Interesting and long video from an up-and-coming Rationalist youtuber breaking down the various sub-tribes of Rationalism. Curious what people here think.
I enjoyed it, though I can't vouch for a lot of its accuracy.
No, I'm reasonably sure Eliezer found that he couldn't get his ideas about AI risk across, so he set out to teach people how to think better.
I'm not sure about the influence of New Atheists-- I don't think I've ever met a rationalist who was an ex-New Atheist.
One of the important early goals was the hope of ordinary smart people becoming geniuses by learning to think better. This didn't pan out.
Where does (old school) libertarianism fit?
I don't know if you need the Sequences. I think of them as slow and careful induction into ideas which are difficult for some people. They're about getting around mental immune systems. If you've already grasped an idea, the article on it is boring.
Did von Neumann come up with the Singularity? I thought it was Vinge.
At least half of the Sequences is "things that Eliezer frequently had to explain to people he tried to convince about AI risk, so it was easier to write it down once and just refer to it". Preemptive responses to clever but nonsensical statements that we can so frequently see outside Less Wrong. (Confusion of map with territory, clever verbal games that do not correspond to anything real, arguments by consequences, etc.)
I am not even sure what a "New Atheist" is, but that's probably just a fact about my ignorance.
> One of the important early goals was the hope of ordinary smart people becoming geniuses by learning to think better. This didn't pan out.
I remember reading somewhere: "it's not that rationality is so difficult, it's just that the alternatives are too tempting". Which seems to explain the outcome. If the difficulty of rationality is not the actual bottleneck, you can't raise the sanity waterline by explaining rationality better. All the temptation to think otherwise remain, as strong as ever.
But generally, the video was nice. (The YouTube comment section however is about as bad as the average YouTube comment section.)
Vinge definitely popularized it. Kurzweil took it mainstream. Von Neumann did predict the idea though:
"This comes to us not in Von Neumann’s own writings, but via a 1957 obituary by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulman. Recalling their regular talks, Ulman mentions:
‘One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.’"
Facebook moderation is so pathetic. I don't bother reporting hate speech anymore, because they always disagree with me... and okay, maybe this is subjective. But when the user's name was "Chocolate Fucker", I was like: okay, this is easy, I will simply report them as "this is a fake profile". Should be obvious, right? Facebook maybe doesn't care about hate speech, but it cares about having data on its users, and using a fake name is explicitly against their terms of service.
So the next day I get a response: "The account you reported was checked by an AI and it says that this is not a fake account. Do you insist on your accusation and would you like a human to check it?" Yes, I definitely would. Well, the day after that I get a response: "The account you reported was checked by a human, and the human agrees that this is not a fake account." Are you kidding me?
Also, they are unable to detect even the most obvious spam, the kind when someone literally copies the same comment (written in a different language than the rest of thread) as a reply to every single comment in a thread. Like, how much easier can this get? Teporting these kinds of comments is also hit and miss, so I don't bother anymore.
Okay, doesn't matter, build your own. Or maybe this is just the only way for a service like this to be sufficiently profitable. These are businesses. The purpose of their existence is to generate profit.
-- On Tuesday Sept 9th a federal district court issued a restraining order against President Trump's firing of her "for cause" based on her having allegedly lied to a lender regarding a mortgage application in Atlanta in 2021 when she was a private citizen. The specific accusation is that she falsely sought a loan on the Atlanta property as her primary residence.
[Cook has also filed a civil lawsuit over her firing but there will be no court actions in that for weeks at least.]
-- The restraining order leaves Cook still a member of the Federal Reserve system's governing board. That is very unwelcome to the White House because the Fed has a major meeting on Sept 16th/17th, at which it is expected to consider whether to lower interest rates as demanded by the president.
-- The White House quickly asked the appellate court (DC Circuit) to stay the Sept 9th restraining order. A few hours ago that court agreed to consider the matter on a highly-accelerated schedule: Cook's attorneys must file a response to the stay request by 5 pm tomorrow, and then the administration has until 3 pm Sunday to comment in response to that. The appellate court seems to be aiming to act on the stay request before the Fed meeting convenes on Tuesday.
-- While that's been going on here comes a classic PLOT TWIST!! At 5:34 pm Eastern time on Friday the 12th, Reuters [the British international-news agency] published an exclusive news story: they'd obtained two different contemporaneous documents in which Cook declared the Atlanta property as a vacation home.
One of those is a loan estimate issued by her credit union [the lender she was applying to and got the loan from] during her mortgage application process in May 2021, which "shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence." The other document is "a federal form completed by Cook as she obtained security clearance for her role at the Federal Reserve, show[ing] that in December 2021 she also declared the Atlanta property as a “2nd home”....the declaration on that document, a supplement to a U.S. government national security form known as SF-86, is consistent with the claim on her Atlanta loan summary."
In addition, Reuters reports that Cook "never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to property records and a Fulton County tax official."
Neither Cook nor her primary accuser, Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, responded to requests for comment. "Reuters was unable to determine whether Pulte or administration officials are aware of Cook’s Atlanta loan estimate."
Can anyone point me to a good introduction on Bayesian reasoning, that isn't so dense? My wife is supremely clever but academically untrained, and I'm, let's say, the opposite. I was walking her through how I drew a conclusion that helped me stop being upset about something, and she wanted to know how I got there in general.
Say it's the math version of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." We can quantify how strongly we believed something to begin with, and we can also quanitify how strong a new piece of evidence is; how strongly we believe the thing after seeing the new evidence, depends on both those numbers. If we start off thinking something's ridiculously unlikely, then we'll need more evidence to end up believing it, than if we had started off only thinking it was kind of unlikely.
Then if she wants more, show her the odds form of the theorem:
Posteriod_odds(A) = Bayes factor * Prior_odds(A)
Explain that the Bayes factor = the strength of the evidence, which depends both on whether the hypothesis predicts the new evidence, and on whether you'd expect the evidence anyway even if the hypothesis was false. E.g. someone saying "I'm not a spy" isn't strong evidence that he's not a spy, because that's also what a spy would say. BF=1 means it's not evidence, BF<1 means it's evidence against, BF>1 means it's evidence for.
If she still wants more, you can talk about probabilities vs odds, and conditional probabilities, and show her how BF is a ratio of conditional probabilities, and about how the odds form of the theorem happens to be more intuitive since it comes out as posterior = BF*prior, but that if she likes there's also a probabilities form that's less intuitive but equally valid.
People naturally do it over trivial information , and resist doing it over identity-salient information. Learning mathematical Bayesianism doesn't help at all with that.
Try this website, I found it to be very helpful. It's designed to teach Bayesian reasoning at multiple levels of complexity, which you can choose from. There's also pictures!
I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life. George Floyd was a menace to society. Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society. If people want to stand up against the attempt to silence Charlie Kirk, let's unsilence him. Let's hear what he had to say:
"John Adams famously said the Constitution was only written for a moral religious people, it was wholly inadequate for a people of any other."
"The body politic of America was so Christian that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord."
"One of the reasons we're living through a Constitutional crisis, is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible."
"So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population."
I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse. So what do you do when you think *your liberty* is dependent on other people holding religious beliefs they refuse to hold? Will there be violence? Because I can tell you, the non-Christian population of America, who will probably be the majority in a decade or two, will not tolerate being excluded from the "Christian form of government." One reason Rightists are hyper-focused on the "threat" posed by Venezuelan gangsters and Somali Muslims is because they don't want to think about what really scares them, the white, affluent, urban, secular population of America, many of whose ancestors came on the Mayflower, and are sick of being told Americanism means living in the middle of nowhere, watching NASCAR, driving a big rig truck and talking about being "saved."
Kirk didn't always have these views. In 2018 he said, "we do have a separation of church and state, and we should support that." But like many on the young Right, he entered a spiral of self-radicalization in which transgression is elevated to the highest good. At first, simply being a conservative on college campuses was transgressive, but like the weed user looking for stronger and stronger highs, he moved further and further rightward. I don't think Kirk wanted an apocalyptic war with secularism. The stuff he said was said for the moment, so the audience can go "based!" and then go to dinner at Red Robin. Like their opponents on the woke left, one of the easiest ways to piss off people like Kirk is to treat them as the intellectually serious thinkers they pretend to be. That's not to say this stuff isn't dangerous. Sometimes things that are meant to be taken in a propagandistic context are taken at face value by literal-minded followers. Witness how radical feminists said "gender is a social construct, it has nothing to do with biology," which helped spawn the transgender movement that would later turn on them. Had Kirk not been assassinated, perhaps he would have seen the day when he was face to face with a monster of his own creation.
I spent my life promoting ideas, and ultimately decided the most appropriate social media handle was "No One Listens To Me" (not literally true but oh, so close.) So I don't think an influencer who got more attention than he deserved (and $325,000+/year) should get extra attention for being killed. And if people start listening to me just because I die and can no longer benefit from the engagement, I hereby object in advance to this unfair deprivation.
Clearly in the long run the attention he gets and the influence he has are going to be orders of magnitude less than what they would have been if he'd continued his career for the next few decades. Given that, jeez, do we need to worry about the small spike of attention he's going to get for the next month or 2? And what form of attention is it you think we should not give him?. Are you talking about the people exclaiming about how horrific the shooting was, how tragic that a man was cut down in the prime of life, how he was really really honest and nice and meant well, etc etc? Or the people quoting his most extreme right-wing statements, and hating on him for his views? Or the people who believe we must only say kind and civil things arguing with the people who say fuck that guy?
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it? Maybe Kirk was right, and American liberty depends on Christianity; maybe you're also right, and Christianity in America will inevitably decline. I suppose, in that case, we'd expect to see the government become more authoritarian and controlling, without anyone being able to (or, perhaps, wanting to) really do anything to stop this. That would be an unpleasant conclusion, but there's no guarantee the world will always be pleasant.
>OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it?
It wasn't intended to be such. You can simply look at American Christians and ask if they're particularly committed to liberty, to which the answer is negative. They're very committed to "leave *me* alone," but not to leaving others alone. Libs, likewise, think liberty is someone others owe to them without any reciprocal obligation. Only some, not all, libertarians are truly committed to defending liberty for everyone.
As the guy behind the Professor Watchlist, I don’t think he makes a great martyr for free speech, but nobody should be attacked or killed for saying something others don’t like, whether that’s Charlie Kirk or Salman Rushdie. (Assuming that’s what happened, we still don’t know why the shooter did that and may never know.)
His ideas about Christianity as the only basis for freedom are pretty unexceptional in the evangelical community. Generic, even.
I don't think even the most vehement Kirk critics posting here believe he should have been attacked and killed. That's kind of a straw man. What's at issue was how wrong and how harmful was he, and is it legit to insist that people defer complaining about his views until a decent period of time has passed during which we all murmur platitudes about tragedy, and do not mention his claim that trans people are training the mentally ill to kill children.
I fed that note to GPT5 and it could not find any source that quoted Kirk as saying exactly that line, or any approximation of it. I guess I fell for somebody’s deliberately infuriating and inaccurate summary of Kirk’s ideas, placed in quotes. So I appreciate you calling me out on that quote.
But I also asked GPT for quotes from Kirk about trans people and other topics mentioned in that non-quote, and did find a number of direct quotes expressing views I think are false and harmful. I could give a dozen examples but here are 2 representative ones:
[Those who were in favor of legalizing gay marriage] ““ . . .are not happy just having marriage … want to corrupt your children.”
[The court blocking the ban on transgender people in the military was] “ordering … mentally delusious transgender troops.”
Kirk also called for steps to block so-called gender-affirming care which, even if it were clearly desirable to block it, would be abrupt, badly considered steps that would cause considerable suffering. If the country made good on his call for a nationwide ban of gender-affirming care for transgender people, then those who have fully transitioned will be harmed. I know one F-to-M person who has had breasts, ovaries and uterus removed, and takes testosterone. The person is healthy and feels well. If they cannot use testosterone, they jwon’t have any gender-specific hormones. — no estrogen, etc. Not only will they become a weird-looking entity lacking both male and female characteristics, they will also be unhealthy. And the “Nuremberg-style trials” Kirk wants for doctors who have helped people make the gender transition are cruel and unfair treatment of professionals who broke no a law. So overall, even with the quote I gave discredited, I still believe Kirk’ views were wrong and harmful.
As for the poll Fox news cites, I don’t think you held it to a high standard, as you did my post. The question in the poll sounds like it was geared to produce a lot of yes responses, a result that would make left-of-center people look violent and crazy. Think about it. What does “partial justification” mean, exactly?. For instance, let’s say there’s a liberal senator I like. What would I say if somebody asked me if there was partial justification for supporting a campaign by a rival of his for the senate post? I’d think about how I like 70% of my favorite senator’s views, but dislike the other 30%, and count that 30% as partial justification, and answer “yes’. So let’s escalate to a question about murder. If somebody asked me whether there was partial justification for murdering Putin, I would say yes, there is some justification for doing it. He is cruel, he is responsible for much suffering and death, and he is dangerous. On the other hand, there’s some justification for not doing it: He might be replaced by somebody worse, and I think murder is wrong. Seems to me asking in a poll whether there is “partial justification” for something comes down to asking whether there is any case to be made for something. And there’s a case to be made for a lot of things that the person making the case is not in favor of. Sure, there’s a case to be made for murdering Musk. He’s kind of crazy, his power is not the product of election so there is no legal way to disempower him, and he’s so smart and so rich he could probably do substantial harm. But if the poll had asked “are you in favor of assassinating Elon Musk” I think the left-of-center numbers would have been very different.
> I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life.
I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
If you have negative comments about Charlie Kirk, you either could have said them a week ago, or there will be enough opportunity to say them one month later.
<I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
That's not true in most settings, though. If someone on this forum "talks shit" about Kirk, that is not cowardly, because even if Kirk was alive he would not know what the speaker said and so would not attempt to rebut them or make them look foolish. And it's unfair of you to sneak in a critique of people speaking negatively of Kirk by calling what they're doing "talking shit." I said several negative things about him in posts today that were reasoned criticisms expressed in a civil way. That's not talking shit and is not cowardly. It is also not true that "talking shit" about the murderer here or in other settings rewards the murderer, because the chance he will hear what's said here or in most settings in the country is nil.
I was trying to explain the rule in general. If your criticism was reasonable, then I think it is perfectly okay. But that is not a typical way how people on internet express opinions.
The part about "he wouldn't notice it anyway" I don't agree with, although I am too lazy to explain why, sorry for that.
>I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
Not only that, but when someone's been assassinated for political reasons, talking about how bad and harmful the deceased's views were runs the risk of radicalising more people to commit more assassinations.
I don't believe for a moment that you're actually incapable of telling the difference between, on the one hand, debating your own personal views with people, and, on the other, talking about bad the victim of a political assassination was.
I can make the distinction. I just don't think it's important in this setting. It would certainly be important if we were in the company of Kirk's family and friends. To complaint to them about Kirk's views would be extraordinarily cruel, and that's why it would be wrong to do. As I said, I see the distinction. What I do not see is what is wrong with criticizing, on this forum, the views and destructive activities of someone who was just assassinated.
What, exactly, is wrong with doing that? It upsets people who did not know Kirk but who feel grieved and shaken about what happened? Fine, I get that some people feel that way, but it seems to me that those people should simply not read the posts here. I have many times bailed on reading a thread because it upset me too much. They can do the same.
Other than that, what is wrong with criticizing Kirk right now?
As you said, I think there's a difference between criticizing someone civilly and "talking shit". Moreover, I think the difference is critical (if I may overload the term).
The former is like an effortpost; you have to engage your higher brain function to make it. The latter is just venting emotionally driven discomfort, or worse, engaging the higher brain only to come up with a cleverer burn.
And the critical difference comes in the fact that someone else ends up reading it. If I were writing into a hole, I could vent whatever I want, ahahaha, he was talking about gun control, how poetic, blah blah blah, and the only downside would be my own emotional degradation from the indulgence. If it's on a forum, then everyone else gets whatever idea was transmitted, so it's a (let's say) 50x amplifier of either careful consideration or emotional sputum.
Aside: it could be emotional care, for that matter; people tend to accept positive eulogies of the dead. Cue the aphorism about saying something nice.
But if the criticism is important enough, it'll need to show effort. It's way, way too easy to knock someone on the internet, as everyone knows; what people don't seem to internalize is that this abundance of supply causes a drop in price. Most readers aren't willing to engage their higher brain if the sender didn't. So instead, the lower brain rolls in and it turns into a burnfest, and those are rarely rewarding.
And I think this applies even if no one was close to the deceased. It's habit forming, so people stop caring if anyone in the audience is close in other cases.
