the characters actually make sense.
And I could always totally understand Mommy Fortuna. I was always happy for her because she had achieved her goal of obtaining immortality when she died (by engraving her into the memory into an immortal being), and was so obviously happy about it in that moment.
I found it most beautiful that the unicorn is the only unicorn ever that has experienced pain, and that both the unicorn and Schmendrick understand that, but that the unicorn doesn't rebuke it but thanks him for it. Even though the pain is immortal and will never go away. This always touched me very deeply.
I also read the novel some years later and was totally disappointed. The movie took the novel and actually took the characters in it serious. Unlike the novel itself.
> as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*. And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too...most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny.
I recently watched it as an adult, having never seen it or even knowing much about it other than 'unicorns are involved somehow', and agree that it holds up surprisingly well, particularly on those two points where I suspect it is completely lost on kids who have not seen enough of aging & mortality to understand: https://gwern.net/review/the-last-unicorn
I dunno whether a community really exists - I for one am not a rationalist and super not an effective altruist (or any kind of altruist really).
The answer will be boring - LOTR. I also have a certain thing for Batman movies, because the villains almost always have some relatable, understandable motive.
I didn't mean "rationalist community", I meant "community that follows Scott's blog". I in fact find it quite annoying and bewildering that the latter is ever assumed to be the former (in the "allegiance to official Less Wrong doctrines" sense, not the "serious about examining your biases" sense).
In one of Scott’s old SSC posts, he jokes that to be a Rationalist is to believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. This is wrong, because the Rationalists are clearly Jews, even within the confines of TPOT.
Yud led his people from frustration and solitude and established the holy land of LessWrong. Unfortunately, everyone who wasn’t them hated them, and they were very inwardly-focused anyways.
Lo, a new prophet was born. A Rationalist preacher named Scott brought compassion and a focus on real-world problems to the creed, and established SSC/ACX. Thus came the broader group of people who wouldn’t call themselves rationalists or are EA-adjacent thinkers, who view themselves as distinct from what came before but have unhelpfully not been named.
Neither Eliezer nor Scott are, thus, the rightful caliph. The rightful caliph will not focus on his people or compassion, but conquest. He will care more for Arabia than Canaan. And, frankly, he will not be very good to those of us who preceded him. The rightful caliph is Sam Altman.
Works for me. I suppose SBF is one of the various false messiahs that kept cropping up and being chopped down? Altman, at very least, has proven quite resilient and un-choppable.
I'm writing something for my own blog and it occurred to me that folks here are pretty good at reading critically and giving feedback on writing, so here's my current draft for you fine folks to tear apart:
Title: Deputies Gone Wild?
Subtitle: Central Massachusetts might be part of the Wild West.
We don't live in the Wild West or 1880s Chicago. Law enforcement officers in America have a chain of command leading up to elected officials. Maybe you don't like the policies they make, but they are still in charge. Police and Constables report to the Mayor. State Police report to the Governor. Federal Agents report to the President. Deputies report to the Sheriff… right? Apparently the Worcester County MA Sheriff disagrees.
I want to publish a guide for landlords and tenants that includes some statistics on the eviction process in Massachusetts. Among other things, I want to know how long each step takes and how much it costs, on average and in the extreme. Most of those steps happen in the courts, and obtaining the relevant court records is its own ordeal. The final step, however, the one where a door might get kicked in and someone could be physically removed from the property, and their belongings are boxed up and taken to storage without their consent, is handled by a Sheriff, Deputy, or Constable. Constables only exist in some cities and towns, and the Sheriff is far too busy to handle individual cases, so that leaves Deputies to do it everywhere else.
I made a public records request to the Worcester County Sheriff's Office ("WCSO") (https://worcestercountysheriff.com/), for things like the scheduling and execution dates, case numbers, assigned Deputy, etc for some past evictions. I was prepared to make the request, get denied, appeal that, and have the request approved on appeal, which wouldn't be unusual in this sort of interaction with local government. Instead, this turns out to be a much deeper rabbit hole.
WCSO's responses to my request and appeal confirmed that they have outsourced service of papers and execution of evictions to a private non-profit corporation, Worcester County Sheriff Civil Process Division, Inc ("WCSCPDI") (https://civilprocess.com/worcester/home/). As best I can determine, WCSCPDI hires employees who the Sheriff then deputizes. Members of the public go directly to WCSCPDI to pay for those Deputies to perform the relevant duties. Although the company uses their full name on some documents, they also use "Massachusetts Sheriff's Office" and "Worcester County Sheriff's Office" in various advertising and official records and even when introducing themselves, so it wasn't clear to me until now that they aren't acting as part of WCSO.
I started this quest looking for records about evictions, but at this point my concern has grown. As best I can discern, Federal and State law do not provide for different categories of Deputy Sheriff. Every Deputy in MA has substantially the same set of powers and authorities. In addition to process service and execution of evictions (which is already well into "only the government can do this" territory), they can detain and arrest people, carry and use firearms in many ways a member of the public cannot, execute search warrants and searches without warrants in some circumstances, and a long list of lesser things related to vehicles, courts, private employment, professional licensing, etc. WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside, etc, all while those people are neither employed nor supervised or controlled by any government official.
The SOR's previous determination was based on a five factor test established in an earlier court case, MBTA Retirement Board vs State Ethics Commission (1993). The SOR concluded that WCSCPDI's creation had no "legislative or administrative underpinning", their "major role as a process server is not a function or duty exclusive to a government entity", they receive no public funds, interests in WCSCPDI are primarily to exclusively private in nature, and they are under no significant "involvement, control, or supervision" of any government official. With every factor in WCSCPDI's favor, the SOR concluded they are not a governmental entity. I disagree with every one of those conclusions.
In supporting my appeal, I have presented over a dozen separate arguments against WCSO's position and that previous determination as it might apply to my request and appeal. I made multiple arguments that records created by WCSCPDI are subject to a records request to WCSO, regardless of WCSCPDI's status, such as Deputies being agents of WCSO regardless of employment, and WCSO having contractual control over records created by WCSCPDI. I corrected individual facts that were represented by WCSCPDI or determined by the SOR incorrectly in the past, such as WCSCPDI receiving no public funds and no process service being a governmental function. I updated facts that may have changed, such as some WCSCPDI corporate officers now being paid employees of WCSO, and employees of WCSO being dispatched to some evictions. I rebutted the previous conclusions for each of the five factors, with six separate arguments for just one of them. Some of those rebuttals should be independently conclusive, such as citing persuasive precedent that any entity created for the explicit purpose of performing duties legally mandated of a governmental entity is itself a governmental entity. I am hopeful that my arguments will prove persuasive, but I am not confident, nor am I confident that WCSO and WCSCPDI will comply even if ordered to do so by the SOR. I also suspect I'll run into records retention problems, with one or both entities having disposed of records far sooner than the 3+ years they are required by law to retain them.
One way or another, I'll be writing more about this at some point after my appeal is determined by the SOR (due by July 9 2025). Maybe it will be good news, and I'll be moving forward with my statistics gathering and other things downstream from that. Maybe it will be yet another legal morass, but of the type I used to pursue for fun rather than the type I'm embroiled in lately with life changing stakes. To be continued…
PS: While defining all the categories of law enforcement records (arrests, body cam footage, incident reports, shift schedules, search warrants, etc), The Secretary of State's Records Management Unit remembered to apply those rules to both local police in the municipal schedule and state police in the state schedule, but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records. This doesn't significantly affect the larger problem here, since the default retention period of 3 years still applies, but it's another thread to follow up on later.
This was really interesting. I do a lot of work with public information act requests, so I feel your pain here. If you don’t get a satisfactory result here you will probably need to file a federal suit, I’m thinking a sec. 1983 claim, though you’ll need a particular person with standing. Im just spitballing though. In any event, the facts are interesting enough though that you might shop it around at a few BigLaw firms; you may find one that would take this on pro bono.
Reaching out to attorneys about pro bono representation for myself and others who have encountered this same road block is on my to-do list. My amateur expectation is that we'd start in MA Superior Court and proceed upward from there, but I can see how a federal case might be appropriate given the federal laws granting these officers authority.
Well, sort of. I don’t give legal advice in comment sections, but a 42 U.S.C. 1983 claim, given certain prerequisites, allows you to bring a civil action against a state, county, or local entity, acting under color of state law, where they deprive the plaintiff of the rights, privileges, or immunities granted under the US Constitution or other federal law. It allows actual and punitive damages, as well as equitable relief.
That *may* well apply here. My *not legal* advice would be to talk to an attorney that does federal civil litigation sooner rather than later.
>WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside ... but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records.
While they perform typical law enforcement duties less often than others do or their other duties, they carry handcuffs and guns and are empowered to do so, and even mandated to do so in certain circumstances.
>Applying the definition of police officer set forth in G. L. c. 41, § 98, we conclude that a deputy sheriff is not a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Unlike police officers 254*254 as defined in G. L. c. 41, § 98, deputy sheriffs are not empowered to make warrantless arrests for crimes that occur outside of his or her view or presence. Under the common law, a deputy sheriff is considered a "peace officer." Commonwealth v. Howe, 405 Mass. 332, 334 (1989). As a "peace officer," a deputy sheriff has only limited authority to make warrantless arrests. See id. See also Commonwealth v. Baez, 42 Mass. App. Ct. 565, 569 n.6 (1997) (collecting statutes granting deputy sheriffs authority to make arrests). More specifically, a deputy sheriff's warrantless arrest power is limited to offenses involving a breach of the peace that occur in the deputy sheriff's view or presence.
Commonwealth v. Gernrich, 476 Mass. 249 (2017) [reversing the defendant's conviction for making a false report of a crime to a police officer].
So, I am guessing that they make very few arrests.
Thanks for the references. I'll read into them. I'm not surprised to hear there's a limit like that. I did try to make sure I wasn't saying they have the same powers as other LEOs, just that all deputies have the same powers. Which is important, since this sheriff seems to be trying to say there are two categories of deputies that should be treated differently, and I haven't found any precedent for that.
Also, it's only incidentally important whether they do crime fighting. They show up to evictions with badges and guns and handcuffs, and that's not ok if there are no records or supervision.
Ahh. It's very hard to find out, for precisely the reasons behind the problem I'm encountering. I'll be making some more general requests once my current appeal is done, for data like arrests performed, search warrants executed, use of force and fired firearms, etc.
Note also that the costs would be closer to 1/3 than to 1/4. And it would be extremely difficult to staff such a school. Not many people are looking for 1/4 time jobs.
A lot of people are looking for 1/2 time jobs, and this means they can teach high schoolers (the ones everyone keeps talking need to sleep in) after the first quarter-day of lessons is over.
No, but the set of skills and knowledge needed to successfully teach elementary school is sufficiently different from the set of skills needed to teach high school that the pool of people with both sets is quite small. And that is not even mentioning the set of skills needed to successfully teach middle school.
Many people have successfully homeschooled their children, which means they have the necessary set of skills and knowledge needed to teach elementary, middle and high school. And most of them are not former school teachers, which means that either we have no idea how to get the right people to become teachers or that the pool of capable people is not this small.
There is a public school board near where I live that is going to 4-days per week. People are freaking out. The local YMCA is building a day-care program for Fridays but it immediately became over subscribed (note: the school board pre-negotiated child care for all the teachers for Fridays. So this model actually costs the school board MORE. It’s been done for the teachers union)
That said:
There are all kinds of people. There are definitely families who would want a 2h/day school. There just likely aren’t enough of them in a concentrated amount. In any given place to make it happen.
Instead people who want that home school and Supliments with lots of online solutions that run 2h/day
Yeah, there's a lot of demand for precisely the opposite of this. Parents need third parties to provide daycare so that they can work. However, they also feel kind of bad about putting their kids in daycare but feel good about educating them. So the trend is for the kids to spend more time in these institutions and for the service to be branded as education rather than childcare...i.e. "early childhood education", etc.
I would prefer an institution that would explicitly say that they provide 2 hours of intense education *and* N hours of babysitting.
For example, such institution would allow me to take my children home earlier on those days when it is convenient. It could also allow my children to read a book or work on their own projects outside of those 2 hours. By not pretending we could get a lot of flexibility.
Please be kind to me, this is my first real post on the Internet. I played around with letting ChatGPT and Claude generalize my ethical heuristics(1), and they both said I should publish (or at least post) the concept. I could really use the feedback of actual smart humans. :)
The Core Insight: Making ethical behavior easier through mechanism design or something you could call Virtue Arbitrage or Ethics Arbitrage
Most people genuinely want to be good(2). The problem is that our systems often make ethical behavior harder and less rewarding than unethical behavior. What if we could flip this dynamic? I'm proposing what I call "virtue arbitrage"(3) - systematically identifying places where ethical behavior is undervalued by current incentive structures, then redesigning those structures to make virtue profitable and vice costly.
TL;DR: How do we want to live? → Most people consider themselves good → If you build mechanisms that reward ethical behavior and price in unethical consequences → You make ethical behavior easier → You enable tons of people to have better participation in the good → And can capture "virtue arbitrage" at scale.
Applied Example: Social Media
Right now, platforms optimize for engagement by any means necessary, even if that means amplifying the most triggering content, fake news, social polarization, and echo chambers that just keep spinning people further apart, because outrage drives clicks. But imagine platforms that instead:
• Reward discourse following "philosopher rules" - citing sources, steel-manning opponents, updating beliefs when presented with evidence
• Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems, maybe even internalizing those costs with something like a 'toxicity tax' analogous to carbon pricing
• Create positive feedback loops where constructive behavior increases reach and influence
I believe people would probably adapt to succeed within these new incentive structures, and those habits would likely spill over into other areas of life.
The Broader Vision: Recursive Ethics at Scale
This scales to a society-wide principle: design every level of social organization to enable better participation in truth, beauty, and goodness - not as rigid dogmas, but as evolving search directions updated through collective inquiry.
The key insight is making this recursive and self-updating: as people experience the benefits of truth-seeking discourse and ethical coordination, they become advocates for extending these principles further. Acting ethically could become more "emergent" rather than imposed, with particularism updating and "sharpening" universalism, while universalist frameworks could help escape local ethical optima.
I'm absolutely acknowledging that these are still early-stage ideas that would need a lot more development before they become something practically implementable. I know that this isn't bread yet, not even flour, maybe just unripe grain? You would need a lot more rigorous definitions, perhaps you even would have to completely ditch the platonic stuff etc. You would have to be mindful of ethics washing, Goodharts Law, power dynamics, mistake vs. conflict theory etc. But I hope there is merit in this pile of ideas, so here are my questions for you:
My Questions for ACX:
1. Is there merit in thinking in this direction? Does "virtue arbitrage" seem like a useful framework? Am I missing obvious implementation challenges or theoretical problems?
2. Who's already doing this? Do you know anyone doing mechanism design for ethics or something similiar, or who might be interested in this concept? Should I post it somewhere else? Where?
3. What are your main critique points? Where does this approach seem most likely to fail or cause unintended consequences?
Disclaimer: I had help writing this from Claude, as the last time I wrote something substantial in English was about 10 years ago and I'm sure there are still a ton of words I'm using subtly wrong. My original system concept is much more complex, but I asked for simplification to make it more accessible.
The full framework involves things like "philosophical democracy" with nested deliberation circles, discourse ethics, subsidiarity principles, "ethics dividends" in taxation, rigorous systematic internalization of externalized costs and adaptive learning mechanisms - but I wanted to start with the core insight and see if it resonates before going into full on special interest mode. (Also I haven't thought deeply enough about it.)
Thanks for any thoughts you're willing to share!
PS: The first time I read a post on SSC was in 2014. I've been a regular lurker since 2015, and even in the phases where I voluntarily had no devices connected this was one of the few blogs I still checked in with my girlfriend's PC. A big thank you to Scott, you had a medium impact on my thinking. :) (Mostly for the better, I hope.) (4)
1 Based mostly on methexis in the platonic ideals, the generalization principle (Kant, Rawls) and emergence/dynamical systems. This also explains the weird 'participating in the good' language :)
2 Or at least want to be able to tell themselves and their peers that they are.
3 Or "ethics arbitrage", which does sound better?
4 That's also the reason I'm choosing this community for this post. :)
I feel like there's an insight here that I've seen in other contexts. Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin." That is, it's great to be committed to your wife, but if you and your cute young coworker start drinking together late at night in her hotel room, you're setting up a scenario where it may be a lot harder for you to stick to that commitment. It's better to try to avoid that situation. This isn't just about sexual morality: If you're trying to eat healthy, it's wise to just not have junk food like doughnuts and potato chips sitting around in your house or office, rather than having them there but using your willpower to avoid them. I think the generalization of this is that you want to structure your life so that it's harder to make unethical/immoral/bad choices than ethical/moral/good choices.
There are ways whole societies can do this. If slavery were legal, you might be tempted to buy slaves to make your sugar plantation more profitable. That would be horribly evil, but you would have a lot of financial incentives in that direction and likely would be competing with slave labor sugar plantations that would price you out of the market if you didn't use slaves yourself. Since slavery is illegal, any bad tendencies you might have to become a worse person in that way are closed off. All kinds of vice laws are explicit attempts to make it harder/riskier to do bad things than good things, whether that's prostitution, drugs, gay sex, gambling, smoking, drinking, dancing, drinking extra-large sodas, etc. And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged. (Indeed, even ending slavery was super controversial and kicked off a civil war in the US, despite it seeming to most of us now like about the most obvious moral question imaginable.)
> Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin."
I also didn't know the term, and I also thank you for it. While I am not a believer, the example that you gave of what a prudent person would do to minimize their chances of doing something imprudent later on carry weight with me.
- I did not know this term. Thank you for it and the answer :)
Yes, and my point is that we (as humanity) should build this insight systematically into our societal design, not just to avoid "near occasions of sin", but also to make acting virtuous easier.
"And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged."
- I would propose to start with the status quo and then use the generalization principle (a la Kant, Rawls, basically "Would I accept this system if I were randomly born anywhere within it?") to point at a more ethical possibility. If it works, you could try to use it recursively. (generalize, implement, generalize, implement etc.)
Do you know anyone who is thinking into this direction?
"Most people genuinely want to be good" no, most people want to feel that they are good. This leads to a certain kind of short-circuiting behaviour, often called virtue signalling. I think any incentive system you set up would be gamed.
"Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems"
Tried that. Reddit admins told people one million times that upvotes and downvotes should not mean "agree" and "disagree", but distributed moderation. Only downvote stuff you would like to see deleted. It did not work, and led to a "hivemind". It seems the lack of voting on comments here leads to better results.
Sometimes it is better not to have incentives, because external motivation can replace internal motivation. You wrote this intelligent comment because something inside you wanted to. If you would be optimizing for upvotes and downvotes, if the 1000 dopamine hits of a much upvoted but mediocre but popular comment, like some silly pun, it might "corrupt" you.
Scott had a nice discussion awhile back on why it's not so easy to label misinformation. Basically, most of the ways media mislead people aren't directly false statements for which you can point to evidence, but rather things like selecting what scenes to show on the news, what subset of arguably-relevant facts to report, which experts to quote, what questions to ask (and make sure never to ask), choosing striking anecdotes without reporting (or probably even knowing) relevant statistics, etc.
In addition, it's totally standard to have people label stuff as "misinformation" when it's true but bad for their side. Anyone who gets the power to determine those labels will have a huge incentive to do this to help their side win fights. See discussions on everything from racial IQ differences to the effects of hormone-blockers on 13-year-olds for contemporary examples.
Hmm, OK my thoughts. This sounds like the classic prisoners dilemma. How do you get people to choose to cooperate. Or how do you get a high trust society. I don't have any firm answers but shared religion (belief system) and small communities seem to be part of it. I was appalled the other day when listening to a podcast that talked about the situation in our big cities (USA) and that everything in drug stores is now behind some locked door. (Because otherwise someone will steal a single can of pop.) I live out in rural America and we still have farm stands with a selection of produce and a box to put your cash in. The box is usually left open so you can make change if you have to. I lived in the city in the past, but I can't imagine moving back.
I think that analogising everything to prisoner's dilemmas isn't necessarily the best way to think about morality.
What I think is that 90% of the population is, while not necessarily perfect, sufficiently moral not to steal from shops. The key to a good society is to find a way to restrain, imprison or just exile those bottom 10%. Your rural community probably doesn't have a lot of them because they move to cities to find a more target-rich environment.
- Exactly, yes! If you let me copy the model of an emergence ladder in my other reply e.g.:
energy > quarks > [..] > living cells > individual human beings > family > circle of friends > tribe > commune > [..] > nation > world
My proposal is that we should systematically build our systems to make ethical choices the most rational and the easiest whereever possible.
Whenever there is a conflict between different levels, we should try to enable a participating in the most ideal stuff as frictionless as possible by design.
E.g. in your community example:
Propose everyone would be better off in a high trust community.
on an individual level: What would you need to be able to trust? What could you do to make it more trustworthy? What could convince you to make decisions to contribute to an higher trust environment?
(Bottom-Up: You could start local meet ups, a neighbourhood watch, a circle of food exchange, clean up together, etc.)
from a communal /policy level: What can you design to enable trust? What incentives / disincetives enable or further a climate of trust (Top-Down: Make design decisions that make all of the above as frictionless as possible, make room in your architectural planning, perhaps build a community center, make behaviour that destroys trust costly etc.)
So basically: Make cooperating the easier and better choice, if possible :)
Shared religion has absolutely been shown to scale better than anything else. Unfortunately IMO the one that is scaling right now is antithetical to liberalism.
Yeah, that makes sense. I shouldn’t really have said that. I was just thinking of all the covert ways of taking advantage of a shared religion that were corrupting influences.
One of the commenters in the thread, Robert Stroi, built this! Give it a go: https://politicalbeliefs.online/
OT, but have people noticed this?
People are sticking AI prompts into scientific papers, hidden in small font sizes or white text.
Genius!
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Artificial-intelligence/Positive-review-only-Researchers-hide-AI-prompts-in-papers
Way back in another comment thread we were discussing, amongst other things, the NY mayoral election and who would win the Democratic primary. I said something in reply to someone else about possible skeletons in the closet for Mamdani.
I didn't seriously think there would be any, just that if motivated anyone can find something to hang you in past comments or actions.
Now it looks like maybe he may indeed have been a little bit naughty. Technically. Maybe:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/zohran-mamdani-marked-asian-and-african-american-on-college-application-report/ar-AA1HVTD4
Well, if Kamala can be both First Asian and First African-American Female, why not Mamdani as First Asian-African-American? He was born in Uganda, which technically does mean he has/had citizenship in an African country, and if he is now in America that would make him African-American, just like Elon Musk 😀
I expect this to be a storm in a teacup but it does go to show, there is *always* something that can be a scandal when it comes to politics!
Show me the man and I will find the crime
I just got an email from the Social Security Administration shilling the "big beautiful bill". It's utterly surreal. I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime. This isn't a political mailing list. This is an official government agency using the emails that people sign up with to see their SS status in order to spam political messaging to the entire country (previously, the emails from the SSA were just the occasional "tips to not get scammed" and the like).
Former Alaska governor Frank Murkowski--father of the current U.S. senator--did something like this while he was in office. It was limited to State of Alaska employees rather than Alaskan residents more generally, but they would receive emails in their official state email accounts that were basically self-serving propaganda newsletters gushing about all the great things that Governor Murkowski was doing for the state. It was pretty gross.
Looking at the text of the email, I agree there is a bit too much editorializing, but notifying people that Social Security payments are no longer subject to federal income tax seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do. (Whether it's actually TRUE is a separate issue, but in principle, it's within the remit of the agency.)
Well you probably know it’s not technically true. It’s what was promised but what it shakes out as is people over 65 are given an additional $6,000 federal tax deduction.
Social Security payments still (as before) qualify at least in part as taxable income.
It varies as before by total income.
Welcome to the world that Slate Star Codex built.
Scott addresses this in the Twighlight of the Edgelords post. Just read it now because when I first looked at it there appeared to be a lot of discussion of Reddit. You may be tired of me saying I only subscribe to the Electric Snowblower and Fishing subreddits but it’s true so I dropped out of that one early on.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/twilight-of-the-edgelords?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
I still don’t know what E.C.O.R.T.P was meant to be.
Little help?
No results with Google. I pointed to ACX as a source with Claude and it was foiled by the paywall.
Well that's not fair. He obviously didn't intend for things to end up like this. Though, I'm wondering how else he expected things to change the way he wanted them to... Did he actually expect a cultural revolution to be peaceful?
No kidding. This is what happens when a man born without the shame gene surrounded by toadies leads our country.
My high school Civics teacher would have pissed his pants if told this was in the country’s future.
A lot of previously apolitical public service type dot gov web sites now also read like tabloid style MAGA propaganda. They look like a Soviet era hard copy issue of Pravda.
This is scary as hell. It’s not going to be easy to come back from this corruption of values. For me this is much more alarming than a hypothetical AGI paper clip scenario.
Yes, the politicization of institutions that were previously neutral is indeed terrible, and hard to reverse. But it's not as new a phenomenon as you're suggesting.
Could you cite something comparable to everyone with an email address associated with an SSN getting nakedly partisan propaganda from an official government agency prior to 2025?
Sure, the FDA tweeting "You are not a horse" about ivermectin, knowing that it's approved for use in humans (by them!) and off-label prescriptions are perfectly standard practice.
That seems like nakedly partisan propaganda to you?
Comparable to everyone with an SSN getting this in their email inbox:
“The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.”
“By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned”?
They're both nakedly partisan propaganda. We *shouldn't* be in a place where off-label use of approved medications is a partisan political issue, but in 2020-2022 we absolutely were. And while the FDA might be excused for providing relevant, factual information, the bit about horses stopped being relevant when the FDA approved ivermectin for use in humans (in 1987).
OC ACXLW Meetup: “Secret Ballots & Secret Genes” – Saturday, July 5, 2025
97ᵗʰ weekly meetup
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eNfff6IiJLfI2N0lCFl8WLeNiCEro2bTKMSfN1N9Q9E/edit?usp=sharing
Below I commented about the big new YIMBY win in California. Today I learned of two new state laws in Oregon, also backed by the state's Dem governor, which YIMBY activists are saying they will now use as models to introduce in more state legislatures.
HB2258 requires municipalities and counties to approve, for all parcels in zones designated for housing, any new construction that deploys a set of statewide pre-approved designs for apartments, single-unit dwellings, duplexes, townhomes, and other middle housing options. The new law also "creates land use and design standards for the plans, providing clarity and predictability for developers, cities, and counties". Developers and builders have to go through individual local approval processes only if they want to build a bespoke design.
(I wonder if that's also a way to discourage brutalism and other widely-unpopular architectural styles? Betcha the Oregon Architects Guild or whatever haaaates this.)
Then HB2138 bars all cities and counties from blocking development of various types of middle-density housing, e.g. duplexes or accessory dwelling units (a.k.a. "mother-in-law" apartments"), on any land where a single-family home can be built. It also bars cities from requiring traffic studies or forcing developers to pay for things like a new stoplight when they’re building or redeveloping a lot.
(That traffic studies thing is one I wish would be squashed in the state where I live, been an old-reliable in the NIMBY toolkit for many years.)
I see also that Oregon's governor (previously the longest-serving Speaker in the history of the Oregon House of Representatives) won the Dem gubenatorial primary in 2022 by a large margin, and in office has made the removal of red tape so as to get more housing built by the private sector her signature issue that she's going to try to get re-elected on. Never heard of Tina Kotek before and I know nothing else about Oregon politics, but will be rooting for her.
> (I wonder if that's also a way to discourage brutalism and other widely-unpopular architectural styles? Betcha the Oregon Architects Guild or whatever haaaates this.)
Where are these mythical "brutalist" apartments being built?!
Low-mid level commercial real estate *already* uses repetitive off-the-shelf designs everywhere just due to efficiency and due to building codes and regulations.
Anyway, this is really great news to hear. At least some things are going in the right direction!
On brutalist architecture. I think the Malcom Moos Tower qualifies. It’s on my alma mater’s campus. I’ve misplaced my Physical Plant issued ‘E1’ key that allowed me to elevator access its roof. Too bad for this evening, it’s a great place to watch fireworks on both sides of the Mississippi, Mpls *and* St Paul.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Moos_Health_Sciences_Tower
Looks like a lovely building. I always like a good example of effortful brutalism.
Weird historical tidbit department.
Famous for popularizing French cuisine in the US Julia Child also worked for the precursor to the CIA.
Child wanted to serve her country during WWII but at 6’ 2” she was too tall to join the military so she served as an intelligence officer in the OSS.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/julia-child-cooking-up-spy-ops-for-oss/
Wow, all the way up to top security clearances, during wartime. That must have been fascinating.
She helped develop a shark repellent based on copper acetate. My first guess would have been she would go with cayenne pepper.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/julia-child-shark-repellant-world-war-ii
Heh....I'm reading that her interest in French cooking began after the war, sparked by the Frenchman she met in the OSS and married.
The Big Beautiful Bill would cap how much med students can borrow from the government. That could make med school unaffordable for many, especially those without family help. The goal seems to be lowering costs by reducing demand—but if fewer people can train to be doctors, what happens to the doctor shortage we’re already facing?
Wouldn't you expect med schools to lower tuitions then?
Perhaps yes. But it may take time and in between the shortage worsens.
Perhaps not. And med school lowers their standards and accepts more of the applicants available.
An argument for latter is that acceptance rates at medical school is very low (around 5%) so they can easily change it to around 10%.
Optimal outcome: Med school lowers their price quickly not to lose out on talent from poorer backgrounds. The question is how likely this outcome is.
If it's at all like the ongoing shortage of sign language interpreters (my field), the shortage will get worse. Unlike interpreting programs, med schools have lots of rich alumni donors to keep them afloat though, so they probably won't close right away.
The Big Beautiful Bill would cap how much med students can borrow from the government—somewhere between $150k and $200k total. But med school usually costs over $250k. Extra loan amount would need to come from private loans.
What's the cap?
According to Spleen's misplaced comment above, "The Big Beautiful Bill would cap how much med students can borrow from the government—somewhere between $150k and $200k total. But med school usually costs over $250k. Extra loan amount would need to come from private loans."
Thanks for the correction.
Would love your thoughts on this. It basically asks to take it easy with the bayesian brain hypothesis, from what I've gathered.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00421-025-05855-6
I wrote an essay, hopefully first of a series, on AI, media and epistemology. Please comment. I am interested in any feedback, as this is my first real foray into writing for the general public.
https://andlosethenameofaction.substack.com/p/architecture-of-truth
Can I share just how much I hate Zoom? For some reason, they've made it **completely impossible** to join Zoom calls from a Portal.
On *some* platforms, like Chrome on a Chromebook, opening a Zoom link will show a hidden "join from the browser" option. However, on the Portal, no matter what you do, there is NO option to join from the browser. It demands that you install the app instead. The problem is that there is also NO APP for the Portal either!
They've completely broken it. And while I normally wouldn't criticize people for not supporting an obscure platform like this, this isn't just a matter of their app not being available, which is understandable. What makes this really galling is that they clearly *do* have the ability to support browser calling and **Actively went out of their way to break things** for no reason. WTF?
It's the same pattern as any other software that is paid for one group but used by another. Optimize for the first group and make friendly looking gestures at the other. It's the same with jira and teams and zscaler.
I have to use zoom at work. I've been doing a sound check before every meeting for over two years now because zoom switches my input source randomly and sometimes it choose ones they don't work.
Despite years of remote work, we're still in the "I can't hear you, can you hear me" phase.
The thing is that other video conference apps don't do this. Google Meet works just fine in the browser. In fact, not only can you join Meet calls in the browser, it has a full-blown browser UI with the ability to create meetings, etc. as well.
Big YIMBY win in California which also sharply improves my personal view of Gavin Newsome. (From a very-low baseline but, still.)