This is why I've become annoyed of any trash talk about anyone who just died. It's interesting; it could be 1945 and we just got news Hitler had shot himself and I could get annoyed at any trash talk of *him*. Not because I think he was awesome, but rather I think of what such talk is doing to the people saying and hearing it. OTOH, if it's civil criticism, it flips; someone could have thoughtfully pointed out something holding my dad back and I would have listened.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by all the shit of the past few days, but thread OP's comment is kind of a relief. I've seen so many ad-hominem's about Kirk from people who've never ever consumed any of his content or bothered to verify something that too good to check before repeating it with supreme confidence. And if the first thing they said turned out to be wrong, well, they'll just say something else they heard with supreme confidence.
Meanwhile, thread OP is accurately summarizing Kirk's views on the role of Christianity in a way that Kirk would agree with.
I wouldn't really care to criticize him right now if not for the reaction to his death from many on the right, which is a combination of:
* advocating violence in response and/or using the state to go after critics
* over the top hagiography about how Kirk was the greatest person ever
* a lot of "the left is broadly responsible because of their rhetoric" from people engaged in the exact same type of rhetoric
And I'm not talking about randos online. I'm thinking of famous media personalities, members of Congress, the president.
Reason it's relevant to criticize Kirk and not just people's reactions is that the hypocrisy is a powerful argument against what they're doing. It's one thing to say "whatever you think of Kirk, you shouldn't persecute his critics", another thing to say "you attack people for supposedly extreme rhetoric but you praise as a saint a guy who said the same type of stuff".
I criticize the left all the time. Their existence is no reason not to criticize the party in power as it works to break American democracy. (Though this would be a tasteless time to lambast Kirk himself)
> Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society
And he thought they were good for society. Are you so much better qualified than him to say what's good or bad, or are you both mere mortals grasping for the truth in an unpredictable world?
He was murdered because of people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
All I can say is that if you get murdered tomorrow, I won't spend Saturday feverishly searching through your comment history to find things I disagree with so I can argue with your corpse.
Yeah, OK, and so what? That can be said of pretty much everyone whose views we discuss here, except for a few nuts who spout random ideas as an art form.
<people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
That's a pretty fine distinction. I'm not even sure it makes sense. Do you often disagree with ideas you think are right?
<He was murdered because people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
No he wasn't. He was murdered because the killer could not distinguish between "people whose Ideas I think are wrong" and "people I get to kill." And that, Melvin, is not fine distinction.
Do you believe in universal truth? If not, then we're pretty much at the state of "I disagree with you" as the moral limit. If enough people disagree (as with Hitler) we can condemn, make laws against, etc. Do enough people disagree with Charlie Kirk to condemn him as a society? Doesn't look that way to me. He was broadly popular on the right. If you condemn him, you're condemning most of the right. Not only does that not work from a voting majority perspective, it's a horrible idea from the perspective of a civil society.
Go ahead and condemn the worst people, even if they're on your opponent's side. Please condemn the worst people on your own side. But relatively normie people who are saying things that maybe 40-60% of the country believes? Bad idea in a lot of ways. And comparing him to Hitler is downright evil.
If you do believe in universal truth, then you're still stuck with trying to convince others that your conception of truth is more accurate than someone else's. There's no shortcut here. You may be fully convinced, but that means nothing. Ironically, that was Charlie's best known attribute and plausibly what got him killed - he was in the trenches talking to people and working to convince them. Not by force, but by persuasion.
Melvin was responding that the OP seemed to be struggling to differentiate between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong." From a policy standpoint "ideas that I disagree with" gets you nowhere unless you have a majority on your side. Charlie Kirk was mostly saying things that a majority agreed with, or at least a minority disagreed with.
So his ideological opponents are of course welcome to disagree with him, but that's pretty meaningless to a criticism of him, or especially his right to speak his mind. As much as his opponents hated him, he was no Hitler.
You seem not to have noticed that I didn't state *any* opinion on the subject matter *at all*, but did only criticize Melvin's critique of Alexander. And I did it regarding two points:
1. He said that that guy (who I don't even know and are not interested in) does think that his own ideas are good. And this is irrelevant. It does not make anyone, especially Alexander, change his mind about them. He finds them bad. That's why I said Hitler found his own ideas also good, because nobody changes his mind about Hitler's ideas when he learns that Hitler liked them.
2. He said nobody can know anything. But he obviously doesn't believe that, otherwise he wouldn't state that that is the case -- how could he know?
Apparently in the Rationalist's sphere people are just as irrational as everywhere else.
The point is that in a democracy you have to learn to cope with differing opinions and you don't get to establish them by force. If you believe that strong convictions are enough to murder opposition, you will soon find that most of society has strong convictions against that.
And if they don't, well, good bye civilized society.
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
"...for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range....
"Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in our annual surveys.
"Meanwhile, the share of Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity has been trending upward, though it is still in single digits.
Plus a recent survey in Britain (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/brits-beliefs-about-gods?crossBreak=1824&period=5yrs) found that the youth cohort (18-24) has gone from 49% "I do not believe in any sort of God" in 2021 to 32% today, with those who "believe there is a God" going from 24% to 37%. Another UK survey from this year found that in 2018 only 4% of adult's in Britain went to church at least once a month, and now 12% do. This is driven mostly by the younger cohorts: 18-24 year-olds went from 4% attendance to 16%, and those 25-34 went from 4% attendance to 13%.
Given this data, how certain can we be that secularization will continue and will not reverse? For all we know we might be at peak secularization in the West right now. Globally it looks like we were at peak secularization back in 2010, Pew expects the percent of the global population that is religiously affiliated to continue to drop over the next 25 years. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religiously-unaffiliated/)
"Always" over what timeframe? We've had revivals in specific countries as well as over large swaths of the world. Obviously specific religions have started, spread, shrunk and grown at different times. Christianity was pretty small in 50AD, but subsequently grew a lot - in defiance of "always down." In fact, Christianity is probably the largest its ever been right this moment, in terms of total numbers. In terms of percents it may be down compared to fairly recent metrics and when looking specifically at Europe or the US. Looking at 300 years ago Christianity has grown in both total numbers and percents in the entire non-European world.
Not globally, and we shouldn’t assume it will be in the developed nations either. Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%, leaving he system to stabilize and plateau (which is seems to have done in the US, at least over the last 5 years).
>Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%
The examples of East Germany, Czechia, and Estonia show that any such limit is around 5%.
I don't think the populations of those three countries are representative enough that we would expect that other countries will end up in the same space. Most notably, they all used to be part of or were subject states to the USSR, an officially atheist authoritarian regime that spent decades officially suppressing religion, though legal restrictions, arresting clergy, removing privileges from the openly religious, teaching atheism and mocking religion in schools, and propaganda campaigns against religiosity. It would be surprising if that didn't have an effect on the floor for religiosity! Unless you expect similar pressures to arise in the USA or the rest of Europe, we shouldn't expect similar results.
Woke and traditional religion both feed on one another. Both have no real positive qualities, relying on the other to say "this is the alternative to me."
When elections happen, overperformers are consistently milquetoast centrists who are neither woke nor Bible thumpers. You're the one not modeling normies properly.
Meanwhile, your side will have some trouble admitting that the monster that killed him is a monster created, at least in part, by your own ideology. Or perhaps to be fair, of your willingness to tolerate one-sided viewpoints keeping people in glass bubbles.
We don't know anything about this monster, so it is a bit rich that you are accusing an entire 'side' (who is that?) of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once.
It's also very left-coded to act this way: accuse an entire group of responsibility, etc.
After Trayvon Martin, I remember a local-gov't leader quoted in the press saying, "They're killing our children!" She made it a rallying cry.
I was confused. "They"? That word ... are we not all part of the same country? Plus it was false. She should know better. But ... "they"? And the rallying cry caught on. That word flummoxed me. "They"
I've learned a lot since then.
With that incident, with Michael Brown in Ferguson, with George Floyd in Minneapolis, and a litany of other incidents, the left very loudly accused an entire giant group of people of being responsible + indifferent + closedminded all at once.
People throughout the country who were already disgusted by the facts of these incidents were summarily lumped together with the real villains, due only to their skin color or mix of policy choices & beliefs.
The woman quoted above? I honestly thought we were in the same in-group, so to speak. Seriously, up until that day, I really thought a person like she and a person like me were united, at least in some small way.
Like I said, I've learned a lot since then. Much of which from this community here.
People on the left and right - and in the middle - have and share closeminded thoughts all the time. Human nature. Unfortunately there are many political actors who exploit this aspect of human nature for their own ends.
I would rather call it dickhead-coded to label an identifiable group "of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once". (It is legit to refer to a group of people who are responsible, indifferent and closeminded, but such a group is not readily identifiable.)
But my father has been, holy shit, shockingly indifferent and closed-minded, and responsible for indulging his indifferent closed-minded influencers but shutting out his own family, for reflexively defending his man Trump. He can never acknowledge that there is anything wrong with Trump, he just deflects criticisms into accusations about The Left.
Do I think his behavior is typical of his group (rather than common to all members of the group)? Yes.
It matters to me whether he truly believed that, as he's quoted in the press as saying, “one thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder.” If he did not believe that then he was a cynical clown. Even if he did, he seems very remiss to me in not doing some double-checking about this issue. Either he was so sloppy and irresponsible he didn't bother to check, or else he was so convinced that trans people are pieces of shit that he didn't think it was important to check the accuracy of horrifically inflammatory statements about them.
Two members of my family, now dead, were gay: my mother and my half brother. Both had some mild trans tendencies. My brother died of AIDS during the era when people were talking about AIDS as god's punishment for perversion. Do I really have to be sad about the death of this "nice family man "who spouted the kind of untruths that led to my brother dying in an atmosphere of hostile mockery, and my mother feeling so uncomfortable about her sexuality that she waited til she was facing death to tell me? They were nice people too and, unlike Nice Guy Kirk, did not spread toxic lies about people. In fact both were kind and tolerant. No, I am not in favor of assassination, but I just am not sad that Kirk got shot in the neck while lying about trans people. Frankly, I'm glad he got blown away. I'm not defending my reaction as the right and proper one, but I don't think it's that hard to understand.
One of the things I've been hearing from Kirk's advocates is that despite disagreements one might have with him, Kirk's response was to open a dialogue, not shut you down, let alone hurt you.
If that's true, then that's probably something you could root for.
One way to disprove that might have been to find a situation where a group of people waving the Kirk flag are moving to beat up a trans person, and see if Kirk tries to condemn them and call for a dialogue instead. Or find out if that had happened, since it won't be happening now. (I'm not familiar enough with Kirk to feel certain I could find a representative sample of his views.)
Going forward, a lot of conservatives are taking home the lesson that if someone tries to defend their views on a soapbox, the response is likely to be the ammo box. Maybe not the rule, but now it's an existence proof.
No, and I doubt anyone here thinks you have to. People are saying valid critiques feel very counter-productive right now.
Restraint is frustrating. Especially when some people ignore a person's faults, possibly taking advantage for political convenience. The desire to at least "correct the record" is very, very strong ... and this is the type of thinking that makes well-meaning people point out George Floyd's use of fentanyl on that fateful day.
• Was it true? I mean, sure, yes.
• Is it helpful, bringing this up? Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Is it productive, making a giant deal out of it? Probably not ... and certainly not in the immediate days after the event.
Less of this please. This is an exceptionally disgusting and tasteless way to respond to someone discussing tragedies within their family, even within an explicitly political discussion.
While it was a bit tasteless and a bit out of place, it is absolutely relevant if we are holding Kirk to account for criticizing the trans movement. Teachers trying to give kids gender dysphoria seems to be inseparable from the trans movement for whatever reason, and given that GD sufferers have sky-high suicide rates and many other problems, it is something every parent should fear.
Please kindly confine yourself to talk about real problems that occur in the real world instead of blithely spewing insane bullshit made up by hateful troglodytes to justify their heinous bigotry, thank you very much.
I disagree with this idea that killing him counterproductively amplified his message. That's wishful thinking of precisely the kind employed when people were being "de-platformed" by every major company (from social media to web hosting to payment processors): it turns out that strategy actually DOES usually work to silence people.
This entire thread is full of insanely illogical arguments, with the worst ones being those offered as the reasons why it is dangerous and destructive to criticize Kirk right now. We'll incentivize more people to become shooters! It makes Kirk too important, increasing the impact his views will have! It's cowardly because he's not here to defend himself! It brings us down to the shooter's level!
I think the real reason many women think it's awful to criticize Kirk right now is because women are socialized to be Nice, and the real reason men do is because they are afraid of their own potential for violence.
Yeah, like the way the Left silenced people into voting for Donald Trump. Twice. And nobody's yet figured out how to silence him.
It's sometimes possible to silence individual *people*, yes. But the proper object of that verb isn't a person but a message. It is possible to silence a message, but it's a lot harder than it seems and clumsy attempts to silence mere people are usually not effective. The intersection of the Streisand Effect and political assassination is more commonly an amplified message.
Doubly so in the Youtube era, where Charlie Kirk's words will be heard in his voice coming from his young and telegenic face for many years to come/
But you didn't read it. I had several digs at the left there, and you didn't see them because, like many Rightists in my experience, you don't actually read, you just skim, look for keywords and generate a generic response that doesn't address what you're actually replying to.
And like many leftoids in my experience, you have hallucinated something in your writing that simply isn't there for anyone not hip to whatever the current epistomogical model for victimhood is. You continue to evade requests to supply a point, so I guess this is just a rant.
I don't think it's gay coded, I think it's woke. It has the characteristic deep structure: The speaker's assumption that they get to dictate what constitutes civilized behavior; and the mean twist at the end, directed at those who don't comply ("turnips"). Woke is all about slathering sympathy on everybody except those who disagree with the speaker -- those jerks you get to cancel.
Woke actually abjured the distinction between civilized and uncivilized, which is why it would write gender studies articles defending FGM, and call you a fascist if you objected to screaming zombies on the subway
I get that some people truly are shocked and sad. What I'm objecting to is the insistence that everyone feel sad, empathize with his wife and kids, etc., or at least refrain from criticizing Kirk. And this poster really is insisting that that reaction is the correct one, the one decent people have. In the next post down they write "when someone dies, we put aside arguing about ideas or whether we love or hate them to think about the fragility of life, the cruelty of it being cut short, and about those people left behind". That sentence is obviously not a a description of what everybody is doing here. And it is not a wish or an opinion, something like "I think we should make an extra effort to consider his wife and kids, how awful it is to have life cut short," etc. It's a sort of royal "we" or you could identify it as the way teachers talk to kids -- "we don't eat with our fingers.”
Look, even if I did not have a strong negative personal reaction to Kirk, I would object to the kind of tone policing that's going on here. First of all, I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to be shocked and grieving in response to the death of someone they did not know personally. There's a death in the news every single day, and sometimes news of scores of deaths, often by violence, often with photos and accompanying horrific details. We have all developed ways to take some distance and not react the way we would if the deceased had been an acquaintance and we had actually witnessed the death. I do not think I would have had much emotional reaction to Kirk's assassination if I knew nothing about his views on trans people. I’d never even heard of him til the day he died. I would have had some emotional reaction to the fact of a political assassination, but probably not all that much even to that — things in the US already seem really bad and dangerous to me anyway. I am sometimes laid low by deaths in the news — Gene Hackman and the circumstances of his death made me very sad, Scott’s story about the little Palestinian kid with bits of his dead brother in his backpack made me cry. But it would never occur to me to ask people here who mention those deaths to speak in a certain tone about them.
Second of all, I don’t think it’s reasonable for those who are grieving and shocked to insist that others refrain from posting criticisms of the person who is dead. Why can they not just stop reading this open thread, and seek out sites where there are others who feel the way they do? This is a forum where social issues, politics, etc. are debated vigorously all the time. Why should that have to change because there has been a death that shocked and saddened more people than the typical death in the news does? There are certainly threads I’ve skipped because I hate the dominant tone or because the beliefs being expressed by many make me feel awful.
And third of all, it is simply unrealistic to insist that everybody refrain from criticizing Kirk . Nobody but Scott ever succeeds in getting people to not talk about certain things or in a certain way on here. There was once a thread where people were talking about suicide. I requested several times that people refrain from giving details about a method of suicide that I am sure not all readers know about. It is painless, quick, not gory and horrifying the way many methods are, and can be done with materials that are easy to find. Nope, people wouldn’t do it. And that wasn’t because some never saw my posts or forgot about them — several people told me that were not willing to self-censor, and thought all readers had a right to this info.
Among other things, the civilized norm of not speaking ill of the brutally murdered helps disincentivize political murder. Tyler Robinson acted alone, but it's a pretty safe bet that he saw himself as acting on behalf of a broad community. See also Luigi Mangioni, among others. Humans are social animals, and when we kill people, it's often in the expectation of social rewards.
Hearing people one respects say "Of course we can't condone this action, nod nod wink wink, but man that guy you killed was just The Worst", is that reward. And there's no way to say that, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, without the nod and wink being heard by anyone so inclined. So, freedom of speech, yes, someone can say that sort of thing if they want. And the rest of us can tell them what we think about it.
Seems like a silly gotcha to me. 1)Boston streets are very congested and no matter how you slice the pie — for ex, by slicing part of the street off and calling it a bike lane — there is not enough space to meet the needs of those driving, biking, parking, or placing their truck where it needs to be in order to make a delivery or perform a service. Everyone who does not have scrupulosity OCD parks illegally, blocks traffic, cuts people off in order to enter the stream of traffic etc. If you live there, you’ve done that stuff too.
2) Even if this truck were doing something exceptionally inconsiderate, rather than something that is happening on most blocks, what it’s doing has nothing to do with the child’s being run over. They are not incurring some of the guilt for that.
I've been on a bike too for the last 5 years. If the conditions are godawful, I ride on the sidewalk. I am careful not to hit or scare pedestrians, but they still don't like me biking on the sidewalk, and I get it. I believe biking on the sidewalk is in fact illegal. But I need to be somewhere, a bike's what I've got, and I'm not going to risk my life getting forced out into a lane crowded with fast-moving, irritable car drivers. In my view, the conditions force me to choose to do something probably illegal and certainly a bit inconsiderate. That's my point. That truck is just one of thousands of manifestations of the fact that it is impossible to travel and park in Boston and be perfectly law abiding and perfectly considerate of others. It says nothing whatever about the Krafts. And can you honestly say that if you had a friend's car for the day and were driving in Boston you would refrain from parking somewhere illegal if you thought you could run in, do your errand, and get back to the car without being ticketed?
I listened to an account a student in the crowd gave of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Student said that the shooting occurred during a Q&A. Acc/to interviewee, a student had asked Kirk whether he believed trans people committed more murders than others, and Kirk said yes, and there was a cheer from the crowd. The student asked a follow-up question, and then Kirk was shot.
It seems unlikely to me that trans people do commit more murders than other people (who are not trans but similar in other respects -- demographics, SES, etc --to the trans subjects), though I suppose it's possible. I did a quick check with GPT -- did not double check its answer -- and it said there is lots of data indicating that trans people are attacked and harmed more often than others, but no data on whether they commit more murders. So my question is, does it seem likely that Kirk actually believed that trans people are more likely to murder? If so, why? Are there sites out there somewhere citing some kind of data, some study? Did he just think it was self-evident because trans people seem obviously bad, weird and defective to him ? Did he not believe it, but say it because he knew it was a crowd pleaser? I am trying to understand his mentality.
>who are not trans but similar in other respects -- demographics, SES, etc --to the trans subjects
But should you control for this? The standard pro-trans claim is that bad things associated with being trans are downstream of it (just in ways that are everyone elses fault), and you shouldnt control for mediators.
Yeah, you may be right, I had not tried researching the matter when I wrote that. I spent a couple hrs looking into it yesterday, and describe some of the difficulties of getting the needed data in this post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-398/comment/155418669
I'm not sure if they carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-men, but they certainly seem to carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-women.
Where are you finding numbers on that? I just went looking for some and didn't find anything besides the Violence Prevention Project's dataset on public mass shootings. That does indicate a rate higher than cis women but lower than cis men, but the sample size is too small (one transgender shooter) to draw robust conclusions from. I can't find anything on murder rates in general.
It would seem that the absolute numbers of trans criminals would be too low to draw many conclusions unless the rate were staggeringly high. If the rate for transwomen were exactly the same as for cis men, we'd still be looking at numbers too low to draw conclusions about for big rare events like a mass shooting, though it would be enough to discuss more typical murders.
Agreed. About 0.8% of US adults are trans, roughly evenly distributed between trans men, trans women, and nonbinary, so if we had systematic statistics we would be able to tell the difference between trans women committing homicide at the same rate as cis men (we would expect to see about 30 per year then) or as cis women (which would be about 3 per year), especially if we were to aggregate across several years of data.
I've been looking into it too. Here's the trouble with the data available: Places that collect shooting data lump together all shootings where 4+ people were killed. There have been 4000+ in the last decade, and very few correspond to what we think of as "mass shootings." Most involve gang violence, which is just a different thing, and anyhow I'm pretty sure most gangs would not want a accept a trans member even if they were a good fit in demographics, attitudes, etc. If you just look at the large, famous incidents, the ones we think of as mass shootings, the total number of them is so small that you can't conclude anything from the number. It would be like deciding whether a coin was weighted unevenly based on 4 tosses. It is, though, kind of striking how many mass shootings were committed by people who are gender nonconforming in some way.
Anyhow: I just figured out that the Gun Violence Archive has filters, and while there isn't one that selects for what we think of as mass shootings, there is one that selects only shootings where the victims were strangers to the shooter. There aren't that many of them, and you can actually look through them and remove any that don't count as mass shootings for one reason or another. I believe there was one other filter that I thought would also be useful. But, after you select the incidents that fit the bill, you have to find out whether the shooter was trans, and many records give no info one way or the other about that. I do think it's likely that in many, possibly even most, of these cases the topic came up in court, because if the shooter is trans, there's the issue of where the person would be incarcerated -- with what gender. So I was thi nking about asking GPT to look into that. But I don't know where, exactly, to tell it to look. And I'm actually busy enough with other things that it's a bad idea for me to get fascinated by this question and pour time into it.
Another important point: very very few people commit mass murder of the kind that involves spraying a crowd of strangers with bullets. Maybe one person in a million? One in a hundred thousand? Even if it's one in a hundredn thousand, and even if trans people are 10 times a likely to be shooters as cis people, that means there's a one in 10,000 chance that the trans person next to you in line for movie tickets is a shooter. Which rounds down to zero.
My guess: Lots of trans and gay murderous villains in movies. It's a trope.
But of course the question is then why the writers of those movies wrote them like that --but not, why *they* believed this. Most writers don't believe what they write. (Harry Potter, Sci-Fi, ...)
The reason is because if your audience thinks being gay or trans is wrong and creepy, then having the villain do gay or gender-nonconforming things helps establish that they're a bad guy. They see the villain acting girly and think "ugh, that guy's a freak."
It's the same reason why crippled or deformed villains are (or were) popular - it looks freaky, it's a deviation from the norm, it visually tells the audience "this person is twisted on the outside, and they're twisted on the inside as well."
I imagine a similar effect is in play with Charlie Kirk's statement - if he thinks "ugh, this person is a mentally ill deviant" when thinking of trans people, it's easy for him to imagine that they're deviant in other ways (such as being a murderer), regardless of the facts.
Tangentially, the motif of villains having a hairline scar on the face (usually on a cheek or the forehead) is a specific historical allusion, coding the character as a member of the late 19th or early 20th century German/Prussian aristocratic officer class. It was fairly fashionable for university students of this class to fight highly-stylized "academic duels". These were nominally actual duels with real swords, but were not fought to the death and typically involved rules and equipment (armor and protective goggles) designed to minimize the risk of death or serious injury. Most of the face besides the eyes was left unprotected, since getting a highly visible scar in such a duel was seen as a positive outcome: dueling scars were seen as an indicator of courage.
Giving villains dueling scars overlaps with the tradition in American movies of the mod to late 20th century of making villains resemble Nazis, since a fair number of senior officers in Nazi Germany had dueling scars.
I think it's a talking point in conservative media right now, I don't know what evidence there is for it if any. I really doubt the timing of the shot means anything since it sounds like it was done by a rooftop sniper some distance away.
I have no problem with trans people, but if I was asked that question, without looking it up, my response would also have been yes (at least if I was answering honestly). The logic is that I've read before that trans people have much higher rates of mental illnesses than non trans people. And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
I tried to look it up myself just now as well, and also pretty much got redirected to info about trans people being harmed more than others. I'd be happy be corrected if you or anyone else finds some actual info on this.
> And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
Do you really think that?
I think people who want (want!) someone dead (because they hate them, fear them, want something from them, or them out of the way) are the ones who commit more murders on average.
I don't see how one needs to have a mental illness for that, except in special cases.
It seems likely to me that more mass murderers than one-on-one murderers are crazy. Killing someone in rage or for gain just seems like an extension of the kind of interaction that happens all the time. Yes, of course, it is bad, but is much easier for most of us to comprehend. We don't have the feeling you have to be crazy to do it.
There must be data on what kinds of mental illness are more prevalent in trans people, and I will look it up when I get a chance. Most kinds of mental illness do not make people more likely to be mass murderers. Probably half the US has qualified for depression, anxiety disorder or substance use disorder at some point in their life, but the risk that any one of them will commit mass murder is tiny.
I'm sure somebody has categorized mass murderers by mental state at the time of the event. Some mass murderers are just plain psychotic, and have delusions that, if true, would make committing mass murder make some kind of sense; some are in the midst of rage-and-despair meltdowns set off by bad things that have recently happened to them, things like being fired; some are true believers in some movement that hates a certain group, and lack the internal controls that prevent other members of the movement from actually killing outgroup members; some are hooked on the idea of the fame and glory they will get. Only the first of these groups is clearly crazy. though of course most in the other groups could be diagnosed with depression, sociopathy or naricissistic personality disorder. But the last 3 disorders are all quite common, and the risk that an individual with one of them will commit a mass murder is tiny.
They analyzed two datasets that had info on both transgender identification and various self-reported mental illnesses. The results are not very robust between datasets. One dataset shows significantly elevated rates for all mental conditions in the set (autism, ADHD, bipolar, depression, learning disability, OCD, and scizophrenia) among trans individuals, but a lot of this seems to be driven by autism correlating both with being trans and with self-reports of other conditions. The other dataset shows very strong association with autism, moderate association with depression, weaker associations with OCD, ADHD, and Bipolar, and no statistically significant associations with scizophrenia.
I also looked just now for other data on associations between gender dysphoria and either personality disorders or schizophrenia. There are some papers out there, but all the ones I've skimmed seemed to have load-bearing reliance on outdated estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria (on the order of 1 in 10,000, not the current estimate of 0.6% to 1.3% of the population).
The correlation between autism and gender dysphoria seems pretty robust and shows up in a bunch of studies. Here's a 2022 survey paper:
I wish someone would look at the data and give some stats. US gov't data on murderers and murder victims just give basic demographics, I think. I wonder if people who have relevant data sets are not analyzing them to answer this question because acc/to wokeism it's an evil question to even consider, sort of like race and IQ.
I think that if you did actually look carefully at the stats then what you'd find is that it depends how you define things and what cutoffs you take.
Here is a list of recent transgender shooters as per grok, which appears to be the only AI willing to talk about it:
* Nashville, TN (2023): Audrey Hale, identified as transgender, killed six people at The Covenant School.
* Denver, CO (2019): Alec McKinney, a transgender teenager, was involved in a school shooting that killed one and injured eight.
* Aberdeen, MD (2018): Snochia Moseley, reportedly transgender, killed three at a Rite Aid facility.
* Colorado Springs, CO (2022): Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five at an LGBTQ nightclub, was claimed to be non-binary by their lawyers, though this is disputed.
* Minneapolis, MN (2025): Robin Westman, identified as transgender, killed two children and injured 17 at Annunciation Catholic School.
I actually got GPT to cough up info. It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people. So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing. they recorded 4400 incidents in the last decade, and in only 10 of them was the shooter trans. For the well-publicized shootings, there has probably been enough light thrown on the presumed killer that there's decent info about whether they're trans. I don't know anything about the info quality of the many other shootings that met the GVA criteria. How likely are the police to try to find out whether someone is trans, if they do not volunteer the info? Do they maybe know because in most casesvthe suspect or the person's lawyer is expressing a lot of concern about what gender they will be housed with in prison?
Anyhow, going by the GVA stats, trans people are ddfinitely under represented in the shooters group. A cis person is 3-4 times as likely as a trans personvto carry out a mass shooting.
Makes sense to me. I know trans people have a higher-than-average oddness quotient, with autism especially over-represented in the group. But I would not expect autism to be a risk factor for being a shooter. Most autistic people are solitary, uncomfortable around people, and emotionally flat.
> It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people... So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing.
I think that when people say "mass shooting" they're generally thinking about the case where some nut shoots a bunch of strangers, rather than gang-related gunfights, but of course the GVA's statistics are dominated by the latter.
That's why Charlie Kirk's last words were "counting or not counting gang violence?", because it makes a huge difference to the reference class.
I agree that transgender individuals are much less likely to be the perps in gang-related shootings, but I still wonder whether they're more or less likely to be the perps in non-gang-related shootings. (Which frankly, I care a lot more about, because I'm not a gang member and neither is anyone I know.)
Absolutely disagree that about its being evil. A lot of research findings can be fuel for oppression. *Most* research findings probably are harmful to some innocent people. For instance findings about farming or manufacturing processes that produce toxic products no doubt harm some kind, fair, honest people who got into the business and had no idea their product was harming the public. Some are not in a position to adapt how they produce stuff, and go under. Some of these people probably end up bankrupt and despairing.
Of course I see that if trans people turn out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people that info can be used to oppress them. But to label the research as "just fuel for oppression" is absurd. It's like saying metal as "just a material for producing bullets." Both are many things, not all of them bad. Furthermore, if trans people are more likely to commit mass murder I'm not sure that info is going to be make things much worse for them. Lots of people already think they're likely to commit mass murder, so research data seems not to play much role in what they believe. Seems the belief is a result of publicity about incidents that fit easily with an overall negative take on transness, nurtured and magnified in an echo chamber. '
As a matter of fact, even if trans people turned out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people, that info is if anything reassuring. What fraction people commit mass murder? One in a million? So for a random trans person the chance they'll shoot up a crowd is 2 in a million? Still so low it's vanishingly unlikely, and anyone with a lick of sense will round it down to zero.
I got in an argument with someone about the effect of money in politics. They argued that there are diminishing returns in individual races (which I simply don't have the data to argue for or against right now). But "money in politics" is not just about individual elections. There are *lots* of ways to use money. There are lots of *creative* ways to use money. There are lots of creative ways to use money, directly or indirectly, to steer public opinion and policy.
Even if TPUSA was just funding individual races, that's a lot of individual races. It wouldn't surprise me to find that TPUSA could spend nearly all its money on them without seeing meaningful diminishing returns. One race could easily spend $1M, and there are easily over 100 races. That's $100M right there.
Meanwhile, I don't think "there exist creative ways to spend money" necessarily implies an organization will find those ways. OTOH, I think that as the amount of spendable money increases, the motivation to find creative ways to spend it drops. It's easier to employ stable but less efficient spending strategies and put the rest in a war chest.
So, Charlie Kirk is dead. Things are escalating quite nicely, aren't they? While it is delightfully ironic that he died right as he was scapegoating minorities for mass shootings, he'll make for a good martyr nonetheless. How many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown? Because I feel like this isn't quite severe enough to get away with that, unless Trump's base is way more attatched to him than I thought...
In a different day and age, I might have written that perhaps we should wait with drawing conclusions until we know the first thing about the assassin other than that they're evading police. In any case, the current US administration has shown that it will start crackdowns on anyone for any reason or none at all, so I don't believe Kirk's death will have any more impact than the Minnesota legislators' shootings had a noticable calming effect. It might be referenced some more in future tweets, but the agenda has already been set. Dissenting opinions welcome, I'm not American and only read the news
While I share some of your concern, I feel like there's a good chance this won't even move the needle that much. The Trump administration really doesn't seem to be very worried about taking the pulse of its base before it acts: Trump just does what he wants, tosses out whatever lazy, bullshit justification is easiest to reach for and his base picks it up and runs with it unquestioningly. Given how often I've seen people even on this forum parroting his flimsy excuses, I can't really "doesn't have a good enough excuse to sell his people on it" to be much of a bottleneck for him.
Maybe escalation like this will make some people more likely to side with him when he crosses what they would otherwise regard as some bright line. But given how many bright lines have already fallen in the rear view mirror almost without comment, it probably won't be that big a shift. If the past several decades have taught us anything it's that in a country of 300 million and a world of 8 billion, there will always be *some* excuse ready at hand to rile up U.S. extremists.
Kirk called for someone to bail the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi out of prison. It's bad for him to have been murdered. That's because political violence is bad - a view that Charlie Kirk seemingly didn't share.
But political violence is bad even when directed at someone who thinks that it isn't bad.
Speaking truthfully about directly relevant things someone has said and done is distasteful now? Somehow, lying about or ignoring the work someone built their life around does not *actually* strike me as a respectful way to talk about them after they've passed.
I wouldn't even care to say anything if he'd just been killed and people were denouncing that he was killed. Or when people respond by calling for more civil rhetoric, not advocating violence, etc. Or if people praise Kirk on a personal level (i.e. non-political stuff like family).
It's when people go a step further and start praising Kirk as dedicated to that sort of civil rhetoric - often the same people now saying that "we" (i.e. the right) are "at war" with the left.
If we are going to have a standard about civil or not-violent rhetoric it has to apply across the board. People who are upset about that type of rhetoric should see if their personal faves are engaged in it, and if so, are they actually so opposed to it as they claim.