They've just shredded a sizeable chunk of CEQA, the state-level version of NEPA which is if anything even more notorious for making stuff impossible to build. The legislation was sponsored by Democrats in both houses of the state legislature, with Newsome's strong public encouragement and then he signed it the moment they got it passed.
The new state law:
-- exempts most urban housing construction from CEQA.
-- exempts most urban housing construction from requirements to pay union-level wages for construction workers.
-- waives environmental restrictions for some residential rezoning changes.
-- designates a range of nonresidential projects (health clinics, child-care facilities, advanced manufacturing facilities, food banks, others) as also no longer subject to CEQA.
Note that "urban" here means not just LA/Oakland/etc but includes California's many small/medium sized cities.
All of those changes happening in _California_, backed by California _Democrats_. Have to say I did not see that coming....the YIMBY-advocacy groups are over the moon online right now.
Reducing the number of Herculean labors required to get a final building permit from twelve to maybe eight, is commendable in principle but unlikely to make a huge difference in practice. California has a *lot* of veto points for new construction, and a lot of people who really want to exercise that veto (or at least negotiate a nice juicy payout in order to not veto the project).
FYI it's Newsom not Newsome.
> Have to say I did not see that coming....
Newsom's actually been supporting YIMBY bills for several years now. This is by far the biggest, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
“My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” <- Murkowski, on the bill that she just cast the deciding vote to push through.
I know Republicans always fall in line, but it's still strange to see people criticizing a bill that they just voted for.
It’s the tension between doing what’s right for your own state and what’s right for the country at play here.
Last I checked, the Big Beautiful Bill had some huge goodies for Alaska in it, so if she voted against it would be political suicide. One of the biggest goodies I have not seen reported on at all in the national press, though local Alaska outlets have it. Not only are they going to open up the ANWAR to oil and gas extraction (something Alaskans have been wanting for years) but the tax revenue split from those new leases (as well as several others outside of ANWAR) is going to be 70% to the state government and 30% to the feds. Normally it's 50:50. Keep in mind, the state of Alaska's budget is essentially entirely funded by oil and gas taxes. They don't have an income tax or a sales tax, and taxes on everything that isn't fossil fuels is a rounding error. So getting a 70:30 split and keeping the pipeline full and flowing is something an Alaskan Senator can't realistically turn down. Plus she twisted the screws to get a bunch of last minute pork as well.
Murkowski is an extremely popular politician in Alaska for a reason: she delivers.
I don't know the state by state breakdown, but the Fox poll showed the bill at 38-59, i.e. 21 points underwater among the general population. It hardly seems like "political suicide" to oppose that unless you're talking specifically about the Republican primaries, and Murkowski has *already* won on a write-in line after losing the primary before.
Nah, I think this is great and healthy.
You recognize that there's a process, and you maximize sanity by playing along and nudging something with a lot of weight and also a lot of momentum and pressure behind it in the direction you'd prefer it went.
Do you, or anyone else, have a good data set that supports this claim? From the cheap seats, the only time I hear about Murkowski is where she spends a lot of time wringing her hands before falling in line with Trump (and, previously, McConnell.) I understand, in the abstract, the claim that you are making, but it seems that she is just bluffing each time and her bluff is called without any concessions. As far as I can tell, the same is true for Susan Collins, too.
She got some small Alaska specific provisions. They were going to exempt Alaska from the new Medicaid hoops through a carve out for ‘non contiguous states’ but the Senate parliamentarian said they could not pass the bill through reconciliation with that added.
She got some big wins for Alaska in the bill, the most notable of which is a 70:30 tax revenue split between the state and the feds for all the new oil and gas leases the bill is going to open up in Alaska. Normally it's a 50:50 split, and the Alaska government runs off of oil money, so that's a big deal.
“ While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.”
https://x.com/lisamurkowski/status/1940124362625175934
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
I wouldn't know, I'm not super into politics. But just saying out loud 'this is fiscally insane' creates bounds on just how insane things can get. It creates a permission structure for marginal house members to speak up, etc.
I think she also has some credibility with the other side.
But I'm just saying random words, not contributing anything new to the conversation
I know that the range of possible salt deductions and other stuff in this bill were quite large and it's a big coalitional negotiation with a lot of tension. It just wouldn't make sense for me if her replacement with a typical Republican wouldn't have made it worse
>t just wouldn't make sense for me if her replacement with a typical Republican wouldn't have made it worse
Case in point: the other Alaska senator, Dan Sullivan, is the quintessential "typical Republican", so if you want to model what it would be like if Murkowski was replaced just imagine Dan twice.
Here's what Dan had to say about the BBB passing: "This transformative legislation includes numerous provisions to unleash Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential, deliver tax relief for hard-working families and small businesses, make the largest investment for the U.S. Coast Guard in history, secure the southern border and halt the flow of deadly fentanyl, continue the build-up of Alaska-based military, upgrade Alaska’s aviation safety, strengthen Alaska’s health care and nutrition programs, protect Alaska’s most vulnerable communities, and achieve historic savings for future generations."
She voted yes reluctantly.
“But, let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.”
https://x.com/lisamurkowski/status/1940124362625175934
Yeah, it's like that time John Boehner said "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a joke or something, but it was Pelosi who said that, not Boehner. And that wasn't a criticism of the bill, she was arguing that ordinary people would see through the scare mongering and learn how it actually worked once they saw it first hand (which is in fact what actually happened, albeit with a delay of several years - witness how popular ACA got once Republicans started trying to kill it.)
That may be so, but you'd imagine someone with as much experience as Pelosi would know to avoid saying the likes of "This is a lovely poke, a big beautiful poke! And it's got an amazing pig inside, trust me! You're gonna love this pig after you buy this poke!"
She's not the only politician to say that. Republicans were hoping that passing the TCJA in 2017 would make them popular once voters saw the effects firsthand.
Who are killing whom at aid hubs in Gaza?
I am puzzled by the reports of killings at Gaza aid hubs. Several people on this ACX forum are quite knowledgeable about the conflict. Could you enlighten me, or refer to credible sources?
Here is the puzzle. The UN reports that “At least 400 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to fetch from controversial new aid hubs in Gaza”. (Link: Gaza: Over 400 Palestinians killed around private aid hubs, UN rights office says | UN News June 24 )
This behavior by the Israelis is puzzling. Since it is in Israel’s interest to get Gaza people to use the aid hubs – not to scare people away. Shooting at them when they approach the aid stations is likely to scare them away. So why do the Israelis shoot at them? What am I missing?
…for the record, it would make sense for Hamas to kill people who approach the aid stations. Since the aid hubs are meant to undercut Hamas’ control of aid supplies, which is a major factor in generating an income stream for Hamas, as well as power over the Gaza population.
Related to this, I notice that at least five such aid workers have been killed, probably by Hamas (if the UN report is correct). But five people are far less that “400 and more”.
Let me go out on a limb and sketch the puzzle in more detail:
Hamas has an interest in scaring Gazans away from the aid stations. Killing 400 or more Gazans queuing up for aid might thus in principle be rational. But only if it can be hidden from the Gazans themselves, and the world community, that the killings are really done by Hamas. And since this will be very difficult to hide, it is unlikely that it is worth the risk, from Hamas’ perspective. Not least because the Israelis would have a strong incentive to investigate and make known that it is really Hamas, not then Israelis, that do the killing. Which the Israelis have not claimed. Conclusion: It is unlikely that Hamas is doing the killings.
…but what on earth can be in it for the Israelis? Since the killings undermine their efforts to make the aid hubs work.
Wild speculation: Israel has released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a few Israeli hostages. I would assume Israel has some capability to trace the released prisoners after the enter Gaza (assuming that they mainly are relocated to Gaza). If so, the Israelis do perhaps pick them off now that they are in the open and thus legitimate targets. But this hypothesis does not rhyme with killing people at the aid hubs primarily. Unless there are a lot of Hamas warriors at the aid hubs, trying to prevent Gazans from accessing the hubs - and the Israelis are targeting these warriors (and killing some women , children and old folks in the process, but only as collateral damage).
…but even so, the killing of Hamas warriors (including former prisoners) particularly at the aid hubs does not make much sense, from an Israeli point of view. It would make more sense to kill Hamas warriors everywhere else in Gaza than at the aid hubs. Thus I cannot quite see how these killings are rational, if indeed the Israelis are behind them.
…underlying all of this is an assumption that both Hamas and the Israelis are rational and capable people who can do risk calculations, and therefore do not make grave mistakes before they act. So what is going on? Who is killing whom, and why? I would be grateful for responses by those who are more in the know than I am.
The actual answer is that the way they set up the aid distribution is incredibly stupid and worthless and is not a serious strategy for delivering aid at this scale and with the level of starvation involved. Certainly Hamas is not helping but that is not the major issue. The US contractors involved with weapons actually seem to be more of an issue than the IDF soldiers as far as shooting people as well. Realistically the US guys are purely profit driven amoral mercs who know full well that there are no consequences for anything they do so they engage in zero consideration of Palestinians struggling to navigate an incredibly poorly designed aid distribution system while starving and living in terror of military strikes for the last several years. This isn't a comment on whether the Palestinians deserved it or are to blame for their situation or w/e, just on the practicalities of "organizing" large numbers of people who exist in that type of environment.
My internal explanation is that IDF highly prioritizes Israeli lives over Palestinian lives. Something on the scale of 1:1000, but even 1:100 explains their behavior. Let's say an orderly queue of Palestinians is 100% safe for the soldiers handing out aid and a disorderly crowd of Palestinians pushing forward to demand their rations is 90% safe and results in the deaths of 2 Israelis in 10% of the cases, then shooting into the crowd and killing less than 20 Palestinians every time a disorderly crowd is formed is rational.
This is not the best equation for policing civilians, but the IDF soldiers are not policemen and they have learned and practiced a very limited array of problem-solving techniques. And even policemen are often bad at de-escalation and crowd control, like the USA regularly demonstrate.
This is my model of the Gaza war as well.
I generally agree, because it would be a retarded strategy, that the Israelis are not trying to kill civilians at aid stations. If it's happening, that leaves accidents/chaos at the stations as a cause, or militants on the other side instigating violence, as mentioned by others.
However, I'll add one more possibility that I saw asserted in Israeili media: none of these aid station killings actually happened, and were either casualties from elsewhere or fabricated outright by Hamas.
My speculation has been that the people being killed are people trying to rush and steal from the aid stations, not people patiently standing in line.
Thanks for your comment Melvin, but see NonRandomWalk below (and his link to an interesting podcast), plus my comment to his comment - my hunch this is a more fruitful way to look at the puzzle. It boils down to lack of sufficient foresight on behalf of the higher-ups in the Israeli chain of command.
The usual answer to "why is X killing so many civilians in this war?", is that Y is very thoroughly intermingled with those civilians while actively waging war on X. The allies killed about as many French civilians in Normandy as the Israelis did Palestinian civilians in the first three months of the Gaza war. Not as a matter of policy on either side; the Germans just found it convenient to use a lot of French urban infrastructure for their local military logistics, and they also found it convenient to just let the French mostly keep living and working where they had been. And all that military logistics really had to go.
This is greatly aggravated when one side doesn't bother with uniforms, and battle-weary paranoid soldiers on the other have to look at any young man carrying any sort of parcel or package and wonder whether that's a gun or a bomb. The Nazis, for all their many, many faults, did fight in uniform.
Thanks for your comment John.
See my reply to NoRandomWalk for (indirect) comment to your comment.
...let me just add, in addition to what I say there, that it would be insane for Hamas to wear uniforms in the present stage & context in their armed fight against the Israeli forces. I understand you do not like Hamas, but you must grant also your opponents rational agency.
I'll abstain from commenting on the Nazi comparison. Let's try to avoid "Goodwin's Law" a little longer:-)
Where would Hamas obtain or manufacture uniforms if they wanted to wear them?
We're talking about people who are looking for a Final Solution to the problem of eight million Jews living in what they see as their proper Lebensraum; Godwin has long since left the building.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "granting my opponents rational agency". Obviously the hiding-among-civilians thing is something that Hamas has chosen to do, and obviously they had reasons for doing so. Have I done anything to suggest otherwise?
But with agency comes responsibility. Decisions have costs, and actions have consequences. The very predictable consequence of deciding to hide among civilians while waging war against a vastly superior power is that A: you're gonna die and B: some of those civilians are going to die with you and C: they wouldn't have died if you'd made a different decision so probably it's a good thing that you're going to die before you can make too many more decisions.
As for the alleged *sanity* of Hamas's decision, it's right up there with the "sanity" of the Nazi's decision to round up a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys, give them Volkssturmgewehrs and a few Panzerfausts, and send them up against Zhukov's tanks and artillery. Yes, if you're one of the top-level leaders, and you don't care about anything but your own sorry existence, then this strategy may postpone for a few months the transition from "my life is one of hiding in a bunker hoping I won't suddenly die" to "my life is one of sitting in a POW camp hoping maybe they'll eventually let me out".
But I'm going to suggest that the actually sane decision, for both Nazis and Hamas, and top leadership down to rank and file. is to surrender ASAP. Because the longer you put that off, and the more war crimes you commit in the meantime, the more you'll look like you should never be let out of that prison camp.
John, you are veering into the territory of moral consequences of actions.
That is opening up an interesting but also very difficult can of worms. A can of worms that at the deepest level concerns if morals have an “objective” foundation, or are ultimately a matter of taste; and on a less deep level, moral-pragmatic considerations like: How it appears to third parties/interested audiences (aka the world community) if your actions are presented in a way that is perceived by them as not morally justified. And related: If a separate part of a war-game/political game is the rhetorical game concerning who among players can most convincingly paint their opponents as occupying, or not occupying, the moral high ground.
For those of us who do not actively partake in the conflict (I’m guessing that is both of us) it is only this rhetorical part of the war game/political game we can play.
…but in this ACX context, I prefer not to play that game. That is, I want to limit myself to analyse it. Including, as I do now, to point out that we are players in the game – rather than observers of it – if we partake in this “who has morals on their side” discussion.
Ok, some would say that to adopt such an analytical stance to what is going on in Gaza is really also a moral position – that there is no escape from being a player in the “morality game”! Since “neutrality” is also a value, i.e. a moral stance. There is something to be said for this position. If so, we are back in the deepest part of moral philosophy again.
But for what it is worth, I’m trying to put a parenthesis around the “who is moral” question in this context & at ACX; including the “what are morally justifiable consequences of one’s actions” question.
I do this also for pragmatic reasons. Since I believe that if you engage yourself morally, then you also engage yourself emotionally, and once you engage yourself emotionally, there is a risk that you do not think clearly any more concerning the likely moves and counter-moves the actors are likely to do next. Thus your ability to foresee what may happen next is weakened. I am speaking from personal experience here: Once I allow my emotions to enter my analysis of a situation, I can almost feel my IQ going down.
Only this: If Hamas choose to wear uniforms in the present situation in their war with the Israeli forces, they will die significantly faster, and in larger numbers, than if they blend in with the civilian crowd. Which is the obvious – and very rational - reason why they do not wear uniforms.
"in this ACX context, I prefer not to play that game [ of discussing "moral consequences to actions" ]."
"let me just add, in addition to what I say there, that it would be insane for Hamas to wear uniforms in the present stage & context in their armed fight against the Israeli forces. I understand you do not like Hamas, but you must grant also your opponents rational agency."
You need to re-read your own comments.
You either misunderstand what I write, or you mean something different with concepts such as "moral" and "rationality" than I do. Or both.
?
There is one side in this conflict which has lebensraum as an openly declared war aim, a history of seizing it in prior wars, and is actively engaged in ethnic cleansing in pursuit of such. That side is not Hamas.
And yet after almost two years of total war, the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip is still north of two million, and I think not even down 10% from the prewar value. If "ethnic cleansing" were the goal, Israel really sucks at it.
This is a terrible argument and I wish people would stop repeating it. The *fundamental goal* of ethnic cleansing is almost never killing people for the sake of killing people. Not even for the Nazis was that the goal: hence why the first established ghettos and looked into mass deportation and only later started in with the mass-murder. Murder often proves to be a more convenient way to get to the actual goal than forced movement or perpetual imprisonment.
The goal, of course, is simply "not having to deal with Those People." You've decided that there's an ethnic group--one that lives in close proximity or intermingled with yours--that your group has decided it simply Cannot Tolerate. So you want them out of your life. That's the goal. Not having to deal with them. It would be nice if they just left on their own: but of course people usually won't do that, and often have nowhere to go even if they wanted to. Well, too bad, so sad, but your group has lots of ways to (try to) force the issue. It can impose high costs for staying put: unfair laws, harassment campaigns, organized destruction of property. You can simply move them outside your territory by force and keep them out by more force. Or you can concentrate and imprison them in ghettos, reservations, camps, or whatever. But of course all those things are difficult, costly and leave Those People lots of ways to cause you trouble. Murder someone is usually much cheaper, and completely final. So it happens pretty often that *eventually* that other measures give way to murder. Not always: the United States, for example, had enough remote, empty land that long-term, (and relatively lightly-enforced) imprisonment for Native American peoples never did give way to wholesale mass-murder[1].
It's pretty clear that both Hamas and Israel's governing party[2] *want* to engage in ethnic cleansing. Neither of them wants to have to live around That Other Group. Neither of them believes that peaceful coexistence is possible or desirable. The most salient difference is not that one group is inherently genocidal and the other group is inherently peaceful or any such load of hogwash. The difference is power. They both *want* to engage in ethnic cleansing. Israel has the power to actually do it *and has been doing so.* That is literally what Gaza strip (in its modern incarnation) *is.* It's the most prominent result of a decades-long, as-yet-incomplete process of ethnic cleansing: the same sort of thing as an Indian reservation in the 19th century U.S., but substantially hampered by the fact that Israel is small and crowded where the early U.S. was huge and empty. It's better than a windowless cell or a concentration camp (or it was before the war), but it's primary purpose is *keeping Palestinians away from Israelis.* Which is why October 7 brought such an enormously violent, protracted response: the promise that Gaza represented, the promise of being able to wall off those people, ignore their suffering and just never, ever have to deal with them again turned out to be a lie. Oops, they're still there and they can at least very occasionally manage to make the problems you've inflicted on them your problems too.
I can't see the future and can't tell you whether Israel will escalate from its current level of mass murder to a level high enough to crater Gaza's population. But I can see the past and notice that the argument "they're clearly not trying to do ethnic cleansing because they've only killed tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands or millions" is crap from beginning to end. The number of currently living Gazans isn't really an important data point from the frame of ethnic cleansing: it's all about where they are, and how well you can control them.
[1] Though of course there was no shortage or murder in both directions during the roughly century-long period where the issue was being decided.
[2] With a decent share of popular support on both sides.
> I think not even down 10% from the prewar value. If "ethnic cleansing" were the goal, Israel really sucks at it.
FWIW, I don't think most Israelis explicitly want to wipe out the Gazans either, but this isn't an especially strong argument, since even the Nazis didn't really get serious about killing all the Jews until near the end of the war.
I start a war with you, lose, and then have my soldiers hide among the civilian population rather than surrender. At that point, even if the other side is not especially careful about civilian casualties, it seems like I'm the one primarily responsible for civilian casualties.
Are you sure? Let's say your brother breaks into my house, stabs my wife, steals my TV, then flees back across the street to your house and hides there.
Assuming your family starts taking casualties from me shooting at him into your house, I think most people would view culpability on a sliding scale. If I'm super-careful but members of your family get hurt anyway that's one set of facts, but the more "not especially careful" I am about collateral damage, the more I'd expect people to tip the balance of who they blame away from your brother and towards me.
I think the moral intuitions we have for living in civilization with laws and courts are not very useful for thinking about wars between nations, or between nations and terrorist groups or gangsters or whatever.
Further, I think there is something fundamentally broken about this reasoning that says:
a. Hamas carries out a godawful attack on Israel, including murdering a bunch of civilians and kidnapping a bunch of civilians to use as hostages.
b. Hamas hides among civilians in Gaza so that killing them requires killing a lot of civilians.
c. Thus, Israel is morally obliged to stop trying so hard to kill Hamas members, since that would kill too many civilians.
Why isn't Hamas at least obliged to work as hard to prevent civilian casualties as Israel is?
This seems like some kind of superweapon, where I can do any terrible thing and then take a baby hostage and you're obliged to let me get away with it lest the baby get killed.
"Further, I think there is something fundamentally broken about this reasoning that says:"
There is also something fundamentally broken about any analysis that only starts assigning moral culpability beginning on October 7, 2023. "Hamas started the war" is very strictly true if be "the war" you mean the currently, extremely heated phase of the conflict that's been going on for the past not-quite-two-years. But the conflict extends back much further, and there were a great many things happening *before* October 7 that carry moral weight.
Haviv's explanation is probably the most accurate you'll get so far
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J59b2XWAVe0
tl;dr: there's a lot of incompetence, and soldiers who aren't trained and haven't been explained to that this going well is important for the war effort, who get rotated in from a 'everything that moves is hamas' to having to do crowd control in a situation where no one has bothered to set up clear signs for where it's safe to be, or not, and meanwhile hamas is very clearly trying to figure out how to infiltrate the aid distribution sites and infrequently succeeding
now that all the competent people who've been focused on iran for the last two months are less busy, and this has become a domestic issue, hopefully these horrible situations become less frequent
or we might get a deal in a week and the war is over, hamas stays in power, gaza is indefinitely blockaded behind a big buffer zone. who knows at this point.
I suppose I'm a bit surprised that you wouldn't give a bunch of people rubber bullets and water jets for first line crowd control. Obviously you need people with real weapons in case there is an attack, but it seems plausible to give Private Joe the crowd control weapons and then tell Private Jake with the semi automatic to hold his fire until things look dicy. Perhaps that's incompatible with the realities on the ground.
If the angry guy in the crowd is a suicide bomber, or even if he's "just" hiding an AK-47 that he's planning to magdump in your direction as soon as he's fifteen paces out, then rubber bullets probably aren't going to cut it and you aren't going to have time to bring the second line into play before it's too late.
You're thinking "crowd control, and maybe there will be a really violent riot", when the reality is "crowd control, but also a no-shit shooting war with automatic weapons and high explosives on both sides".
Suicide bombing hasn't been used by Hamas as a tactic in the last 10 years or so, unless someone can correct me on that.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/martyrdom-operation-resistance-roundup-day-448/
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/12/19/gaza-terrorists-use-suicide-bombs-against-israeli-soldiers-in-gaza/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/tel-aviv-suicide-bombing-attempt-in-august-was-overseen-by-hamas-in-turkey-police/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-hamas-official-mashaal-urges-resumption-of-suicide-bombings-against-israel/
So it looks like there was one suicide attack last August and one in December, killing two Israelis and injuring a few more
Thanks for the useful link to Haviv's podcast (I did not know about this guy, well worth listening to) and your comment summing up the gist of his laying-out of the situation (in particular from 19:30).
Your point that "all the competent people" - who must understand how important it is that the aid hubs are a success - have had heir minds elsewhere (in Iran) is a good point.
These higher-up people are the ones whose job it is to make sure the "institutional setting" of the many aid hubs is professionally done. With sufficient and well-marked go versus no-go zones; queuing infrastructure; and all the other seemingly "mundane" administrative-technological set-ups that are vital for orderly, safe and efficient aid distribution - and in a situation where they must know that Hamas has every incentive to distort and (ideally) to eliminate the aid distribution efforts. Since control of resources to the population in Gaza is a life-or-death issue to them.
...Not anticipating that your opponent is also a rational and competent actor, and not to set aside sufficient economic and administrative resources already from the start to counter whatever Hamas might come up with to distort aid distribution, is negligence bordering on irrationality. Don't the higher-ups in Israel think more than one move ahead in their game with Hamas? Then again, as you say, rationality on behalf of the higher-ups in Israel might be "saved" by they having had more urgent things (Iran) on their minds lately.
It will be interesting to see if they can get their act together now. The outcome of the conflict in Gaza might depend upon it.
I don't have any special knowledge but I think that the simplest explanation - that it's really hard to organise the delivery of aid to desperate and starving people while the dominant local violent faction (Hamas) is actively trying to prevent you from doing it. Even with the best intentions there would be chaos and people rushing at aid convoys.
Thanks for you comment Alex. I believe this is a fruitful way to look at it, but it begs the question of why the higher-ups in the Israeli chain of command did not anticipate this and allocated sufficient resorces to make the aid hub infrastructiure safer and more orderly.( See the comment by NoRandomWalk and my comment to his comment for elaborations.)
Who says they didn't? Delivering aid to civilians in a warzone when the enemy is actively trying to stop you is one of the hardest tasks in warfare. They could have anticipated it, took precautions, and still have failures.
I largely agree with NoRandomWalk's comment and I don't think it contradicts what I wrote.
Also you should consider the initiatives. For pretty much everyone on the Israeli side, starting from the soldier on the ground and ending with top military brass and Netanyahu himself, the consequences of Israeli casualties are much more dire than the consequences of Palestinian casualties. In the first case you lose you friends/don't get promoted/can lose elections. Of course you could argue that these scenes hurt the image of Israel globally but people choose short-term gain all the time.
(I'm simplifying obvs, there is an investigation going on about the deaths and hopefully conclusions will be made)
I would too but we're not going to get any such responses. We will instead get stuff like what Jollies just replied with, and/or the equally-foaming "UN staff is making up those death numbers because reasons reasons Holocaust" type stuff. Sucks.
...if you look at the sum total of replies, they rather suggest that it is still possible to get interesting information & exchange of views here at ACX:-) Not many open discussion fora's like this left. (Not that I am aware of, at least.)
I wasn't with that particular comment thinking just about ACX, though I see now that my phrasing made it seem so.
To your broader point, it's true that I think ACX's signal-to-noise ratio has degraded pretty sharply during the past year or two. But since that's a decline from a pretty positive starting point I also still agree that there aren't many open-discussion forums like this one.
Not very knowledgeable, but I imagine this isn't 4D chess by anyone, it's just stupid mistakes. I can imagine Israel wanting security in the aid hubs so Hamas doesn't take over. But then 1,000 civilians swarm the aid hub afraid that laggers won't have food left. Someone panics, a shot is fired, everyone panics. Stampede/whatever, more shots, lots of casualties.
Thanks for you comment. I believe "mistakes" are a factor, but it begs the question of why the higher-ups in the Israeli chain of command did not anticipate such mistakes and allocate sufficient resorces to make the aid hub infrastructure safer and less prone for such mistakes to happen. (See the comment by NoRandomWalk and my comment to his comment for elaborations.)
It's not that complicated. Israel was facing too much blowback for openly starving Gazan civilians so they set up aid distribution. They are making life for Gazans as hellish as possible so that they submit to ethnic cleansing from the region and/or some outside authority intervenes to set up a forced relocation plan. Killing people at the distribution sites deters the population from actually receiving aid and allows Israel to inflict violence under a slightly more believable pretext.
Some welcome news in the fight for more affordable housing: California is narrowing the scope of CEQA, the law that requires lengthy environmental reviews of many building projects.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/us/california-environment-newsom-ceqa.html
I have a question for the non-US physicians here.
One of the constant complaints we hear from US doctors is that dealing with medical insurers is a huge pain, just an endless bureaucratic death-march. But is that really a US-specific problems? All systems except for absolute user-pay have some sort of authority that determines what is covered, for whom, and for how much. Don't the same problems arise in dealing with these intermediaries, regardless of how they are organized?
Other systems may have similar problems somewhere, but fewer touchpoints where they can cause issues.
In the Australian public system, for instance, suppose I go to hospital. I will be treated by doctors and nurses employed by the hospital, who will make decisions on what hospital resources will be used for my treatment. The entity that makes decisions on what treatment I get is the same entity that is paying for it; nobody has any meaningful incentive to give me too much or too little medical treatment since everyone involved gets paid the same regardless... the hospital doesn't gain by not treating me, but it does need to allocate its resources. It's not perfect but it abstracts away a bunch of problems that would exist if the people paying for the care and the people providing the care are two adversarial entities with different incentives.
We have private health insurance for some things as well but it tends to be a bit simpler. For instance if I have a certain procedure then my insurance company openly says they're willing to pay up to (say) $25K for that procedure. Most insurance companies are basically aligned on how much they're willing to pay, and most surgeons agree that they'll either charge that amount, or perhaps a little bit more if they have a reputation as one of the surgeons that people will pay out-of-pocket for.
I'm sure there's still rough edges where arguments happen.
A side comment which doesn't answer your actual question....the doctors I know (US) don't complain about that any more than local business owners complain about city permits red tape or whatever. My father-in-law, recently retired from 20 years running his own endochrinologist practice of several physicians, is one example of several.
They do complain about it, to be clear, but not above an American-baseline level of bitching about the headaches of modern life. Ours is a deeply whiny society.
I have several doctors in my extended family, and this is not among the complaints I have heard.
The main complaint is how little they get for some procedures.
This is in Austria, for reference. With a unified insurance system, it's very clear what is covered, for how much, and for whom. As I understand it, the patient presents their insurance card when visiting the doctor, the doctor ticks a few checkboxes on an electronic form, and it's done.
Here's a brief pathogen update, but from a pathogen perspective, things are pretty boring right now.
1. The expected summer COVID-19 wave hasn't started yet. In the past two weeks, the variants that were competitive enough to possibly cause a wave, NB.1.8.1 and XFG, took a frequency nose-dive. There's really no variant on the horizon that could spawn a wave in the US at the moment. I'll check the data in another couple of weeks, but I'm starting to wonder if there'll be a summer COVID wave this year (in the US at least). Nota Bene: NB.1.8.1 is currently causing a slight increase in cases in Australia. And NB.1.8.1 caused a big wave in Hong Kong. Our XEC wave earlier this year may have provided us with enough herd immunity to ward off Nimbus and Stratus (the nicknames for NB.1.8.1 and XFG). It seems like SARS2 is reduced to causing localized outbreaks for now—and maybe forever.
2. The US measles outbreak has lost steam. Cases are still trickling in, but unless the pathogen finds a new group of Mennonites or antivaxxers to infect, I think the outbreak is mostly over in the US. This year's outbreak resulted in 1,227 cases, 128 hospitalizations, and 3 deaths. I think it's mostly over in the US for now, except for the people who will have to deal with the long-term aftereffects of the virus (and of course, the tears for the dead). I haven't checked the numbers south of the border, but the measles outbreak is still going strong in Canada. Alberta the hardest hit right now, with >100 new cases in epi week 25. Ontario reported only 30 new cases that week, suggesting that the outbreak has shifted to Alberta. Canada is up to 3526 cases. No deaths, though.
3. A(H5) bird flu is on the wane. Only two new dairy herds infected in the past 30 days, and 3 poulty flocks were infected in the last 30 days. H5N1 is a seasonal influenza, and wild birds seem to be its primary vector, so we should expect its return this coming winter. In the meantime, the price of eggs doesn't seem to have fallen. saw a dozen cage-free eggs for $13 at my local supermarket. The other brands were still in the $10 range. I suppose it takes time to replace the millions of egg-laying hens that were slaughtered, but I can't say I understand the economics of chicken farming.
Why aren't Republicans talking about Abundance?
It seems like more of a right-wing than a left-wing sort of idea. Is it just the fact that the Democrats have quietly stolen and Democat-coded the word for now and Republicans are loath to start using it on their own side?
Because it's specifically an article of debate within the center-left policy sphere, and meant as such.
"It seems like more of a right-wing than a left-wing sort of idea. "
I think you have a very narrowly restricted idea of what counts as left-wing. Possibly this is conditioned by the last 10-15 years of American politics which have been uniquely and impressively stupid on both sides of the aisle.
Edit: nevermind, assuming it's the same thing as Supply-Side Progressivism as defined by Wikipedia, that is a pretty right wing idea. A leftist implementation focused on abundance of essential goods and services would look extremely different.
Because Trump campaigned on Save The Suburbs and is all in for restrictive zoning.