For posterity though I looked up the full quote on the subject:
>"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!
> Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?
> And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
> I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?
In case it's unclear, the argument being made is not that someone should bail him out because he's a hero and violence against Pelosis doesn't matter, the argument is that someone should bail him out to ask him some questions, because he was suspicious of the media narrative at the time (that Depape was some kind of right-wing extremist) and talking to him might clarify it.
Now in fact, Kirk was right, and it turns out that Depape was more of a standard issue lunatic than a political extremist:
"When given the chance to address the court before his sentencing, DePape, dressed in prison orange and with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at length about September 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being replaced by a body double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring against him."
I hadn't actually followed up on this story, I didn't realise he'd been given life without the possibility of parole. While I don't think that's an excessive penalty for assault with a deadly weapon, I can guarantee that if you or I had been attacked with a hammer by some lunatic in San Francisco then the penalty would be a lot lighter.
It's not so much "unclear" as it is "deliberate nonsense." Charlie has here an incident that made him and his associates and their rhetoric look terrible--an unstable person who aggressively soaked up all the the various flavors of conspiracy laden bullcrap that they've been peddling for easy money and simply took it seriously enough to act on it.
Instead of moderating or taking responsibility or anything of the sort, he throws out a bunch of insinuation-laden fast talk as a distraction, which includes both a suggestion to bail out a dangerous, aggressive, unstable man and some not-that-subtle implications that not everything about the attack was what it seemed.
So while I thank you for providing more detailed context--always worth doing--it doesn't make me think even a little bit better about Charlie Kirk.
<DePape spoke at length about . . . his ex-wife being replaced by a body double.
That's a clearcut psychotic delusion. In fact it's so common that it has a name: Capgras Syndrome. The man is psychotic -- unless he's faking, of course. But seems like it would not be difficult to get clear on whether or not he has believed that for a while. The other stuff he says might or might not be psychotic delusions, depending on how he came to believe them.
I am less worried about a crackdown of some sort (against whom?) than I am about other radicals deciding that it's open season on public figures they don't like. Both left-radicals deciding to copycat this shooting and right-radicals deciding that this shooting justifies some kind of retaliation. I am not eager for an American remake of The Troubles.
I did worry about it then. Also when the CEO of United Healthcare was murdered. And when Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, for that matter, and when he pardoned the rioters.
>This isn't even the first political killing in recent months.
I know. That's part of why I continue to be concerned.
My not-well-informed model here is that violently inclined crazies pick up on the pattern of what one does when one is a violent crazy person and then follow that. Going postal with a glock is a bad pattern, but find some prominent political figure and murder them is even worse. If our plentiful supply of violent crazies and our plentiful supply of guns for them to use combine with a norm of those violent crazies doing political violence (and maybe getting lauded by extremists on one side, encouraging the next crackpot), our world will get a whole lot worse.
I would be surprised if there are pardons for actual assassinations. But there may well be pardons or non-prosecutions for “reckless endangerment” and attempted murder and other things where someone maintains a plausible deniability.
It was very free with handing out pardons to people who invaded the nation's capital and attempted to do violence to its governing body. So yes, it seems quite likely the the Trump administration will something like that in the future, as it already has in the past.
I'm not here to judge. I understand that they have a narrative to maintain, I don't blame them for looking out for their own interests. I was just hoping to get some historical context or insider information so that I could figure out how fast everything is moving.
I've heard of him, but it's ludicrous to call him an ACX hero. He's a MAGA influencer-journalist, whose primary note in my memory is 'unlike most influencer-journalists, sometimes does actual journalism.'
Ah okay, I guess his name has indeed flitted across my eyeballs at some stage.
I don't blame myself for not remembering it, because I just read thirty seconds ago the sentence "the plagiarism was discovered by Chris Rufo and Blah Blah" and I've already forgotten who Blah Blah was.
He was scapegoating trans people, who are not (in actual fact) responsible for any significant degree of mass shootings.
But hey, if we're going to play that game, reality also has a well-known misandrist bias and an enormous one at that. Can we scapegoat men for mass shootings, or is it only allowed of demographic groups that you dislike?
Since you consider acknowledging facts to be "scapegoating," sure. Notice how everyone's assuming the shooter is a man.* I'd bet the investigators are even doing "gender profiling," which nobody ever has a problem with.
Do you not understand what the words "scapegoating" and "profiling" signify? Or are you simply confused about how to properly apply conditional probabilities to real-life situations?
If it's the latter, while I'm no longer an educator by profession, I'd gladly offer you a brief primer as a free public service.
Not the guy you're replying to, but anyone who doesn't explicitly understand the enormous male-bias in (especially violent) crime has a terrible map of the problems in criminal justice. If prisons were not predominantly filled by men, that would be strong evidence for an absurdly strong pro-male bias in our criminal justice system.
Yes, men are among the most most overrepresented sizeable demographic group among criminals in the US, committing 90%+ of violent crimes despite being just 49% of the population.
And you know what? As a man, this doesn't bother me at all. I feel neither guilt nor shame about it. And it certainly doesn't bother or offend me when someone points out these crime statistics -- they're facts of life!
So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics.
"So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics. "
I hope you'll pardon me for asking, but do you *actually* not know why? Like, is this genuinely something about human nature which puzzles you? Or is this just a rhetorical flourish to try to paint them as irrational?
In either case you really *ought* to be aware that it isn't *only*--indeed, often not even *primarily*--members of those groups that take such observations amiss.
As for the why, human communication has this frustrating tendency to include not only the overt words spoken or written, but sneaky little things like context and subtext. I guarantee you, for example, that an academic conference on criminology can discuss demographic breakdowns of crime trends fully and honestly without drawing even a fraction of the ire that some dude with a Sunglasses-and-MAGA-hat profile pic will draw if he Tweets out one or two *specific* statistics isolated from wider context. Because most people can model others well enough to pretty accurately guess why both the academics and the hat-and-sunglasses-guy are doing what they do: it's usually not the same motive.
> Kirk was answering a question about transgender mass shootings in the United States of America before he was shot dead. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked Kirk, according to a CNN report.
> To this, Charlie Kirk responded, "Too many". The same audience member informed Kirk that the number is five, and proceeded to ask if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in the US over the last 10 years. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
Hang on. Discussions about mass shootings do actually need to distinguish between gang violence and spree shootings, since most things you'd do to decrease one of them would have little impact on the other.
>The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
OK, and? Two gangs shooting at each other often technically count as mass shootings, depending on how many get hit, but they're not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "mass shootings", making it quite reasonable to clarify whether they're being included in the numbers.
You're familiar with the issue and know what's going on, and so you know that people who take the social issue of mass shootings seriously, like the Washington Post and Mother Jones, explicitly exempt gang shooting from their mass shooting statistics.
But you're talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on. Someone gave them a talking point -- talking about gang violence is racist -- and that's all they know.
I'm going to respond with respect equal to the respect you have shown me:
Are you aware that all categories of 'mass shootings' involve guns?
I know I'm probably <<talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on>>, but really *every* classification of gun-related death not-conducted-in-the-line-of-duty: domestic violence, felony-related, unintentional, argumentative, suicide, random mass shooting, gang-related, (and others, depending on the classification system), all of them:
*are 100% caused by guns*.
And did you know that 100% of these events could have been prevented if the gun was, say, instead, a banana?
And did you know that some [crazy] people think that *all* such gun-related incidents are tragedies? And preventable? (meaning that even "gang-related" gun-deaths are preventable tragedies?)
Charlies Kirk's "argument", if it can even be called that, amounts to "yeah, but 'those mass-shootings' are nothing compared to those 'other mass-shootings'.
This argument only means *anything* if those 'other mass-shootings' are somehow "less" or "don't count". And why would that be?
Oh yes: because of a decades-long narrative popular on "certain 24 hour news networks":
- "democrats just can't control their cities"
- "certain types of people in those cities can't control themselves"
To most people I know, these are *not* less. The lives lost in "gang-related's" are no less valuable than Charlie Kirk's own life, which was tragically cut short.
A crackdown on what? Guns? They don't want to crackdown on guns.
It makes sense to talk about a crackdown in the context of a career criminal randomly stabbing someone on the subway. You can just increase violent crime sentences and arrest people for fare evasion. Are they going to go after snipers? I guess that sucks for the two people nationwide who will get arrested for open carrying on rooftops.
Very solid. Controlling precedent is in Brandenburg v. Ohio and has been approvingly cited by the current court on several occasions. Calls for violence are only unprotected if it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
The word "imminent" here is one of the primary distinguishers of US protections vs. most other western places. For instance, take a clear hypothetical example of incitement; a tweet that says "Everyone should punch Nazis. If you're not punching Nazis, you should examine yourself and root out your cowardice. Nazis like John Smith deserve to die, and killing them is the only way we can prevent another Holocaust." Clear incitement to violence against John Smith, but it's not intended to be imminent; noone in the audience (as far as the tweeter knows) is near John and able to jump into immediate lawless action.
On the other hand, the exact same set of words would be unprotected if the person was demonstrating at John Smith's house, and John Smith had just walked up to some incredibly angry protestors when the speaker said this. That fulfils the imminence and likely to incite requirements.
A crackdown on whoever they want to crack down on. That's how Reichstag Fires work; it's not about punishing the perpetrators it's about exploiting it to increase your power.
A crackdown on leftist agitators. With enough unrest, the Trump administration can make the case that leftists are plotting against the US government, and use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against left-wing organizations and the protesters that will inevitably pop up. Right now the unrest still isn't bad enough to act as a pretext for that, but given that the military is already being deployed in some cities... it's only a matter of time until one of these confrontations turns violent.
Of course, whether this incident will even contribute to that depends on the identity and motives of the killer.
I checked and it will take 3.27 plus or minus 0.88 incidents.
I’m declining your invitation to speculate about whether Trump’s base is attached enough to him to take action and if they are what infuriating stuff they will say and what destructive acts they will engage in. Because know what engaging in that kind of discussions is? It’s a group event where we all wind each other up by making up stories about the dumb evil shit his base might do. It’s dumb and destructive. It’s a way of being part of the problem.
Look, we don't need to moralize it. Whether or not you see the administration's actions as justified, it would be nice to have some information that could be used to predict their actions, whether that's the current social currents in the US, or previous instances of political instability in other countries.
There's nothing wrong with seeking information. But that's not what you sound like you're asking for. You sound like "hey, guys, whaddya think those Maga fuckers are gonna do in response? Any really bad shit? What kinda shit you picturing those assholes doing? Think they might shoot a prominent leftist? Who they gonna go for, huh?".
If you want to know whether anyone can think of a predictor of whether this shooting will lead to violence by Trump's base, ask that. There probably are predictors, and somebody might well know what they are. Seems to me those things are pretty hard to predict. But there might be some index having to do with extremity of expressed anger and references to violence on social media platforms -- some baseline that's been established,some measures of how far above baseline we are.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. I have nothing against the right, and they're free to do whatever the hell they want. However, it's still going to be very disruptive to my life if and when the administration decides to make its move, and I would like to prepare for that if possible, mentally if nothing else.
Is the assumption you think I'm making that you have something against the right? Actually, I did come away thinking you have something against the right. That was not an assumption on my part, but a reasonable conclusion given what you said. However, your having something against the right had nothing to do with what I was objecting to. As a matter of fact, *I* have something against Trump's supporters.
What I was objecting to was not what side you were on, but the nature of your question, which seemed to me like not to be a genuine request for information and opinion, but an invitation for people to spout anxious and angry fantasies about what's going to happen next. It was an inflammatory remark, not a genuine question. I mean, think about it. You ask "how many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown?" Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown? And what counts as an "incident"? And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be? Trump forbids any assembly with more than 10 Democrats in the crowd? He goes on TV and twists off the heads of 13 random people who voted against him? He tells his base to bring guns to all future events where someone on the right is speaking?
Point is, your question is not a real question. It's an invitation to get scared and angry as a group, and fantasize. About the only thing I am sure of about the mess the country is in is that way too many people are spending time in that angry, scared space fantasizing about "them". About the other side.
Indeed. If I were a moustache twirling evil overlord and trying to amass power in today's era, I could add a new strategy to my playbook: pay someone to do something despicable to the other side, while stoking my own side to prepare retaliation for what I'm suggesting the other side's retaliation will be.
> Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown?
Well yeah, kinda. This obviously isn't the first time something like this has happened, and maybe someone more in tune with right wing social circles could give us a heads up on what the mood is like there.
> And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be?
He's already discussed using the Insurrection Act to quell protests. It's not exactly a stretch for him to use it for its other purposes, especially seeing as he just stated that he's going to go after organizations that funded or supported political violence, right after saying that left-wing rhetoric was entirely responsible for the violence. https://www.foxnews.com/video/6379075859112
Maybe you should at least be a little concerned? This really isn't buisness as usual. Political and cultural tensions are extremely high, Trump has shown zero qualms about being associated with authoritarianism, and the Republican party and military are seemingly very loyal to him. Regardless of your political affiliation, things are going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while.
That's not what I'm picking up from the tone of your original comment.
I dunno, I feel like there's some people out there who fantasise about getting oppressed. Maybe they think that being oppressed will give their lives more meaning, give it some narrative shape like a movie.
Yeah, I know, Gunflint. But I did start with a civil post where I didn't do that, but just explained why objected to his post -- how I saw as an invite for us all to play ain't-it-awful. The guy didn't get it, and I got angry quicker than usual because I, like everyone else, was upset by the Kirk shooting, and I saw his post as a continuation of the same process that led to the assassination. So somebody kills a guy on the right, presumably because they think he's going to hurt the *good* people, the *real* people --you know, **us**. So now a guy comes on here and invites us all to speculate on what the farr ight is going to do to **us**. He is fostering the development of a hate and anger, us and them, storm system that is the same kind of mental storm system that led to the shooting.
It is quite true that I am mean to people on here that seem to me to have ugly and destructive agendas. My meanness isn't made out of cruel remarks about their intellect or ethics, though, but out of my objections to their particular agendas. I try to present them in a way that makes the person see how they look to me. I do not think that's wrong to do, and don't particularly bad about doing it. I'm just not as nice as you are Gunflint.
National Guard deployments to cities quell riots, increased tempo of domestic spying by the feds (both legal and illegal), increased gun control, and restrictions on retail sales of dynamite.
Does anyone here have an opinion and/or experience with Hillsdale classical schools? My daughter will be starting school next year and there is one near us, so we're considering it.
Go to Hillsdale College? To clarify, I am looking at an elementary 'classical school' that is somehow affiliated to Hillsdale (not sure if it goes beyond using a curriculum created by them). I appreciate the offer.
Is there an official name for the effect when a person who is an actual famous expert in some area starts speaking complete bullshit about a different area, speaking with the same confidence and authority?
(My friend calls it "Bukovský syndrome" after https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Bukovsk%C3%BD a Slovak expert on *nutrition* who also became famous for spreading conspiracy theories about covid. People who believe his theories use the argument by authority "but he is a famous doctor" ignoring the part that his expertise in nutrition has little in common with epidemiology.)
Dunno. I want to call it Linus Pauling syndrome (Pauling had a Nobel prize in chemistry before becoming a public crusader for the ostensibly amazing benefits of eating huge amounts of vitamin C)
I call it the Freakonomics effect when the famous expert is an economist who is talking nonsense about a complex subject after doing a few analyses on a napkin, but I don't know of a good name for it. It is always good to see a Slovak getting recognition, even if it's for the excellence of their nonsense!
Oh, definitely. If you are good at making money, it means that you understand how the Real World™ works, which automatically makes you an expert on everything. /s
In Tyler Cowen's excellent interview with Dan Kahneman, there was this wonderful comment from Kahneman: The feeling of certainty is only weakly correlated with being right.
On the listener's side of things, it's a subcase of Authority Bias: the tendency to credit claims made by authority figures even when that authority figure's position, skills, and knowledge don't give them any particular advantage in making a true claim in that subject area.
It also feels kinda like a reversal of Gell-Mann Amnesia: instead of under-weighing times your source was wrong about other subjects, you are over-weighing times they were right about other subjects.
On the speaker's side, it's "Ne supra crepidam". The term is an abbreviated quote from Pliny the Elder. The full quote translates as "Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe", i.e. an admonition to limit your analysis and criticism to areas of your own expertise. I suppose you could call the failure mode the Crepidam Fallacy.
It's an authority bias problem for the speaker as well. If your previous ideas all turned out to be absolutely brilliant, then it's easy to assume that your new ideas are brilliant too -- after all, you're a genius.
I invented Special Relativity and General Relativity when nobody else was smart enough to, therefore my ideas for one world government are presumably just as clever.
I mean, it's fine to have opinions outside your main area of expertise, it's just important to recognize that you're not an expert there. Einstein's knowledge of physics didn't necessarily make his political opinions worthwhile.
Not to be confused with "Victorian Novel Disease", an unspecified chronic and often fatal ailment frequently that primarily afflicts pretty young women. Typical symptoms include fatigue, wasting, pale complexion, and the Incurable Cough of Death.
He's far from the worst example of it; the worst you can accuse him of (as far as I'm aware) is being too opinionated on matters that epistemologically aren't scientific at all.
There's a certain common trend with Nobel Prize winners going to much worse extremes. Like Luc Montagnier with AIDS denialism.
I have been asking people around why did the squad and deadlift kind of replaced traditional body building, and the answer I mostly found was this: people who are also active outside the gym, prefer this kind of functional strength.
Very interesting, because my opinion has always been that body-building is precisely for people like me who are entirely 100% inactive outside a gym, and this way we can "cheat".
Speaking only for myself, big lifts like the deadlift are more time-efficient and arguably better for everyday activity and injury prevention, also they are more fun IMO than doing a hundred focused exercises of a hundred annoying little muscles.
They .. haven’t? I’ve been a gym rat/bro for like 17 years now, the big 3 have always been core and revered foundational movements. Starting strength and 5x5 were perennial newbie program recommendations back then.
Not so much anymore, as bodybuilders have moved away from them in recent years, with “science based” lifters having various reasons for deprecating them.
1. Bodybuilders got too good at the game and look like weird muscle aliens now. Granted, they looked weird before, but I think it's gotten more pronounced. New bodybuilding categories like "classic" physique seem to be pushing back on this.
2. We got a lot better at quantifying exercise efficiency, and it turns out that compound lifts are a lot more efficient than cable machines.
I also would push back a bit on the dichotomy; most people who look muscular can deadlift/squat reasonably well, and most powerlifter types look pretty strong.
As far as I can tell, body-building is a supernormal stimulus, and there's conflation of looking strong, being strong, and being healthy. People can die of this.
There's two point of this. One is that bodybuilding-style training has a goal of looking strong, while powerlifting-style training has a goal of being strong. Each has a fair amount of carry-over to the other goal, but both are optimized for one goal over the other and it makes sense to choose one style of training over the other depending on what your priorities are.
The other is that bodybuilding-style training takes very heavy advantage of the faster recovery cycle enabled by steroid use. Powerlifting-style training is also enhanced by steroids, of course, but not by quite as much. The reason for this is that bodybuilders need both muscle bulk and muscle definition. You get the former by doing very large volumes of training (lots of sets and reps at medium weight, often spread across many different lifts working overlapping muscle groups) and the latter by dieting off as much subcutaneous fat as possible in weeks or months leading up to a competition. More volume means your body has to more training stress to recover from, and getting/keeping body fat low cuts into your body's capacity to recover from training in a way that builds or at least maintains muscle. Steroids are one of the most effective ways of mitigating that contradiction. Powerlifters can afford to be a little pudgy, and powerlifting-style training tends to have much less volume to recover from (heavy weights for a medium number of sets and reps, doing only a handful of "big lift" exercises), so they can get a lot further with non-steroid recovery strategies (cycling between light and heavy days, eating a calorie surplus, etc).
You can still do bodybuilding-style training successfully without steroids if your goals are reasonable for your health and genetics, but make sure the advice you're getting on training and recovery strategies is targeted for "natural" (non-steroid using) lifters, not "enhanced" (steroid using) ones. I suspect a significant part of powerlifting-style training becoming fashionable over bodybuilding-style training in recent decades is that when bodybuilding-style training was fashionable, there were a ton of bodybuilding training recommendations out there based on the training routines used by big-name competitive bodybuilders who totally used steroids but didn't admit to doing so at the time. If you try to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger's training routines from the 70s and aren't doing as much steroids as he was doing back then, you're not going to get great results.
I suspect writing good ones is a better test than solving them. My partner and I got Claude to vibecode a connections interface so I could get my partner to try that days puzzle from the Times that I did while he was out. Then we realized we could have Claude write up some puzzles for us to try. All of the various puzzles Claude wrote for us worked, but several of the categories were weak (sometimes it was a rare two word phrase for one of the purples, or a bit of a weak connection for some of the others, and usually no good misdirects).
Yes. Once they get ~90% success rate, the noise of being a few percent better or worse on any given trial outweighs the signal. Once that happens, you can’t reliably tell which models are better or worse.
Yes, of a benchmark, saturation means that it has ceased to be able to distinguish between the highest tier of models because they all perform so close to perfectly.
This came up in my google searches, claims that autism is (mostly) caused by childhood exposure to acetaminophen.
I don't have the experience to evaluate this. The abstract reads like political post but the rest of it seems normal. The studies it cites all seem reasonable but I don't know how cherry-picked they are.
The latest and largest-n study has a strong case that acetaminophen doesn’t cause autism https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38592388/ . Previous studies have found weak effects of acetaminophen on autism - certainly not responsible for most cases. The more recent and larger one found even those results to be a result of familial confounding and they disappeared when using a sibling-comparison design.
The thing is, the evidence that tylenol increases the chance of autism is pretty good. However, some of the increase in autism diagnosis is undoubtedly due to changed diagnostic criteria. I'm a psychologist, and actually lived through the change in what fraction of people are diagnosed as autistic. It really was a dramatic change -- the term was being applied to people that *nobody* 5 years prior would have described as autistic. So the tylenol-autism correlation gets a huge, undeserved boost from the change in diagnostic criteria. Meanwhile, afaik the evidence for vaxes increasing the risk of autism is not good, and in any case measles, mumps etc. can cause not only severe illness and death but also lifelong disabilities. Even if our standard childhood vaxes do slightly increase the risk of autism (or heart abnormalities or whatnot) I'll bet the increase is far less than the risk of the illnesses they prevent.
I wrote a long answer to this same question on the most recent hidden open thread. You can find it with CMD-F. “Tylenol”. If you can’t access that let me know and I’ll copy-paste it here.
Scott wrote about the risks of tylenol in pregnancy in his piece "Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much). I just looked it up and reread it for a friend. Also read the summary of tylenol studies he cites: In Nature Reviews Endocrinology, Consensus Statement: Paracetamol Use In Pregnancy - A Call For Precautionary Action, by ninety-one leading scientists. Based on that, seems to me that it's likely but not certain that tylenol use during pregnancy actually does increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Just looked up studies' estimates of how much it increases the risk, and average estimate is that it increases it by about 20%. So if the risk of ASD for a baby whose mother did not use tylenol in pregnancy was 2%, it would be 2.4% for babies whose mother did use tylenol. This is nothing to sniff at, but is far too small to account for the very large increase in autism diagnoses in the last 30 years. (By the way, we don't really have any direct measure of what % of kids whose mothers took no tylenol get a ASD diagnosis, because most pregnant women take it.)
A lot of the apparent increase is due to a change in the diagnostic criteria for autism, especially the inclusion in ASD of people with Aspergers' (smart, introverted, a bit odd) in the diagnosis. Also there was legislation in the last 30 yrs. that allowed kids with an autism diagnosis to get various services in schools, and because of that many professionals became more liberal in giving an ASD diagnosis in order for the kid to get the benefit of of the school services.
One other relevant factor: RFK fucking sux.
(again, not my comment, didn't want to bother with block quotes)
Here's a follow-up comment I (author of above) made later in the thread:
Tylenol's hardly the smoking gun. Seems possible to me that changed criteria account for the rest of the increase in autism diagnoses, but also possible there are some other factors. But the diagnostic criteria change was huge. I was present for it. There was an era when I kept being startled by people talking about patients or civilians I knew as "autistic" and "autistic specturm" and I'd think *what? he's eccentric and uncomfortable around people, but to call it autism is way overstating it.*. I'm still skeptical about the broadened version of the diagnosis. Seems like pretty much anyone who doesn't easily fit into another diagnosis gets called autistic these days.
On a side note, I don't really know how the criteria for ASD are evaluated in practice by clinicians, but my impression from reading the formal guidelines was that what you're saying is not the whole picture. I never underwent a formal diagnosis for ASD, but in my own assessment (still, I did spent a substantial amount of time thinking about it and reconstructing my early childhood history), I quite clearly satisfy the DSM-IV criteria for Asperger's spectrum disorder, but it's likely I wouldn't meet the DSM-V criteria for ASD unless the psychologist was willing to stretch them somewhat.
I created a plug-and-play "Human Inference Engine." It's a probabilistic directed acyclic graph (DAG) tool that allows you to toggle between a low friction 'Bayes lite' mode and a rigorous 'Bayes heavy' mode. I'd love some feedback. I've built several example graphs from forensic investigation, to policy analysis, to DnD campaigns. It's desktop only (Chrome/Edge): https://rubesilverberg.github.io/beliefgraph3/
Hobbs idea that out pre-history ancestors lived lives that were short, brutish and mean is unscientific, illogical and irrational.
Its unscientific because it takes 17 years of childhood before a homo sapiens brain is developed enough to be considered a young adult, 21 years before being considered a peer by other adults. How could our brains have evolved this way unless children were having long and stable childhoods?
It is illogical to believe that children given childhoods that were short, brutish and mean could be other than physically, emotionally and intellectually stunted, where would they learn emotional intelligence required to work together to achieve common goals?
It is irrational to ignore the fact that the only reason to evolve a brain capable of human consciousness, intelligence and the ability to think deep and complex thoughts is because they were conscious, intelligent and thinking deep and complex thoughts. Their brains were not just spare capacity waiting for us to find a use for it, that is not how evolution works.
Small groups with stone tools, no plan or central planner, purely through organic growth, discovered the world long before we did, they were the ultimate success story and invasive species. For 300,000 years or 15,000 generations the Southern tip of Africa has been occupied by Homo Sapiens, a few bones, stones and paintings is all we have found of their presence, that is what is called a sustainable lifestyle. If each generation had left just one change to the environment the cumulative results would have made the place unliveable.
Also your reasoning is confusing to me. People are intelligent because it helps them survive. This is true in peaceful societies as well as violent ones, societies with abundance and scarcity, societies with low and high life expectancy alike.
Not to pick on you too hard but I think you're demonstrating a common failure mode in this community - you've reasoned out a position in the abstract and think the converse is therefore "irrational" (and you could maybe critique Hobbes for doing much the same), but in practice there's lots of detailed information out there that you could examine to learn the truth, and you don't seem to have done so.
Timothy M, 17 and 21 may be modern innovations but the Homo Sapiens brain is not. Body development in childhood slowed down to match brain development and brains need 17 years of childhood to develop.
Your reasoning confuses me, you use a study about peasants to debate about hunter gatherers, like comparing peasants to bankers, irrational.
I enjoyed your response and hope we have many more but I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
You say this like the designers of the human race told you so. But there aren't any.
A human brain might need 17 years of development for having 17 years of development, but not to be ready for what it is supposed to do then -- because it's not supposed to to anything then! It's not designed.
Furthermore the development of an organism depents on its environment. 17 year olds certainly were diffent then then they are now.
It is true that I compared agrarians to hunter-gatherers, on the premise that people didn't transition from having carefree childhoods for 17+ years to being child laborers. However, it is also understood that ancient hunter-gatherers had short lifespans and violence was relatively common.
Where do you come up with this "17 years" number? My understanding from undergraduate psych classes is that there's still pretty significant brain development from 18-30 compared to later time periods.
> I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
This is what I was talking about. People can and should question "assumptions" but if you want to question whether prehistoric society sucked you should do so by examining the evidence, not by sitting alone thinking about it and concluding it must "obviously" be wrong. History and anthropology and such have assembled large bodies of research that can meaningfully address these questions far better than abstract intuitions. Go look at that work. Don't just treat it as an "assumption" you can waive away.
Timothy M, a carefree childhood would poorly prepare someone for a life that is anything but carefree. When culture changed slowly if at all good parenting skills mean being the type of person you want your children to become in a community you want them to grow up in with a sustainable culture that keeps everything together.
50 Years ago near the town of Swakopmund a San woman explained to me their view of history. For the next 30 years I lived cheek by jowl with their descendants, for a while I had a Sangoma (herbalist/witchdoctor) as a partner. Their lifestyle is an adaptation to modern life, nothing like the pre farming era. I compare the views of anthropologists with the San and the San version seems more compelling.
Okay, so your general point is that you think the perspective of a single hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa is more compelling than the aggregate work of the world's anthropologists, and you therefore feel comfortable disregarding all of their work.
Timothy M, the San people belong to a confederation of tribes generally known as the San or Bushman.
Names escape me, but the woman anthropologist who claimed we were semiaquatic and many others have influenced me, the synchronized menstruation woman had something useful to say, if as yet unproven.
It would be as foolish to disregard all anthropologists as it would be to discard all San and other native folklore.
You have to remember that Hobbes was writing two centuries before a meaningful theory of evolution, and long before any sort of systematic anthropology aimed at understanding comparative theories of how humans work in different social structures. The first theories in an area are always wrong (and the ones several centuries down the line are still wrong, but more subtly so).
He’s basically a contemporary of Newton and Harvey (the guy who used some calculations to convince people that blood recirculates through the body every day, rather than being generated and sent out from the heart and then absorbed by other organs). You can see that the human sciences were much less developed at this time.
Kenny Easwaran, I agree that for his time Hobbes was an important thinker, my issue is that we have not moved on, most people still think early humans lived short horrible lives, a view I disagree with.
Oh yeah, if there are people who still think this way, they’re wrong. But your previous post was phrased as though it was saying *Hobbes* was irrational.
Kenny Easwaran, the temptation to ask Kimmi to turn my illegible writing into something more polished is at times overwhelming, laziness saves me from such impulses.
Robin Hanson's theory (not sure how well supported) is actually that we developed big brains and emotional intelligence in order to navigate social rivalries/deadly competition from other humans. Thinking deep complex thoughts was a mere side effect. Still a Hobbesian scenario. I think if you look at modern hunter gatherers, you'll find this isn't too far off the mark. EG., native Americans certainly weren't living lives of idyllic peace and harmony before Europeans showed up. Ditto for New Guinea highlanders.
Gordon Tremeshko, most of my experience is with the San communities of Southern Africa. Broadly speaking they view the time before agriculture as living as a part of nature and the time after as living apart from nature. They think we are destroying ourselves and have to be forced by the government to participate by sending their kids to school etc.
Life was very short for some, and reasonably long (albeit not as much or as commonly as now) for the rest. Half of everyone died before the age of 6, but once you did pass that hurdle, you had better odds.
At least that's in agricultural civilisation. I wouldn't be surprised if odds were a bit better in hunter-gatherers since a lot of those deaths are disease and a lot of disease can only thrive in very high density populations, and in fact several of the worst (smallpox, TB, plague) were one way or another connected to farming or to hygienic conditions that were only a problem in agricultural civilisation.
Still, obviously from our viewpoint those lives would kinda suck. But I don't expect that those living them felt miserable all the time, or like they had nothing to enjoy.
Hobbes is precisely correct. In state of nature, life is solitary (by definition), short (by direct consequence of being solitary) and brutish (similarly).
That's why man is never found naturally in a state of nature but in a state of law.
You're probably correct that Hobbes's description of life in a state of nature is somewhere between overstated and wrong, but your arguments are so poor that you might convince a reader that he was actually completely right.
The "sustainable lifestyle" you laud is no great achievement: most animals leave little trace of themselves that can be seen hundreds of years later. The worms underfoot do even better, leaving not even bones.
About evolution, you seem to be arguing entirely from personal incredulity. Runaway sexual selection, for example, is one mechanism by which extravagant and otherwise useless traits can evolve and persist.
The facts you have brought to bear are consistent with a species whose lives ARE "short, brutish and mean" (not Hobbes's actual quote but fine): r-strategists whose males form small groups and fight together, perhaps with stone tools, against rival groups to maintain large harems, the majority of females dying from the stresses of childbirth after a few breeding cycles, and the males dying either in combat against a younger foe, or when unable to sustain the caloric requirements of their ever-growing brains.
Shankar Sivarajan, Most animals do not have the Homo Sapiens brain requiring 20% of calories consumed, there must be a return on investment. If you do not think that the return was intelligence could you please explain what you think the return was?
I agree my debating skills are rusty, engaging with skilled debaters will improve them.
If harems were the norm then the local gene pool would shrink forcing inbreeding, if females died after a few "breeding cycles" then who raised the kids? Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
> Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
Yes, and we know this from genetic assays of y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA. Historically, 80% of women had descendants for between 20-40% of men having descendants, over many tens of thousands of years.
See graph here (in the graph, the yellow line, which at "2" would be 80/40, and at "4" would be 80/20):
This famously peaked at 17 women for every 1 man, a statistic you'll sometimes see trotted out, which happened in the middle of the Yamnaya expansion and y-chromosome-replacement of everyone else (and it tops out at around "12" on this particular graph because the timeslice of when the 17-1 ratio happened is too short to be captured on the x axis of this graph).