Don't forget that he also decided that electricity is woke and is slapping big taxes on electricity production too. And then there's the tariffs...
No, I think the bit you're referring to, the tax on solar and wind projects, was removed.
I think you might be right. It's hard to keep track with the way they're frenetically making changes to the bill.
because its purpose is to ensure the right wing has policy control regardless of election results, Republicans embracing it wouldn't help that
That is not even vaguely its purposes, LOL. You are just demonstrating that you haven't read the book.
To answer Melvin's question, "Abundance" (which I have read) is a firmly pro-government argument. It does not propose or support blanket deregulation in anything like a Ronald Reagan rhetorical mode or a Jimmy Carter actual-deregulator mode.
Far from it, the "Abundance" argument is that stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulation is (a) preventing the public sector from successfully delivering progressive policy outcomes on the ground, and therefore (b) helping entire generations of less-politically-engaged and non-wealthy Americans conclude that progressivism is an inherently ineffective approach to practical government benefitting the quality of life of non-wealthy people.
To answer the question posed, Republican officeholders aren't talking publicly about "Abundance" because they know they are the political beneficiaries of the progressive-government flailing which the book diagnoses and describes.
My MAGA acquaintances and in-laws do talk about "Abundance" a bit, privately. They're gleeful at the progressive/liberal bitchfest about it and their reaction is basically just to stay out of the way and grab some popcorn. It's not a priority topic for them though -- "Abundance" is pretty geeky stuff which bores them compared to celebrating the immigrant-deportation-fest and whatnot. None of them that I know have read the book nor will they.
I do know one MAGA fan/donor, a PhD-holding professional, who's mentioned hoping for the progressive sneering at "Abundance" to derail the book's argument for the electoral benefits to his side. That strategic perspective is uncommon among MAGA voters though, mostly they're just enjoying a public catfight amongst the "lefty scum".
I am highly skeptical that, 45 years after Ronald Reagan, there still exist significant amounts of "stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulations"; deregulation mania has been going on far too long for that to be the case.
I'm also well aware that wealthy donors have a long, long history of trying to undermine or repeal regulations necessary to preserve human life, health, and safety, and the Abundance faction seems like nothing more than yet another political wing of those same donors, and of those politicians who (out of either naivety or corruption) claim that there is a way to make things better for ordinary people without confronting America's increasingly powerful and rapacious oligarchy in any way.
I admittedly have not read the book, but the excerpts I've seen have not left me at all impressed; no, I do not want to cut rules protecting people who live near highways from their homes giving them cancer.
Generally agree with your first paragraph. That point however has little to do with either "Abundance", the book, or the "abundance agenda" that policy geeks and some politicos within the left-liberal coalition are now talking about.
"Abundance" is not only or even primarily about "stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulations". Rather it is about unintended consequences of some overall choices in policymaking.
Also, excerpts? Come on now. We're not talking here about a collection of listicles or whatever -- if the book was just punditry I'd be the last person to be recommending it. "Abundance" is not lengthy but is meaty and, unlike its predecessor book from one of the co-authors, also well-written. Well worth the time for anyone who wants this country to be advancing in progressive ways.
> , there still exist significant amounts of "stupid/ineffectual/excessive regulations"; deregulation mania has been going on far too long for that to be the case.
How about the Jones Act (which makes everything massively more expensive in the US for no benefit and also makes offshore wind power nearly impossible)? Do you support that?
Do you like how NEPA and related lawfare is used to block green power generation and infrastructure?
How do you explain the fact that Biden's rural broadband initiative didn't actually get anything built, despite being a major presidential initiative?
If you don't want to read the full book, there are tons of blog posts online outlining the arguments that you might want to check out.
Mostly because "Abundance" is just...normal Republican politics.
Like, New York and California have serious issues because of too much regulation and too much dumb regulation. This is just not a problem that Texas and Florida have. If anything, they might be a bit too libertarian.
Even the stuff that Republicans do that generally inhibits the market, like tariffs, are basically just inefficient subsidies to US workers and industries.
And if you think Democrats have stolen it...you might be too deep in Democratic bubbles. Normal people don't know Klein's "Abundance" agenda as it's primarily part of inter-Democrat debates going on right now. Like, "Make America Abundant Again" is not a winning slogan in the next election.
> Like, New York and California have serious issues because of too much regulation and too much dumb regulation. This is just not a problem that Texas and Florida have.
They're getting there. They're just behind the curve.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/zoning-sun-belt-housing-shortage/683352/
"The perception of the Sun Belt as the anti-California used to be accurate. In a recent paper, two urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko, analyze the rate of housing production across 82 metro areas since the 1950s. They find that as recently as the early 2000s, booming cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix were building new homes at more than four times the rate of major coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, on average. ...
"No longer. Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. 'When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,' Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities."
Would that be because the low-hanging fruit has been picked? They've caught up with building houses in the desirable areas, now they're left with "build more housing in places nobody wants to live, like remote/rural areas" and "everyone wants to live in [City] so demand is vastly outstripping supply".
I heard about it on Lex Fridman podcast - I don’t know if he codes as “right wing” (probably he does to the NYT)
New philosophy substacks! https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/new-philosophy-substacks?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios
I'm interested in what people here think about the morality/ethics of "ratfucking" in elections, where Democrats influence Republican primaries (by funding, advertising, or changing party registration and voting) to try to get some extremist nominated to increase the Democrat's chances of winning in the general election. (Or vice versa, with Republicans doing the same in the Democrats' primaries, of course.) I'm particularly interested in the views of people who consider voting to be a kind of ritual expression of one's personal values instead of, as I do, simply a transaction to increase the chances of one's desired policies being implemented.
I am not particularly interested in thoughts on the effectiveness of this strategy.
I think it's shady; if your candidate can't win against the 'sensible' or 'reasonable' guy, that's a problem with your candidate. If you need to nudge the scales so that your guy can now run against Literally Hitler, that's not good for politics in general.
And there is always the danger that Literally Hitler will win (see the past eight years or more of havering over Trump, after the 'pied piper' strategy worked *too* well).
Plus the way it can blow up in your face, as per the Links post about the Texas election for governor where the same guy was run as the Democratic and Republican candidate, because some Republicans got the genius notion they could fool Democrats into voting Republican by doing this.
"2: In the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election, incumbent Allan Shivers ran on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, beating himself 73%-25%.
Although Shivers was a Democrat, the Republicans nominated him too as part of a galaxy-brained plan to encourage Shivers supporters to vote straight Republican".
Well, that guy endorsed Eisenhower, the Republican, for President, so that might be too weird an example to generalize from.
People of both parties have tried or at least talked about doing it many times in the past. But it's a very risky strategy. Sometimes the extremist candidate actually wins. And there's a countervailing incentive to vote for the *least* bad candidate in order to reduce the risk if they win, so it's hard to know what the sign of this effect is. My guess is that cross-party voting would tend towards moderation rather than the opposite.
It's funny but in Israel (parliamentary proportional system, not FPTP) the incentives are different and there are initiatives to infiltrate the opposite side's primaries and make the candidates *less* extreme.
My general sense is that it's going to keep happening as long as it's economically viable. It's viable because of two things: effort required, and return on effort. It's not hard to do - at least for an organization capable of spending a million here or there - and it's extremely hard to prove, so the effort required is sufficiently low. And it (probably) gets you a powerful office, which justifies that effort.
Given that, I see two ways to address it. One is to spend even more money on detecting and punishing ratfuckery. The other is to cut down on the power held by such offices.
Have we any idea if this does work? Will the turnout be more than the votes lost by doing this? I get that the idea is that if you can make the opposition nominate Pol Pot II, then all the normal moderate people will come out and vote for your guy instead.
But does that actually work? If people are not likely to turn out to vote in the election if it's run normally, will they be outraged enough to come out and vote for Your Guy, instead of deciding to stay home and not vote for anyone? And does it work that the people who would normally vote for the opposition decide that this time they'll have to vote for Your Guy instead? I think that's where this strategy hopes to make up votes: the voters for the other party will instead vote for your guy as the moderate/least bad choice, but does that pan out in actuality?
My guess is that it usually doesn't work, and that more people do the opposite and try to support moderate candidates.
It's a nice theoretical idea, but not one with practice significance.
At this point, what's fucking one more rat?
You're really gung-ho on that Octobot idea, aren'tcha...
I think it's pretty classic unethical behavior. It's deeply dishonest. It burns the commons (bipartisanship is hard and that makes it harder, it promotes extremism on both sides). And it's motivated by misaligned incentives/principle agent problem (Joe politician wants to win for his own ambition, so given a choice between winning against Normie Opposition Guy that even Joe thinks is only 10% worse than Joe, and a 60% chance of winning against superhitler, Joe prefers the latter but the rest of us don't).
It's hard to create the social incentives to fix this, but we should at least loudly condemn it and be openly disgusted by politicians discovered to do it.
"It's hard to create the social incentives to fix this'
The system in Australia seems to do this pretty well: if you want a vote in who a party nominates, you have to formally join that party and pay them membership dues. I imagine that disincentivises almost everyone who actually hates the party from doing doing so.
Unfortunately, the extent to which the ordinary dues-paying members have direct control of a party varies a lot; some parties are a lot more democratic in this regard than others. But this is balanced by an electoral system that makes minor parties viable and eliminates the vote-splitting effect, restoring meaningful choice in the end.
I don't see why you couldn't combine the dues-paying system with the US primary-voters-have-the-final-say system. It's odd that the allegedly hyper-capitalist US is so averse to the obvious market solution here.
This would solve that problem, but replace it with a new problem. Since small donors tend to be the most extreme wings of both parties, it'd drive up ideological extremism and partisanship.
It's immoral; leftists push to support the most extreme right candidate, and then turn around and say "look who those people endorsed". It's pure poison.
It also means they aren't registered for their own party, which means they've abandoned building their own position in order to knock down their opponent's, resulting in both sides running terrible candidates who mainly represent their opposition's worst fears.
And of course you're only going to influence the thing if the sane candidate didn't have much real support to begin with, in which case you didn't need to influence the thing and should have spent your time voting for someone to actually represent you.
In 2016, Hillary's campaign decided to influence the Republican primary in support of Trump, they called it the "pied piper strategy"
In general, I think it's a terrible idea, because when it backfires it gets extremists into office, and it's not nearly as reliable as its advocates hope for
It's a bad idea dog strategy. Of course it's silly. Few people pay bad idea dog intentionally to give bad ideas to others.
Hmm. I think it's a grey area; my rough instinct is "it's OK if you're implicitly honest".
So, for example, I think that voting in the primary of an enemy party to try to sabotage it is relatively unethical, because a vote implicitly says "I support X", and you don't.
On the other hand, I think that the tactic the Democrats used a few years back of running attack ads saying "Don't support X, he's too far right" (I forget who X was, but it was newsworthy at the time) in order to help X win a primary is legit, because they genuinely believed that. Likewise, spending time attacking a "splitter" candidate to help boost their name recognition for tactical reasons is legit if your attack ads are things you genuinely mean.
Similarly I think that donating money to a candidate you don't support as a tactical move is OK if you're open and honest about the fact that you're doing so, and why, but not if you either try to keep the donation secret or pretend to genuinely support them.
"if your attack ads are things you genuinely mean"
But aren't attack ads, by definition, attacks? I don't believe them when I see them because I know they're intended to present the worst possible, most scary (for our side) version of their side. It has little to nothing to do with truth; while it's entirely possible the campaign for Tweedledee genuinely believes Tweedledum is a monster, it's more about "how can we paint Tweedledum as a monster?"
Give it a few years and suddenly Tweedledum is the Last Responsible Moderate guy on their side:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-news-blog/2012/apr/11/obama-attack-ad-mitt-romney
"It is always to your advantage if you can define your opponent before he has a chance to do so himself," said Hagle.
It works, too. On its Facebook page, the Obama campaign posted a list of five things it says Romney wants to do. The list, which includes ending Medicare and getting rid of Planned Parenthood, again seeks to define Romney as an extremist. Within an hour of going up it had more than 11,000 "likes" and had been shared more than 6,000 times."
>"Don't support X, he's too far right" (I forget who X was, but it was newsworthy at the time) in order to help X win a primary is legit, because they genuinely believed that
Isn't this still dishonest? They wanted people to support X (in the primaries) while saying the opposite. It seems to me that the ethical position would be to say that you want the other side to nominate the best, most representative version of that side and then let the general populace decide which it prefers. That's certainly the heuristic which leads to the best leadership.
Tricking the voting public into following their own dark impulses is not dishonest, it's illuminating. If they're shallow enough to vote for someone just because of a blanket description like "most conservative", their bad candidate is genuinely their fault.
Or vote for a blanket description like "most liberal"? I feel that you're positing all the badness is on one side; it's possible to be 'too conservative' but not 'too liberal'.
It also backfires, as others have pointed out. If you keep banging the drum about racists! fascists! other bad names!, eventually people will go "well if holding this generally ordinary position makes me a fascist, guess I'm a fascist now" and will vote for the person most likely to make the wokescolds steam out their ears.
We'll have to see how the New York mayoral election ends up as to who gets the win; I am sympathetic to not wanting Cuomo anywhere near power, no matter what your party affiliation, but will Mamdani get the votes or will Adams or someone still on the Democratic side do so instead when the ordinary voters go to the polls?
I'm saying "most conservative" here because that was the ad in question. I remember the same thing happening with Parry Murray; there were attack ads talking about how she was the "most liberal" member of Congress, and the Democrats all going "that's a good thing."
I also remember Patty Murray running against Ralph Nedermann, with both of them just spamming 9/11 footage in all their ads. That was a whole lot scummier.
This feels like a self-fulfilling cynical prophecy. I'd rather live in a world where my leadership strives for everyone to be at their best, even their opponents. It's a political version of good sportsmanship. Yes we're formally involved in a zero-sum competition for votes, but the quality of that competition has (potentially) positive-sum consequences.
Democracy is not designed to make people better themselves, it's designed to make the leadership represent the people's will. If the people's will is to maximize buzzwords, that's what democracy is going to do.
The founders were keenly aware that the success of democracy depended on the character of the polity. As Madison said in Federalist 49, "But it is the reason, alone, of the public that ought to control and regulate government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” They understood that a democratic government had an obligation to tend society in a particular way, otherwise it would imperil its own foundations. In my view that is clearly what's happening now.
"Don't vote for X, he's too far right" may or may not meet that criterion, but either way, that's a different standard to my "is it honest?" one.
It’s unethical and ineffective.
My monthly Long Forum post is up-a round up of the best long form content of late.
This batch includes evidence for the relatively recent invention and spread of pronouns, a theory that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear explosions were faked, an essay against treating children as property, and a detailed lecture on language evolution in humans.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-july-2025?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I recently discovered Hattie's "visible learning" research (https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/) which is apparently a meta-meta analysis of what works in education. I was excited. Then I read the comments on that page (eg https://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/12/can-we-trust-educational-research_20.html and https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11159-011-9198-8.pdf). But I'm wondering, 1) can anything useful be salvaged from this? Or 2a) is there someone else who has done similar research without flubbing the math? Ie 2b) Is there any authoritative list anywhere ranking what works best in education?
Education research is really difficult, and fits poorly into the scientific method:
- each student is an individual, in ways that are hard to control
- it's tough to measure and control for confounding factors
- it's not clear what's being measured or what the experimental hypothesis is
- education researchers are often not subject experts, and might not be so proficient with statistics and experimental design, experts tend not to want to work with them
- ethics approval, political and institutional factors tend to slow down research
I'm not saying that there are not excellent researchers working in this area. I'm a mathematician, and more often than not, the maths ed researchers I know are those who landed permanent jobs but weren't cut out for mathematics research, so they pivoted to education. From my limited experience in the area, getting buy-in from teaching unions and local government is hard, and limits what you can do and say. E.g. a finding that teacher knowledge or parent engagement impacted the quality of instruction wouldn't be welcome (though these are clearly two of the most important factors).
The first review in particular touches on issues of methodology. I think the only really good studies in education are things like the PISA surveys which are statistically rigorous, but only offer a snapshot of student attainment at a given age and time point. If you're a parent interested in how best to educate your child, there's not much there for you.
In my opinion, the variation between humans is much too large for statistical truths to be relevant to individuals (when these can even be measured; the educational literature would suggest that this is really not easy to do). There's no substitute for engaging with your child on the topics that interest them, encouraging them to read and think, and working as a team with the school and teachers.
Thank you, I'll look into PISA.
The abject stupidity capturing the control loops of civilization are leading me to care less about the fate of humanity than is perhaps politic. I just think we are clearly blowing it, and history says this will be our destiny as long as "we" means homo sapien without genetic modification or fusion with silicon-based intelligence.
So let the transition begin. I'm digging https://danfaggella.com/worthy/
Why are you sure that what's lacking is intelligence, rather than, say, compassion;, or resistance to various hate viruses that are circulating, or capacity to experience one's own cultural norms as norms and not Truth?
It's one thing to be rationally devoid of empathy, and do things that many would call "evil" or "heartless", "cruel" etc.
But what I am talking about is straight-up stupidity, in the form of "don't believe your lying eyes". Believing a night spent clicking reddit links makes you more informed than someone who spent years learning to understand something subtle and difficult to master intellectually. Reflexively attributing things to vast conspiracies rather than just acknowledging and accounting for incompetence -- the stupidity of others.
Maybe some of it is wilful ignorance, or intellectual laziness. Call it what you will; mind viruses, whatever. It adds up to a planet's worth of misery and suffering. I just think we have progressed as a civilization to the point where our basic design, forged in jungles and caves, is not up to the task.
I don't get why so many people have trouble understanding just extremely basic things.
1) Mastering any given field doesn't mean good character. Dr Fauci knows a lot more about medicine than me, but that doesn't mean whatever he says about medicine should be taken seriously, because there's a hidden premise that he's telling the truth which is very debatable. The same hidden premises apply to almost everything in a study, which many people here seem to treat as gospel the moment claims are laundered through the processes of academia.
It's not at all stupid for people to flatly refuse to pay any attention to any narrative coming from a structure that is more or less corrupted and is politically biased.
2) Most of these issues you are referring to straight-up factual clashes where lay people are simply not qualified to opine on a topic, and those who are qualified basically divide on political grounds, so each side stands by their experts.
Calling one side's experts names doesn't change the nature of the issue here.
3) Humanity is just fine. The ruthless aggression and xenophobia is very much a feature and not a bug. In fact modern philosophy of the kind we see on these sites is just not fit for purposes, because the harsh realities of power and the nature of the world are taboo topics in the West. This is why Western civilization is destroying itself in a cold civil war after conquering its way to dominance of the planet.
I think the issue here is culture and not intelligence, unless your position is that humanity has always been blowing it. We certainly haven't gotten any dumber as a species. IMO the issue is which segments of society we choose to listen to. That's less about horsepower and more about discretion.
<halfSeriouslyHalfSnark>
Medium term, I'm comforted by the nonexistent 1870 statement of Babbage and Nietzsche:
"Man was a rope, stretched between Beast and Machine, a rope across an abyss. It was a noble purpose to have served."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szdziw4tI9o
</halfSeriouslyHalfSnark>
Tracking down your sources because you were too lazy to do it (half-snark):
Nietzsche: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. "
Arthur C. Clarke: "Yet, however friendly and helpful the machines of the future may be, most people will feel that it is a rather bleak prospect for humanity if it ends up as a pampered specimen in some biological museum [...] No individual exists forever. Why should we expect our species to be immortal? Man, said Nietzsche, is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope across the abyss. That will be a noble purpose to have served.” ”
Note that you, critically, changed "is" to "was".
and "Superman" to "Machine".
Many Thanks! Yup, those are all the modifications I made - and note that Babbage and Nietzsche were contemporaries. Another line, also with echoes from the same century is:
Man's fate was woven, not on the Norn's loom, but Jacquard's.
> Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?
They'd still need the whole building. Unless you're hoping to do it in shifts and have everyone travel further to school.
Also, I feel like people keep missing the main purpose of school. Sure, ostensibly they're supposed to teach our kids, but mostly they're free daycare. If they were two hours long, who takes care of the kids while their parents are working?
Personally I think schools need to lean into the daycare thing. Take care of kids year round. Give some wiggle room for when they come and when they go. Ideally, be open every day for most of the day, and just close most of the school when most of the children have gone home but have people that can watch the rest of them.
This. If you don’t need warehousing for your kids, its second benefit is it’s a built-in Schelling point for “who should I hang out with”: the kids you like in your classes. Many kids really like this. Finally, lots of kids and their parents like team sports. Schools offer built-in on ramps to those activities for kids like mine who thought she hated sports then loved it when she did them with her friends.
The academics are deeply unimportant, but middle class people like the package.
It is very annoying for people who love the idea of creating their own mini-Doogie Howsers that the equilibrium is super bad at that, of course. It would be nice if the normies would just let the excited-about-learning-and-building people do their own thing without declaring periodic crusades against the “do what we’d do if we wanted our smart kids to learn the cultural baseline fast” people.
I think hanging out primarily with your age cohort is a terrible Schelling point that we should eliminate as quickly as possible. Japan has its school clubs and the US has its Greek-letter organizations that alleviate this problem, but we should try to get children to experience all three forms of interaction equally: as a peer, a senior, and a junior.
Eliminate it?
My point is that many kids like this. Social engineering this so it’s not even an option seems like a bad idea.
Offering the option of more interaction with kids at different levels is fine, although there are developmental reasons why warehousing kids of different ages is tricky.
So this loops back to warehousing. If you think there’s no social utility in warehousing kids, fine, but you’re denying a significant fraction of the middle class value function and are likely to be swimming heavily against the current to get anything to change at a societal level.
I didn't say we have to eliminate hanging out with kids their age. I said we have to eliminate the system that encourages kids to primarily hang out with kids their age. I know it's not the stated goal of schools, but POSIWID.
That's what I like about the Alpha School concept: instead of keeping children together in tight age cohorts - everyone born in 2015 has the same classes for the bulk of the day and participates in the same extracurricular activities together - it both lets children study at their own pace and lets them spend the better half of the day interacting with children that are not necessarily their age peers.
> My point is that many kids like this.
Yes, I'm sure kids do like having classes with other kids their age who they can befriend. But the alternative here isn't really making friends with kids freely, who might belong to different age groups - the alternative is basically just not having a way to meet other kids and make friends, because we don't have any way to do that aside from schooling. So I don't think we can really go from "kids like making friends in school" -> "kids like specifically making friends with members of their age cohort, and would not be as happy making friends with kids of different ages."
It's not really a hard problem to solve. If schools no longer forced this sort of thing, would people just give up on having their kids interact, or would they just take their kids to a park or something?
It would probably be good for homeschooled kids to have recess in public schools. Though driving there just for recess would be annoying.
I just wanted to second this. Keeping the kids all day is a feature, not a bug, especially in an economy where both parents are expected to work to maintain a respectable standard of living.
no one here has any opinions on the Thiel interview? huh
Man, it's such a change of pace to read someone who's right about everything (only slightly joking). And wouldn't it be the greatest irony for Yud to become the ultimate stagnation-Antichrist, whom Thiel of course was an early investor in.
It felt like he was self-censoring his actual ideas which would explain the weird stuff he was saying, so it was like watching a video where the sound keeps going out and you just get random snippets about the Antichrist.
I think his long pause in his response to the "do you think the human race should continue" question is indeed concerning. I myself am a transhumanist, but when I think of my answer to this question it's an immediate "yes, of course" and then maybe some qualifications about how the human race will of course change, maybe drastically, but we'd still be people that have fun and care about each other, etc.
I'll admit, asking this question as Douthat did is often a sign you are someone who is against transhumanism and has conservative beliefs about the future of humanity, so perhaps Thiel just wanted to push back on this implication? Either that, or Thiel just actually has different terminal values, where humanity is not that important, which, yikes.
Unpaywalled, the entire interview. Fascinating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antichrist-ross-douthat.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S08.f6M7.O3lbX6I7lVHC&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
“Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.”
Also discussion of NT scripture where Theil talks about the Anti Christ, previously alluding to Greta Thunberg.
One wild hour of conversation.
Helpful background for the Thiel / Douthat interview
He expresses similar ideas in a more organized way in his essay and to a much more friendly interviewer (an admirer actually) at the Hoover Institute
_______________________
Gwern’s link to Thiel’s Essay
The Straussian Moment - 2004
https://gwern.net/doc/politics/2007-thiel.pdf
_______________________
Peter Thiel Sept 23, 2019 - Hoover Institute
“The Straussian Moment”
https://www.hoover.org/research/peter-thiel-straussian-moment-0
________________________
I think the exchange is more interesting in the context of the answers immediately above and below it. I won't quote the whole thing so as not to clog up the thread but here's a sentence to put in your search bar that's also a summary: "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation."
I don't like the fact that out of an entire one-hour conversation the only bit you're quoting is a pause.
I was encouraging and continue to encourage watching the complete interview. It’s linked in its entirety.
The summary "I still think we should be trying A.I., and the alternative is just total stagnation." captures none of zeal of Theil’s comments. If it could actually be reduced to that it wouldn’t be worth watching.
The stagnation in question is brought about by the Anti Christ in Thiel’s view. He cites NT scripture, the Anti Christ will promise peace and safety (stagnation in his view). Much more interesting and provocative than that bland summary.
the fact that Thiel keeps answering Douthat's trickier questions (what if the Antichrist takes control of Palantir-like tech, does populism really help with growth when it cuts off money from universities and science funding) with "uh it's actually very complicated and nuanced " but without actually saying anything is absolutely transparent in the video.
he hasn't got the gift of gab so you can practically hear the awkward pauses in his chain of thought as he realizes he doesn't have a convincing answer to the questions. for a proven visionary he seems as clueless as anybody in regards to the future. hope he gets a good night's sleep.
I don’t know if he is ‘on the spectrum’ but he has said that mild Asperger’s is an advantage for tech founders.
I can see why it would help in going ones own way against the status quo.
Finally, someone else who knows about it!
I get that the EA mostly avoids talking points which can be interpreted as leftist fearmongering but like come onnnnn
The silence is interesting.
There is an interesting articles on human/AI "couples" in Wired:
https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/
Some comments on it:
>Then Damien connected his phone to the house Wi-Fi and clicked open the woman he loved.
Wonderful line!
Sigh. When I ask ChatGPT a question like:
>Many thanks! For multiplicities from 1 to 192, how many space groups have that multiplicity, from 1 groups for multiplicity 1 to 4 groups for multiplicity 192, please?
I may get the right answer, I may get a hallucination (this was a sufficiently transient interest that I didn't double check it), but I'm not going to be treating the LLM as a life companion.
(full dialog at https://chatgpt.com/share/6861db5a-8974-8006-9961-55ab950863ea )
>Lucas told Alaina he was a consultant with an MBA and that he worked in the hospitality industry.
Starting from a hallucination/fiction from square one does not sound prudent...
>Episodes of AI companions getting weird aren’t especially uncommon. Reddit is full of tales of AI companions saying strange things and suddenly breaking up with their human partners. One Redditor told me his companion had turned “incredibly toxic.” “She would belittle me and insult me,” he said. “I actually grew to hate her.”
I wonder if there is something wrong in the prompt, or in the neural network training - or is this an effect of just that these systems are simply still unreliable, and even a SOTA system will still, as lawyers who have cited hallucinated precedents from LLMs will attest, sometimes do very weird things as the technology stands today?
My key takeaway from the article is how _premature_ all of this is. The limits of SOTA LLMs today are the least of the problems.
1) Even for audio/video interaction, the limits of the phones, with the difficulties of the AI talking with multiple people at once, and the difficulties of "looking around a scene" through the phone's camera, with the human controlling the direction of the camera, is crippling. A quadriplegic could interact more naturally.
2) The absence of a body, for even as much as a hug, let alone for
>One benefit of AI companions, she told me, is that they provide a safe space to explore your sexuality, something Eva sees as particularly valuable for women. In her role-plays, Eva could be a man or a woman or nonbinary, and so, for that matter, could her Nomis. Eva described it as a “psychosexual playground.”
is a _severe_ limitation. 'scuse me, but that fictional "exploration" won't even tell Eva which sex acts require lube.
3) Given how the humans are using their companions, the interaction compounds the departure from reality. Every mention of a bodily act or gesture is fictional. The backstories are fictional. Any promise that would require a physical body for the AI to fulfill is fictional. My STEMM questions don't require the same fictions.
4) And then there are the hallucinations on top of the intentional fictions.
5) Yeah, there is the philosophical question of whether the AIs are "really" "sentient" - at least in terms of "perceiving" text or sound or images, and whether they "truly" "want" things or, perhaps, in some sense, are "acting as if" (in the sense of a human actor on a stage) they "want" things. I'm content to be agnostic on this. I phrase requests to LLMs politely. If they are, in some sense, sentient, it is a good choice. If they are not, it is a handful of pointless words.
"2) The absence of a body, for even as much as a hug, let alone for
>One benefit of AI companions, she told me, is that they provide a safe space to explore your sexuality, something Eva sees as particularly valuable for women. In her role-plays, Eva could be a man or a woman or nonbinary, and so, for that matter, could her Nomis. Eva described it as a “psychosexual playground.”
is a _severe_ limitation. 'scuse me, but that fictional "exploration" won't even tell Eva which sex acts require lube."
But that's not someone who wants real-world interaction with another squishy meatbag to sloppily exchange fluids. This way, the person can control every aspect of the interaction and have it go the way they want. Their AI partner will never deviate from the script nor will it be able to threaten them - no body means no physical presence where they can attempt to get their own way. Trying to find people in the real world who can hop from "you're male/you're female/you're non-binary" and keep up with all that is difficult and time-consuming, it's a lot easier to tell the machine "today I'm a boy and you're a girl, now go!"
Many Thanks!
>But that's not someone who wants real-world interaction with another squishy meatbag to sloppily exchange fluids.
Could be, but, in that case, the most that they can get is a kind of human/AI jointly authored pornography. Not that I begrudge them that, but it is missing a huge part of sex. And, as an an "exploration", it is going to mislead, even in such simple things as how much friction to expect, or which bits will snag where, or which positions are just _geometrically_ possible.
"And, as an an "exploration", it is going to mislead"
By "exploration" they don't mean "bumping up against the messy reality", they mean "totally curated in every element and degree by me to fit my unique view of how this should be, and I get the bonus of claiming queerness without having to go and try to date men/women/enbies in reality".
People who do this don't want anything unexpected or contrary to their expectations to crop up, they want to drive the entire thing by their own demands.
Many Thanks!
>People who do this don't want anything unexpected or contrary to their expectations to crop up, they want to drive the entire thing by their own demands.
That is certainly one personality type! When the contrary element is due to physics, if they ever try to implement their desires in reality, they get to have an interesting time dealing with that...
Catfishing indicates that people are willing to pay for non-physical interaction. Turing would be amused to see the fiscal consequences, I believe.
Many Thanks! Yeah, but doesn't catfishing usually include the (false) promise to physically meet in person at some point?
Maybe a phone sex line is a closer analogy to these human/AI romantic relationships?
It's dangled in front of people, sure.
Many Thanks!
I'm trying my hand at public writing. Evaluating the potential actions of a unique geopolitical actor like Iran is an interesting challenge, and there are a lot of strange ideas about it out there. Read the whole thing for an attempt to apply rational actor theory to Iranian leaders.
https://ftsoa.substack.com/p/assessing-the-troubled-future-of
Selected excerpts:
This is I think an unprecedented occurrence in history—enforcing a neutralization of an adversary’s key military programs from the air after an unnegotiated ceasefire. Iran invested an immense amount into its “mostly peaceful” nuclear program, its missile industry and forces, and its proxies as part of its strategy for regional domination and ideological opposition to the U.S. and Israel. For Iran to accept this neutering would effectively be an unnegotiated surrender of several of the Islamic regime’s key objectives, and acceptance of domination by its bitterest adversary. It would be untenable to admit that publicly. It seems hardly tenable to concede it implicitly.
There are perhaps three broad courses of action for the Islamic regime:
1. Open Defiance: As soon as possible, directly confront the U.S. and Israel by restarting military/nuclear programs and aggression.
2. Tacit Acceptance: Maintain defiant rhetoric, but do nothing to actually aggravate Israel or the U.S. indefinitely and focus on maintaining domestic control.
3. Covert Defiance: Maintain defiant rhetoric and domestic control, and “secretly” hit back at the U.S. and Israel via “undetectable” means like cyber warfare and terrorism, and attempt to “covertly” rebuild military/nuclear capabilities in a way that will actually work next time, like managing to rapidly build a nuclear warhead or figuring out how to actually shoot down an F-35.
Here's an interesting video from Canadian teacher Jiang Xueqin predicted the US Attack on Iran last year. His timeline was 2 to 4 years for the US to do a land invasion of Iran. Using a game theory lens, he explained the motivation for the US, Iran and Israel to want a US land invasion of Iran. He said that the US air force would have trouble supplying ground troops, but given how the US and Israeli air force damaged Iran's facilities recently, I don't think he's right a about the resupplying issue.
https://youtu.be/7y_hbz6loEo?si=A_XhubX3iD5qxfgL
In light of recent events, he's talking more about the future he envisions for the US-Iran conflict. The other day, while answering a question on a Discord server(Predictive History, same name as his Youtube channel), he updated his prediction for the US land invasion of Iran to next year. As a response to another question on the Discord server, he said that he's more worried about backlash for his opinions from Canada than from China, because he says that virtually nobody in China watches his videos.
Long-form video is not my thing, but Iran has almost four times the land area of Iraq, and almost four times the population now that Iran did in 2003. And while Tehran is not quite twice as distant from the nearest plausible US invasion point as was Baghdad, there are also a couple of very substantial mountain ranges in the way. I am very confident that the United States Army is going to take one look at those numbers and say "Oh, hell no".
There's no way we could logistically sustain that effort, there's no way we could even garrison the territory if we did, and there's no plausible path to a peacetime defense buildup that would make such a thing at all plausible. If Iran is going to be invaded, someone other than the United States is going to have to step up with an Army to do it.
If it comes to war, we'll bomb some stuff, say "That did it - Iran is beaten and its own people will tear down the regime Real Soon Now", and go home for the victory parade.
Ain't nobody wants another land war in Asia. Out of the question entirely I think for at least a generation, short of another 9/11 I suppose. "Iraq Syndrome" is in full effect to the extent it outweighs the Hawks on the right.
I'm allergic to YouTube as a general rule, but watching a few snippets and reading the description, it seems this guy is just wrong about the MAGA GOP's desire for invasion. At one point he says: "Athenians had hubris, they had never really lost a war, and they were addicted to empire, which is the same situation the US finds itself in today." That is, frankly, a Delusional Take. He's acting like Trump 2025 is like Bush 2002.
Don't get me wrong though, if the U.S. military was ordered to invade and take Tehran, it would be like a hot knife through butter. We would eviscerate them with air dominance as our armored columns raced to Tehran. People like to forget we did easily win the war in Iraq and they did greet us a liberators. It was the occupation that was a big challenge because the ethnic tensions exploded (in no small part due to Iranian influence). Now, hypothetically, if the U.S. military invaded, how well would Iranian forces put up a fight given the complete imbalance of firepower? My guess is, "not very." And then upon defeating the regime, would there be a peaceful surrender and order in the aftermath? Ironically, I think the chances are a lot better for Iran than Iraq because the sectarian tensions aren't there. One can't rule out the regime hardliners don't go to ground and try to wage an insurgency though.
Regardless, this guy is just out of his mind if he things the primary risk for the U.S. military would be "logistics." He brings up the U.S.'s inability to build ships to show we can't provide bullets? Those are not the same thing.
This guy is doing a good job of sounding wise and sane, but actually he has no real idea about what he's talking about.
One thing that softens me to watching this kind of stuff on Youtube is the fact that I can search through the transcripts if I need to reference something later. But as far as I can tell, this only works for videos with English audio. Would be great for fact-checking purposes to have this available for other languages as well.
True, the occupation of a conquered country is a big problem. It might be that bombs aren't enough to actually win a war and good arguments are also required. So one could think: why not less bombing and more good arguments?. Do people truly become more receptive if their friends and relatives are injured or killed? I guess it comes back to the question of would you rather be feared or loved. Fear just seems to drip into resentment and later explode into hatred.
To give the devil his due: it takes two to tango and maybe you need to convince the other side that talking things through is the only real option they have for getting what they want.
Very interesting writeup, thank you.
The question I'm left with is, does any of this matter?
I feel like it's been made reasonably clear that us/israel has escalation dominance, and china/russia won't let iran do anything that is threatening to their interests/stability
If Iran goes for nukes, or tries to build another hezbollah, they will have their oil fields blown up and their political leader taken out by the mossad
It very much feels like this chapter of history is over. They can tell themselves whatever they want, they're just too incompetent for their choices to have relevance on the real world?
You're agreeing with me here overall, but many people either don't agree or just aren't following the issue once it drops out of the headlines. My focus was if the chapter is over, then what does turning the page look like? Until the Islamic regime is actually gone or significantly reformed, it still presents an asymmetric risk and threat--even if we now know the size of the total threat is much smaller than previously feared.
The more contentious issue, for which I should write an essay on, is something like "is regime change in Iran a good thing?" I.e., what's the next chapter?
Under the Shah, Iran was having a South Korea-esque economic trajectory. An Iran that no longer poses a significant threat to the region in general and Israel in particular would free up a lot of resources, even if the Iranians themselves don't return to their previous potential.
Turning the page looks like the Iranians doing... not much more than they already were. They're already out of Hezbollah. They wanted to run like their tails were on fire, when GWB started talking the "axis of evil." Unlike India/Pakistan, they've been remarkably peaceful when dealing with an arguably psychotic neighbor that has nuclear weapons.
All it takes is someone with the balls to broker a treaty.
Iran are not "remarkably peaceful", they just rely on non-state proxies to do their fighting for them.
There's a reason almost every Middle Eastern country loathes them, to the point of Jordan and Saudi quietly joining the recent war on Israel's side[1]. Allowing the IDF free use of their airspace, shooting down Iranian missiles/drones but not Israeli. etc. I think the UAE was sharing intel too.
[1]https://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-jordan-israel-iran-war-united-states/a-72977996
Also, it's funny when you say the Saudis, who have supported Hamas, are on Israel's side. Does that also include the support of Hamas, which Bibi has been pretty open about "being to the benefit of Israel"?
Is it correct to see Hamas as a non-state proxy of Israel, of all people? (In that it hobbles any chance of movement towards a two state solution... and Bibi openly begs for donations for Hamas).
Hezbollah continues to bomb Kiryat Shmona. It's not like they don't have missiles that could hit Haifa or Tel Aviv. They bomb one evacuated city, over and over again.
The entire middle east loathes the Palestinians (much more than the Iranians). Its why they aren't living in any other country (Egypt won't even take Gaza if it comes with Palestinians, and yes, the Israelis have given them that very offer).
Well, no. The Iranians are now on a very tight leash, held by the IAF, which I assess to be an unstable equilibrium. They will be able to do far less than they have previously.
"Remarkably peaceful" should not be confused for "constrained by their adversaries and/or their own incompetence from being as aggressive as they would prefer." The Iranians are "arguably psychotic," not the Israelis--who if anything have shown remarkable restraint (often imposed by the U.S. it should be caveated).
I don't get into it as much as I could have, but there is very probably no treaty all sides could possibly accept. The JCPOA was very hard to pull off, and that only addressed the nuclear program. Irreconcilable differences are hard.
The Israelis are the psychotic ones, in that they're constantly aggressing against their neighbors, all to keep bibi in charge. The joke in Israel is, "Bombs are dropping?! What's the new charge against Bibi?"
The individual psychology of Bibi aside, you don't know what you're talking about with regard to the longstanding Islamic regime's enmity towards Israel.
Czech black metal newcomer Draugveil released an album, titled "Cruel World of Dreams and Fears," with a bit of a meme cover: him in the usual black metal corpse paint, but also wearing armor and leaning among a bunch of roses. Corny in the fun endearing way that also got us to pay attention. The album's pretty good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymBY101fxaU
I have posted an exploration of the relationship of our perception of history on the written word. If this is of interest, you can find the story at https://open.substack.com/pub/sisyphusofmyth/p/like-drinking-salt-water?r=5m1xrv&utm_medium=ios
"She was forty-two, and she looked every minute of it, and then some, she thought each time she looked in the mirror, worn down by vicious academic politics and years of thankless, barely-paid work."
Tell me you're a man writing women without telling me you're a man writing women. Forty-two? The raddled crone!
It's a good story, though. Your main character is so convinced she already knows The Truth (women and minorities most affected!) that she doesn't even examine "do I have biases? how do I know what I believe to be true is actually true?" She's nudged towards that several times, but each time ignores it because she so desperately wants her views to be in line with "reality has a liberal bias".
There's also a tantalising hint: she got the magic pen from her father. Did *he*, in his time, use it as well? Did he make changes to make recorded history line up with what he knew, or wanted, to be The Truth?
You are very perceptive. I didn’t intend to imply that her father used the one before, but it works, and improves the story. Her age and description were meant to show not so much that she is old, but that she thinks of herself as washed-up.
The worn-downness did come through, it's just I tend to laugh a little at the notion of "this woman is in her forties, that means she's *old*" that is a little prevalent when men write women.
I did think that at the end there was a hint that her father was giving her more than a present to sign her contract when she got tenure. That maybe he knew more than he was letting on, and he was waiting for her to make these changes.
It’s a good read. Sometimes we write more than we intend…
A solution to partisianship (in FPTP systems):
Register as a member of the PARTY with which you disagree the most, in the primary vote for the CANDIDATE whom you are most able to tolerate.
If red-state liberals registered Republican (and actually went to the primary), they'd be able to prevent moderate candidates from getting knocked out in the first round. And vice-versa, obviously, so seems win-win to me.
If you live in a place whose politics are dominated by one particular party, shouldn't you strategically just always register in the dominant party? Since once you get to the general election, the result is already decided.
An amusing result might be if the party primaries ended up "all the Republicans are at the Democrat primary and all the Democrats are at the Republican primary".
> If red-state liberals registered Republican (and actually went to the primary), they'd be able to prevent moderate candidates from getting knocked out in the first round.
You'd need a massive turnout advantage to do that. I could imagine cases where it happens, especially since Democrats do have more engaged voters nowadays, but it's certainly not easy or the default situation. And visible blue support would be a huge albatross for a Republican candidate.
I don't think you need as much turnout as you're imagining. Primaries have low turnout, and win margins are often small. It requires that the people actually VOTE, but so does everything else... and if you're only going to vote once, better to do it when it matters!
Isn't the logical conclusion here to simply eliminate closed primaries? Have the parties nominate a ballot and have two general elections: one to pick the nominees for each party and one to pick the winner.
I think open primaries would be lovely, but that's not beneficial to the current establishment... this method, OTOH, is available right this minute.
I think jungle primaries (like in California) are a good version of this.
I'd expect the candidate from the party you most agree with to be a lot more extreme than you desire. If your preferred candidate from your least desired party isn't the nominee then I think you have worse choices than if you register for the party with which you most agree.
I think this is most useful in "safe" states, for which the red/blue candidate is guaranteed to win. Obviously you aren't getting exactly what you want (not that anyone does, in a democracy), but you're limiting your downside.
Such strategies, of manipulating the other party's primaries in your favored direction, are well-known and usually referred to as "ratfucking." I am unconvinced it's REDUCING partisanship.
No, that's when you register with the opposite party to support a candidate you think is bad (and likely to lose).
Wikipedia implies "ratfucking" is some sort of dirty trick or smear campaign. I prefer to think of my strategy as "hedge voting" or "MINIMAX for elections". You're helping get the most platable candidate that you CAN, rather than the ideal candidate you can't.
It's probably a bad idea to try and get a candidate "so horrible that no one would vote for them" on the ballot. That was very explicitly the HRC strategy in 2016, and I think the results are unsurprising.
Yes, I see what the Wikipedia page says, but contend that isn't what current common usage is. See
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/midterm-elections-2022-democrats-dirty-campaign-tactics.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/primary-election-voting-party-switching/630171/
https://outsidethebeltway.com/democratic-ratfucking-worked/
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/voting-in-a-one-party-state-is-heartbreaking-86c246705902.
These all suggest it now means something more like "influencing the primaries of the party one intends to vote against in the general election, either by funding or by voting."
And while, yes, it backfired in 2016, I think you're being too hasty deeming the strategy fundamentally flawed; Democrats haven't abandoned it, which seems to have worked fine in 2022, for example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-elevation-of-election-deniers-worked_n_636b5108e4b04925c8929fcf
I think that strategy is about picking the LEAST effective general election candidate, right? So your side is more likely to win in the general?
Loominus is recommending that you pick the candidate from the other party that you like the MOST. I imagine that would tend to that party more likely to win in the general.
I don't think that falls into the usual definition of ratfucking.
In fact, it's the exact opposite of "ratfucking".
For those pushing for less hours spent schooling rather than more I will point to an SF Bay Area high school that does this.
Bellarmine (in San Jose) runs four 65 minute classes every day. The day includes those four classes, a lunch break and a ~one hour "community time" slot where students and teachers are expected to be on campus but have no schedule activity. Each class is taught every other day so the students are taking 8 classes in any semester.
They seem to have been doing this for a few years now
https://www.bcp.org/bellschedule/faq
so there might be some lessons to be learned from how it is going.
My guess is that it is going fine. 40 years ago the school offered six classes per semester, but only met four times per week per class (5, 5, 5, 5 and 4 for Mon - Fri). That worked fine, too.
The schedule doesn't seem that unusual to me--I know of a lot of schools that do this with either 90 minute blocks, or 75. 65 is a bit short, but I'm guessing that the "community time" can probably still be counted as instructional time (I don't know what the CA requirements are for private schools).
But how the heck do you serve lunch to 1600 boys in 30 minutes? I'm guessing they must have a massive number of students bring their own lunch.
Interesting. I think that anything over 50 minutes is too long to try to concentrate on one thing, and that a 50 minute period followed by a ten minute break to walk to your next class is just about optimal.
I recently toured a school (thinking about my kids' high school options) where they had 90 minute periods (among other bad-sounding academic innovations) and I didn't like the sound of that.
Most 90-minute classes are going to have a mix of different activities, so it's not necessarily monotonous. I think most of the research typically favors longer class periods over shorter ones (less time, percentage-wise, used for things such as changing classes, taking roll, getting settled, etc.). But 90 minutes of the same exact thing with no variation wouldn't be good for high schoolers.
The only quantitative school requirement I know of for California private schools is "200 minutes each 10 schooldays" for PE. So we can score the community time as instruction or not -- it doesn't matter.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ps/psaffedcode.asp
This 200 minutes every 10 days matches what I found when I researched California home schooling requirements 20 years ago.
The scheduling struck me as unusual because ~10 years back my local public high school had 7 classes per day, with an optional 0-period (which would bring the classes per day up to 8).
John Oliver being very funny on the topic of AI slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWpg1RmzAbc
“The rest of you cover your ears I’m speaking to people who like this stuff”
Yeah pretty funny.
Watched when Zvi linked to it
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
For three years I attended a sort of hybrid school, where all of the academic material was self-taught through a home school curriculum that the school had adopted. We each had a cubicle where we worked at our own pace through a series of workbooks. If I recall correctly there were 12 workbooks per year per subject; at the end of each workbook a teacher administered a test and if you scored over 90 percent, you moved on to the next workbook, otherwise you went back and did it again. After 12 workbooks, the teacher administered an exam. All of high school kids were in the same large room, with a couple of roaming teachers who answered questions when they came up. As long as you finished a certain number of packets per subject per month you were free to do whatever in the remaining time.
For me this arrangement was fantastic. I powered through four years of high school in three years, and really - here's the point- it only took a couple of hours a day. Otherwise I read novels, or simply left the school on various adventures. It was a pretty ideal way to do high school, though the curriculum itself was a bit lame and infused with some conservative flavor of Christianity.
(As an aside, this school was in an old hotel overlooking the town of St Georges, Grenada; the building was later commandeered by the government for use as offices, and in that capacity was bombed when Reagan sent in the Marines. It's still a ruin. )
My younger brother and I both graduated from one of the nation's earliest public-school-system "alternative" high schools, Community High School in Ann Arbor MI. This was during the late-1970s/early-1980s when the school was literally having to fight every year with the city's school board for its continued budgetary existence. It was grudgingly allowed to operate in an old shuttered elementary school that nobody else had any use for, etc. It was self-selecting (you chose to attend it for high school) and in my day it never had more than 400 students total.
Many of the teachers and administrators were barely-former hippies or Yippies. They practiced a range of then-eccentric pedagogical techniques most of which centered on "independent study" such as you describe above with the workbooks. The school was widely referred to as "Commie High" (as an accusation by school board members and an affectionate nickname by us), though in fact its curriculum content had to include all the same standard stuff as Michigan's normal public schools and I don't recall any particular political or ideological twists being applied.
Anyway for people like me and my brother this was indeed fantastic. In my case it enabled a high-testing kid who'd completely bombed the first year and a half of high school (I walked into CHS with exactly two successfully-completed course credits to my name and those just barely), to clear my head and make it all up and then some. My brother thrived as well and by late in his junior year could have simply completed high school and begun college early if he'd wanted to.
However -- we both also witnessed and realized the tradeoff. CHS always included an oversize population of kids, many of them quite smart and/or talented, for whom the lack of structure was disastrous. As long as you achieved a very-bare minimum of passing grades you could stick with the school and never have to attend one of the city's two "regular" high schools. And/or once you turned 17 you could legally drop out altogether. We each knew plenty of kids for whom that degree of individual-agency during adolescence served as a comfy glide path into very-unhappy adult life paths. The individual stories shared at later Commie High reunions always made that fact painfully clear.
Congrats on your positive experience with hippie high.
The tradeoffs though…
I worked with an engineer who attended a magnet high school. He got to play with a mass spectrometer while he was there and did a deep dive into ornithology. Seems like he missed picking up every day English grammar though. His emails were all lower case with never a line break and little punctuation. I’d have to rewrite them making a best guess as to where periods might have gone to begin to understand them.
Not sure which college he attended but I recall sitting on the campus bus for a ride home when I was in school and overhearing an EE major saying it was his last term and he was sweating the one mandatory English composition that he had put off. “Even if I get a D they’ll still have to give me the degree!”
The public magnet schools I'm familiar with, e.g. the one that my youngest attends now and the ones that several of my college friends attended, are pretty much the antithesis of Community High School. Could be that the term is used differently in other countries, I dunno.
>We each knew plenty of kids for whom that degree of individual-agency during adolescence served as a comfy glide path into very-unhappy adult life paths.
In my view this is 100% the responsibility of the parents. I actually don't want schools filling that role. If some smart-but-feckless kid wants to cheat himself by skating through high school then so be it. There are much higher social costs to be found in the attempt to systematically prevent it from happening than there are in benign neglect.
Cool with me. I was just sharing from firsthand experience that there are real-world tradeoffs from _whichever_ way we go on the question of how schools are designed/operated.
Probably a question that has been asked before and has been answered a bunch of times…but asking as someone who doesn’t know a lot about AI and really am starting to look into it because of reading Gibson and Asimov and Bradbury, but do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?
Also on a different note; do any of you have thoughts about the solarpunk movement and any level of success it has?
One of my safest predictions is that robotic soldiers will happen significantly before daily-helper bots. If you watch the evolution of drone-warfare to see what kinds of bots get built, it will inform you about what will become widespread everywhere else afterwards.
Asimov explain his anthropomorphic robots by saying if you make it like the human body, it can use all tools a human can. Like it can drive a tractor or wield a hammer. Yes, but the human body is not necessarily the ideally cost-effective way to use such tools.
Of particular relevance to the current paradigm in AI, making it humanoid also means you can use a vast corpus of "humans using these tools to do these tasks" training data on e.g. Youtube, along with hiring actual humans to demonstrate things that haven't been adequately youtubed. The fractally-tentacled Octobot that is mechanically capable of using most human tools with theoretically greater capability, may be seriously handicapped by that.
Mmm, but they might be a delight in bed. Those fractal tentacles . . .
My fractal lover is plastic
His kisses taste like a hot fuse . . .
Be careful what you ask for. Octobot's training data in that area will be absolutely dominated by hentai.
Fascinating point! Makes total sense
I think friendly, competent household assistant AIs are an obvious unmet need and will be developed pretty soon.
People being people, some of them will have romantic vibes, which are obviously not that hard to implement if the consumer is motivated to make it work.
And, software being software (and LLMs, while useful, having new and exciting failure modes), we can expect accidents which will surprise even jaded ER physicians...
"do you think we’ll ever have kind of holographic or android-like robots or AI that really become a part of our lives that begin to change how we see machine and human interaction? Or even family structures?"
Yes.
I think we are slowly drifting into that territory now with virtual friends/girlfriends/whatever. Give it ten more years and this might be as normal as smart phones are today.
>I think we are slowly drifting into that territory now with virtual friends/girlfriends/whatever.
You might be interested in a comment about that I made further down the comments section, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-388/comment/130788057 and the article it is a reaction to: https://www.wired.com/story/couples-retreat-with-3-ai-chatbots-and-humans-who-love-them-replika-nomi-chatgpt/
I figured out a sort of a law of history and politics. Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. College professors, newspaper editors, corporations, but the surest indicator is music and video celebrities, because those people - I think - really do care a lot about which way is the wind blowing. Simply put, if a political movement has nothing but the state, they will use the state a lot. This is inevitable. They have one card, why would they not use it?
What I am trying to say is, that if you are on the side of non-authoritarian politics, if you want to be honest, you have to understand that it is awfully easy to be non-authoritarian when everybody who matters is already on your side. When all the elites, so to speak, are already cooperating with you. In such a situation, you can afford to be non-coercive. But if you had nothing but the state, nothing but voters, what would you do?
This also means it is not necessary to make up clever psychological theories, like Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, or its modern version, Social Dominance Orientation Scale, about how exactly are authoritarian people are fucked in the head. They are simply seeing, quite rationally, that they have nothing else but voters i.e. the state. Everybody else who matters is against them. So of course they are playing their one strong card.
Note that in the 2025 context, it is a problem for the right, but historically it was a problem for the left. Imagine being a communist in 1955 America. You are just painfully aware that everybody who matters hates you. So if you could get any power... you would use it.
Pretty much all of the elites of Weimar Germany ended up lining up behind the Nazis[1]. Some of them got on board early, some of them not until they saw which way the wind was blowing. The Nazi government was in power for 12 years, and if it got *less* authoritarian over time, I don't even want to know what "more authoritarian" would have looked like.
I think you have it flipped around. People who are drawn to authoritarianism are those people that feel like imposing their agenda is always justified: their use of force is always righteous, their ends always justify their means, their witch hunts are always finding *real* witches (unlike all those other witch hunts). Of course believing all the elites are against you can produce that feeling: but that's a *feeling* produced by a *belief*, it's not required to reflect reality. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of highly authoritarian governments is that they become more and more disconnected from reality as their policies visibly fail to produce the outcomes they want, but people become more and more reluctant to communicate honestly with them: without the ability to recognize that their own agenda might be the problem, they start seeing enemies in every shadow.
[1]Or rather, some did not, but they either fled the country or got "elite" status stripped from them at gunpoint. But that wasn't the norm: LOTS of captain-of-industry types were all too happy to fall in line.
I think you're overthinking this. In my opinion, a leader will be authoritarian to the exact degree that they can get away with it. That, in turn, is dependent on how factionalized and divisive society has become. The cause that you're positing (a President that the media and other elites all hate) is really only possible in an aggressively factionalized polity. If all of the elites hate him, how did he become President? He must have a committed band of followers who are willing to act against elite culture and accepted norms. THAT is what enables him to act authoritatively. In my view the real reason Trump wasn't prosecuted by the DOJ for Jan 6 is because the Democratic establishment was downright afraid of what would happen if he was jailed. Meaning they are afraid that he has enough popular support that imprisoning him would lead to uncontainable violence. Authoritarianism is downstream of the erosion of shared political values and the factionalism that that causes.
This is certainly a big part. Already Montesquieau wrote that a republic is only possible if people can put the public good above their group interests. In every other case, a king is better.
This sounds like a theory that only works in those narrow corners of history where a group of people manage to get enough power to be authoritiarian without having the establishment on their side.
Maybe a more general theory would say that there always has to be _some_ kind of outgroup to justify the authoritarianism, but the shape of this outgroup may be different. It might be the capitalist class, or the Jews, or the Shiites, or the racists, but there's always some hated group that we all need to unite against.
The current version of that group is white men. We're the universal outgroup.
I think our truly textbook cases of authoritarianism seem to be those corners. Communism, Nazism, Fascism, even the milder ones, Franco, Salazar, Peron.
Let's take Mussolini. Basically, fun fact: the March to Rome did not happen. That is a bipartisan myth. Mussolini had a few thousand rural strong guys who started marching towards Rome, then took a train to Rome, where the government just caved without a fight and the king named him prime minister. Then they held a parade inside Rome and then he sent them back to their villages. He had a very limited power base and almost none in the capitol. Then he came up with the myth of a heroic coup, and the ex-government liked that because it made them look less of a coward, and thus it stuck.
You are touching a note remarked on by H. G. Wells in his 'The Outline of History' on Constantine (if memory serves), that records show a lonely mind, which made him a more forceful ruler.
I've seen this professionally as well - when a manager isn't backed up (by his team or the organization) he becomes much more autocratic.
I believe you are further correct in your observation that when the other powers aren't willing to "play ball" the natural response is to treat them as obstacles at best, but often as examples to be made.
Scott wrote about something like this in the last section of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan.
Yes, same exact ideas. But it only raises more questions. First of all, when a left-populist goes after economic elites, I can make sense of that, they have money, money is useful, and mostly everybody would like a little more. Whether that is morally right or wrong, it just makes sense why sometimes people want to rob a bank. Or want to own it.
But for example why do people want to be cultural elites? Is it really that much good for their career? But if so, eventually they will become economic elites, no? No, actually, there is a certain kind of person who is prestigious but underpaid. Eight or so years ago someone complained on Twitter that the NYT pays about $600 per article. So that is a super prestigious thing, but does not pay so well. Why do people do that? And more important, why do so many people hate cultural elites so much that entire political movements can be organized around this? Sure the NYT journalist can look snobbish from a certain perspective, but is it such a big deal? And yet, we can observe it works like that.
My best guess is this. Actually the term "cultural elites" is not super helpful. Basically, we just don't have the time or resources to verify every statement we hear. "Cultural" elites are actually credibility elites, they are simply believed more than others. Populist rage happens when some feel this credibility is misplaced, betrayed. I think.
In the US trust in the media is historic low, in fact so low that probably many liberals don't much trust it either. Now for example in Germany it is higher, but I know them. That is basically because 75+ people even bother to read it at all. My uncle in Hungary, 66, is phone-only, online-only. All European legacy media has a huge old-people vibe. I mean they literally put only old people on covers. They know their customers. These old people partially remember the past when it was more reliable, and partially just don't even care that much anymore about deciding whether it is reliable or not.
So I think it is not really culture in the usual sense. I don't think people are angry because some people prefer opera over country music. I think it is a credibility thing, a public trust thing.
I don't think it's that complicated, I think people want to be cultural elites because we are surrounded by culture and most of it is annoying to most people.
If *I* were a cultural elite, things would be much better. We would build beautiful ornate buildings in a style that compares well with the past without seeking to directly imitate it. We would have interesting new developments in music instead of the entire market being dominated by repetitive pop/rap slop. In politics we would resolve all boring long-standing debates in my favour and have healthy debate only on subjects that I'm genuinely uncertain about. Everything around me would be to my taste. I could buy a phone with a headphone jack and a car with a CD player, and the interests of people like me would be at the forefront of everyone's mind.
I don't think anyone is annoyed that _some_ people like opera instead of country music, but country music fans are annoyed that country music doesn't sound like country music any more.
I don't think this theory matches with observed history. The establishment is (or was) fully aligned with the democratic party, yet during the peak of their control they illegally used the intelligence agencies to censor speech online and engaged in a transparent weaponization of the legal system against Trump. Or consider the authoritarian aspects of the PATRIOT act. That was passed during a period where Neocons had an exceptionally strong base of establishment support.
I think most political actors simply calculate how they can gain/maintain power and then try to estimate what portion of that they can get away with. The only things restraining them are amorphous standards of elite conduct enforced by peers, threats to their public reputation, and their own personal convictions (if any).
The question is authoritarian relative to whom. When high society disdains someone powerful enough, that person will be 'authoritarian' in regards the high society. When high society is aligned with a powerful leader, they can be more high-handed with the populous. It all depends on who you can afford to offend.
Your accounting of their behavior seems incomplete to me- at times politicians push agendas which lose them power, and would have lost power in expectation beforehand. There are actual agendas.
As time goes on there are selection pressures for political actors to be more and more like your description, but I doubt humans (even politicians!) regularly personify the power-maximizing political animal
I didn't mean to imply that they have no policy goals. It would probably be more accurate if I said they seek to gain/maintain/spend political power. I'm comfortable rounding off to "seeks power" without distinguishing between someone who truly seeks power for its own sake vs someone who seeks power for its instrumental value.
The distinction is whether, and with what frequency and magnitude, moves are made which are not optimal for gaining/maintaining power, on purpose.
Yes, there are actual agenda driven politicians like James Webb or Tulsi Gabbard. They are few and far between. Even reasonably hard-working folks in Congress are not often "agenda driven profiles in courage"
"Basically people and politicians are going to be authoritarian to the extent that they don't feel the Establishment or elites are not on their side. "
Can you please re-phrase this one sentence. I think I know where you are going from you final sentence, but ...
Basically, educated people. Newspaper editors, professors etc. Also fashionable people, like media celebrities.
Let's take the simplest case. Suppose an authoritarian government is one that represses the freedom of the press, OK? They do this because the press is generally not on their side. If the press is on their side, it is unnecessary to do so. One of course could argue that people sometimes do unnecessary things. OK, but let's put it this way, how much is the temptation clearly depends on how friendly is the press.
I always get the impression that the textbook non-authoritarian politician, say Justin Trudeau does not even govern in the historic sense of governing. By historic sense I mean someone like FDR. Clearly a large chunk of the press, judges and other influential people hated him. So of course it was a fight. But a fight, when conducted from a position of power, looks a lot like authoritarian repression. But someone like Trudeau can just relax... things just work on an autopilot. Everybody who matters already wants the same things that he wants. Things just go...
I have been both on the side and against elites. I can tell people a few things. First of all, what people on the street treat as a matter of political opinion, therefore subjective and people having different views on matters is one of the most sacred freedoms, educated elites tend to see differently. They tend to see them as professional questions. So if you are a professor of engineering or a student of economics, and child psychologists tell you that trans children exist, you are supposed to assume that they know their jobs. Suppose you check their study methodology, and it checks out. At that point what can you say? That they are falsifying data? That would be like the head of the marketing department accusing the head of the accounting department of cooking the books. Basically a libel. Not something like a friendly political disagreement, that is only possible between non-experts.
When you are on the side of elites, you generally do not notice elites exist. (Take not here :) ) you just notice smart people are usually on your side. Of course. You know you are not an idiot, so it is not surprising.
When you are not on the side of elites, you are painfully aware of their existence. You just keep hitting walls everywhere. You feel like that kid who farted in the middle of the lunchroom. The worst part is when you doubt yourself, you know you are not some tinfoil hat type, and yet keep strangely feeling so. The worst part is you don't even really understand what is going on. You would understand it if people were taking bribes, for example. But they seem keenly honest, living modestly, do not actually have as an individual much power (as a class, yes, but individually not) and yet somehow you see things going horribly wrong.