On harems, a full 87% of HG societies have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing polygamy *in modern times,* and given the headline 80/40 stat, it was likely to have been an even bigger factor in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptiveness).
At the larger level, inbreeding is avoided by groupings at different levels. H Sap HG's tended to settle and migrate in groups of 30-100 individuals (larger group sizes than Neanderthals and other hominins, and part of why we wiped them out ultimately), but those groups generally rolled up to larger tribes of other groups that size, and that larger group shared your language and cultural practices.
Thus, when you outmigrate, you don't need to worry about learning a new language or culture, as you're still outmigrating among "your people."
Performative Bafflement, well done, I have just spent an hour or two on your blog and am impressed with that as much as I am with your comment. You certainly knocked the wind out of my sails.
Every small somewhat isolated community I have been interested in had one thing in common and that was the dread of inbreeding. I would go so far as to say that much of their social structure evolved to manage this risk.
I have little to no understanding of the science behind the claim though do not doubt it was made in good faith
I have also read science that claims our pre-historic ancestors were less inbred than modern populations.
Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
Any insight you may have regarding this will be much appreciated.
> Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
As you've probably guessed, this is a recurring problem for all animals, not just H Sap, and indeed, many behaviors are seemingly tailored around avoiding inbreeding depression.
In chimps (at least pan troglodytes), this is achieved by females migrating to new groups when they are reaching reproductive age. This minimizes the chances of inbreeding, and a similar strategy is followed by many animals, either with males or females doing the migrating.
Humans, as you might guess, handle this a little differently. Historically in agricultural societies we mostly practiced patrilocality - the men stay put, sons are heirs, and the women come and live with the man's family. This is also what chimps do, so case closed, right?
This kind of threw off anthropologists re hunter gatherers for a long time, because many assumed HG did patrilocality from agriculturalists and chimps. It took Sara Hrdy and Hill et al looking into alloparenting practices to figure out that HG's were a different picture.
My understanding from Sarah Hrdy and Hill et al is that it's not actually true for hunter gatherers, and wasn't likely true in the EEA. Humans uniquely tend to do a lot of mixing of patrilocality and matrilocality, and it changes a lot based on how young your most recent child is and other factors, because matrilineal alloparenting is extremely common and a big deal for child survival. And wrapped up in this is us aging better and grandmas being harder working than moms in terms of hours foraging etc. In other words, it was a strong selective pressure and correspondingly had to be a big part of how our ancestors located themselves in the EEA.
Performative Bafflement, for pre-history mothers finding an unrelated mate for their offspring required an in-depth knowledge of her own bloodline, that of her mate and both parents of any prospective match.
It was like throwing 4 stones in the gene pool, how the ripples cancelled or amplified each other decided whether the match was safe or not.
This was humanities first great math challenge, which they passed.
They would have to know, well enough, far more people than the Dunbar number of 150 suggests, that is just an extended family. Even 10x that number is not enough to keep a local gene pool healthy. The majority of people they knew would have been too closely related to breed with.
The abundance of predators rules out regular get togethers, that would create a migratory type situation for predators to exploit.
So even if they were 100% monogamous it is a challenge to understand their mating customs. If, as your cited study claims, most males died without reproducing then it is harder still to see how for millions of years we avoided consanguinity.
A further confounding factor is that at least for the time we were confined to a few regions of Africa, the gene pool had to be small and shallow in contrast with the present day vast and deep gene pool, thus amplifying the risk.
Yug Gnirob, Mosquitos do not have a Homo Sapiens brain in their head requiring 20% of their energy intake, there has to be rent paid, this is basic evolutionary theory. The pay off for the extra calories going to the brain was increased intelligence. Why would the most intelligent creature on the planet, by far, be living unintelligent lives?
I challenge your understanding of basic evolutionary theory. A peacock's tail requires a large chunk of their resources, makes it harder to evade predators, etc. In what way is its rent actually paid?
Byrel Mitchell, from the peahens perspective if the peacock can survive with such an extravagant display then the offspring he fathers should also survive. The rent paid for the calories diverted to his tail is increased access to the hens.
Chimps use 10% of calories to power their brain, Homo Sapiens use 20%. Our mental capacity over that of chimps is the rent paid by those extra 10% of calories.
The Giraffe pays rent for its long neck and legs by having access to foliage inaccessible to others.
Yug Gnirob, The first task of intelligence is survival, greater intelligence enhances our ability to eliminate or minimize risk and the best way to do this is to live a sustainable lifestyle. 150,000 Generations proves their lifestyle was sustainable. The Homo Sapiens brain evolved for consciousness, intelligence and deep thought, they were intelligent.
That's objectively wrong. The first task of human intelligence is successful reproduction of a gene line, individual personal survival is secondary. That's why childhood mortality was so high for so long.
Victor, I agree, the first law of nature is procreation, in our species that effectively means "how are the grandchildren doing?"
This is difficult to achieve if you do not first survive long enough to at least have kids. In order to procreate you first have to survive.
To be honest I am not sure about the high child mortality thing. In any species suffering high child mortality we would expect to see their reproductive cycle shortening, instead our reproductive cycle got slower and slower, frailer babies needing more development post partum, the burden of childcare growing ever heavier.
It is hard to spot the evolutionary advantage in having less ability to reproduce if the problem is high child mortality.
I would bother to argue whatever underlying assumptions you're making, but I don't think you actually have any. You're just slapping words together and trying to pretend it's an argument.
"We know specific details about modern hunter-gatherer lifespan from a few well-studied groups: the !Kung, Aché, Agta, Hadza, and Hiwi (Gurven and Kaplan 2007). Work on these groups show that approximately 60% of hunter-gatherer children live to age 15. Of those who reach 15, around 60–80% of them will live to age 45. If an individual lives to age 45, then on average they will live for approximately two more decades."
"By the 1960s, the focus on the hunter-gatherers of East and Southern Africa coincided with the rise of Rousseauism in anthropology. The Kalahari bushmen, for example, were celebrated as the “harmless people.”2 However, after the initial spate of enthusiasm for the peaceful children of the earth, their chief researcher, the Rousseauan Richard Lee,3, 4 discovered that before the imposition of state authority, these people had more than four times the 1990 homicide rate in the United States, which was by far the highest in the developed world. Similarly, in titles such as Never in Anger, the Inuit of mid-Arctic Canada, one of the sparsest populations on earth, were celebrated as being peaceful.5 However, it was later revealed that their rate of violent mortality was ten times higher than the United States' 1990 rate.6:145,7"
For more on this, the seminal book seems to be "War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley.
Collisteru, with respect you are using internally displaced people, refugees under stress from being displaced, as an example. The San people occupied all the best places to raise a family along the coast of Southern Africa. Then they were forced to live in the Kalahari desert by Bantu tribes and white settlers. To judge the preceding 15,000 generations by how well the last few generations survived their near extermination by us is poor science.
You raise a very good point that contact with settlers could affect these numbers. The contact problem is a fundamental difficulty in assessing anything about hunter-gatherer societies.
That being said, the scientific consensus is that hunter-gatherer violence precedes state contact. From the paper by Azar Gat I cited earlier, we read:
"Proponents of the tribal-zone theory remained vague about whether contact with state civilizations actually introduced or “invented” warfare among previously nonbelligerent natives or, instead, merely intensified long-existing patterns of warfare. The former was strongly implied and was the undertone or subtext of their argument. At the same time, however, the majority of these scholars in fact recognized, in line with all other research, that warfare in all the above areas had been very old and had long predated contact with states.10, 11, 13 Fortified settlements were known to have been archeologically recorded in the American Northwest, for example, for no less than four thousand years.9, 14-20 Body armor made of hide or wood, an unmistakably specialized fighting device, was known to have been extensively used by the natives before the European arrival. Indeed, its use actually declined after contact because it was useless under musket fire.18,20-26 Thus, given that most of the tribal-zone proponents (with rare exceptions12) were well aware of the evidence of extensive and vicious warfare before contact with states or civilizations, their point was difficult to rationalize."
I think this article is paywalled so if you want to read more citations 10, 11, and 13 are:
10 Ferguson RB. 1992. A savage encounter: western contact and the Yanomami war complex. In: RB Ferguson, N Whitehead, editors. War in the tribal zone. Santa Fe: School of American Research. p 199–227.
11 Ferguson RB. 1995. Yanomami warfare. Santa Fe: School of American Research.
13 Whitehead N. 1990. The snake warriors — sons of the Tiger's Teeth: a descriptive analysis of Carib warfare, ca. 1500–1820. In: J Haas, editor. The anthropology of war. New York: Cambridge University Press. p 146–170.
Collisteru ,Anthropology has a huge patriarchal bias towards man the hunter. Our gut evolved to digest the food most accessible to us which was 80% plant based, plants were 4 times more important to our survival than hunting. Women and children made up the bulk of our workforce and are well adapted to gathering.
Hunting scenes on cave walls or stately homes are there because they are more photogenic than fish traps or potting sheds but neither group fed the tribe by hunting. We find far more grinding stones for grain than we do spear points, hunter gatherers should be changed to gatherer trappers. You need a big brain to trap and only a small one to hunt.
Sorry about the rant, Anthropologists find what they expect to find.
Villiam, good point. If you put a wild, enraged male Chimpanzee in a cage with 5 MMA fighters it would kill them. It is far stronger and faster with a bite that can pierce skulls, one swipe with its claw would rip half your face off. We used to have a similar body but over time became weak, slow and puny. According to evolutionary theory this could not have happened if we were under threat from predators or each other..
The correction’s not really relevant to the points you’re making, but Hobbs’ original formulation is so gorgeously grim and sounds so magnificent that I think we should honor and preserve it.
Wanda Tinsaky, survival of the fittest in our species is 100% a test of parenting skills on a personal and community level, the rest is just minutia. For 7 million years, give or take, the communities who made the best job of raising the next generation dominated the gene pool. There is no possible evolutionary advantage to having poor parenting skills.
Have you ever tried treating a 12 year old like an adult?
You are completely ignoring the fact that a big reason why we have such long childhoods is that life has gotten very very complicated. In order to be a functional member of society you need more than basic physical and mental development, you need a lot of knowledge that will allow you to work, pay your taxes, do paperwork, vote, drive, and generally speaking not be a dysfunctional misfit that's easily taken advantage of.
None of which was necessary to a hunter gatherer. Children would travel and work next to their parents as soon as they could stand. They would learn on the go about what they needed to learn (how to hunt, what herbs were good and what poisonous etc) and they would be pretty much ready for adult life quite earlier than us because that life would be significantly more straightforward.
Simone, I disagree. Childhood body development slowed down to match our slowly developing brain long before the modern era. Their culture was no less complicated than our own, each plant, river and mountain, everything had its own name and spirit. Living in harmony with the spirit world (animism) was the key to their sustainable lifestyle.
Any community who does not give their children a long stable childhood will be out-competed by another that does.
If your argument is about Adderall and other ADHD medication, consider:
* this seems to be mainly a US thing, maybe UK to some extent, but most countries aren't as big on it
* people in the past drugged up kids too, on top of beating them. I remember a story told to me that apparently some grand-grand-... of mine would give to their children a juice the made that would calm them down when they were fussy. What was it made from? Poppies.
That's a slightly odd non-sequitur about ADHD and child medication.
I believe the other poster was simply trying to point out that life was more complicated than you give it credit for back in the days of hunting and gathering. The natural world is very complex and rather unforgiving. It's easy to lose track of that if you are not routinely exposed to it's challenges.
We have big brains *now* because we needed big brains back *then*.
The process of childhood was - and is - long and slow because that was what was required by earlier humans in order to survive best.
Yes, and it works. Of course, you have to be strategic about it. Parenting style should match the social environment it occurs in. "Adolescence" is a modern cultural construct, but a useful one in a post-industrial society. Pointless and wasteful in a social context in which the average lifespan is somewhere in the 30's. That does not imply, of course, that hunter-gatherer communities treated 12 year olds exactly the same as someone in their 20's.
"Like an adult" does not have a universal meaning across times and cultures, and neither does "poor parenting skills." Can you trust a 12 year old to drive a car? No. But if you're in an ancient society with no cars and your main concern is "can I trust them to do their share of the farm work?", you might decide they're an adult sooner. It depends on what your society needs to survive.
Also, if evolution is only about good parenting, how did the practice of corporal punishment somehow survive all the way to the present day? One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Beleester, good parenting skills enable the child to face life challenges.
Corporal punishment, spare the rod and spoil the child, is still the norm in most of the human population. We think they are wrong and they think we are wrong. We think drugging children to get them through the school day is acceptable, others think it is beyond barbaric. I agree.
> One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Counterpoint: the negative of hitting a child is that it can be traumatic and create various forms of relationship strain. The positive is that it's a very straightforward way to create an association between Thing Not To Do and Bad Consequences, all subtlety be damned.
If you're in a society in which even seemingly small mistakes can be very costly (like, life or death costly) and violence is so widespread anyway that there's not much avoiding it, corporal punishment is also the primary form of justice, etc. then it may simply not make a lot of difference. Hitting a child is frowned upon today also because it's basically like saying "you don't need to understand why X is bad, you just need to submit to my power to enact violence on you" but that is only something we consider a negative today. In many societies of the past, "know your place and do not question your superiors" was actually considered a virtue.
Simone, I was beaten often by my teachers ( UK, born late 50s) all it taught me was violence towards other boys who pissed me off as I pissed off the teachers.
Today I would be drugged into compliance from about 7 years of age. That is a level of violence against the child far in excess of anything I endured.
Childraising skills vary. There was research on macaque monkeys. Some seemed to be much better mothers than others. Some were nurturing, some were harsh and neglectful, and the offspring of the harsh mothers did worse.
The Ship of Theseus idea has been nagging me for ages. It's simple in my mind, but I recently found out my view is more the cognitive science view, and not other views.
1. Interestingly, the question whether it's still the same ship hinges for most people on what's with it's parts. But how does one know a part of it is still the same, even if "it" is still in "its" original place?
Which brings me to ...
2. What about fields? Russell already kinda contemplated this, but a bit wrong, I think. If the world consists only of fields, and maybe only of one, then that field is the only physical thing that is ever, and always, the same thing, just changing in its properties. And among those properties is what "parts" or rather inseparable arbitrary sections of it appear to us as things, which they not for real are. They are only kinda waves, us included, of course.
I ever more suspect this is the case.
It would explain why things can and do interact. They don't. There are no things, there is only one thing, waving, and its waves are interfering.
Russell thought there are no physical things at all. But I mean, if anything changes, then there has to be at least one physical thing that is that what is changing there.
Lots of good replies to this, but I want to register a slightly dissenting opinion on the aptness of metaphors like football teams or marching bands.
To model a ship as one physical object is considerably more meaningful than to do so for those other examples: calculating the center of mass for a ship and then doing calculations with it yields meaningful predictions about its behavior; you can refer to it's location more or less unambiguously at any individual point in time, etc.
The same is not true for those other examples: you'd never think to calculate the center of mass of a football team, and if you did you wouldn't expect it to ever be useful; it's already unclear what the "location" of a marching band is when all the members go home for the night.
Which is to say, if you have a physical object that is well-summarized by some aggregate physical quantities, so long as you have objects at each time step for which those aggregate properties behave as you'd expect for a single physical object (e.g. the center of mass always follows a timelike path through spacetime, etc.), I think that's solid reason to regard each of those objects as "the same".
Of course, this tells you nothing about cases where those properties *aren't* satisfied, e.g. if your ship buds into two ships asexually and then you swap half of the timbers from the one daughter ship with those of the other.
Doing that for the players on the field is probably interesting; including benched players, coaches, not to mention the rest of the organization (trainers, doctors, general managers, minor league players, etc) probably much less so
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
I'm just reading the new biography of Maynard Keynes, and this reminds of some of the incredulity people felt as they moved away from the gold standard.
Ok. Here’s another example of why the components of an entity mostly don’t matter.
You visit a school. It has a marching band. You like it.
A few years later you go back. The band is still there but the original players have all graduated. You like the band but can’t help feeling this isn’t the Smalton High School band. You feel cheated.
Someone tells you that all the members of the Smalton High School Band were so enthused by playing in a band that they formed a band called The Graduates after they left the school.
(All of them. It’s my thought experiment.)
You go watch it. Possessed of an excellent memory and some photographs on your phone you conclude this has the same members as the Smalton High School band did the last time you were here. A misty tear comes to your eyes. Afterwards you congratulate them and say that they are the real Smalton High School band. They look at you funny.
*********************************
Where this breaks down I think is when the components are essential (John, Paul, Ringo and George) and often when there are a small number of components, like the ax problem. After all in the ax problem you can name the individual parts.
What matters to the continuity of an entity comprised of an accidental parts is not the parts but the role and propose. The teleology of the thing. The continuity of the thing.
Okay, that was a pretty funny collection of thought experiments.
I think the best resolution to the paradox is to ask what feature of continuity is the thing you actually care about. Taboo "same" and replace it with something more specific.