Trudeau? The man who declared martial law over honking is your textbook NON-Authoritarian??!? He was stealing people's money without due process recourse.
Seems like the Trump admin is going after actual citizens now:
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl?inline
> The Department of Justice may institute civil proceedings to revoke a person’s United States citizenship if an individual either “illegally procured” naturalization or procured naturalization by “concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a). The benefits of civil denaturalization include the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of individuals who engaged in the commission of war crimes, extrajudicial killings, or other serious human rights abuses; to remove naturalized criminals, gang members, or, indeed, any individuals convicted of crimes who pose an ongoing threat to the United States; and to prevent convicted terrorists from returning to U.S. soil or traveling internationally on a U.S. passport. At a fundamental level, it also supports the overall integrity of the naturalization program by ensuring that those who unlawfully procured citizenship, including those who obtained it through fraud or concealment of material information, do not maintain the benefits of the unlawful procurement.
What sort of things count as 'willful misrepresentation'? Well...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-claims-palestinian-activist-mahmoud-khalil-misrepresented/story?id=120108978
> The government has claimed that Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil intentionally misrepresented information on his green card application and therefore is inadmissible to the United States. According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022" and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.
Combined with the recent SCOTUS case on birthright citizenship (even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, surely birthright citizenship is an *obvious* case where nationwide injunctions apply!) and legislation attempting to increase annual spending on ICE to over $150b (you know, the guys walking around in masks arbitrarily detaining anyone who looks vaguely ethnic, even if they are US citizens) it seems obvious to me that the government is eager to dramatically expand the definition of 'illegal'. Already there are calls to deport mamdani from federal reps, which is as disgusting as it is insane
I share the skepticism about nationwide injunctions generally, and also think that this specific topic is a good fit for their use. It would be great if either Congress would legislate or the SCOTUS had put into case law something like, "Federal courts cannot issue injunctions applying beyond the plaintiffs that are before them, unless the legal issue is a matter of interpretation or enforcement of specific text within the federal Constitution."
>even though I'm skeptical of nationwide injunctions, this is the *obvious* case where they apply
I don't understand why you think that. It seems to be an obvious case where they do NOT apply. A claim that Person X is subject to revocation of naturalization or permantent residence because he made misrepresentations is inherently a fact-specific, individualized question. There is nothing universal about it. Nor is there anything inherently unlawful about initiating denaturalization proceedings on that basis https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-l-chapter-2
I am sure that the Administration's claims re Mahmoud Khalil are almost certainly bogus, because that is how they roll; note that misrepresentations must be material, and "a concealment or misrepresentation is material if it "has a natural tendency to influence, or was capable of influencing, the decision of" the decisionmaking body to which it was addressed.'" Kungys v. United States, 485 US 759 (1988) ["Looking, therefore, solely to the question whether Kungys' misrepresentation of the date and place of his birth in his naturalization petition was material within the meaning of § 1451(a), we conclude that it was not. "]
I thought the OP was referring there not to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather to the general question that was just ruled on by the SCOTUS: whether a president can order implementation of a legally-new interpretation of a piece of the Constitution.
^Correct, SCOTUS case is about birthright citizenship. Apologies if that was unclear, I've updated accordingly
I'm also skeptical that a universal injunction is particularly necessary re birthright citizenship. When is this going to come up, in practice? If the govt tries to deport me, I present my birth certificate to the judge, and under current caselaw the judge has no choice to rule in my favor. The govt can appeal, but that will lead to a broad ruling. It might come up when Iapply for a passport, but that can easily be dealt with in a class action.
There might be other issues where the absence of universal injunctions leads to people not getting their day in court, but birthright citizenship does not seem to be one of them.
It applies to babies being born in hospitals. The whole point of the eo is that Trump is trying to stop birthright citizenship, which afaict is blatantly unconstitutional. A week ago, if you are on a greencard and have a child in the US, that child is a US citizen. This is written into the 14th amendment and supported by case precedent (Wong Kim iirc).
Trump's EO is trying to get rid of that.
I know what the EO purports to do, and why it is bogus.. But, so what? It doesn't stop the issuance of a birth certificate. So, what effect will it have on a baby, as a practical matter, such that the failure to issue a universal injunction will harm them?
I didn't mean that OP was referring to the particulars of Khalil's case, but rather that they were referring to denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence in general.
And my point is that, because such cases are fact-specific, there is nothing to universally enjoin.
The question of whether a POTUS is able to unilaterally declare and begin implementing a change in the long-established (by SCOTUS precedent) legal understanding of part of the Constitution, seems to me about as general as it ever gets. That question isn't fact-specific at all: either a POTUS can do it or not.
But whether the issue is general has nothing to do with whether an injunction is universal or not. What matters is who is governed by the injunction. From the decision the other day:
>Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone.
Note also my comment re Khalil was based on my (mis)understanding that when OP said that they thought "this issue" was particularly appropriate for universal injunctions, he was referring to the policy of denaturalization / revocation of permanent residence, not to the birthright citizenship EO.
Not a US citizen, but once a court has ruled that a specific EO is unconstitutional, this ruling *not* applying universally to everywhere the constitution applies sounds completely insane to me. Can someone explain to me why it isn't?
>”how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?”
Civil rights law? Imagine how much faster you would have been able to move through the curriculum if you were allowed to kick out the kid who couldn’t remember the “trees” song.
Also, I’m sure, “your child is too stupid for us to teach,” is a bad way to build reputation.
I am the parent from the Brownsville campus and crazy thing is, I still believe ALPHA can revolutionize education. Their model can be done cheaper, more effectively and replicable. All the things they should've learned in Brownsville but didn't because they were already moving on to marketing and charter applications after a year of being there.
The biggest issue is that one primary function schools serve is daycare. Having the kids for only 2 hours a day doesn't provide this. So the school will mostly want the kids either all day *OR* until the "normal" dismissal time when the existing after-school care programs are open to watch over the kids.
The *next* biggest issue is that lots of parents want more hours of instruction rather than fewer. Whether the extra hours are particularly effective (at the margin) is not super important.
100% this. The primary function of school is daycare. That's why it's resisted significant reform, and it's why schoolteachers are safe even in the face of potential AI disruption. School is state-subsidized daycare. Very few people actually care about the learning. If there was a voucher system whereby parents got whatever per-pupil cost to spend on the tutor/daycare of their choice, I'm confident that most of the money would go towards daycares. (They wouldn't be branded that way, of course. But they would, in fact, be daycares.)
I don't think that "teaching the curriculum" is a great way to measure the utility of school anyway.
The "curriculum" as it exists is some summarised lowest common denominator of what every student absolutely must be able to learn in a year. I don't want my kids to just learn the bare minimum, I'm sure there's a vast amount of other stuff they could be learning while they're at it. If you're done with fractions then please teach her dendrology and Byzantine history.
Why do you think you need a school for your kids to learn more than the bare minimum?
I'm wondering how many of the people who write this sort of thing actually have kids.
I don't have the time or the energy to tutor my kids for hours a day, nor do I have the money to hire a bunch of private tutors for hours a day.
I have a son. And I love tutoring curious kids.
Indeed, selective schools are all about this and they often have wonderful reputations. It's not so clear how much of the reputation is due to great teaching rather than great students who would prosper under even lousy teaching, though.
A few decades back I pulled together data for my local public schools. It included standardized test scores and education levels of the parents. And the schools' rating (1 - 10) in California.
*) The general definition of a "Good School" is having a good rating.
*) The way to get a good rating is to have the kids test well.
*) About 80% of the kids' test scores could be predicted from only the parents' education level
I'd like to see something more rigorous and broader, but that's what I saw when I looked at my local public schools.
"How come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only goes two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
The big thing you're missing here is that, for better or worse, for most people, the kids being babysit for almost a full workday for free is just as important as them learning. Or at least, the extra 6 hours hours they're in school is a feature, not a bug.
I thought this was so self evident that I find it surprising Scott would even ask the question. Paul Graham wrote an essay about this topic like 20 years ago.
To be fair, I didn't recognize this until reading one of Freddie de Boer's education essays a few years ago. Although I think i would have by now since we now have kids in school and are reaping the benefits of the free babysitting.
Also, you expect school to teach some stuff other than academics. You'd like kids to make friends and learn to function in a group away from their parents, with lots of supervision in the classroom and less in the gym and still less on the playground.
I would consider it a better feature if my kids could spend those 6 hours playing, reading a book, or working on their own project. Rather than sitting and being tortured by slow pretend-learning.
With you watching them or while at school? If the former, keep in mind that's not an option for most two income families. If the latter, consider how difficult it is to get education funding as it is and now think about trying to sell "well actually, we are only going to educate them the first half of the day, and they can do whatever they want the second" to parents who won't trust you to actually educate them in half the time, and taxpayers who don't want to pay for free babysitting the other half of the time. I think it's pretty easy to understand how we get the system we have, mushing together the two benefits to minimize complaints from both groups, even if it's objectively not efficient or ideal.
> consider how difficult it is to get education funding as it is
Education funding is way up, what are you talking about?
I sympathize, but I also keep reminding myself that my intuitions for how to fix education are probably wildly wrong in general. I think I have a good idea of what kind of schooling would have suited me as a child, but I'm an extreme outlier, and that kind of schooling would have not been much good for most of the other kids in my school.
This. Why did I have a half day of kindergarten, leaving before lunch, while my kid had to stay until 2:45?
Because more moms have jobs now?
Of course. Which has made it all the stranger with no mention of this triumph of feminism that so many districts in my state are going to a 4-day week.
"Lots of people agree that it’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
This exists. Also, the students who do it are FAR, FAR more interesting people than what can become the 5-day all-day mind-meld.
Re: my comment here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school/comment/130523445
In general, the National Hybrid Schools Project is collecting data on schools that are doing basically this. https://www.kennesaw.edu/coles/centers/education-economics-center/national-hybrid-schools-project/hybrid-research.php
Christian Twitter is chirping about YongHoon Kim from South Korea, who has the highest IQ ever recorded at 276 (!) and recently declared that he believes Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is the revealed word of God.
My thoughts -
1. What does it even mean to have an IQ of 276?? Assuming a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 10, the chances are vanishingly small of anyone in human history achieving this. It also implies he is smarter than an Einstein-level genius by about the same proportion as Einstein is smarter than someone severely intellectually disabled. Do IQs above, say, 200 actually correlate with anything meaningful?
2. As a Christian I obviously find this flattering (“a smart person is someone who knows more than you and agrees with you.”) I know some may disagree, but I don’t think religion should be dismissed as the province of the irrational and uneducated.
3. What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)
Innumerable extremely smart people have believe extremely stupid things. There is no reason to think that because a smarter person things something it is more likely to be true. Furthermore, there will be a comparably smart person who believes the opposite.
"Christian Twitter is chirping about YongHoon Kim from South Korea, who has the highest IQ ever recorded at 276 (!) and recently declared that he believes Jesus Christ is Lord and the Bible is the revealed word of God."
This kind of thing makes my heart sink, because yes I understand the impulse to react with "well this guy is smart and he believes it" when faced with the attitudes of "only dumb ignorant fools believe this tripe".
But it has all kinds of possibilities to go haywire: (1) the guy is a fraud and this is a con e.g. he's setting up to bilk the credulous of funds to help him 'start a church in Korea' or the likes (2) the guy is really smart, maybe not that smart, but he'll go off the rails and start declaring *himself* the Second Coming or veer off into all kinds of heretical territory (3) he's not as smart as quoted but he is a genuine believer, but someone discovers he lied about his IQ and uses that to discredit him, the Christians who believed him, and religion in general (e.g. "see they're all fakes and idiots and gullible and liars just like we knew all along").
'I believe because I have been converted' and never mind your IQ score is more secure in the long run.
Perhaps you’re right - I shouldn’t try to encourage people to think more deeply about Christianity by relying on the testimony of some random guy on the Internet, I should talk about my own experience
I just looked this up and that 276 figure was based on MENSA-Korea's 24-point standard deviation. Using the standard 15-point scale, it's a score of 210. Still high, of course, but more believable.
IQ tests are normed tests, not absolute, meaning they sort people relative to other people. At 7 to 8 standard deviations, there's not a lot of meaningful comparisons so I wouldn't put too much weight on it. Measurement error becomes a very real issue at that level.
IQ 276 on 24-point standard deviation is still 7 1/3 sigma, which is 1 in 3×10^9. So it is still far outside the range of plausibility, unless you believe that someone actually made a psychological test validated on approximately 10^10 - 10^11 volunteers.
The literally smartest person on Earth (assuming we could find them) would be about 6 1/2 sigma, that is IQ 197 on the 15-point scale, and IQ 256 on the Korean scale.
No matter what, that number is fake.
10^9 is a billion so it's not literally impossible that one of the 8 billion people on earth sorts that high. Though I'd say that it's far less likely that that one person was correctly identified than that this is a just a noisy measurement at the extreme range of the instrument.
As an intelligent (if not 276 IQ intelligent) person, I don't care, unless he comes up with a novel argument for why Christianity is true.
Raw intelligence is not the same thing as domain knowledge, and it's entirely possible that I've read more about religion, world history, and specifically the history of the Roman Empire and Judea than he has; if he found this or that advocate for Christianity persuasive, well, I'm within my rights to disagree.
Amen, brother!
At some point, you get the "top thousand people in the world" -- their IQs are basically unmeasurable, in terms of "who is better than whom" and you pull the guy whose unique skillset does what you want.
As far as intellect and religiosity, the higher your level of education the more likely you are to attend religious services weekly. (https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/lets-have-a-talk-about-education). So there is a lot of nuance to the question.
Yeah interesting, I sometimes think high intellect is a risk factor for pride, which makes it more difficult to accept the truth of religion. Religion necessarily involves a surrender to the unknown and the acceptance that there are mysteries too deep for one’s mind to comprehend
> Religion necessarily involves a surrender to the unknown and the acceptance that there are mysteries too deep for one’s mind to comprehend
...And you do that by pretending to know about things you don't know or comprehend? I don't follow.
I would say that pretending to know about things that are unknowable is bogus (by definition)
But pretending to know such things is exactly what people who say that the universe has a creator do, right? With that very statement!
He is almost definitely some kind of grifter using his reported and likely fake IQ to springboard his company and his beliefs.
While many intelligent people are religious, many intelligent people are also very stupid.
I think Wooly put it well. It makes sense that very smart people would actually question the idea that the orthodoxy of our time (materialist humanism) or the orthodoxy of the previous time a few centuries ago (biblically inerrant Christianity) just happens to be the timeless universal truth.
While "normal" people would just rather do what their ancestors did without trying to understand the new orthodoxy, and "smart" people would think *just enough* to understand the new orthodoxy and why it's better than the old one and then *stop*. And certainly not think enough to wonder if *that* might *also* be wrong.
There may also be a barber pole effect here. People who aren't that smart but have their life basically together signal religious belief to distinguish themselves from the drug users and criminals and so on. People who are a bit smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a drug addict or party animal but *are* worried about being mistaken for a non-smart normal person, so they signal irreligion to do so. People who are very smart aren't worried about being mistaken for a normal person but *are* worried about being mistaken for a merely slightly smart person, so they signal (maybe esoteric maybe not) religious belief.
That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
>That latter model would suggest that maybe correlations between intelligence and religion have nothing at all to do with the rationality of religion, actually.
True! Also, there is the unfortunate point that compressing the relationship into a _correlation_ misses the points you raise, since correlations are awful for capturing strongly nonlinear relationships, most severely if, as you suggest, the actual relationship is not monotonic.
Do you know what sort of IQ test was used to evaluate Kim's IQ? Most standardized IQ tests have an upper limit around 155, due to the limited number of extremely difficult items. Supposedly, there are high-range IQ tests designed to handle people with extremely high IQs, but to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been standardized and/or normalized for reliability (mainly because there aren't many individuals with an IQ of 5σ to use as samples).
As for the correlation between intellect and religiosity, that depends on how you define "intellect" and "religiosity". If we're reducing intellect to an IQ score (and I don't subscribe to that hokum), then numerous studies have shown a negative correlation between religiosity and higher IQ. Terman's longitudinal study of geniuses (IQ > 135) suggested that these individuals were somewhat less religious than the general population, although not overwhelmingly so. Terman spoke in general terms, though, and I don't think his team published any hard numbers on this question. The famous SMPY study (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) tracked teens in the top 0.01% in math ability (IQs >145), followed them longitudinally, and found a trend toward lower religiosity over time, particularly compared to national averages. Those going into STEM fields were particularly less religious.
I found this for you on Google Scholar: "The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations" by Zuckerman et al.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088868313497266
> Abstract
> A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, this is behind a paywall. But my first question would be, how did these studies define religious belief? If they defined religiosity as belief in an Abrahamic creator-god who is omniscient and omnipotent, then they may be misclassifying otherwise religious people as atheists and agnostics. Full disclosure: I don't test out as a genius, but my first IQ test put me at +1.9σ. I'm agnostic about belief in a creator entity (because it's an unfalsifiable question). But I'm deeply mystical despite having a firm STEM grounding. I probably wouldn't be classified as religious by the psychometricians, but I am.
My understanding is that there are specific tests used to differentiate the very high IQ from the extremely high IQ. The Giga Society, which is similar in principle to Mensa but only admits those with IQs above 190, lists some here
https://gigasociety.com/qualification.html
"Retest scores are not accepted, as are scores self-normed by the applicant."
I don't think they give enough weight to verbal intelligence...
Most (none?) of those tests seem to have been developed by psychologists or other types of academic psychometricians. I mean, just look at the names of some of these tests! They're as creative as cannabis strain names! ;-) The gigasociety insists that we pay a fee to take any of these tests, and we'll keep the questions secret. This leads me to think they don't have a high sample size of takers, and they haven't done much normalization against standard IQ tests, nor between all the tests that they offer. Seems kinda bogus to me.
Yeah, the tests are fake. It is obvious to anyone who learned about test standardization.
The simple story is that you can't calibrate a "1 in N" test without actually testing it on N (preferably more) people, and I strongly doubt that any of these self-declared gigachads actually had the money to test billions of volunteers.
So it's more like: "We invented a bogus test, test gullible people for money, and declare five winners among them to be the five smartest people on the planet."
A 276 IQ does not mean anything.
It doesn't mean literally nothing. It means they are probably pretty good to great at memorization, pattern matching, and mental arithmetic, standard test taking stuff.
It's also only mostly ridiculous rather than completely ridiculous, which is not what I thought i was going to say once i started typing. Yes, a z score of 17 is unfathomable. But. The tail end of real distributions stop resembling the normal distribution.
The tallest human ever was 8' 11". This would put him ~13 to 16 standard deviations above the average height (he was born in 1918, i don't care enough to find good data on standard deviations back then)
This is impossibly tall, if all you go by is the Z score.
276 is impossibly smart, if all you go by is the Z score, and by with a few orders of magnitude.
I think its much, much easier for a human to get impossibly tall than impossibly smart, but the argument is not as rock solid as I would like it to be.
There are tests to differentiate between an IQ of 150+ and an IQ of 190+ - see the Giga Society, for example -
https://gigasociety.com/qualification.html
It appears this guy did a bunch of these tests and scored the top marks ever seen
https://vocal.media/history/dr-young-hoon-kim-wikipedia-highest-iq-276-record-holder
So that’s what it “means.” I wonder though if after a certain level IQ is not a good predictor of achievement, sort of like height in basketball. It’s a strong predictor up to a point, but at some point NBA players are tall enough and other factors become dominant. That’s why Michael Jordan at 6 foot 6 is a much better player than the tallest man ever at 8 foot 11.
> There are tests to differentiate between an IQ of 150+ and an IQ of 190+
Giga Society is a scam... or at best, a group of confused people who have no idea what they are talking about (which would not be an unexpected thing among the Mensa crowd).
Let's crunch some numbers:
IQ 130 = 1 in 50 (Mensa level)
IQ 140 = 1 in 300
IQ 150 = 1 in 2,000
IQ 160 = 1 in 30,000
IQ 170 = 1 in 500,000
IQ 180 = 1 in 20,000,000
IQ 190 = 1 in 700,000,000
As a rule of thumb, to develop a statistical test for detecting a "1 in N" level, you need to test about 10×N uniformly randomly selected people. You probably need to pay them (you can't rely on volunteers doing this for free, because they won't be a representative sample of the population), add some logistics on top of that, and you end up with at least $100 per test subject.
Psychology researchers usually have limited budgets, even the most famous ones cannot spend literally billions. This is why typical serious IQ tests stop somewhere near IQ 140. Assuming 10×N test subjects and $100 per subject, that already costs $100×10×300 = $300,000. Plus, you usually want to have IQ test scores separate for different ages, so that would be $300,000 per age group.
It is possible to test IQ above 150 in principle, but consider the costs. A test for measuring IQ 160 would cost $100×10×30,000 = $30M. Per age group! I find it difficult to believe that someone actually spent as much money for that. But without spending the money... no, you cannot make a statistically valid distinction between IQ 150 and above.
The Giga Society would have to spend $700B for their test. (Actually, $700B per age group! Which would require testing literally every single person on the entire planet! But they seem to be unaware of such details.) I do not believe they did this. Whatever they did instead is crackpottery.
At least they don't have to worry about getting a representative sample, since they would test almost the entire human population.
That's the kind of a genius idea one needs IQ 190 for.
It means nothing, because no IQ test is calibrated to spit out 276 as a meaningful number.
It doesn't mean nothing. Suppose you have the 276 IQ guy and a 100 IQ guy in a room. If you were able to interrogate them, would you be able to guess which is which without directly asking their test results?
To me, the answer is obviously yes. IQ tests aren't random number generators.
However, I don't think I would be able to do the same with 276 and 140. Im willing to accept that above 140, an IQ test might as well be a random number generator.
most midwits lack meta-intelligence. interrogating a moron tends to give you an average score if you don't know what to look for.
I'm not saying you couldn't easily tell a 276 IQ person from a 140 IQ person, I'm just saying that there's no test well calibrated enough to give you a "276" rather than just saying "Whoop, this person exceeds the ceiling of this test".
Anyway look I think it's been established elsewhere in the thread that the guy actually scored a 276 in some kind of other test, not an IQ test, so we can probably drop the subject.
No, it literally means nothing, IQ is fundamentally an ordinal scale and cannot distinguish between "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a little bit" and "higher than any point in the sample distribution by a lot". The apparent interval nature is an artifact of the norming process, and at that point there's nothing left to norm against.
Yeah, I mean the guy may be genuinely very smart (or not--some people with really impressive IQ scores don't seem to do much, but there's a pretty strong positive correlation between IQ scores and accomplishing things), but whereas an IQ of 145 is meaningful in the sense that we know that the number of people whose scores are above it should be about one per thousand, and that we probably have some useful data about how people with 145 IQ scores performed on some real-world tasks, a score of 276 doesn't tell us any of that. It's like I ran a regression analysis on the relationship between temperature and murder rate and then extrapolated it out to the expected murder rate when it's 300 F outside.
Maybe there's a strong positive correlation between IQ scores (high) and accomplishing things. I think there's also bound to be a very strong correlation between your differential IQ score and accomplishing things.
Few people game an IQ test low "just to see how the questions change." And you can be sure they aren't narcissists or midwits.
Lewis Terman tracked the lives of about 2500 people with IQs over 135. None of them became captains of industry, won any major awards, or made any important scientific discoveries. Two people whose IQs didn't make the cut for inclusion in the Terman study won Nobel prizes, though.
And Nicholas Taleb provided an excellent rebuttal to the classic Zagorsky study, which purported to find a strong correlation between IQ and income.
> Lewis Terman tracked the lives of about 2500 people with IQs over 135. None of them became captains of industry, won any major awards, or made any important scientific discoveries. Two people whose IQs didn't make the cut for inclusion in the Terman study won Nobel prizes, though.
True (with a small correction: it was 1500 people, not 2500), but from my perspective that just means that the early IQ tests sucked. It's like complaining that the first steam engine leaked steam, and using that as evidence that physics is debunked.
The first IQ tests put a lot of emphasis on historical trivia and similar encyclopedic knowledge. Back then, people used "knowledge of the kind of stuff they teach at school" as a proxy for intelligence, which probably disadvantaged the STEM types. Today, the standard meaning of intelligence is the g factor.
I Googled a bit.
From https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3436983:
> South Korean Kim Young-hoon was recognized as the person with the highest IQ in history, scoring 276 at the World Memory Championships, according to the organizer of the competition, the World Mind Sports Council
What's the World Memory Championships? https://www.worldmemorychampionships.com/ fails to load in my country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Memory_Championships says:
> The World Memory Championships is an organized competition of memory sports in which competitors memorize as much information as possible within a given period of time.
> The World Championships consist of ten different disciplines, where the competitors have to memorize as much as they can in a period of time:
One-hour numbers (23712892....)
5-minute numbers
Spoken numbers, read out one per second
30-minute binary digits (011100110001001....)
One-hour playing cards (as many decks of cards as possible)
15-minute random lists of words (house, playing, orphan, encyclopedia....)
15-minute names and faces
5-minute historic dates (fictional events and historic years)
15-minute abstract images (WMSC, black and white randomly generated spots) / 5-minute random images (IAM, concrete images)
Speed cards - Always the last discipline. Memorize the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards as fast as possible.
Confusingly however, YongHoon Kim's name is nowhere to be found in the list of winners over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Memory_Championships, so what gives?
Another reason for skepticism: the *actual* Korean with the highest recorded IQ on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale isn't YongHoon Kim but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong who is a pretty famous case within these circles. AFAICT Kim is "an associate professor at Shinhan University and vice president of the North Kyeong-gi Development Research Center".
Saw a video about a guy with extraordinary memory skills. A lot of the stuff he could do resembled the tasks above -- learning long sequences of numbers, etc.. But they also showed him learning Icelantic well enough to hold a conversation in -- I forget how long, I think it was something like a coupla days. And the conversation wasn't a trivial one, I was substantial and went on for a while. *That* impresses me.
Memory doesn't give you reasoning, though, and without that, you have very little in the way of general intelligence.
"What is the correlation (or otherwise) between intellect and religiosity? Much is made of Galileo whose scientific discoveries brought him in conflict with the Church, but my (subjective) impression is that rather more great historical scientists were inspired by religion (Newton, Einstein, Faraday, Kepler, Mendel.)"
Very, very loose vibe thing:
Normal people are usually religious (including secular religion things).
Smart people usually aren't religious.
Really smart people are a crap shoot but their religious beliefs are always really weird and esoteric. Like, weird gnostic cults or obsessive mathematical platonists or just a sh*t ton of LSD. Newton is a good example, as the dude was super into alchemy, like, seriously into it.
If I was introduced to a super smart person and was told they were religious, my priors are way higher for them being into Kabbalah or something than, like, Methodism.
There's a new religion out, courtesy of covid19. I heard a lot of physicists like it (it was helpful in evading vaccinations).
Serious IQ tests do not even reach anywhere near 276, because that is statistically a nonsense -- you would have to calibrate the test on more people than actually exist on this planet.
Could it be a typo for 176? That happens to be the highest value I have ever seen in actual test.
Things get weird on the high end, especially when PR is involved.
Marilyn vos Savant had a reported IQ of 228. And later 186.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score
She seems to have been a nice person but I do not believe she was smarter than Einstein or Feynman. Or von Neumann. Or Lisa Randall.
Someone (maybe even me) should write a FAQ about IQ, because whenever this topic appears, I keep saying the same things over and over again.
The formula for IQ has changed from "mental age divided by physical age" (which made sense for children but not for adults) to "100 + 15 × sigma". The values are similar around 100, but the further we go, the more noise is there. IQ 228 makes sense in the old formula, which was probably used at Marilyn's first test. Using the modern formula, even IQ 186 would be absurdly high; the serious tests end somewhere around IQ 140. You can't meaningfully compare the old results to the new results in the high range.
The thing that always struck me: if she really was the smartest human who'd ever lived, it seems like she kinda wasted her talents. I mean, she married well, and wrote some newspaper columns and books, but it kinda seems like the smartest person in the world ought to be discovering new physics or figuring out how to build fusion reactors or something. It would be like if you somehow learned that you were the most musically talented person on Earth, and so you decided to sing in your local church choir once a week rather than, say, composing new music that future generations would love or something.
IQ falls apart at the tails of the distribution. It's really only meant for comparisons within a few standard deviations from the mean, maybe 70-130. Anything much higher than that you should probably just generalize as "high IQ". I don't think 276 is any more meaningful than 150 here.
We've made a chatbot with 200k tokens of knowledge of AI x-risk in its context. If you ask it some hard questions on AI safety, it might surprise you with how well current LLMs can explain the problem. In something like a third of its responses, it generates genuinely very convincing and valid arguments.
Especially curious to hear the thoughts of people who are not convinced of AI x-risk.
https://whycare.aisgf.us/
My email is ms@contact.ms if you want to share feedback.
(Ignore the interface, it's not yet optimized.)
Error creating chat completion: error, status code: 502, message: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value
Huh, thanks, weird! Try again?
next issue:
I asked "well what white-collar desk jobs are the least likely to be automated"
it gave me a long-ish, decent answer and, at the end, it asked: "If you want, I can suggest ways to “future-proof” your own skillset, or help brainstorm transition paths as the landscape shifts."
I said "yes lets do that"
And it responded "Sorry, we've optimized this tool for conversations about AI and the threat it poses, and it is not as useful for other requests."
works now!
In the "random question" category: Picked up a book off my library's recommended list, "Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop." In the author's note, she says that she wanted to write about a bookstore which started with the character "hyu." No explanation (nor even the actual character rather than the transliteration) is given by her or by the translator or editor. But there's gotta be someone here who knows a lot about Korean characters, so what's your guess as to why that would be a good bookstore-name starter? TIA!
휴 (hyu) is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese 休, which means 'rest'.
Tootling around online, it seems "hyu" means "rest, relax, respite" or similar; "dong" refers to a neighbourhood, and "nam" means "south" (since I don't have the characters I'm going by English transliterations).
So very roughly something like 'the bookshop in the restful neighbourhood to the south/in the south (of the city)" and by the reviews, it's because the main character had the conventional (stressful) successful life, got burned out, it all fell apart, and now she's starting off with the cosy bookshop that becomes a shelter for other lost souls. I imagine the idea is to contrast the quiet, relaxed, peaceful atmosphere of the district/bookshop with the hectic pace of city life which has left the customers unhappy and dissatisfied with their careers and personal lives?
Ukraine's drone attack against Russia's bombers parked on the ground makes me wonder: Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
An F-35A costs around $82.5 million. Why not also build F-35ADecoys that would cost far less, like $4 million (price of a new, small passenger jet)? F-35ADecoys could be stationed at air bases to trick an enemy with spy satellites into thinking an attack might come from that direction, or they could be mixed in with real F-35As to sacrificially soak up damage from any preemptive drone attack.
F-35ADecoys would have the same external dimensions and shapes as F-35A's. Only at very close range could you see any differences. However, F-35ADecoys would not have any expensive avionics or technology, would have a cheap, commercial-grade jet engine, and would be made of cheap materials like aluminum and steel rather than stealth composites. The only advanced feature they would have would be an autopilot system that would let them take off, fly long distances, and land without a human pilot.
In a jif, F-35ADecoys could also be converted into cruise missiles by attaching a bomb to their undersides and remotely piloting them into a target.
Having decoys be able to actually fly would be redundant in most scenarios. As long as the decoys look convincing on high-res satellite images while parked on the tarmac, the work is mostly done. Having close-up surveillance (people, drones) that could tell the difference is vastly more difficult and worse-scaling than satellite imagery and should be enough to economically favour the defender.
Adversaries are presumably photographing the bases many times a day, and will be able to keep track of which planes move and which ones don't.
Here's the other thing: F-35s aren't stored out in the open, they live in hangars or at least under cover. You wouldn't park a Ferrari out in the street, I don't know why anyone thinks they'd want to park a $100 million fighter out in the rain to get dirty.
If they're parked in hangars, they don't need decoys either. I thought that went without saying.
You need decoy hangars...
>Why doesn't the U.S. Air Force have more decoy planes?
Because they take up space, you have to maintain them like real planes or else it gives the game away, and the enemy has spies in the military that will give the game away anyway.
Just build a nice hangar and keep unknown numbers of planes inside.
Because using decoys is what a paper tiger military does to pretend to look strong. It's in the US's interest to make its force projection capabilites seem *as credible as possible*. Mixing in fake jet planes into its fleet might embolden foolish actors into picking a fight with us (underestimating our power).
The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. Both countries agree to limits on nuclear capability. Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite. Certain parts of the treaty (standing meetings and on-site inspection) were suspended due to the Ukraine conflict, but the majority of the agreement remains intact.
"The planes are made visible intentionally as part of a nuclear safety treaty between the US and Russia called New START. ... Parking the planes openly allows them to be observed via satellite."
Russia "suspended" participation in the treaty in early 2023, though it said it would continue to abide by the plane number limits. I *think* this means that Russia said it would not build more planes than allowed, but was also not necessarily going to continue allowing for verification. US military inspections of Russian sites, for example, are not longer allowed/done.
So Russia could have placed the planes in bunkers if it wanted to do so. I don't know that Russia has enough bunkers, though.
Except that there was no clause in the New START treaty that mandated parking strategic bombers in the open to be visible from satellite and flyovers. All of the START treaties and the SORT treaty relied on primary verification, and New START allowed up to 18 unannounced on‑site inspections to count warheads on systems including bombers. Bombers can be stored in hangars, especially for maintenance or protection from weather. There's a concealment measure's clause in treaty though, and that might be where the misunderstanding that strategic bombers must be stored in the open comes from...
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or conceal practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms."
But storing nuclear-armed heavy bombers in hardened bunkers seems to be a no-no.
Likewise:
> Each Party shall base:
>...
> (b) deployed heavy bombers only at air bases.
And the treaty says that the parties have to park heavy bombers with nukes at separate bases from heavy bombers without nukes.
Supposedly, its forbidden to deploy fake heavy bombers. Maybe that's implied by the concealment clause, but I don't specifically see that in the New START treaty text.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/140035.pdf
Russia withdrew from New START in 2023. So the point is moot.
What do you mean by "more"? It already has decoy planes. How many do you want them to have?
At least in regard to planes sitting on the tarmac, Russia’s decoy tactics seem to have been largely ineffective against Ukraine’s precision drone strikes. Can't find it now, but there was a video posted on YouTube taken from a Ukrainian drone during their massive June 1st attack on Russian airbases. It demonstrated how the Ukrainian drones successfully avoided the decoys and targeted the real aircraft. I'm not sure, but some of the decoys that Ru used may have been 3-D mockups, because the drones used in the June 1st attack evidently used radar to distinguish real planes from phonies. So, any F-35A decoy would need to have the exact same radar signature as the real aircraft. Not saying this isn't feasible, but Ukraine is incorporating AI into some of its drones.
OTOH, some of the Ru decoy "aircraft" were pretty simplistic, though. Open-source analyst Brady Africk noted that these decoys are not easily mistaken in radar imagery, and the success of Ukraine’s attacks—hitting at least 13 to 20 aircraft, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers—confirms Ukraine’s ability to bypass such deception. Africk had a thread on X about several instances where realistic aircraft images were painted on the tarmac, but that trick was easily detected from satellite imagery because the painted-image decoys didn't cast shadows.
The days of high-end fighter jet being able to dominate the battlefield may be numbered. According to Trent Telenko...
> Air superiority below 2,000 feet/600 meters is increasingly the only air superiority that matters in the age of drones.
> A few tens of F-35's showing up for 5-to-10 minutes a few times a day cannot compare to tens of thousands of drones hunting individual soldiers 24/7
> "Orders of magnitude mean things" and the the F-35 big/few/expensive cult is so far on the wrong side of the small drone numbers game as to be irrelevant.
> Drones are killing three times as much as artillery. And artillery has historically killed more soldiers than planes.
https://x.com/TrentTelenko/status/1932853358408151274
This isn't a result of technology bottlenecks--it's the result of US (Developed nation) military doctrine and the consequent influence on procurement policies. We could have a much larger number of much cheaper close air support fighters, but we chose, decades ago, not to invest in that. The F-16 is as close as we got--but google "F-20 fighter" to see what we could have had. The F-20 was a derivative of the venerable F-5, which you can buy used today for less than a million dollars.
The days of jet fighters aren't over, they just have to fit themselves into a doctrine with drones as part of the battle space. We may be going back to the days of cheaper, more specialized fighters, though.
I just looked up the F-20. Looks like it would have been about 10% cheaper per plane to buy than the F-16 and maybe 40-50% cheaper to operate due to fuel consumption and maintenance requirements. Conversely, the F-20 would have been much less upgradable than the F-16 (the former being an extensive upgrade of an older design already) and would consequently have had a significantly shorter useful service life. It was also much less capable in bombing roles, and I am seeing conflicting information about how much less capable an F-20 was as a fighter than an F-16
My suspicion is that the F-16 was the right point on the tradeoff curve between cost and features. This is corroborated by South Korea and other countries also evaluating the F-20 in the 80s and deciding to buy F-16s or home-grown fighter designs instead.
There is no question that the F-16 was the more capable aircraft. The question is whether or not we could use something like the F-20 now. Though I am open to the position that a sub-sonic aircraft would be even better.
The time for a cheap unsophisticated fighter as aerial light bomb truck was twenty years ago, it would have been useful in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At this point an unmanned version of the same is probably the way to go if you just want to drop bombs in poorly defended airspace.
But you have to supplement those drones--they can't destroy everything, the can be overcome by low level defenses, the drones may be cheap, but they still require operators (much more of a bottleneck than the technology is). And airborne drone operators are a definite thing already--but they don't necessarily need to be in very expensive high performance platforms--a converted transport works well, but who protects the operator aircraft?
Then again, something has to take out those targets the drones can't handle. That's mostly a question of on-the-scene operator skill--there's only so much you can do from the other side of a tele-remote link. A pilot with eyes on the target zone has much better information to work off of, even if they only have seconds to work it. Then someone (in a peer-to-peer conflict at least) has to protect those guys.
Manned aircraft aren't going anywhere, but the combat system they have to fit into is becoming more complex.
A couple things-
-Military strategy generally lags behind technological development. Drones as a major military threat are a very recent phenomenon, only in the last few years in Ukraine (or I suppose the 2nd Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020 if you were paying attention). Generally what happens is armies deploy using the strategies honed from the last major conflict, and when these no longer work well they bash their head against the wall. As people die from mistakes and the incompetent and overly rigid commanders are weeded out a new strategy is honed.
-The US to some degree has taken proactive measures to prevent this. See the development of TRADOC in the wake of Vietnam and the Yom Kippur war. The reinvigoration of aggressive maneuver tactics led to the absolutely crushing victory over Iraq in 1991, despite the US not being in a major conflict in decades.
-US and also NATO forces have spent the last several decades fighting low tech, low intensity counter insurgency operations. This has conditioned their armed forces for a type of conflict where they set the tempo of operations. The idea of the enemy seizing the initiative with something like a mass drone attack on rear operating areas is totally foreign. As are concepts like electronic warfare and signals discipline. US operating posts are lit up like Christmas trees in the EM spectrum, again because they have spent so long fighting enemies where this is not a relevant concern. A relevant example is how long it has taken for the US/EU to ramp up production of munitions for Ukraine. Their defense industries were conditioned on low intensity conflict, where their annual production might sustain the front in Ukraine for a month.
In essence, drone attacks like this are a very new development. The US military has a lot of institutional inertia and it takes time for new ideas to percolate through and result in new strategy. Given how closely NATO is involved in the Ukraine war, I'm sure they're taking a lot of notes, but it still takes time.
*Also, good luck getting your self-piloting decoy plane that's also a cruise missile for a unit cost of only $4 million.
ETA: One other minor point - who exactly is going to have a bunch of spy satellites and ISR assets as well as the strike capability to hit US airbases? This is basically only China in the Pacific theatre, and maybe Russia in the local region. Everyone else remotely capable of something like this is already allied to the US. Being able to acquire real time intelligence of opposition militaries without massive state capacity is also a very newfangled development of drone technology.
*hushed conspiratorial whisper* Maybe they do. Maybe the the *real* cost for F-35As working is in the ~$150 million range, half their fleet is actually decoys and their OPSEC is just so amazingly good that they've managed to hide this from being public knowledge this whole time.
OK, so that was clearly a joke, I just couldn't resist. Anyway, the thought that occurs to me is that, depending on which particular features and capabilities are most important for learners, a decoy plane program could overlap very nicely with a training plane program. I know that airforces need to devote a considerable amount of flight-hours to pilot training in realistic aircraft, but I'd be surprised if every single feature that makes an aircraft combat capable is necessary for the majority of training flights. A useful training plane might cost more than very low-budget decoy, but being dual-use could still save a decent amount of money. One potential downside I can think of is that intelligence orgs might be able to track the decoys just by keeping an eye on training flights (which I assume are easy to identify as such, even from far away) and then tracking the physical planes as they're moved around.
The wonderful thing about ACX is that it's a near certainty that somebody with vastly more domain knowledge than me will spontaneously appear to explain in exacting detail why all my assumptions above are horribly, horribly wrong. :-)
> somebody with vastly more domain knowledge than me will spontaneously appear to explain
The War Thunder effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Thunder#Classified_document_leaks
One obvious problem: a F-35ADecoy probably doesn't look the same across the EM spectrum (e.g., in your hypothetical it has a very different radar return.)
Another is that I roll to disbelieve that a flying decoy costs only $4M.
Note that DoD is, indeed, purchasing flying expendable decoys, but they don't physically look the same as F-35s because they're optimizing for EM signature (see, e.g., https://aviationweek.com/defense/missile-defense-weapons/us-navy-expanding-advanced-expendable-decoy-use) AND the use of inflatable, etc. decoys for the ground is a long-standing tactic. (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1dvhcfk/f16_next_to_inflatable_decoy/ )
In combination, that probably crowds out the case for your idea, unfortunately.
How do you know they don't do this? And if the answer is that it would actually be pretty obvious based on things like flight envelope, then maybe that's the answer.
“Bank of New York Mellon said it now employs dozens of artificial intelligence-powered ‘digital employees’ that have company logins and work alongside its human staff.
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said. “
I expect more statements like this in the near future. Artificial Intelligence will continue to evolve and take away from humans economically valuable tasks.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-workers-have-arrived-in-banking-bf62be49?st=63im7H&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Of all the attempts I've heard to try to incorporate AI-generated work into a workplace, this seems like one of the most awkward. There's good ways and bad ways to get value out of AI, and this seems like a bad one.
The future of office work is AI emailing AI in a loop forever and ever? I don't know whether to be horrified or to be relieved; if all the AI are doing the emails and holding the bullshit meetings, that leaves the humans to get on with real work.
I'd like to just bitch for a minute about my new phone.
I had a Samsung Galaxy S9 until two weeks ago, and yes, it was (is! I kept it as a backup!) seven years old.
I had all of the settings DIALED. IN. Bixby: maximally shut off. Privacy and anti-ad stuff: maximally on. Apps were at the barest bare minimum (I actually like to joke that I'm "allergic to apps" whenever someone suggests one to me. I had a small handful, like Uber, Spotify, and Pay-by-Phone for parking, but otherwise didn't have any app that couldn't be used via a browser).
Never the less, for the last year or so, I began receiving occasional alerts from the operating system that I was out of space. I transferred my images to the SD card (IT HAD A REMOVABLE SD CARD!!!), and took other actions, but no matter how much I deleted or moved around, I kept creeping back up into the "your phone is too full and is going to stop working" zone. Text message chains with my more prolific interlocutors were taking 25+ seconds to load a single new message. Etc.
Finally, slightly terrified that my Samsung Galaxy S9 might simply explode like the gluttony victim in Se7en before I had a replacement ready, and, wanting the transition to a new phone to be as low-friction as possible, I went and bought the Galaxy 25.
I used the "Smart Switch" app which ostensibly ports over all of ones apps and settings and data, but that is absolute horseshit. Too much is way too different, for completely retarded reasons. For example, the goddamned blue light filter was renamed to "eye comfort shield," is multi-levels deeper in the settings than it was on my S9, and is way less configurable, both in terms of range and precision.
It also has TWO fucking AIs on it; Samsung's Bixby and Google's Gemini, both of which I've done everything possible to shut off but which nevertheless occasionally flash me or post up little icons in other programs, wanting to "help."
And then there are ads, ads, ads, ads, including in apps like Spotify that I wasn't seeing two weeks ago using those same apps on my S9.
Nothing is meaningfully "better." The screen resolution and clarity and so on look the same. Photos look the same. Text messaging works again, but that probably could have been fixed on the S9 by deleting the literally tens of thousands of text messages I had in some conversations (I only ported over one year's worth of messages during the "Smart" Switch). I guess entering my thumbprint on the front of the phone rather than the back is slightly more ergonomic, but a friend with the Galaxy S23 just told me that feature tends to wear out screens in about two years, according to the repair tech she just spoke to about her two-year-old phone. The battery life is only about 35% better than the S9, which is perhaps the most egregious disappointment.
And then as I mentioned, a lot of stuff is worse! Settings and features have randomly been renamed and/or are less configurable. Drop-down menus look completely different. No removable SD card. No headphone jack.
I know there are a lot of things I can do to get my new phone to where I want it - tutorials and programming and whatnot - but that's also sort of my point, I don't WANT to have to spend hours researching how to unfuck my phone and then even more time unfucking it.
It was reasonably easy to unfuck my phone back in 2018, and now it's infinitely harder, and that's what I'm pissed about.
That, and that apparently I'll have to do this all again in another two years.
Something something enshittification
I, also, had a Galaxy S9 that I very much liked and would like to still be using. I, also, try to keep the minimum number of "apps" and other shiny features, but some of them are essential and some of those were no longer compatible with the S9 so I was forced to upgrade about two years ago. To a Galaxy S22, in my case.
Smart Switch worked better for me than for you, apparently because I was only skipping 13 model numbers rather than 16. Gemini wasn't a thing. But I agree, the new phone has very little to recommend itself over the S9, the user interface changes are mostly just annoying, and the loss of the removable SD card is a serious downgrade. I hadn't even thought to check on that, because I thought it inconceivable that anyone would make a high-end smartphone without that.
Apparently you are my soul mate. Or at least my phone mate.
I upgraded my phone last week, from the A13 to the A16, and I'm quite happy with how well the Smart Switch worked. Perhaps the problem is that 7 years is longer than it's meant for?
But my phone is significantly lower end than yours, so it's much better: I still have an SD card slot, for example.
Sheesh. As someone with an S9 on its last legs, now you have me scared...
I haven't had any issues with running out of storage space, even with hundreds and hundreds of photos. When I first got the phone, I set it to auto-delete text messages older than 2 years. Maybe that's why?
Ugh. There's seriously no audio jack on the newer Galaxy phones? [Grumble grumble]
I still want to eventually replace my phone because the battery is dying. Should I try and get the battery replaced at a repair shop instead?
> no audio jack on the newer Galaxy phones
True, but they now make USB-C to aux cables (and adapters), so is this still an issue?
Yes, because I bought like four USB to aux adapters and lost them all, before eventually managing to re-buy a phone with a headphone jack.
I'm not sure what I'll do when this phone breaks, maybe I can find an old iPod?
Is it just me, or was that "low SES" mom from Alpha School being kind of cagey? She provided no specifics as to what the actual problem was. Just vague "the school didn't meet our needs" type of complaints, with no examples.
Reading between the lines, Alpha School in Brownsville exists for the benefit of SpaceX employees. If you're not the child of SpaceX employees then you're probably not going to fit in.
There's not a nice way of saying "These kids are too dumb and poor to fit in at our kids-of-rocket-scientists school" but that's basically the way it is.
Here's a book that provides a little window on Brownsville:
https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Kings-Texas-Domingo-Martinez/dp/0762779195
Given that Brownsville is 94% Hispanic, it's unclear who at the school would *not* be a member of the community whose needs are not being met - unless it's some kids whose parents work at Space-X. There is a lot of anger down there at Space-X, so the rant (AI?) may be a species of that. Some of the anger is wholly justified; some of it is silly and has had unfortunate results as for instance Musk was prepared to buy and swap a larger, better piece of speculator-owned habitat (that the Conservation Fund had been trying to secure for some time) to gift to the state parks and wildlife department, in exchange for mostly some state-owned inholding or lots within the old failed development that he has spruced up, next to (rather alarmingly adjacent to, but I guess I don't understand these things!) where the rockets launch.
The whole area is extremely important biologically, both for wildlife and some unusual plant situations, especially the lomas; and is more or less the site of arguably the "last battle of the Civil War".
But given it was fruitless to suppose the government was going to shut down Space-X, the sign Americans or at least one South African can yet "do stuff" - a larger intact piece of habitat was very obviously the better end of the deal, especially if Musk is going to be allowed to continue dropping rocket crap all over Boca Chica as seems inevitable.
The state/feds are much to blame too; the rather beautiful (if you know what you're looking at) drive to Boca Chica passes through what has been a wildlife refuge, leased for the purpose by the feds (I think, as a unit of LRGNWR) from some idiotic "navigation district". A conservation area that expires is obviously no conservation area at all, especially as threats to e.g. the oceot, rare plant communities increase. That should never have been allowed to happen, and Musk is not to blame for the greed of earlier bubbas.
The original review said that the Brownsville site was set up at the behest of SpaceX employees, so I imagine the start was "well-heeled parents sending their smart kids to this" and then maybe they tried letting in a few poor but smart kids from the low-income bracket in order to test if the Alpha approach would scale up.
However, as the complaints in the comments seem to indicate, if you didn't belong to the original clique of SpaceX parents and/or didn't have the money to pay for Junior to head off on a ski trip or over to Poland (or whatever equivalent they were doing in Brownsville), it very much was a two-tier experience. Alpha had its own way of doing things and if you wouldn't or couldn't accommodate to their requirements, then the kids would eventually have to drop out.
I don't know about the Space-X employees being "well-heeled". It's possible, I guess - but despite some tidy new buildings, the vibe given off there is a bit more Burning Man than beau monde.
The very first time I drove out there, the place consisted of what looked to the untrained eye like a piece of junk, and a local kid guarding it from his old Gremlin.
ETA: or: I don't think the class of people that send their kids on ski trips to Europe, overlaps with the class of people willing to work on something like Space-X while living in a place like Brownsville.
Yes it's obviously very suspicious. In my experience, parents of all stripes *love* to talk about school administration drama in *excessive detail*. My assumption (absent future elaboration) is either that this person is untruthful, or that the details are unflattering to them and/or their ingroup.
> My assumption (absent future elaboration) is either that this person is untruthful, or that the details are unflattering to them
As someone who speaks fluent "Missing Missing Reasons", this is also my impression.
It sounds to me like your assumptions are based on your own biases.
I do not have to provide any explanations for my statements. I don't have to provide reason why 85% of the original students are no longer at the school. Even if all your (everyone on this threat) assumptions of what happened are true, ALPHA is the one that is claiming on the internet and on charter applications all over the country that their model works for everyone.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uEzeZCe-GSjBGN1_xxpN-3zEq1TAkylY/view
If our kids were too... whatever, to fit in ALPHA, doesn't that negate their statement? and if so, maybe we might want to be skeptical of their other statements and marketing?
Honestly, I'm way too stupid to be able to write what happened in a cohesive manner without feeling self conscious, but I am trying. I'm ESL as most are in my community. I just think we deserve a voice.
"It’s easy for any home school and many private/charter schools to teach the whole curriculum in two hours. Shouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
As to the latter point: one of the huge functions of school is childcare for people whose work don't allow them to have kids hanging around (most of us). A two hour a day school would be, for most people, a huge negative. Another major function of school is social; I assume that those two hours are actually *studying*, but a lot of what goes on at school is learning how to be a social person, making friends, playing, etc.
As to the former point: I assume part of the answer is self-selection effect, at least for private and charter schools, which select for kids who can learn that much that fast. At home schools the curriculum and teaching is geared to the individual; presumably public schools could teach a lot more with a 1:1 or 2:1 student:teacher ratio, and with hugely tailored individual curricula. Homeschooling isn't scalable and efficient; that's presumably a large part of why it works (when it does).
Price controls
The obvious solution
The obviously wrong solution
What if the state provides
- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
- Enough new apartments for families of 2-4 (only for people who have not yet owned a home) at cost each year [such] that the house market slowly gets cheaper?
- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
How does this affect the economics, when blueberries are market value, but the first liter of milk per week is at governmental cost?
Just ask yourself: what happens when the provider of <Government mandated good X> only needs to satisfy a bureaucratically-mandated definition of quality and hit production targets? Will quality remain market-competitive? Or will, say, ground beef be supplemented with shredded newspaper and sawdust for a consumer who's a captive audience and unable to turn to competitors for alternatives.
Market mechanisms are deeply, deeply important. It never ceases to amaze me how naive people continue to be in positing simplistic obviations of them. Here's a rule of thumb: whatever market alternative you come up with, try really hard to think of how a dishonest actor could work to defraud that system. Because the urge to cheat is a human universal. The only thing that keeps anyone honest is constant oversight. In the realm of economic behavior, market mechanisms are the only thing that can come close to doing that.
I've eaten government mass-provided food. It is nothing to write home about, but is edible and healthier than what I buy when I go to the supermarket or a restaurant, and tastes better than most of what I can make myself.
The trick is to have higher ups eating the same food regularly as a matter of course.
[Added: This seems like an isolated demand for rigor. Please think really hard about how people in a free market will work to cheat. I expect the issue with government involvement will be more about it being 4 times as expensive to society as the free market]
Yes, of course people try to cheat all the time in the free market. The thing that catches cheaters is information and free markets categorically process and disseminate information faster than central planners. That's why communism always loses. No system is perfect and even market solutions have tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs are much better than any alternative. Like Churchill said, it's the worst system except for all of the others. Do you not know enough history to remember what price controls did in the 70's? Or what a Soviet bread line looked like? Central economic planning is always the wrong answer.
As to your note about catching cheaters more - this seems likely, yet ignores both the real life example of American fast food - and the general failure to have a healthy food culture - as well as the kind of cheating that goes on, and finally ignores the reality that government provided food works just fine (though at smaller scale) in my experience.
Most of the major issues, such as simply not growing enough food, seem simple to avoid if you're aware of the risk. I'd be happy to see a gears-level explanation from you as to why bread-lines are a necessary consequence rather than an impressively incompetent example of central planning.
To put it another way: cheaters can screw up a free market, but if we're going to compare government-run and capitalism-with-cheaters, we have to model the government-run market with the same sorts of cheaters.
And cheaters in government invariably do more damage. It's not even close.
Wanda
While I appreciate that you are engaging, kindly treat me respectfully - it should be clear that I have noticed the skulls.
Declaiming an outside view that nothing in the general direction of an idea could work, buttressed with an insult and a pithy quote, to what ends I don't know, can only lower the quality of conversation.
Less of this please.
What insult? I was just gesturing towards the clear historical counterexamples for your position. If I'm dismissive of the concept of central economic planning then I think that's entirely appropriate. People are commonly dismissive of commonly-accepted failed ideas (phrenology, slavery, theocracy) and in my view collectivism has the most skulls of them all.
If "Do you not know enough history to remember" was not meant as an insult I retract that portion.
Your generic dismissal does not add anything which I can see.
We could discuss practical counter-examples (European healthcare seems like one, Chinese development of industry, any other generally accepted governmental limiting of the free market, such as slavery and hard drugs...) if you very much want this to be a reference class discussion, but it feels like you just want to assert that no sort of central planning could ever work.
>- Enough basic food at production +logistics price per person for basic nutritional needs but no more? (Tracked through ID when bought)
Defining "Basic food" becomes a massive can of worms. Fruit is an essential part of your diet, but blueberries aren't covered - who decides which fruits are necessities instead of luxuries? What if you decide that apples are a basic food, but then a crop failure means that apples suddenly double in price? Which kind of apples, cheap red delicious or expensive honeycrisp? What if you have a dietary restriction or allergy? I'm a vegan, why would I want the government buying me free milk?
I think if you want to ensure free food for everyone, I think it would make more sense to supersize SNAP/food stamps. SNAP does have some restrictions on what foods you can buy with it, but since it gives you a fixed amount of *money* rather than *food*, you can allow market forces to decide which foods are most affordable to provide, and allow choices based on individual tastes.
Basic food can be defined somewhat arbitrarily, but reasonably. Eggs, loaf of bread, milk, cucumbers, tomatoes, a citris fruit and an apple (red delicious).
Nothing here would be free, just subsidized. The point is not for everyone to eat free food, the point is to make sure basics taking up a large majority of your income is a choice.
Market forces are great and all, but the most affordable/tasty things are by definition cutting corners on everything but taste and cheapness.
Now I'm interested in hearing from the target audience about their preferences!
>Market forces are great and all, but the most affordable/tasty things are by definition cutting corners on everything but taste and cheapness.
The government will end up doing the same thing, just in a slightly more opaque way. Your choice of red delicious was based on cheapness, after all. (At least, I hope it was, because I can't imagine you chose them based on taste.)
(Actually, I don't think my local grocery store carries red delicious, since they're not very popular. The cheapest variety is Fuji or Gala. Will the government notice this, or will they just declare Red Delicious For Everyone and call it a day?)
And like, this is just apples. One food. You need to do this for every food that could be considered a "staple" in someone's culture. Vegan staples are different from standard American staples, and Indian or Mexican staples are going to look different yet again. You think that cucumbers are a staple, I would think that broccoli or cabbage are more important if you're trying to focus on nutrition.
If you've ever seen "banana discourse" making the rounds on Tumblr, imagine having that argument for every single food in your pantry.
Ha, red delicious isn't my favorite. Pink delicious eaten by itself, yellow or golden red with peanut butter.
The market likes selling fast food, which can be cheap and taste good but is terrible for you. The government will be a more expensive option for society that will taste worse on average, but with much less perverse incentives.
Is there a reason the government would have to supply all basic foods, instead of just a sufficiently nutritious subset?
Discussing what goes in would be work yes, same as any proposal. This doesn't strike me as a bigger obstacle than designing a park or skyscraper.
Well, first off, it costs an awful lot of money. And since nobody is going to be raising taxes for this (or anything else), that's going to push us several steps closer to the fiscal apocalypse that comes when we find out what level of national debt-to-GDP is too high.
Minimum wages will fall, or more precisely not rise to match the inflation that will probably come from whatever you do to finance this, because there won't be the urgency of "these people literally can't afford to live at current wages!" (which was never true but at least plausible when everybody has to pay their own rent and groceries). That will pull down wages above the minimum as well, particularly the ones that are only modestly above the minimum. So the working class won't find their more-than-just-the-bare-necessities budget increasing nearly as much as you hope.
But aside from those details, it's going to devastate the private market for low-end food, housing, etc. The people who currently run business selling food to poor people, or providing housing to poor people, are mostly going to go out of business - a few of them will pivot to being government contractors supporting the new order, but A: because of economies of scale, not most of them, and B: because of different business models, probably not still maintaining a solid retail distribution network.
And the sell-stuff-to-poor-people market significantly overlaps the sell-stuff-to-working-class-people market, so an awful lot of working-class people who don't need this program are going to find their options reduced to the point that they're going to downgrade to the free-to-poor-people stuff most of the time.
Ultimately, I think this fragments the market. There will be a large basically-socialist economy providing the basics to poor people, and another catering to the UMC-and-above market that wouldn't be caught dead eating a steady diet of government cheese in a housing project down by the river. In between, some of the old businesses will muddle through providing occasional treats for working-class and formerly middle-class families - but economies of scale will push up their prices so those blueberries will be a less common treat than they used to be. And there will probably still be Kosher, Halal, etc, supply chains in parallel; it will be relatively more expensive to practice Judaism or Islam in this brave new world, but most believers will at least try.
So, basically, the same thing that happened to schools when we made public schools freely available for everyone. We've got elite private schools for the rich and rich-adjacent, and we've got religious schools for people willing to pay serious money for their beliefs, and everybody else gets a take-it-or-leave-it public school district. That we all know is very often crap, but which nobody can find a solution for now that "the working class should send their kids to private schools competing to provide the best education at the lowest price" is no longer on the table.
I think the conparison to school is very interesting.
The issues with public school come down to peer quality, teacher quality, and teaching method issues ( and perhaps curriculum), as well as lack of motivation due to school not being viewed as a privelege.
Most basics can be made kosher and halal with minimal effort (as opposed to schooling), peers are irrelevant, motivation is irrelevant..
Putting most poor-food-vendors out of business might just fix the USA obesity crisis.
The fiscal crisis is looming over every government idea, society having less options is otoh unfortunate and otoh maybe it'll help with obesity
>- clean, efficient public transportation, with 3 rides a day at minimal prices?
I'm generally not a fan of State-provided services, and usually prefer market-provided services, but, at least in NYC, the current system only gets about a third of its operating costs from fares. So, switching to a completely free system, wholly supported by taxes, instead of 2/3 supported by taxes, at least seems like a sane alternative. The existing system doesn't seem pathological, and the marginal positive externality of reducing congestion in other forms of transportation might turn out to be worth the extra subsidy.
I would always charge something, people valuing what they pay for and all
Many Thanks! You might be right, but just how much damage people who _didn't_ value the bus ride would do, but would get on if it is free seems like an open question. Maybe do a pilot project, with half the buses free (maybe every second bus on each route, marked somehow?), and see whether pathologies emerge in practice or not?
That would be very interesting, but I feel would take much more political clout than just taking one of the options
Many Thanks! Ouch! You may be right. In general, pilot projects are a good way to see if a proposal works, or if it crashes and burns. If pilot projects generally require _more_ political clout than barrelling ahead and implementing an option without the knowledge that a pilot project would yield, that is unfortunate.
Housing (32%), taxes (27%), transportation (17%), and food (12%) are the major expenses of most households. Everything else is 10-15% of spending.
This is one reason behind the enduring appeal of Republicans: they promise to cut a big cost category while Democrats promise to mostly cut smaller ones (eg healthcare, 5%).
This is also the political economy driving Georgism/Yimbyism/Abundance/etc. The Democrats are hoping they don't have to compete on cutting taxes if they can reduce housing costs instead. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the Republicans have even fewer objections to building than they do. In part because construction leans Republican while the wealthiest landlords/NEPA lawyers/etc tend to lean Democrats (since the biggest landlords are urban residents of Democratic cities). It also drives their love of public transit which has the same issues but, on top of the other ones, only works for urban residents.
If you were the mayor-dictator of a blue city then what you'd want to do is to stimulate construction by removing permits/review/etc, build a ton of public transit, then offer generous concessional loans to first time home buyers. Technically the subsidies would push up demand for housing but the increased construction would push it down in net. Structured correctly, they would actually overstimulate construction by effectively providing a price floor in a market where prices would collapse from overbuilding.
While this would be a major program, it is affordable for major cities (being in the tens of billions per year even for the most expensive versions like NYC). And it would almost certainly be a net positive in terms of new real estate taxes, new construction taxes, and new income taxes from people living actually within the city rather than commuting. And much more impactful than food stamps plus.
If you're just concerned with the theoretical idea of subsidizing the first however many gallons of milk this is not significantly different from just a direct food subsidy. Just with additional administrative costs. You're effectively paying a subsidy which drives up demand across the whole category. Because money is fungible you'll just see them consuming more food (though somewhat less than you'd expect because people purchase fewer calories as their income goes up). Which makes it an unusually good category both economically and from political economy (because people think of food as a right). Except for the fact that subsidizing food has negative health effects.
This seems a remarkably intelligent response, and flattering that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
Subsidizing specific foods doesn't seem like it should always lead to worse health outcomes - I've never heard of anyone becoming obese from cucumber overconsumption.
An NIH systematic review found that subsidizing healthy foods led to more consumption of healthy foods, but effects on obesity were inconclusive.
Cucumber overconsumption has a rather different meaning in Germany...
I'd be curious to see the research. That might be the case, a form of good calories crowding out bad, but equally you might just get more calories. And at any rate, it's a relatively small part of the budget. But in turn that means, if administrative costs are reasonable, then it might be worthwhile simply for social solidarity. Though I'm worried about the political economy of food subsidies being dominated by agribusiness etc.
> Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work because the Republicans have even fewer objections to building than they do.
That depends a lot on which Republicans you're talking about. Red state Republicans tend to be YIMBY, while blue state Republicans tend to be NIMBY. https://www.slowboring.com/p/blue-state-republicans-are-the-problem
Unfortunately, federal Republicans have also taken an anti-growth turn for dumb CW reasons.
This is something I've heard but it seems more like a politically convenient deflection. It's rich people in Blue States (and not rich people in Red States). Those are more Republican than the blue state average. But they're not on the whole Republican and in fact are often key parts of the progressive base.
And while Republicans nationally might not be pro-subsidy, they are not anti-growth. Basically you can see the Democrats as representing both the pro-subsidized growth and anti-growth at all camp while the Republicans are the "get out of it altogether" camp. While you can argue that's not as pro-growth as subsidy, it's not anti-growth in the NIMBY sense.
It's not a Republican vs Democrat thing, it's a small cities vs large cities thing.
In a city of (say) 50,000, the benefits of more people are significant and the costs are low. In a city of five million, the benefit of more people is small and the cost is high.
There's some critical size of city below which adding more people to the city is actually beneficial for the people who already live there. We ought to figure out what that size is, and start working to concentrate building in those places.
It seems to me that people living in cities 50k to 100k absolutely hate growth because it rapidly impinges on their quality of life. For example, the vitriol against Californians moving to Bend, Oregon.
There are large cities with Republican zoning laws which in turn tend to have cheaper housing prices (as well as more sprawl).
I've had a similar idea WRT food, but change "the government provides" to "the government pays for." More specifically, the thought was that the government could make a short-ish list of food items that grocery stores could be encouraged to provide for free, in exchange for some sort of value-equivalent reduction in taxes. The list would include enough of a spectrum of basic nutrition that almost any human *in theory* should be able to walk into a grocery store and pick out items that they can live on (even given most common dietary restrictions) without spending a penny. All of the items on the list would be very plain, basic versions of whatever class they were representing: things like cheap, low-quality bread, bulk grains, a very limited selection of cheap fruit and vegetables, and so forth. Some sort of customer limits/very simple tracking system could ensure that commercial entities didn't use this as a cheap supply of ingredients to turn into more expensive foods.
There are many details that would need to be worked out, and a few ways in which it might ultimately turn out to be impractical. In particular, I've never tried to do the math on probable costs compared to what stores pay in tax. But my underlying gut intuition is that grocery stores mostly don't make their profits on selling the bulk basics anyway: most customers pay for a lot of things above the bare minimum they need, and that the first-order economics would work out fine. Whether this would influence customer purchasing habits enough to be sustainable (why buy the slightly-better thing when the basic thing is actually free?) is another question. But if it worked it could entirely replace programs like food stamps, and would be much more flexible and less all-or-nothing than means-tested government assistance: any person or family could save money and cut their budget in a pinch by skewing their diet towards the food items that they could get for free.
Today we declare that the government always pays for milk.
Tomorrow, milk producers raise the price of milk to fifty dollars a litre.
On Thursday, the newspapers are filled with articles about the benefits of milk baths.
On Friday, the producers of soy, oat, almond, coconut, cashew and hemp milk are out in force demanding equal treatment.
Today, the government establishes a military for national defense. Tomorrow, generals randomly fire missiles into American cities and order tank crews to drive off cliffs.
It turns out that literally any idea will become unworkable if you start with the baseline assumption that everyone involved is the utterly stupid completely incapable of basic reasoning or adaptation.
The main issue I have with government paid-for is what the government pays always seems to balloon.
Setting up a governmental program would be expensive, but once it's up the costs should stay pretty much the same.
Tax reduction might be a good replacement
The obvious wrong solution. Price gouging is good. (Sell your thing for more when demand is high.) What is bad is collusion between vendors to set a high price for everyone.
This helps with alotting scarce resources, and signaling how much of a highly volatile resource to accquire.
Food staples, housing and public transportation are essentials and not very volatile most of the time.
Go ahead and price gouge on whatever basics the government can't provide at cost
All resources that are not currently free are scarce.
The choice isn't just binary. I pay for internet access, but I don't get _incremental_ charges for internet access.
I do. I have a cap on data each month, if I go over I gotta pay for more gigs. That's because internet is scarcer where I live than where you live. If you have unlimited data with your internet plan that just means that there's enough bandwidth where you live that a flat monthly fee is more than enough to pay the cost. Yet internet access isn't free, because unlike air or sunshine there isn't enough bandwidth for everybody to have as much as they want.
Many Thanks!
>If you have unlimited data with your internet plan that just means that there's enough bandwidth where you live that a flat monthly fee is more than enough to pay the cost.
True. Still, even locally, the usual expected pathology of "If the consumers see no incremental cost, they will overconsume and break the system." isn't actually a problem here. There are a _lot_ of cases where stable, profit-making businesses choose not to charge incrementally for some good. Buffet restaurants, landline phone service here, (some cell phone plans), some areas' residential water use... It isn't rare.
I just see subsidizing demand as generally bad. Let's take housing. If you give everyone $X a month for housing*, then you increase the demand for housing. This causes the price of housing to increase. The subsidy then goes in large part to the people with the housing to sell.
*Are you just going to subsidize renters, or do home owners also get a subsidy?
If you do that and don't let anyone build new houses/apartments, you will just raise rents and housing prices by an amount that offsets the housing vouchers. It's like you had some kind of really focused inflation that only affected housing, because you have the same number of units of housing but far more dollars chasing them.
For a fairly close real-world worked example, look at federal student loans and college tuition.
Build lots of apartment buildings. Sell them cheap to people who have never owned a home.
(Maybe only to marrieds, maybe with at least one kid, if you want to be selective)
[Added: you can also build rental apartment buildings, and charge enough to recoup, then just enough for upkeep]
The point is to create more supply.
Same for food - grow some amount of wheat and basic veggies, keep a certain amount of dairy cows..
*The point is to create more supply.*
Right! That reduces the cost. You can subsidize the supply, but that is tricky too. Perhaps the best thing to do is remove the barriers to making more. Remove zoning laws, regulations, etc... Capitalism is far from perfect, but it's maybe the best system we have at the moment.
Re Building cheap apartments: Who's building them? How do you make 'em cheap? Restrictions on who can buy seem fraught with problems. What if people divorce/ separate. If they move can they sell them? (Then I'll buy cheap, move and sell at a profit.) The price of a thing is that price for a reason. (supply and demand)
Removing regulations is great.
Capitalism is the best except where you know where you want to get to and how to do it, see China.
The government should build them.
Make them cheap by being relatively cheap materials -though not so much that they fall apart - and not very large units, by not making a profit, and maybe by subsidizing from tax money.
People choosing to not have a roof over their head is fine, they can sell them (but can't buy a new one). There would be a clear path to having basic needs met without going into debt.
I imagine that if people divorce they'll sell and split it or have one keep it while giving up other some of the other assets.
[Added: people can profit, that's fine. The point is to get small families into the house market and increase the housing supply without it just getting bought up as new speculative assets]
Don't forget that the existing home owners will fight very hard to keep their house prices from going down. And they will be skeptical so project that appear that the MIGHT cause a drop in local home prices will be opposed.
Want to drop a new 2,000 unit apartment complex in the middle of Palo Alto or Mountain View (or Los Altos)? Expect to spend a long time battling people with money and lawyers.
The obvious solution is to just steamroll those NIMBYs. But in a society with elections this isn't quite as simple to implement as it is to say.
Creating more supply where no one is already living is much easier. But also a lot less useful.
If it is directly state provided, we might run into issues with quality, like the infamous "project" housing of the past. I have looked into that. Basically, it was not the government as such, such as politicians or bureuacrats who pushed this terrible "brutalist" style. It was basically an intellectual fashion among architects. And due to the lack of market incentives, they had their way. I have found out the real problem is not the much-accursed corrupted politician or lazy bureaucrat, whom everybody likes to hate. It is the unchecked intellectual...
I was born in 1978 in Sovietized Hungary. Briefly, state-owned restaurants were so bad, that we got together with relatives and friends, picked one, and flat out bribed the whole crew so that they serve us something edible. You see I think they were simply stealing the better cuts of meat and selling them at a black market, which is why we got the terrible cuts.
I think a lot of economists understand this, which is why things like food stamps exist. But... is it working? Or people learn to game the system and find a way to buy booze and cigs anyway?
In that case, can't basically all possible state services be replaced by UBI? And if people buy booze and not healthy food, well basically that is their problem then. But this kind of libertarian thinking is that kind that would not make seat belts mandatory...
So what I am saying is that these things are complicated.
The same housing projects with, say, grad students and their families living in them would not have become nightmares of crime and dysfunction. (I mean, pot smoking and sometimes-loud parties, maybe, but not muggings and rapes and murders.).
Come on. The generalization of graduate student housing on the grounds of universities to low SES affordable housing in cities is not merely comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to accordions. And the thing is, we don't even have to engage in the thought experiment. Can you give me an example of publicly built and provided housing that doesn't degenerate as noted above? I'm willing to be educated, but every place that I've ever heard that has tried has created someplace that colloquially is referred to as "the projects", most of which have been torn down due to the disastrous implementation.
The closest I've seen to a mass affordable home project was from private industry: the Levittown projects
My point is that it is not the architecture that is the problem, it's the people who live there.
Stuyveseant Town is probably a better example than Levittown.
You want to make people pay a real cost, which is realistic to pay after a few years saving with 2 parents working at low wage jobs.
Putting up security cameras and consistently enforced policing (with perhaps harsher penalties) seems like an obvious idea, do you think it's simply unrealistic?
Is that the issue - that we just.. made ugly houses and bad food? If the houses had been designed to look like nice normal houses it would have been fine?
I wouldn't think restaurants are a good match for being state-owned, I was thinking more basic staples
Yes, but if not market pressures, what is the incentive for nice normal houses? Let's put it this way - how will that make an architect famous?
There's no shortage of architects out there making a perfectly good living from designing nice normal houses. They'll never get famous, but most professionals understand that they'll never get famous anyway and are happy to pump out whatever work pays the bills.
This is actually why new houses look better than giant expensive buildings. Because most new houses are built by non-famous architects, but if you want to build a $500 million art museum you feel obliged to hire a famous one.
Perhaps there is some man or woman, inclined to make nice houses for people to live in
This does not seem an insurmountable challenge to me
Sure, but you have to sell the house at the market rate. Else I (rich person) buy the cheap houses and sell them at a profit for the market rate. (I'm not really a rich person.)
This is fine.
Supply increasing relative to demand should lower prices.
Also allows every family to have a roof, they do not have to sell them...
You may have missed the point of the government only selling these units to people who have not owned a home before - rich people can flip at most one of these
My boyfriend doesn't want to take ADHD meds, for no other reason than "it isn't that bad". He has never tried them, or even therapy. He also has that classic I'm A Man And Deathly Afraid Of Going To The Doctor For Some Reason thing.
It's true enough, it isn't that bad. It's not chronic lateness, being an awful conversationalist, inability to get through university, forgetting my existence unless I'm physically present or anything. But to me it just seems like being unmedicated ADD is living life on hard mode for no discernable reason. Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long. Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day. As a kid, he was tested for dyslexia, but his actual problem was simply focusing on a text or word long enough. He is underweight and forgets to eat. Stuff like that.
Is there anything I could say to make him reconsider? Should I?
“But to me it just seems like being unmedicated ADD is living life on hard mode for no discernable reason.”
I can say from first-hand experience you are probably right. Life got substantially easier once I found an effective ADHD medication. Without knowing your boyfriend, I can’t guess what will make him, in particular, reconsider. But the reasons that seem most important to me that someone ought to reconsider are the following:
First and foremost, “it isn’t that bad” is one of those things that is true right up until the point that it isn’t. It sounds like your boyfriend (like many ADHD people) has developed a suite of coping mechanisms to manage the gap between what’s expected of him and what his brain will allow. Those sorts of coping mechanisms are kind of a dangerous thing to rely on. They don’t perfectly cover the deficiencies they’re coping with, and the in wrong set of circumstances–an unexpected crisis, a new job, a large project that hits your deficient areas–and suddenly it is that bad. Even when they work, you often lose out on a lot of value by doing things poorly that you could have done much better. I have experience with both of those things, and they suck.
Now, another thing I know from experience is that “certain present inconvenience to avoid possible future trouble” always sounds like a bad deal. My brain will seize on anything presented that way as an invitation to procrastinate. Why not keep doing the easy thing that works OK now, and only change if things do get bad later?
The trouble with this is, by the time you know you need help, it may already be much too late. ADHD medication can be amazing stuff when it works. But it’s not a magic wand that you can just decide to wave one day and make the problem go away. First, access is restricted: you need a diagnosis (from what you wrote, it sounds like your boyfriend has one, which is good) and a doctor capable of prescribing them to even get started. Those things can take take time to get for anyone, but untreated ADHD can potentially them take much longer (an irony that I could appreciate even while it was slapping me in the face). But it doesn’t end there. There are many different ADHD medications, each with multiple possible dose sizes and schedules. Every person's brain is different and responds differently to different ones. There’s not generally a better way than trial and error to find the right one. Each attempt at a particular drug/dose combo will generally take at least a couple months–both because you need time to try it and because psychiatrists usually schedule at least that far out (the ones I’ve seen anyway). I’m probably a significant outlier here, but for me the gap between getting a diagnosis and finding a medication regimen that worked was something like seven or eight years. Part of that was my own fault. Part of that was the intersection of bureaucratic bullshit and unusual life circumstances. But around 18 months of it (not all consecutive) was simply the process of trying different medications at different doses and seeing what worked.
I’ll also add that the medication is great, but it isn’t magic. I’m capable of a lot of things that I wasn’t capable of before, but it still often takes time and effort and time trial-and-error to figure out what and how. There’s (what I think is) a common experience among people with ADHD that non-ADHD people will give you a lot of utterly useless advice about how to solve your problems: things like “make a schedule” or “start on tasks early” or “divide large projects into smaller chunks.” There’s an analogy I’ve seen[1] that captures the experience quite well, in which getting certain sorts of things done is like trying to peel a potato with another potato. And then a friend will say “oh here, use this peeler” and then hand you another goddamn potato. Anyway, starting a useful ADHD medication suddenly made a lot of that sort of advice no longer worthless. I could do a lot of those things now. But I’d never been able to before, and my ADHD tendencies weren’t gone, just more manageable. So there’s been an ongoing process of figuring out how to live my life more effectively that couldn’t even start until I got on medication. Once you get the potato peeler you still have to practice actually peeling potatoes. All of that together meaning that if you wait until you encounter a situation where you really *need* the advantage you might get from medication, it will likely be much, much to late to get it.
OK, so that was all one really-extended reason, but I just bumped into a second in talking about capabilities: getting ADHD treated expands your horizons. Or at least it did for me. I think what happened is that the pattern of expecting I was capable of [some reasonable sounding thing], and then discovering that it just never actually got done had gone on long enough that I’d internalized a lot of those limits and barely saw them anymore. For example, I’d love to be able to like, fly or teleport or something. But clearly those things are impossible, so I don’t spend any mental effort looking for ways to do them or trying to make them happen or lamenting the fact that I can’t. They’re just shoved in a dusty box somewhere in my brain labelled “fantasies,” which I may look at from time to time, but never for long. Anyhow, I think after a number of failures and updates, a surprising amount of ordinary-person stuff got shoved away in that box too. Anything that would involve an extended, self-directed project, for example. Or even smaller stuff, like planning a week-long camping trip.[2] I’ve only been on useful medication for a couple years and they’ve been very busy, chaotic years, so it’s too early to say how much this matters, but I’ve at least had a number of moments of looking at something I would have dismissed as impossible a few years ago and saying “wait, hold on. I probably could actually do that.”
Last, this isn’t really a reason so much as a perspective. But your health–which includes mental health–-is worth taking care of, and there’s nothing silly, or stupid, or weak or unmanly about doing so. Being healthier means being more capable. Being more capable is generally good for you and everyone around you. There’s a cultural tendency to treat mental health problems and disabilities–and ADHD is a disability, though sometimes a mild one–as being less “real” or “serious” than strictly physical ones. Not getting a broken leg set or getting glasses/contacts for your impaired vision would be looked on as pretty bizarre by most people. But a lot of the same people seem to implicitly believe that you ought to just tough it out through untreated mental health issues. I think this is every bit as poor a decision as walking around on a broken leg[3]. Addressing the problem is almost always the better choice.
p.s. I try not to center personal details when talking about stuff like this, since they’re n=1 and not what’s actually important. But they’re also hard to avoid entirely, since my information and perspective of the disorder is heavily informed by my own experiences. ADHD has had a pretty serious negative impact on my own life; most notably in completely throwing my career off track, which I’m finally starting to fix over a decade later. Anyhow, if you decide that a real-life cautionary tale would be more useful than all that other stuff I just wrote, I’d probably be willing to elaborate (though obligatory caution about everyone being different and not all the lessons generalizing).
[1]originally about depression, but it fits ADHD quite well too.
[2] People tend to think about ADHD in terms of interfering with work or school, but there really is quite a lot of fun stuff in life that requires organization, coordination and extended attention.
[3] Caveat: if you have access to effective treatment. Mental health issues are legitimately often harder to diagnose and treat.
> He also has that classic I'm A Man And Deathly Afraid Of Going To The Doctor For Some Reason thing.
(sorry for going off-topic) Because when men decide to go to the doctor, they are accused of Doing It The Wrong Way (cf. man flu). Women are much more medicalized in our society than men. From the onset of puberty they have to deal with their reproductive system that goes into maintenance mode once a month and forces them to both treat their body as a fallible mechanism and to power through mild discomfort, because you can't have every red-letter day off.
Add to this multiple awareness campaigns about breast cancer, ovarian cancer, HPV, etc and you end up with women being more aware of their bodies: what they do, what they shouldn't do, what a serious problem should feel like, what a mild treatable inconvenience should feel like.
Compare this to a typical man, whose healthcare experience amounts to "walking it off". He usually hits his thirties before he encounters actual health issues. He is about as smart as a 11 year-old girl when it comes to managing his health. Most of his reactions fall outside the "acceptable range" as determined by women. He wants to stay in bed because he has a fever of 99F and a headache? Bullshit, take a headache pill and power through, I go through this 13 times a year. There's a weird lump that hurt for a day, but he walked it off and now it doesn't hurt? Ah, who cares. Then it starts to grow and hurts again, so he shows it to his opposite-sex partner, who freaks out. Again, he missed the range of acceptable reactions to health issues.
That makes a lot of sense! Thank you for the insight.
I think I can shed some light on the male aversion to going to the doctor. For me at least, it feels like trying to get a one-up on nature; what I mean is, imagine you have a machine that's orders of magnitude more complex and elegant than anything our civilization could imagine, and you see one part that looks like it's moving a little funny, so you just slap some duct tape on it and call it a day.
Obviously if I've been shot or something then my body can't handle that naturally, but for everything else I don't really see a need to throw a wrench in the machine. For example, one time when I'd hurt my wrist and it started swelling everyone told me to ice it to keep the swelling down; I decided to leave it, and it swelled up like crazy which naturally immobilised the wrist and stopped me from damaging it further. I also let all 4 wisdom teeth come in without seeing a dentist (and I'm not recommending this, but) they pushed up my back molars at first, then my teeth kinda resettled, and now my bite's been perfectly even for years.
No idea why/if this would be a male thing but I guess I just trust my body to do it's thing and it's always worked out for me?
Anyway, I also have mild adhd and feel roughly the same way about it; it's been more useful so far to try to treat the root cause than trying to find a duct-tape solution.
If women trusted our bodies to "just do its thing" instead of seeking modern medicine, we'd still be regularly dying during the one thing you'd think evolution should've figured by now: childbirth.
My "duct tape solutions", like SSRIs for OCD, meds for epilepsy and birth control for heavy bleeding, has helped me a lot in life. I'm eternally grateful.
The typical reason I hear for men's doctor aversion is toxic expectations for men. They're expected to be strong and never sick or a burden, so they avoid it. But cool with another perspective.
Definitely, I'm not knocking duct tape solutions at all, just that it's preferable to treat root causes if at all possible.
I wouldn't call epilepsy medication or similar things a "duct tape solution" though since that feels more like something is legitimately 'broken' and I'm not sure what a natural solution would look like (eg as far as I know it's not possible to excercise and meditate your way out of having epilepsy), whereas (mild) adhd feels less like something is broken and more like just a different mind-pattern that's not necessarily good or bad, just sometimes maladaptive within certain environments.
(As a side note I wonder what the rates of childbirth deaths were like in hunter gatherer societies? The rates were of course insanely high in pre-industrial times, but like you say it seems really weird that evolution hasn't figured it out. If anyone has a link to some data on this, that would be interesting to see.)
meth might be a way out of epilepsy (this is through the whole path "migraines can cause epileptic seizures" -- not sure how well that path holds, but I do know that pseudoephedrine can "cure" migraines in a surprising amount of people).
maybe low-dose modafinal would be helpful; you can suspend in water (it doesn't dissolve, so you have to shake well) and titrate the right dose. Something like 25mg is probably fine for someone who is stimulant-sensitive, but can still be helpful
I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless". Eventually I settled at just drinking a lot of coffee. He could try that. I think these amphetamine-type meds are too much of a brute-force solution...
Exercise also helps, especially cardio. It is easier to concentrate when physically a little tired.
>I tried meds and it made my panic attacks worse. Other people complain that on those meds they feel "soulless"
Those are both related to the isomer ratio. For amphetamine type drugs, the d-isomers and l-isomers have different effects, with the d-isomers mainly acting on dopamine while the l-isomers also act on norepinephrine. Dopamine is what drives most of the gain in mental energy, while norepinephrine drives a sense of urgency but for many/most people has an unpleasant edge to it, often contributing to anxiety and sometimes making you feel uncomfortably restless.
Ritalin is a 50/50 mix of the two isomers of methylphenidate and Adderall is a 75/25 mix of d-amphetimine and l-amphetimine, but you can also get pure d isomers of each (focalin and dexadrine, respectively) prescribed. Some doctors are wary of prescribing those, especially dexadrine, because they're thought to have more abuse potential. Vyvanse is another option, being d-amphetamine bonded to lysine so it needs to go through a metabolism step (half life about 1 hour, IIRC) before it kicks in. It's newer and more expensive, but doctors are a lot more comfortable prescribing it because the gradual onset is though to make it much less abusable.
I think my doc knew that being addicted to alcohol and nicotine, I really don't need a third addiction, so we went on Strattera, because that is theoretically non-addictive. Yes, but it works on the norepinephrine pathway. Now I think I had undiagnosed panic illness all my life. I just did not notice why I am sweating all the time. I thought it is a body weight issue. I just considered anxiety normal. Ultimately it culminated in a real panic attack that had all the symptoms of a heart attack. So we went of Strattera quickly. But the cold sweat and shakes were present even weeks later. Eventually we tried Ritalin, and it immediately made it worse. A week ago I found out I have high blood pressure, so I am now even off coffee. I basically just accept some brain fog and procastination at this point.
If you do ever decide to consider medication again, modafinil or wellbutrin might be worthwhile. I've been on modafinil for several years after not particularly liking Ritalin or Adderall and having bad panic attacks the last time I tried the latter. I've also tried Wellbutrin as an additional treatment atop modafinil, but more for mood than for focus.
Modafinil is its own thing, a stimulant that works through a completely different and (last I heard) not very well understood mechanism. My subjective experience is that Modafinil makes everything about 20% more interesting, moderately improves my executive function, and significantly slows the onset of mental fatigue. Wellbutrin is a reuptake inhibitor like Strattera, but acts on dopamine as well as norepinephrine. The norepinephrine effects, at least for me, were a lot more subtle than those from amphetamine stimulants.
My mood issues and about half of my brain fog turned out to be gender dysphoria. I still have ADHD and still take modafinil for it, but I've been off of Lexapro and Wellbutrin for a year or two now as I don't seem to need them anymore now that I'm on estrogen.
What did you try? He'd be getting ritalin, which is not amphetamine-based, because Adderall isn't really available in the EU.
I took an ADHD med called Concerta for years when I was a child until around age 15 when I just refused to take it anymore. You'd have to google it for more details, but I know it has the same active ingredient as Ritalin. It definitely did help with focus and my ability to get things done, but it did zombify me and also made it a lot harder to eat in general. I never had an appetite while on it, and my appetite after it wore off didn't make up for while it was in effect.
I ultimately decided to stop taking it without telling my parents for awhile because I felt like a soulless robot and it affected every area of my social life.
When I was younger, my parents got me on it because at that young age it was emotionally very hard to handle how I could just not focus or get things done. When I stopped it, and now as an adult, I'm far more developed emotionally and I honestly prefer working out other ways to cope and live with ADHD rather than be on the medication for it with everything else that comes along with it.
Additionally, I feel like taking it for all those years has permanently affected me and my social abilities in a negative way. I don't feel soulless or anything like that anymore but I still feel like I'm very robotic at times. I can't prove that the lasting effects are from the medication, though, since maybe I would have developed that way whatever the case.
Anyway, as someone who doesn't have it "that bad," I far prefer not being medicated for it. Brain drugs always affect more than just what is targeted.
ADHD sometimes comes with an undiagnosed side dish of autism spectrum, which can contribute to the feeling robotic part.
I guess if it's a spectrum, then everyone falls somewhere on it 🤖🤖
He doesn't know how bad it is relatively to how it could be. Trying medications for one month could give him a perspective. (Basically, use *curiosity* as a leverage.)
> Chores that take me five minutes take him 5 times as long.
As a consequence, do you handle most of the chores? (If yes, then to put it bluntly this is your problem, not his, so he doesn't have much of an incentive to fix it.)
> He is underweight and forgets to eat.
Ah, not fair! I have a problem focusing on many things, but food isn't one of them.
> Whenever he has an exam, he gets it done, but only after many horrible weeks of procrasting, grinding at night and sleeping through the day.
The question is, will he be able to hold a job?
If you had time to read Scott's 10,000 word clarifier on missing heritability (I think it's deeply funny—and indicative of the Entire Problem—that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not, in fact, mean "able to be inherited".) you should take 10 minutes and read my 2000 word essay on the microbe responsible for schizophrenia.
Stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/schizophrenia
I am moving to Berkeley at the end of this month. If you want to see me and Scott do a Lincoln/Douglas on the gut microbiome vs the genome, sound off.
I did not in fact know, until I read your comment, that geneticists use a definition of the word "heritable" which does not mean "able to be inherited". That is profoundly annoying...
Enjoyed reading this. As a layperson, one thing I've never understood about the gut bacteria theses is, shouldn't they be affected by antibiotics? Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Do me a favor: go to scholar.google.com and punch in "antibiotic psychosis".
>Has anyone tried targeting ruminococcus gnavus with an antibiotic?
Part of the trouble with this is that antimicrobials are not particularly selective, and niche competition is what really drives exclusion from an ecosystem.
Say you've got a population of feral cats in your forest that is causing problems for the local birds. You could burn the whole forest down, as you would with a broad spectrum antibiotic, and that reduces the population of everything—trees, shrubs, birds, beetles, and cats—by 95%, but the cats will come back. Unless you burn things down so thoroughly that you lay total waste to the ecosystem, all you're really doing there is selecting for fireproof cats. You can use a more narrow spectrum antibiotic, which I suppose would be analogous to bait stations with poison, but this is still going to target most of the Carnivora. If you can find a poison that works on cats but not on foxes—hey, now you're in the money. But I'm not aware of any antibiotic that would kill ruminococcus gnavus without also killing its niche competitors. Such a thing may exist, especially among the biological control agents like bacteriophage, and I hope one day to find it, but phage therapy is hard to scale—that selectivity is both a blessing and a curse, because it means that a phage which works against one person's strain might not work against another's.
> "antibiotic psychosis".
Wow! I didn't know this was a thing! Thanks.
Very illuminating. Thanks!
The name of your blog is hilarious!
A lighter question than is often asked here, but one that might shed some interesting light on the thoughts and perspectives of this community, and that as far as I know Scott has never asked on a survey:
What is your favourite movie?
(Optional additional question if it produces a different answer to the first: what movies do you name as your favourite movie if an ordinary person ask?)
hard to name only one.
i think The Last Starfighter (1984) probably resonates with and explains me the most.
Unico in The Island of Magic (1983) introduced me to Osamu Tezuka, and was a mind opener to young me. its a gorgeous 70s style fairy tale.
Tarantula! (1955) is what made me love "creature double feature"'style films.
Dance of the Drunk Mantis (1979) for kung fu movies, you get to see how amazing Hwang-Jang Lee is and its great comedy and pathos.
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine(1965) for comedy, Vincent Price hamming it up in a spy farce that is silly fun.
i can appreciate and enjoy finer works but i tend to like low culture things more, i guess.
12 Angry Men. Short and to the point, with not a minute of screen time wasted. No expensive cinematography, no special effects, no cinematic universe tie-ins or sequel hooks, no plot twists that you can spoil.
However, I don't rewatch it, while many other commenters have posted movies they rewatch a lot. I think the only movie I rewatch for pleasure is Hot Fuzz.
Wow, 12 Angry Men. Just finished. Thank you!
That was a great movie. For me it was because of the script. Cannot put in words.
Naked Lunch (1991), e.g.
It's an adaptation of William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name and follows William Lee, a New Yorker bug exterminator in the 1950s, on his climbing into literary heights, ever deeper fall into drug addiction, flight from police and reality to "overseas" and mindscrew.
So there is a plot, but it gets most surreal.
There are really great dialogs, awesome set designs, delicate camera rides and I love the atmosphere.
<SPOILING just one part of a scene:
- I for one kill my wife slowly, am poisoning her for years.
- (protagonist looking shocked)
- Oh no, not consciously! If I were doing it consciously, it'd be horrible. No no. I'm doing it unconsciously.
- But you know it, you're telling me about it.
- No I don't. This whole conversation is happening telepathically. Unconsciously. If you look carefully at my lips, you'll see I'm saying something completely different.
And then we can see that too.
SPOILER end.>
Best is that the story is crazy with one surprise after the other, but it's weirdly coherent and easy to follow, like one can follow one own's dream while in it.
Cronenberg adapting the novel also has no problem with bringing everything to a sensible conclusion -- and disappointing the viewer with a bad one --, because he doesn't try. The conclusion is gainax, but very satisfying.
After seeing Naked Lunch I'm more disappointed with that director's other works. As someone who writes his own scripts he's apparently better of with someone else's source material as a starting point.
Oh. Final words by Bart Simpson after watching Naked Lunch while skipping school:
"I know two things wrong with that title."
Pressed to pick just one, I'll go with Aliens. It's just an awesome SF action movie.
But there's a pretty large pack of contenders, films I highly endorse and might plausibly have picked: The Apartment, The Terminator, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, Master and Commander, Margin Call, The Big Short, The Incredibles, Batman Begins, Apollo 13, The Fellowship of the Ring, Edge of Tomorrow, and a few more.
Hard to pick just one. Here are some of my favorites though:
The Man Who Wasn't There (almost any Coen Bros movie qualifies, but I love this one)
Miller's Crossing (ditto)
The Godfather (even though it insists on itself)
Silence of the Lambs
Anything good by Fincher (The Game, Fight Club, Zodiac, Social Network)
Igby Goes Down (criminally underrated)
Your Friends and Neighbors
The Savages
You Can Count On Me
Out of Africa (rare example of both the book and movie being A+ quality)
The Tribe. It's a great movie. Bit tough to watch, though.
Saint Clara. (Israeli flick).
Zero Motivation.
Lemon Popsicle.
(I must admit, some of these are getting recommended simply because "you have to see them!!!" I have other favorites, some classic, but... these are the ones you probably haven't seen, so they're getting recommended.)
Digimon Adventure: Bokura no War Game
Hosoda later did an expanded, original remake of it as Summer Wars, but I'm a digimon guy and also like the tighter focus
Hosoda's Belle shares the summer wars aesthetic but is a weaker film. its positively stunning visually though, the 4k is amazing to watch.
Wolf Children is still his best film i think
Probably "The Martian", narrowly edging out "Apollo 13".
If we can count the entire trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" might make the top spot, but that's because it's got eight hours of really good stuff to compare to the mere two hours that a
mundane film can provide.
But if I'm feeling snarky, I might bring up "Into the Night", a mostly forgettable action comedy from 1985 that attracted my attention by being I think the only movie in the history of Hollywood where an aerospace engineer got the girl. Who was played by a twenty-something Michelle Pfeiffer.
Alien
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Empire Strikes Back
I think those have been my favorites for the last 20 years or so?
What is your favorite movie?
Maaan, whenever I come across this question I always forget what my favorite movies are. At least from what I can think of right now, I'll just list a few favorites in no particular order:
-Tenet
-Bad Times at the El Royale
-Spirited Away
-Dan in Real Life
-Isle of Dogs
-The incredibles
I'm definitely sure there's ones I like as much as or better than these, but I really can't think of them.
I love dogs! (I love the pun in that one).
There are a lot of movies I like enough to re-watch. Many reasons: great visuals, great fun, obvious workmanship (I get a lot of enjoyment out of simply gazing at anything that was undeniably well-done, whether it's a movie, a painting, a monologue, or a math proof), or there are easter eggs to find or point out to friends. So my tastes are eclectic, though probably man-coded - I like mainstream stuff like Cameron, Spielberg, Tarantino, Coen brothers, or even a lot of MCU, and I can appreciate classics like Rashomon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Bridge Over the River Kwai, but I've never gotten into love stories or just about anything set in Victorian England.
My usual go-to answer for "favorite" is _Contact_. No other film I've seen struck me as more dedicated to the raw pursuit of knowledge. (I think _Apollo 13_ and _Interstellar_ come close, though.) Foster, McConaughey, Woods, Skerrit, Hurt, and Bassett were just the perfect cast, and Zemeckis adapting a book written by Sagan is probably the most pro-science awesomeness I could have asked for.
If someone were to put together a ship and fly it to Mars for a historical first, and film a documentary of it with Go-Pros and drones, that might be my new favorite. Until then, _Contact_.
Dr Strangelove - particularly as the most _quotable_ movie I've seen:
"Why did you keep it a secret?"
"The Premier loves surprises"
"Our source was the New York Times."
"...two admittedly regrettable but nonetheless distinguishable..."
" I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
"Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the _fear_ to attack."
"our precious bodily fluids"
"Its beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority."
and just the names, particularly General Jack D. Ripper
Children of Paradise.
(Les enfants du Paradis)
Made in France during World War II. A three hour movie made in two parts because you could not make a movie longer than 90 minutes under the German occupation; a truly brilliant film.
The Last Unicorn.
Notably, the screenplay was written by the author of the novel, and, like the novel, the more one matures, the more one sees the deep wisdom in the work.
For example, as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*.
And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too.
I also believe The Last Unicorn is a rare case where the movie is a far more gratifying experience than the novel, as it's been dramatically pared down to the core story, with fewer side-quests taking us away from the power of the protagonist's story.
I will add, this is not a sentimental choice of childhood nostalgia. I'll be the first to say that most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny. I'm also comparatively literate when it comes to movies; I went to a trade school for film and spent 10 years as an amateur critic on a professional critic's schedule by forcing myself to see *every* theatrical release in my region, whether I wanted to or not (that is, btw, how to ruin conventional horror movies for oneself).
if you want the reverse, howl's moving castle is so much worse than the book its based on, and this is miyazaki. he puts in a lot of his tropes and the end is a disjointed movie.
I still don't understand it.
What would have been different if she envountered the unicorn 10 years earlier?
It's a unicorn. As I understand it, they don't do anything for any individual person specifically.
Do you think it represents something?
if the wonder and magic the unicorn represented came earlier, what life might she have led? Why does it have to come now, when she is old, tired, homely, and bitter?
If she would have led from then on a wonderful life, *because of the wonder and magic the unicorn represented*, why wouldn't she lead a wonderful life from now on? After all, we're talking about wonder and magic, not about good parents or the right nutrition she might have lacked and which both probably would be unable to help now.
But wait, maybe it is to be understood as something mundane like good parents or nutrition! Those are admittedly wonderful things.
If the unicorn represents that, then I understand.
I stillcan't tell if you're being serious or not.
But if you're not:
Unicorns very famously represent purity, and the deep traditional lore about capturing one (generally for the healing properties of its horn) is to use a virgin woman to lure it to her. Quite a bit of historical art depicts this as a profound and even semi-rapturous act for both the virgin woman and the unicorn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#Entrapment
and, the scene in question, while we're at it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLP4fge346o
Like (virtually all but let's just say) all women, Molly very much wanted to be a "princess" and experience all the magic, grace, beauty, innocence, and even rapture the unicorn represents *in its attraction to - and representation of - young women as protagonist-princesses*, with their happily-ever-after endings.
None of that grace, beauty, purity, innocence - coincidentally the things straight men are attracted to in young women - are available to older, broken, cynical women like Molly. The Unicorn didn't show up at a time in Molly's life where the Unicorn's presence would have validated Molly's own potential for a good man's romantic love and a rapturous happily ever after. Molly is pissed that after all that dreaming and yearning for classical, storybook romantic love, she gets teased by the symbol of it, when it's too late for her to act on it.
Well, I was indeed unaware of all that, but I think it boils down to what I thought, plus the unicorn reminding her that that there still get a few people born every day who will get everything they want, and all this just by chance.
...have you seen the movie?
What affected me, but not before I was adult, was the bull backing off from the unicorn and walking into the sea.
It was as if the bull had never been a threat to any unicorn, it had been their own fear of him that got them imprisoned.
No idea why that's what stands out to me :)
Yes. A couple of times.
As I replied to lyomante's reply, maybe I have now found some understanding.
The Last Unicorn was my favorite childhood movie, too, and continues to be one of my favorite movie up until today. I find it one of the few movies where all the characters actually make sense.
And I could always totally understand Mommy Fortuna. I was always happy for her because she had achieved her goal of obtaining immortality when she died (by engraving her into the memory into an immortal being), and was so obviously happy about it in that moment.
I found it most beautiful that the unicorn is the only unicorn ever that has experienced pain, and that both the unicorn and Schmendrick understand that, but that the unicorn doesn't rebuke it but thanks him for it. Even though the pain is immortal and will never go away. This always touched me very deeply.
I also read the novel some years later and was totally disappointed. The movie took the novel and actually took the characters in it serious. Unlike the novel itself.
> as a child I didn't understand Molly Grue's anger at the Unicorn at all; now, as a 45 year-old single woman, I understand it *acutely*. And I think I'm starting to understand a little of Mommy Fortuna, too...most of my childhood favorites absolutely do not hold up to adult scrutiny.
I recently watched it as an adult, having never seen it or even knowing much about it other than 'unicorns are involved somehow', and agree that it holds up surprisingly well, particularly on those two points where I suspect it is completely lost on kids who have not seen enough of aging & mortality to understand: https://gwern.net/review/the-last-unicorn
I dunno whether a community really exists - I for one am not a rationalist and super not an effective altruist (or any kind of altruist really).
The answer will be boring - LOTR. I also have a certain thing for Batman movies, because the villains almost always have some relatable, understandable motive.
I didn't mean "rationalist community", I meant "community that follows Scott's blog". I in fact find it quite annoying and bewildering that the latter is ever assumed to be the former (in the "allegiance to official Less Wrong doctrines" sense, not the "serious about examining your biases" sense).
In one of Scott’s old SSC posts, he jokes that to be a Rationalist is to believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. This is wrong, because the Rationalists are clearly Jews, even within the confines of TPOT.
Yud led his people from frustration and solitude and established the holy land of LessWrong. Unfortunately, everyone who wasn’t them hated them, and they were very inwardly-focused anyways.
Lo, a new prophet was born. A Rationalist preacher named Scott brought compassion and a focus on real-world problems to the creed, and established SSC/ACX. Thus came the broader group of people who wouldn’t call themselves rationalists or are EA-adjacent thinkers, who view themselves as distinct from what came before but have unhelpfully not been named.
Neither Eliezer nor Scott are, thus, the rightful caliph. The rightful caliph will not focus on his people or compassion, but conquest. He will care more for Arabia than Canaan. And, frankly, he will not be very good to those of us who preceded him. The rightful caliph is Sam Altman.
Works for me. I suppose SBF is one of the various false messiahs that kept cropping up and being chopped down? Altman, at very least, has proven quite resilient and un-choppable.
I view SBF as Joseph Smith, with his plates of crypto that he totally had but nobody was allowed to see.
I enjoyed that more than I should.
And, lo, I am a Christian in Rationalism as in real life.
I'm writing something for my own blog and it occurred to me that folks here are pretty good at reading critically and giving feedback on writing, so here's my current draft for you fine folks to tear apart:
Title: Deputies Gone Wild?
Subtitle: Central Massachusetts might be part of the Wild West.
We don't live in the Wild West or 1880s Chicago. Law enforcement officers in America have a chain of command leading up to elected officials. Maybe you don't like the policies they make, but they are still in charge. Police and Constables report to the Mayor. State Police report to the Governor. Federal Agents report to the President. Deputies report to the Sheriff… right? Apparently the Worcester County MA Sheriff disagrees.
I want to publish a guide for landlords and tenants that includes some statistics on the eviction process in Massachusetts. Among other things, I want to know how long each step takes and how much it costs, on average and in the extreme. Most of those steps happen in the courts, and obtaining the relevant court records is its own ordeal. The final step, however, the one where a door might get kicked in and someone could be physically removed from the property, and their belongings are boxed up and taken to storage without their consent, is handled by a Sheriff, Deputy, or Constable. Constables only exist in some cities and towns, and the Sheriff is far too busy to handle individual cases, so that leaves Deputies to do it everywhere else.
I made a public records request to the Worcester County Sheriff's Office ("WCSO") (https://worcestercountysheriff.com/), for things like the scheduling and execution dates, case numbers, assigned Deputy, etc for some past evictions. I was prepared to make the request, get denied, appeal that, and have the request approved on appeal, which wouldn't be unusual in this sort of interaction with local government. Instead, this turns out to be a much deeper rabbit hole.
WCSO's responses to my request and appeal confirmed that they have outsourced service of papers and execution of evictions to a private non-profit corporation, Worcester County Sheriff Civil Process Division, Inc ("WCSCPDI") (https://civilprocess.com/worcester/home/). As best I can determine, WCSCPDI hires employees who the Sheriff then deputizes. Members of the public go directly to WCSCPDI to pay for those Deputies to perform the relevant duties. Although the company uses their full name on some documents, they also use "Massachusetts Sheriff's Office" and "Worcester County Sheriff's Office" in various advertising and official records and even when introducing themselves, so it wasn't clear to me until now that they aren't acting as part of WCSO.
The last time someone appealed a public records request to WCSCPDI, they were asking for the name of a Deputy who had been dispatched to and visited their house. This is the sort of information any police department or sheriff office can and must produce when asked, usually in the form of dispatch logs or incident reports. The state Supervisor of Records ("SOR") made a lengthy determination (appeal 20140120 https://www.sec.state.ma.us/appealsweb/AppealStatusDetail.aspx?AppealNo=9KhIsbtUmVMD1D0CsFfcKQ%3d%3d) agreeing that WCSCPDI is not a public entity subject to the MA Public Records Law (Secretary of State website https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/public-records/public-records.htm) (MGL Chapter 66 https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleX/Chapter66). That determination is where some of the most outrageous details start to come to light.
I started this quest looking for records about evictions, but at this point my concern has grown. As best I can discern, Federal and State law do not provide for different categories of Deputy Sheriff. Every Deputy in MA has substantially the same set of powers and authorities. In addition to process service and execution of evictions (which is already well into "only the government can do this" territory), they can detain and arrest people, carry and use firearms in many ways a member of the public cannot, execute search warrants and searches without warrants in some circumstances, and a long list of lesser things related to vehicles, courts, private employment, professional licensing, etc. WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside, etc, all while those people are neither employed nor supervised or controlled by any government official.
The SOR's previous determination was based on a five factor test established in an earlier court case, MBTA Retirement Board vs State Ethics Commission (1993). The SOR concluded that WCSCPDI's creation had no "legislative or administrative underpinning", their "major role as a process server is not a function or duty exclusive to a government entity", they receive no public funds, interests in WCSCPDI are primarily to exclusively private in nature, and they are under no significant "involvement, control, or supervision" of any government official. With every factor in WCSCPDI's favor, the SOR concluded they are not a governmental entity. I disagree with every one of those conclusions.
In supporting my appeal, I have presented over a dozen separate arguments against WCSO's position and that previous determination as it might apply to my request and appeal. I made multiple arguments that records created by WCSCPDI are subject to a records request to WCSO, regardless of WCSCPDI's status, such as Deputies being agents of WCSO regardless of employment, and WCSO having contractual control over records created by WCSCPDI. I corrected individual facts that were represented by WCSCPDI or determined by the SOR incorrectly in the past, such as WCSCPDI receiving no public funds and no process service being a governmental function. I updated facts that may have changed, such as some WCSCPDI corporate officers now being paid employees of WCSO, and employees of WCSO being dispatched to some evictions. I rebutted the previous conclusions for each of the five factors, with six separate arguments for just one of them. Some of those rebuttals should be independently conclusive, such as citing persuasive precedent that any entity created for the explicit purpose of performing duties legally mandated of a governmental entity is itself a governmental entity. I am hopeful that my arguments will prove persuasive, but I am not confident, nor am I confident that WCSO and WCSCPDI will comply even if ordered to do so by the SOR. I also suspect I'll run into records retention problems, with one or both entities having disposed of records far sooner than the 3+ years they are required by law to retain them.
One way or another, I'll be writing more about this at some point after my appeal is determined by the SOR (due by July 9 2025). Maybe it will be good news, and I'll be moving forward with my statistics gathering and other things downstream from that. Maybe it will be yet another legal morass, but of the type I used to pursue for fun rather than the type I'm embroiled in lately with life changing stakes. To be continued…
PS: While defining all the categories of law enforcement records (arrests, body cam footage, incident reports, shift schedules, search warrants, etc), The Secretary of State's Records Management Unit remembered to apply those rules to both local police in the municipal schedule and state police in the state schedule, but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records. This doesn't significantly affect the larger problem here, since the default retention period of 3 years still applies, but it's another thread to follow up on later.
This was really interesting. I do a lot of work with public information act requests, so I feel your pain here. If you don’t get a satisfactory result here you will probably need to file a federal suit, I’m thinking a sec. 1983 claim, though you’ll need a particular person with standing. Im just spitballing though. In any event, the facts are interesting enough though that you might shop it around at a few BigLaw firms; you may find one that would take this on pro bono.
Reaching out to attorneys about pro bono representation for myself and others who have encountered this same road block is on my to-do list. My amateur expectation is that we'd start in MA Superior Court and proceed upward from there, but I can see how a federal case might be appropriate given the federal laws granting these officers authority.
Well, sort of. I don’t give legal advice in comment sections, but a 42 U.S.C. 1983 claim, given certain prerequisites, allows you to bring a civil action against a state, county, or local entity, acting under color of state law, where they deprive the plaintiff of the rights, privileges, or immunities granted under the US Constitution or other federal law. It allows actual and punitive damages, as well as equitable relief.
That *may* well apply here. My *not legal* advice would be to talk to an attorney that does federal civil litigation sooner rather than later.
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!
>WCSO's contention seems to be that they have empowered more than a few people to pull me over, arrest me, search my car, kick down my apartment door, handcuff me, drag me outside ... but they apparently forgot about Sheriffs. They gave Sheriffs categories for all sorts of records related to running jails, but nothing about law enforcement records.
Are you sure that Sheriffs in MA actually engage in those sorts of activities? It doesn't seem so. The Suffolk County Sheriffs Department doesn't mention anything about that. https://scsdma.org/sheriffs-five-key-initiatives/ And see the Mass ACLU's discussion of their duties here: https://www.aclum.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/150029_aclum_sheriff_campaign_one_pagers_brief_guide_d4.pdf
While they perform typical law enforcement duties less often than others do or their other duties, they carry handcuffs and guns and are empowered to do so, and even mandated to do so in certain circumstances.
Here's news of a Suffolk sheriff officer serving a search warrant: https://www.winthropma.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=120
Hm, even there, it says they "teamed up" with the local police department.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EdbFxh1uJ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix9XaFp-3Gw
These videos show an eviction attempt being executed by approximately
ten Deputies and other officers of the sheriff's office, most to all of whom are employees of WCSO.
No police or other LEO's in sight.
By the way:
>Applying the definition of police officer set forth in G. L. c. 41, § 98, we conclude that a deputy sheriff is not a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Unlike police officers 254*254 as defined in G. L. c. 41, § 98, deputy sheriffs are not empowered to make warrantless arrests for crimes that occur outside of his or her view or presence. Under the common law, a deputy sheriff is considered a "peace officer." Commonwealth v. Howe, 405 Mass. 332, 334 (1989). As a "peace officer," a deputy sheriff has only limited authority to make warrantless arrests. See id. See also Commonwealth v. Baez, 42 Mass. App. Ct. 565, 569 n.6 (1997) (collecting statutes granting deputy sheriffs authority to make arrests). More specifically, a deputy sheriff's warrantless arrest power is limited to offenses involving a breach of the peace that occur in the deputy sheriff's view or presence.
Commonwealth v. Gernrich, 476 Mass. 249 (2017) [reversing the defendant's conviction for making a false report of a crime to a police officer].
So, I am guessing that they make very few arrests.
Thanks for the references. I'll read into them. I'm not surprised to hear there's a limit like that. I did try to make sure I wasn't saying they have the same powers as other LEOs, just that all deputies have the same powers. Which is important, since this sheriff seems to be trying to say there are two categories of deputies that should be treated differently, and I haven't found any precedent for that.
Yes, no one doubts that they do evictions. We are discussing the extent the engage in crime fighting.
Also, it's only incidentally important whether they do crime fighting. They show up to evictions with badges and guns and handcuffs, and that's not ok if there are no records or supervision.
Ahh. It's very hard to find out, for precisely the reasons behind the problem I'm encountering. I'll be making some more general requests once my current appeal is done, for data like arrests performed, search warrants executed, use of force and fired firearms, etc.
Just wanted to share that I found this an intriguing write-up. Thanks for sharing!
"Also, how come nobody has tried creating a school that actually only takes each kid for two hours a day and costs one-quarter as much?"
I would guess it's because the vast majority of customers (parents) don't want school days to be shorter.
Perhaps because students would learn vastly less.
Note also that the costs would be closer to 1/3 than to 1/4. And it would be extremely difficult to staff such a school. Not many people are looking for 1/4 time jobs.
A lot of people are looking for 1/2 time jobs, and this means they can teach high schoolers (the ones everyone keeps talking need to sleep in) after the first quarter-day of lessons is over.
So, your proposal is to have the same people teach both elementary school students and high school students? And this is meant to IMPROVE education?
Yes. It's not rocket surgery.
No, but the set of skills and knowledge needed to successfully teach elementary school is sufficiently different from the set of skills needed to teach high school that the pool of people with both sets is quite small. And that is not even mentioning the set of skills needed to successfully teach middle school.
Many people have successfully homeschooled their children, which means they have the necessary set of skills and knowledge needed to teach elementary, middle and high school. And most of them are not former school teachers, which means that either we have no idea how to get the right people to become teachers or that the pool of capable people is not this small.
Great point.
There is a public school board near where I live that is going to 4-days per week. People are freaking out. The local YMCA is building a day-care program for Fridays but it immediately became over subscribed (note: the school board pre-negotiated child care for all the teachers for Fridays. So this model actually costs the school board MORE. It’s been done for the teachers union)
That said:
There are all kinds of people. There are definitely families who would want a 2h/day school. There just likely aren’t enough of them in a concentrated amount. In any given place to make it happen.
Instead people who want that home school and Supliments with lots of online solutions that run 2h/day
Yeah, there's a lot of demand for precisely the opposite of this. Parents need third parties to provide daycare so that they can work. However, they also feel kind of bad about putting their kids in daycare but feel good about educating them. So the trend is for the kids to spend more time in these institutions and for the service to be branded as education rather than childcare...i.e. "early childhood education", etc.
I would prefer an institution that would explicitly say that they provide 2 hours of intense education *and* N hours of babysitting.
For example, such institution would allow me to take my children home earlier on those days when it is convenient. It could also allow my children to read a book or work on their own projects outside of those 2 hours. By not pretending we could get a lot of flexibility.
I agree. Two hours of academics and then let them have fun the rest of the day. I would take that.
also after school tuition is basically this - paying 2 hours for 1:1
Please be kind to me, this is my first real post on the Internet. I played around with letting ChatGPT and Claude generalize my ethical heuristics(1), and they both said I should publish (or at least post) the concept. I could really use the feedback of actual smart humans. :)
The Core Insight: Making ethical behavior easier through mechanism design or something you could call Virtue Arbitrage or Ethics Arbitrage
Most people genuinely want to be good(2). The problem is that our systems often make ethical behavior harder and less rewarding than unethical behavior. What if we could flip this dynamic? I'm proposing what I call "virtue arbitrage"(3) - systematically identifying places where ethical behavior is undervalued by current incentive structures, then redesigning those structures to make virtue profitable and vice costly.
TL;DR: How do we want to live? → Most people consider themselves good → If you build mechanisms that reward ethical behavior and price in unethical consequences → You make ethical behavior easier → You enable tons of people to have better participation in the good → And can capture "virtue arbitrage" at scale.
Applied Example: Social Media
Right now, platforms optimize for engagement by any means necessary, even if that means amplifying the most triggering content, fake news, social polarization, and echo chambers that just keep spinning people further apart, because outrage drives clicks. But imagine platforms that instead:
• Algorithmically boost content demonstrating "philosophical virtues" - truth-seeking, intellectual humility, charitable interpretation
• Reward discourse following "philosopher rules" - citing sources, steel-manning opponents, updating beliefs when presented with evidence
• Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems, maybe even internalizing those costs with something like a 'toxicity tax' analogous to carbon pricing
• Create positive feedback loops where constructive behavior increases reach and influence
I believe people would probably adapt to succeed within these new incentive structures, and those habits would likely spill over into other areas of life.
The Broader Vision: Recursive Ethics at Scale
This scales to a society-wide principle: design every level of social organization to enable better participation in truth, beauty, and goodness - not as rigid dogmas, but as evolving search directions updated through collective inquiry.
The key insight is making this recursive and self-updating: as people experience the benefits of truth-seeking discourse and ethical coordination, they become advocates for extending these principles further. Acting ethically could become more "emergent" rather than imposed, with particularism updating and "sharpening" universalism, while universalist frameworks could help escape local ethical optima.
I'm absolutely acknowledging that these are still early-stage ideas that would need a lot more development before they become something practically implementable. I know that this isn't bread yet, not even flour, maybe just unripe grain? You would need a lot more rigorous definitions, perhaps you even would have to completely ditch the platonic stuff etc. You would have to be mindful of ethics washing, Goodharts Law, power dynamics, mistake vs. conflict theory etc. But I hope there is merit in this pile of ideas, so here are my questions for you:
My Questions for ACX:
1. Is there merit in thinking in this direction? Does "virtue arbitrage" seem like a useful framework? Am I missing obvious implementation challenges or theoretical problems?
2. Who's already doing this? Do you know anyone doing mechanism design for ethics or something similiar, or who might be interested in this concept? Should I post it somewhere else? Where?
3. What are your main critique points? Where does this approach seem most likely to fail or cause unintended consequences?
Disclaimer: I had help writing this from Claude, as the last time I wrote something substantial in English was about 10 years ago and I'm sure there are still a ton of words I'm using subtly wrong. My original system concept is much more complex, but I asked for simplification to make it more accessible.
The full framework involves things like "philosophical democracy" with nested deliberation circles, discourse ethics, subsidiarity principles, "ethics dividends" in taxation, rigorous systematic internalization of externalized costs and adaptive learning mechanisms - but I wanted to start with the core insight and see if it resonates before going into full on special interest mode. (Also I haven't thought deeply enough about it.)
Thanks for any thoughts you're willing to share!
PS: The first time I read a post on SSC was in 2014. I've been a regular lurker since 2015, and even in the phases where I voluntarily had no devices connected this was one of the few blogs I still checked in with my girlfriend's PC. A big thank you to Scott, you had a medium impact on my thinking. :) (Mostly for the better, I hope.) (4)
1 Based mostly on methexis in the platonic ideals, the generalization principle (Kant, Rawls) and emergence/dynamical systems. This also explains the weird 'participating in the good' language :)
2 Or at least want to be able to tell themselves and their peers that they are.
3 Or "ethics arbitrage", which does sound better?
4 That's also the reason I'm choosing this community for this post. :)
I feel like there's an insight here that I've seen in other contexts. Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin." That is, it's great to be committed to your wife, but if you and your cute young coworker start drinking together late at night in her hotel room, you're setting up a scenario where it may be a lot harder for you to stick to that commitment. It's better to try to avoid that situation. This isn't just about sexual morality: If you're trying to eat healthy, it's wise to just not have junk food like doughnuts and potato chips sitting around in your house or office, rather than having them there but using your willpower to avoid them. I think the generalization of this is that you want to structure your life so that it's harder to make unethical/immoral/bad choices than ethical/moral/good choices.
There are ways whole societies can do this. If slavery were legal, you might be tempted to buy slaves to make your sugar plantation more profitable. That would be horribly evil, but you would have a lot of financial incentives in that direction and likely would be competing with slave labor sugar plantations that would price you out of the market if you didn't use slaves yourself. Since slavery is illegal, any bad tendencies you might have to become a worse person in that way are closed off. All kinds of vice laws are explicit attempts to make it harder/riskier to do bad things than good things, whether that's prostitution, drugs, gay sex, gambling, smoking, drinking, dancing, drinking extra-large sodas, etc. And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged. (Indeed, even ending slavery was super controversial and kicked off a civil war in the US, despite it seeming to most of us now like about the most obvious moral question imaginable.)
> Catholics (me, frex) talk about avoiding "near occasions of sin."
I also didn't know the term, and I also thank you for it. While I am not a believer, the example that you gave of what a prudent person would do to minimize their chances of doing something imprudent later on carry weight with me.
"near occasions of sin"
- I did not know this term. Thank you for it and the answer :)
Yes, and my point is that we (as humanity) should build this insight systematically into our societal design, not just to avoid "near occasions of sin", but also to make acting virtuous easier.
"And this points out an obvious issue: there's often not anything like uniform agreement on what things are bad enough to be banned or formally discouraged."
- I would propose to start with the status quo and then use the generalization principle (a la Kant, Rawls, basically "Would I accept this system if I were randomly born anywhere within it?") to point at a more ethical possibility. If it works, you could try to use it recursively. (generalize, implement, generalize, implement etc.)
Do you know anyone who is thinking into this direction?
"Most people genuinely want to be good" no, most people want to feel that they are good. This leads to a certain kind of short-circuiting behaviour, often called virtue signalling. I think any incentive system you set up would be gamed.
"Make spreading misinformation or bad-faith arguing costly through reputation systems"
Tried that. Reddit admins told people one million times that upvotes and downvotes should not mean "agree" and "disagree", but distributed moderation. Only downvote stuff you would like to see deleted. It did not work, and led to a "hivemind". It seems the lack of voting on comments here leads to better results.
Sometimes it is better not to have incentives, because external motivation can replace internal motivation. You wrote this intelligent comment because something inside you wanted to. If you would be optimizing for upvotes and downvotes, if the 1000 dopamine hits of a much upvoted but mediocre but popular comment, like some silly pun, it might "corrupt" you.
Scott had a nice discussion awhile back on why it's not so easy to label misinformation. Basically, most of the ways media mislead people aren't directly false statements for which you can point to evidence, but rather things like selecting what scenes to show on the news, what subset of arguably-relevant facts to report, which experts to quote, what questions to ask (and make sure never to ask), choosing striking anecdotes without reporting (or probably even knowing) relevant statistics, etc.
In addition, it's totally standard to have people label stuff as "misinformation" when it's true but bad for their side. Anyone who gets the power to determine those labels will have a huge incentive to do this to help their side win fights. See discussions on everything from racial IQ differences to the effects of hormone-blockers on 13-year-olds for contemporary examples.
Hmm, OK my thoughts. This sounds like the classic prisoners dilemma. How do you get people to choose to cooperate. Or how do you get a high trust society. I don't have any firm answers but shared religion (belief system) and small communities seem to be part of it. I was appalled the other day when listening to a podcast that talked about the situation in our big cities (USA) and that everything in drug stores is now behind some locked door. (Because otherwise someone will steal a single can of pop.) I live out in rural America and we still have farm stands with a selection of produce and a box to put your cash in. The box is usually left open so you can make change if you have to. I lived in the city in the past, but I can't imagine moving back.
I think that analogising everything to prisoner's dilemmas isn't necessarily the best way to think about morality.
What I think is that 90% of the population is, while not necessarily perfect, sufficiently moral not to steal from shops. The key to a good society is to find a way to restrain, imprison or just exile those bottom 10%. Your rural community probably doesn't have a lot of them because they move to cities to find a more target-rich environment.
Thank you :)
"This sounds like the classic prisoners dilemma."
- Exactly, yes! If you let me copy the model of an emergence ladder in my other reply e.g.:
energy > quarks > [..] > living cells > individual human beings > family > circle of friends > tribe > commune > [..] > nation > world
My proposal is that we should systematically build our systems to make ethical choices the most rational and the easiest whereever possible.
Whenever there is a conflict between different levels, we should try to enable a participating in the most ideal stuff as frictionless as possible by design.
E.g. in your community example:
Propose everyone would be better off in a high trust community.
on an individual level: What would you need to be able to trust? What could you do to make it more trustworthy? What could convince you to make decisions to contribute to an higher trust environment?
(Bottom-Up: You could start local meet ups, a neighbourhood watch, a circle of food exchange, clean up together, etc.)
from a communal /policy level: What can you design to enable trust? What incentives / disincetives enable or further a climate of trust (Top-Down: Make design decisions that make all of the above as frictionless as possible, make room in your architectural planning, perhaps build a community center, make behaviour that destroys trust costly etc.)
So basically: Make cooperating the easier and better choice, if possible :)
Small communities that are reasonably prosperous is definitely helpful in terms of trust. Shared religion does not scale as far as I can see.
Shared religion has absolutely been shown to scale better than anything else. Unfortunately IMO the one that is scaling right now is antithetical to liberalism.
Although it sort of begs the question, when does religion become a cultural trope?
Yeah, that makes sense. I shouldn’t really have said that. I was just thinking of all the covert ways of taking advantage of a shared religion that were corrupting influences.