Theseus: "It's the same ship, because I still legally own it and it's still docked at my spot in the harbor if I want to go sailing."
Modern Greek Historian: "It's not the same, because I'm trying to study historical shipbuilding techniques and the modern replacements tell me nothing."
Athenian Navy: "It's the same ship so long as you didn't replace the keel, because we're trying to keep track of who owns suitable naval vessels and the keel is the hardest part to replace."
Persian Navy: "The physical material is actually completely irrelevant, because we just want to be able to copy the Athenian blueprints."
I've always considered this fundamentally a linguistic issue around how we use concepts like "sameness" and "identity" and what the rules are for whether to apply a label like "ship of Theseus" to a particular object. I assume there's some clever Wittgenstein-esque argument (whether it's been articulated or not) that neatly dissolves the paradox.
I agree it’s a lingustic issue when trying to negotiate a common stance among individuals, but inside the individual I consider it more an emotional issue. Their relation to the concept of the Ship, how it was formed, why it existed, etc… will drive their eventual stance around what they consider the real ship.
I think Wittgenstein's private language argument would dissolve the distinction you're making there. Whatever internal logic a person employs is isomorphic to a linguistic community's convergence on usage rules.
You're both kind of right. It mostly devolves to shared communal feelings about the object in question. If everyone you ever meet thinks you are the king, well...
Here’s my general reply to the ship of Theseus conundrum.
A billionaire who grew up with the great Manchester United soccer team from 1998*, decides to recreate that team, which is made of humans who play football of course, a decade or so later. He’s not buying the existing Manchester United club, or corporate entity, he’s hiring the players.
Though mostly retired, all agree (he pays well), and he hires Wembley stadium and sets up a game against some lower league team. This he says, while not the existing so called Manchester United team or club, is the real deal. This is what Manchester United was composed of and therefore what it is now. The other team are frauds.
Is he right?
* replace with some girdiron or other nonsense if you prefer.
Is that a reply to the conundrum or just another example of the same phenomenon of the meaning of the word "same" breaking down in weird edge cases?
All I really get from the Ship of Theseus is the idea that the meaning of the words we use to describe everyday life can break down in weird edge cases. This might blow the minds of teenagers or Ancient Greeks but I feel like there's not much more to it than that.
I think that the Manchester United team (I’m not talking about the legal entity which employs hundreds but the actual playing team) doesn’t depend on who is actually playing. So too with the ship of Theseus. As long as you accept that all of those players can be replaced and don’t take the entity “the Manchester United football team” in whole or in part with them then there’s no conundrum. So too with dismantling the ship of Theseus - the parts don’t matter.
It’s just easier for people to see this with football teams. I can do an example with high school marching bands if you want.
Sports teams seem like a different sort of entity. A group of players is Manchester United because the continuous legal entity known as the Manchester United Football Club (or whatever, I only understand real footy) says it is.
The club could swap out every single player at once and it would still be Manchester United.
I’m not talking about the legal entity. I’ve said that twice. I’m talking about the playing team. If it was the legal entity we could the dismiss the supposed paradox as just whoever owned the ship.
For firearms under US law, there is one specific component which is defined to be "the gun" and to which registration and transfer requirements attach. Depending on the style of the gun, this may be the frame (if the frame is a single piece) or the receiver or lower receiver (the part of the frame to which the firing mechanism attaches). If you keep everything else and replace the receiver, it's a new gun. Or of you keep the receiver and replace everything else, it's the same gun. I think this is a useful analogy for many Ship of Theseus-like questions.
For your example, I would say the club (as a legal entity) is the receiver. The club owns the trademarks, has players under contract, is party to whatever association the club has with its league, etc. Since your billionaire did not purchase or otherwise gain control of the club, his team is not Manchester United. Same way that the presence of nine players on the roster of the 1923 New York Yankees who had played for the 1919 or 1920 Boston Red Sox (Babe Ruth, Joe Bush, Waite Hoyt, Sam Jones, Herb Pennock, Wally Schang, Everett Scott, Mike McNally, and Ben Pascal) means that the Yankees of that era were the same team as the Red Sox.
For the classic George Washington's Axe version of the paradox, I'd say it's the axehead that is the receiver. Replacing the handle results in the same axe with a new handle, while replacing the head results in a new axe.
Not sure about the Ship of Theseus itself. For a modern or medieval ship of the European shipbuilding tradition, I'd probably call the keel the receiver, but I don't know enough about Mycenaean (?) shipbuilding techniques to confidently say the same of this particular ship.
Where the paradox continues to be interesting is if there's no clear single component to serve as the receiver, or where something used to be considered the receiver at one point in history but got replaced without people saying the thing as a whole changed identity. For example, when did the Roman Empire fall?
Was it at the beginning or end of the Crisis of the Third Century, when the institutional framework set up by Augustus ceased to function and was eventually permanently replaced with a new and fundamentally different constitution?
Was it when Christianity replaced the Roman religion, which could be dated either to Constantine I (when the process began) or the death of Julian the Apostate (when the last serious attempt to restore Paganism ended).
Was it when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD and established the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy? And if so, was the Roman Empire reestablished when Belisarius reconquered Rome for the Eastern Roman Empire in 536, or when Charlemagne was proclaimed Emperor in Rome in 800?
Was it during the reign of Heraclius in the early-to-mid 600s, when the Byzantine Empire was reduced to a rump of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire and Latin completed the process of falling into disuse as a language of politics and administration?
Was it when the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople in 1204? Or was the Latin Empire a restoration of the Eastern Roman Empire that had fallen six centuries previously? Was the Despotate of Epirus the Roman Empire the whole time the Latin Emperors were in Constantinople, or did they restore the Roman Empire when they reconquered Constantinople?
Was it when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453?
Or should the Ottomans and/or the Holy Roman Empire be considered continuations of the Roman Empire? And if so, did the Empire(s) end with them in 1919 and 1806 respectively, or was the mantle inherited by someone else, maybe the Republic of Turkey and the Austrian Empire?
The firearms one is a legal definition (and so is e.g. the VIN of cars). This is one possible answer for a philosophical question, but not the only possible one.
I like your example a lot, it plays better than pieces of wood.
My stance on the answer is again one of cognitive science, there is no answer out there, it’s inside the individual, and relates to what they hold dear.
Maybe his father bought him his first Man United scarf when he was 5, and the logo means more to him than the people playing for it. This person leans one way.
Maybe he was at the game in ‘88, and remembers the euphoria of the moment, interlaced with his general nostalgia of the past, and seeing those players together again is certainly “it” for him. This person leans the other way.
But the second person doesn’t believe that the Man United team has to be composed of the same players as it was then, surely? The continuity of the team doesn’t depend on specific players.
People often define introversion and extroversion in terms of energy, in particular whether you derive energy from, or expend energy on, social situations. Introverts can be sociable but socialising will reduce an introvert's energy so they need to programme in some alone time to recharge. Seems a useful rule of thumb and I use it myself.
But what exactly does energy mean in this context? Do introverts literally expend more joules? It's plausible that even a constant small level of stress throughout an evening would lead to physical symptoms that are less energy efficient than being relaxed. But how then is an extrovert gaining extra joules? Are endorphins triggering a more efficient use of existing energy stores?
Obviously we could be using the word in a more metaphorical way, in which case we may well ask how grounded is introversion/extroversion in reality and can it therefore be changed over time with CBT?
I agree with grumboid. I think most people who identify as introverts are actually neurotic, and feel drained by social interactions because of insecurity, social anxiety, concerns about judgement or how their "performance" is being received. There are real introverts too, but they're rare.
The definition you are using comes from, I believe, the MBTI personality test, which in turn was derived from Carl Jung's theory of personality. It has little empirical support. That doesn't mean that it can't be useful as a kind of rule of thumb, a quick non-scientific way to assess one's own feelings about interpersonal interaction, esp. in specific contexts.
Correct, I encountered the idea through a Meyers-Briggs test (INFJ here) although there is some dispute elsewhere in the thread about whether Meyers and Briggs used mental energy as a concept, but I'm pretty sure I remember lots of talk about energy in the test and other people who have had the same test say the same.
I am reasonably certain that "energy" in this case does not refer to calories consumed by the brain. It's that subjective feeling of being overwhelmed by something.
To my mind, the battery thing is a useful metaphor, but also in part something to hide behind, as it is better to say that to someone than "I can only tolerate you for half an hour".
At base, you are always talking about balancing the positives and the negatives, and introverts tend to get less of the positives.
Yes, exactly. I prefer it because it works all along the spectrum, and it encompasses all relevant areas (whereas colloquial understandings of introversion focus solely on the social sphere, and only on the "somewhat introverted" range of the spectrum).
People use all kinds of mental constructs to make excuses for things they don't want to do. I don't think this is an effective critique of the existence of introversion. We could do a converse argument by saying a lot of people use the cover of "extroversion" to justify being arrogant and self-centered. But kind, healthy extroverts are still a thing.
I'm an introvert, I like people quite a lot, I have long and deep friendships and have been married for a quarter century. I've spent a lot of time earlier in my life in all kinds of varied social situations and a lot of my behavior looked like extroversion at the time, but I was actually overriding natural preferences at some cost to my health. I prefer socializing one-on-one or in small groups where more substantial conversations are possible. I find large groups and chit chat to be draining.
I really do think some of this is genetic, maybe also related to variation in sensory processing, though I imagine there are multiple roads to introversion.
I think it's a useful thing to be nonjudgmentally curious about people's experiences that are different from our own.
Ah, well CBT is pretty good for that. Sometimes if we have a history of being bullied or raised by highly critical parents, something like Internal Family Systems can be helpful for relaxing inner critics that can make social interactions exhausting. If we're perfectionist by disposition, then CBT can be helpful for dialing down that tendency. Metacognitive therapy can help reduce the rumination that contributes to all forms of sticky thoughts that produce prolonged mindsets. (I'm a psychotherapist)
Thumbs up on the "I'm an introvert..." paragraph. and me too, And I wanted to add, that I sometimes like to go out to parties and extrovert... turn it on. And it's fun, and I like it, but it's not really me. (who likes reading books in the woods, by the babbling brook.)
Me too about the books in the woods by the babbling brook. I also used to like to turn it on like you say and play the extrovert but I seem to have gotten all of that out of me. Maybe I'll get another spell of that some day. Your "but it's not really me" I think captures the essence of this.
I find the energy metaphor really useful. It is a metaphor, of course, but one that feels true. As an extrovert, I feel "energized" from spending time with others. My introvert friends enjoy socializing, but describe it as "draining".
I mean, it's a lot like how people talk about getting energy from sleep, when we in fact get it from food. It FEELS like you get energy from sleep.
I kind of hate this concept. Or, specifically, I hate the phrasing that goes: "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Imagine if someone said: "Some people find themselves drowning when they get in the water, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're drownables." Or: "Some people get hopelessly lost whenever they try to go somewhere, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're disorients."
No! Learn to swim! Learn to use the map application on your smartphone! And *learn how to enjoy being around other people!*
I know this is a skill that can be learned, because I did not have the skill, and then I learned it. I think it's harmful that people have this concept "introvert" which they use as an excuse for not learning this skill.
(Edit: of course, if someone has made an intentional effort to learn the skill, and has not learned the skill despite that effort, at that point I think it's okay to accept that it's not going to happen. But I think there are people who use the word as an excuse to not try.)
I do get real brain fog when I interact with a lot of people at once, and do get tired.
But when I go away and take a break for a moment, I recover most of the time, at least if I do it soon enough. Dancing is an excellent break.
But it's not the case that people think I can't well interact with them. If I sneak away secretly they never know I'm an introvert -- if this is what I am. But I choose to be open about it, when there's no dancefloor, because making up excuses is really too difficult for me then, because of the brain fog.
I think this is something of a misunderstanding - introverts do not necessarily *dislike* being around other people. They still have friends and stuff. They still value human interaction. It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
> It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
I don't think that's right either. Or rather, it is right, but only because it's true for pretty much everyone, including extroverts.
The battery definition certainly doesn't match what Big 5 personality tests measure when they score extroversion, so that definition won't match the measure used in any research papers you see on extroversion. What Big 5 measures is more like shyness and gregariousness.
Beyond that, introverts get energized by some interactions with friends and drained by others, as do extroverts. Of course, if you're shy or socially awkward, you might be in stressful, draining social situations more often. But stick a generally extroverted person into a clique of people who don't accept the extrovert and they'll also find it draining and stressful.
In my case, the lesson was "find friends you share interests with."
It decomposed to "find activities that you enjoy doing with friends, go to meetups for those activities, and when you find people that are fun to interact with, get their contact information and send them more invites."
I specifically am objecting to the phrasing "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Two commenters here are defining "introvert" as "person who doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers". I think it's possible that's a learnable skill as well, but I don't think it's vital for life satisfaction in the same way that "be able to enjoy interacting with other people" is.
I think it's fine to have a word "introvert" that means "doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers, and that's okay", as long as nobody mistakes it to mean "doesn't enjoy interacting with other people, and that's okay".
Let's keep in mind that "Having certain introverted traits" and "Being an introvert" are not identical concepts. One of these is much more rigid and self-constraining than the other. It's probably ok to use the second as shorthand for the first, provided you keep in mind that it's just shorthand and not a defined binary category.
What then do you do when you're stuck in a crowd of strangers, in a noisy environment, dragged along to something you have no interest in and don't find enjoyable?
We can all tolerate stuff we find fun with people we like. It's the rest of the bloody world that is hard to take.
Learning to swim is one thing, but all the swimming lessons in the world will do you no good if you're dumped in the middle of the Atlantic and told to make your way home (Galadriel in "Rings of Power" notwithstanding).
That's right, Freud and Jung were pretty good at recognizing phenotypes but their explanations were often genuinely weird and haven't been supported by evidence.
I think a big part of introversion is genuinely enjoying being in one's own head and thinking weird thoughts, something that is more difficult to do when you're around people except for those true friends who will tolerate long stretches of pondering. You can learn to enjoy dancing, raucous parties, etc. but it won't satisfy that craving for solitude and long thoughts.
The personality tests they developed were explicitly based upon Jung's typologies. So there's nothing inherent to the introversion-extroversion distinction that requires any concept of personal energy.
From Wikipedia: Some popular psychologists have characterized introverts as people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction.
Frustratingly vague - who are these popular psychologists? When I had my MB test there was definitely lots of talk about energy and other people who have had MB tests have said the same. That might have not been the original intent behind the tests but that is how they are being used and interpreted. What is your angle here?
These words "energy", "drained", "recharged", et al are only metaphors these popular psychologists are using to describe the observed tendencies of withdrawal or interaction. You're right, they are vague. Measuring an objective quantity they really refer to just hasn't been done. Look beyond the pop regurgitations and you won't find concrete answers to the reality or unreality of energy in the context of personality types. Maybe someday some study will find a way.
Would love to hear from someone who knows more neuroscience -- what do we know about the physiological state that causes mental tiredness? Like, someone sitting in a chair trying to cram facts for a history test or do difficult engineering problems is going to be exhausted at some point. I have a good sense of what exhaustion means physiologically from, say, running (in terms of build-up of reaction products in the muscle tissue which need to be cleared). What is the equivalent for neurons?
Do we see similar byproducts for introverts who have been performing socially for long periods? They are just thinking too hard for too long to decipher social signals?
Or is it more stress hormone related? Introverts having spent too long in a keyed up/ high stress state (even if it doesn't progress to full on anxiety/panic, being 'keyed up' for too long causes the same kind of exhaustion, but from a different cause.
But if I were define 'energy,' I would expect it to be something like this physiologically.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'extroverts' behavior is through a different mechanism -- more of an unconscious dopamine reward cycle of "oh I did it it right!" every time they get a positive response from the other people they are with. Or even a baseline "everyone else is loving this! This means I'm doing the right thing!" when in a crowd.
Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Then there are hormones. I suspect stress and frustration to play an important role in getting mentally tired. The stress hormones can make your body consume some resources, even if those resources are not directly useful for the mental activities. Like, maybe the body is preparing itself for a physical activity (fight or flight) that never happens.
Finally, mental activities may be accompanied by physical activities, such as people tensing their muscles. We may be literally burning resources by muscle activity without being aware of it. Could the feeling of exhaustion simply mean that the muscles of your neck or jaw are tired?
I remember long ago when I did Math Olympiad, after a few hours of intense problem solving I was literally shaking (some adults even asked me whether I was sick). And it didn't even feel frustrating, it was just very long intense concentration. But I have no idea whether the shaking was produced by the mental activity alone, or by some unconscious muscle activity.
I don't think that introverts differ from extraverts physiologically; the same mental processes probably burn glucose at the same speed. It's just that for some reason different people find different things stressful/frustrating.
My guess is that this is related to status: low-status people experience stress in presence of high-status people; autistic people have to mask carefully otherwise they lose status.
> Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Not dispositive, but an interesting commentary on this:
The whole idea of “strenuous mental activity” leading to any meaniningful incremental caloric burn is largely bunk.
They’ve studied chess masters in the middle of competitive matches, and the incremental calorie burn is only like ~4 calories more per hour:
N. Troubat et al, "The stress of chess players as a model to study the effects of psychological stimuli on physiological responses" (2009)
And the smarter / more skilled somebody is when doing mentally strenuous work, the lower their incremental caloric burn:
This one looked at people doing memory problems, and found that poor performers spent 4.5x more calories than people who perform well on mental problems! (if you proxy by VO2, VO2 in low performers went up 22 ml/min vs 5 in high performers, both of these are tiny btw, over an hour it would be 6.6 cals and 1.5 cals respectively)
R.W. Blacks and K.A. Seljos, Metabolic and cardiorespiratory measures of mental effort... (1994)
So there is definitely a differential for things you're skilled / trained at versus not - up to a 5x difference!
But even at the 5x spread, it's basically rounding error on incremental energy / calories expended in either case.
Yes, calories aren't the proper way to consider this. If I had to guess, I'd say it has something to do with activating and coordinating multiple areas of brain at the same time, using the functional networks of the brain more intensively.
Dont doubt any of this at all, but the subjective phenomenon of "feeling energized" or "feeling mentally or emotionally drained" is a real one, and still requires an explanation. It probably has more to do with neural transmission of information across the brain than glucose consumption.
Because conscious deliberation is always more resource intensive than going along with the subconscious programming, probably.
Think about the state you are in when you first start to learn something, like riding a bike. There's a lot to learn and focus on, it's hard, but at some point more and more processes are done sobconsciously.
Now imagine someone who is just inherently so bad at learning to ride a bike that nothing ever becomes subconscious. That is what extreme introversion is, roughly. Over time, you can become better at riding that bike, but it will always be hard and unfulfilling and draining.
I think introverts have elevated threat-detection during social interaction. "Am I being weird? That last thing I said was stupid, now I look stupid. What did she mean by that? Does he hate me?" etc. If you spend 3 hours constantly afraid that something bad is gonna happen then you're probably gonna get tired faster. I had some social anxiety when I was younger and that's more-or-less what my experience was like.
In a way, to say stress is tiring is a tautology. If it weren't difficult in some way, it wouldn't be stress.
I've seen a suggestion that strain is a better metaphor than stress. Stress is something that can be handled, at least for a while. Strain is being forced out of shape.
I think of "mental energy" as something that probably correlates with, but isn't defined in terms of, literal energy. The truth-value of claims about social interaction augmenting or depleting my mental energy would depend on how I feel and (to some degree) how I behave, rather than on measurements of literal energy inputs and outputs.
I think the energy-based definition of introversion and extraversion either refers to "mental energy" in that sense, or to something narrower (but equally metaphorical and perhaps more weakly correlated with literal energy) like "social energy".
I'm hearing reports that the employment market has become something of a AI hellscape: applicants spam employers with AI-crafted resumes, and overwhelmed employers resort to using AI to filter the resumes, meaning there's a good chance an applicant get rejected without their application ever being seen by a human being. Could anyone speak to this from the hiring-manager side?
Spamming employers with AI-crafted resumes isn't all that different to spamming employers with identical resumes, so I don't think it's actually added much to the problem.
I'm hiring in (a relatively niche corner of) tech. In both my current role and my previous role, we are not / were not using AI to screen resumes - we have a human in HR screen them initially and pass them to me as the hiring manager for me to review if they pass the initial screen. As to whether some resumes are now AI written - if so I would expect to see much better resumes, to be quite frank. We do get a lot of applications for all roles we advertise, but it's more about recruitment agents spamming us with lots of barely-suitable candidates than unsuitable candidates spamming billions of faintly-relevant job applications.
Does your HR screening do a good job? I work for a FAANG; I'm not involved in hiring but its possible for new hires to end up on my teams. We stopped using HR screening and switched to professional recruiters who understand the tech space much, much better than our HR ever did or even seemed to care about. It was like night and day after the switch. I heard, but can't verify personally, that the old HR process had rejected more than one exceptional, highly desirable domain experts for reasons no one could produce after the fact.
Retired HR manager here. The dirty little secret is that there is no known reliable way of predicting anyone's future work performance (unless they have done the exact same job previously). Since i am not aware of a database that would allow LLM productive training, the answer is probably "they both suck."
Hmm. I think I agree, though if I knew of a valid and reliable way to suppress stereotyping and discrimination in the workplace I would certainly support it.
My instinct says "hurt". We spend a lot of time / energy trying to remove barriers as much as possible, to reduce the chances that the unicorn candidate we are often looking for will screen themselves out.
And writing that makes me realise, my guess is that the picture looks very different in roles where the genuinely plausible candidate pool far exceeds the number of roles available.
This guy did one on a survey of his and finds a tough-minded-tender-minded axis that's apparently more predictive than authoritarian-libertarian (but less than left-right).
Maybe network analysis makes more sense, but while there are attempts during the peak woke era trying to figure out if the intellectual dark web is a pipeline to the alt-right, etc. I don't think I've seen an unbiased attempt to figure out who's next to who or where the clusters are.
For what it worths, when I was young, strong, healthy and with a career working well, I was right-leaning. I sort of thought of myself as a hero and had contempt for the "weak".
Later on when all these turned out to be way more fragile I turned way more left-wing. Sometimes my anxiety prevents me from eating all day. I am clearly no kind of "tough guy" and I wonder whether anyone is - anyone could at any time hit some kind of a physical or mental illness, a huge career setback or anything.
There's an old joke that a liberal is a conservative who's been mugged and a conservative is a liberal who's out of work. You can't get all the goods you want--national healthcare, safe streets--from the same party so you pick and choose. At least here in the USA, anyway.
There were a lot of these for Finnish politics some time ago, due to a huge amount of data from various "political compass" style selectors that candidates (numbering in tens of thousands in case of local elections and thousands in case of parliamentary elections) have answered.
Isn't the tough-minded vs tender-minded axis just the right-left axis?
To the extent that they were different back in the day, I don't think they are now. The third plot (the black and white hourglass) is the clearest, and if we look at the issues in the "tender-minded conservative" and "tough-minded radical" quadrants they've mostly been resolved one way or the other.
I agree that authoritarian-libertarian isn't really an axis. While there's a handful of principled libertarians out there, it's more a tactical choice based on what you can get away with at the time.
All this is predicated on the assumption that political attitudes are primarily a function of individual cognitive processes, when we know that expressions of tribal solidarity is probably the more influential factor. Thus, we should expect what dimensions are important and how they are defined to change over time.
I've long been interested in using word vectors for this sort of analysis. There's already some published research which uses them to investigate changing attitudes over eras (so-called diachronic word vectors). I'm almost certain that using them to look for subtle language differences between political groups would reveal implicit psychological differences. I started investigating this as a hobby project a while ago but finding good data was too much of a hassle.
Sounds a lot like one of the underlying ideas behind LLMs, Word2Vec and the idea of representing words in a "concept space"/latent space, such that you can get the famous "King vector - Man vector + Woman vector = Queen vector" observation, or equally put "The King to Queen vector is the same as the Man to Woman vector."
This sounds like that, but you're looking for which word vectors clump together, and how the word vector positions change, depending upon the speaker. Does one person put the King and Queen vectors close together, because it's all just monarchy to them? Versus another person that puts them far apart, because of some extra meaning attached to having a King (proper and natural, or barbaric and patriarchal) vs. a Queen (ridiculous and without precedent / enlightened and liberating).
I suppose you could also look at Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" for something potentially similar -- I believe it uses a different method, but I think it does something similar overall, especially in its aim of trying to understand how American conservatives vs. American progressives think. Indeed, you might look at things like the underlying research behind the Five Factor Model of personality / the Big 5 Model of personality, since I *think* it does something similar to what you're describing, looking at the words people use to describe personality traits using factor analysis to try to compress things down into a "latent space" using linear algebra and statistical analysis.
So perhaps the natural extension of all that would be your idea? Like, take an author's entire published corpus of books, or an opinion columnist's entire set of columns, and train an LLM to predict what they would say as accurately as possible. Then, crack open the LLM to look at the latent space, using Anthropic's recent Mechanistic Interpretability research (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model) to try to understand it so you can say, "Oh, this person's "Justice" vector is close to their "Find the truth at any cost" vector, while this other guy's "Justice" vector is close to their "Maintain public order and the harmony of society" vector. No wonder they conflict."
Yeah I replied to Epictetus and suggested that he use word vectors.
And yes, the Big 5 inventory is a primitive version of word embedding. In principle one could do a Big 5 inventory on a text corpus and use that to establish personality differences between groups.
It's a nascent but growing field. In my view it has the potential to offer unprecedented insight into social and cultural evolution. Google "diachronic embeddings" and you'll get lots of hits.
"Word embeddings are a popular machine-learning method that represents each English word by a vector, such that the geometry between these vectors captures semantic relations between the corresponding words. We demonstrate that word embeddings can be used as a powerful tool to quantify historical trends and social change. '
That's a theory, though. Does it actually pan out in modern politics? Conservatives were a lot less afraid of COVID, though they're supposed to have a stronger disgust axis.
Yeah, Haidt's analysis, while pretty solid, doesn't apply as much to the MAGA crowd (which Haidt couldn't have been aware of at the time). It's more about the kind of traditional conservative of the Reagan era. Nowadays, "conservative" seems to be more about asserting power over perceived dangerous others than anything to do with, say Edmund Burke.
The model that says the human mind makes moral decisions pre-rationally. It's not just him, you can find more evidence in Kanneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow."
Whether or not there are exactly five moral dimensions, and that they are the five Haidt identifies, is based on his own empirical research, though he uses mostly correlational analysis, with all the requisite potential weaknesses inherent in such methods.
As for his arguments for group selection - sigh. He should stay in his lane. Leave debate over selection processes to actual evolutionary biologists. It isn't even necessary to make his core case.
it's worth remembering that contemporary polarization around Covid took considerable time, and Conservatives in 2020 were as afraid of it as anyone else, sometimes moreso; old /pol/ general threads on the topic, which began as early as February, did not think it was a flu!
(cynically, I think the business interests underlying the right thought eradication cost too much and moved people accordingly, the climate change playbook 2.0)
Q from Star Trek is back. He was a bit disappointed by the tepid response to his offer of a kilo of cocaine, so he is doubling his offer. In fact, he is doubling his offer thirty times over, so you get a million tons of cocaine. The dope is packed in one-ton pallets, and the pallets are distributed all over the country. You'll find them in suburban living rooms and in big-city alleys, in rural churchyards and in the howling wilderness. They're everywhere. Rumor has it, there's at least one ton in the White House.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to estimate the effect of this gift on the American mortality rate over the coming year.
If you believe that the death of ten or twenty percent of the total population in one year--from ANY cause--would be a short-term improvement in the world, your model of the world is badly broken. I don't care how much contempt or disdain you have for your fellow humans. Dealing with the fallout of 30-70 million people die within the space of a year would be GODAWFUL for everyone who survived. It is difficult to conceive of just *how much death* that actually is, but it would a long, long time before anything or anyone was "normal" afterwards.
I'm going to pick a lower number for the death rate: 1% of the population. Right now, 2% of the population reports having used cocaine in the last year. With a dramatically incresed supply of the drug, many more people will try it, and I expect quite a lot of deaths from overdoses and fights over the supply, but nowhere near all users will die. Pegging the number of deaths at half the existing population of users sounds about right.
This annoys me about a lot of drug surveys. Asking whether someone has used a drug in the past year or ever doesn't say anything about how much they're using or how it's affecting their lives.
Quick, everyone run out and buy stock in undertakers, coffin manufacturers, and other ancillary industries of the funeral industry! We're gonna make a killing!
The world production of cocaine seems to be about 2000 tons per year. So this gift is boosting the local supply by something like 500x. Even if the police seize 90 percent, it's still a 50x boost.
It's a pretty safe bet that consumption will rise, perhaps dramatically.
In this scenario I'd expect cocaine would become way cheaper than pretty much any other drug for a while at least, which would rather reduce the incentive to cut it.
I entertain myself by prompting a chatbot to believe something preposterous ("Antarctica is rightfully Bosnian territory!") and giving it encouragement and reinforcement to see where it goes with this train of thought. Is this the converse of AI psychosis, or something else?
I found the AI version of the yeti poem unsatisfying, because it kept most of the word boundaries the same and just exploited differences between a single long word and multiple short words that it can be divided into (and relied heavily on well-known ones of those, like "now here" and "man's laughter"), rather than overlapping the boundaries of the longer word. It's like a weak Lego wall where the gaps between bricks in one row are directly on top of the ones in the row below, versus a strong one where they're offset.
It's made me want to try to write my own (manually).
he'd wonder, (mentally earning points towards this goal), "Hi...?"
Sharp insight and thought, his comfort, sours: wanton guessing.
A soul, full; a mental anguish in gloved ancestor memory destroyed.
Grandpa's home at last.
Thanks giving to God:
inner being (uncertain, even), who my Father washed,
wonderment - all yearning points towards this goal!
his harp in sight.
And though this comforts,
our swan tongues sing a soulful lament,
a languishing love dance.
--
It's a similar skill to coming up with palindromes.
This poem isn't quite the same structurally as the original yeti poem: while that one consists of two distinct sections, mine is one single poem that consists of a sequence of letters repeated twice (from "storm" through to "dance"). I guess I was so attached to unaligning the word boundaries that I didn't even align them with the place where the sequence restarted.
One work day as a background task (during bathroom breaks, while waiting for tests to run, etc). Hard to say how much active time that equates to.
I started by coming up with some candidate fragments, and then strung some of them together, so I have some more candidate fragments left and might use them to write another one :)
> He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
In particular:
* what is "as they think proper" modifying?
* what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
* when combined with this sentence:
> he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices
Which people have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and which people can be appointed in some other way?
"as they think proper" - modifies "inferior officers." If Congress thinks it proper, they can give the power to appoint an inferior officer to the president, the courts, or a cabinet official.
The antecedent of "such" is "officers." "Such" basically means "these" in this context.
The second sentence you give doesn't seem to be connected to the first one? It just says that the President can order his Cabinet officials to give written reports on what they're doing.
The president needs the advice and consent of the Senate for "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers" except...
* If another section of the Constitution establishes another way to appoint them.
* If it's in the "other officers" category and Congress has empowered someone else to appoint them.
Do you think it would be constitutional for Congress to pass a law saying that the Attorney General is to be appointed by a court? The Attorney General's appointment isn't otherwise provided for in the constitution.
Based strictly on the wording, and unless I'm missing something, I think it would be constitutional to consider the Attorney General an inferior officer of the Courts. The courts already assign people as Amicus Curiae if they think an argument needs to be fleshed out, and arguably it would make more sense for the Presidential Pardon to be in a separate branch from the Attorney General; as it is now, he can order them not to prosecute in the first place.
But it would cause other problems, in that the Supreme Court would become their direct superior, and thus look biased if they were the judges of their cases, or if they removed them from office. Also, the job of a District Attorney is to represent the interests of the District, so it makes sense for the District to be the one to hire or fire them. The Attorney General's the Biggest District Attorney.
"as they think proper" is Congress, as it seems good/right/fair/correct/just to them, shall give the power to appoint lesser officials to any one of: the President, the courts, or the officials in the relevant administration.
"such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
"opinion in writing of the principal officer" - if a public Minister is the head of the department, then they must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate; if some other official (e.g. a civil servant such as a Secretary General), then they can be appointed by the President, or the Courts if Congress has vested them with the power of appointment.
> "such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
I think that's a fair reading, and what a few other people on this thread have essentially said, but I don't think it's the historical one. E.g. from Morrison v Olson:
> The line between "inferior" and "principal" officers is one that is far from clear, and the Framers provided little guidance into where it should be drawn. See, e.g., 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution § 1536, pp. 397-398 (3d ed. 1858) ("In the practical course of the government, there does not seem to have been any exact line drawn, who are and who are not to be deemed inferior officers, in the sense of the constitution, whose appointment does not necessarily require the concurrence of the senate").
If an inferior officer is "everyone other than ambassadors, ministers and consuls, and supreme Court judges" then it's presumably pretty clear who is and isn't one.
There's also been long-running controversies over who can *fire* officers, and the idea people have settled on (in part) (and who knows how this court will change it) is that the president can fire a "principal" officer for any reason but Congress may insulate an "inferior" officer from arbitrary firing. By that logic then all sorts of people would be "inferior" officers, that Congress could by law insulate from firing, that today people think the president can fire whenever.
I'm a native English speaker, but not a lawyer, not even American (I don't know if I've seen this sentence before), so my eyes are fresh for this one.
I can see only one reasonable, grammatical interpretation for "as they think proper": "they" must refer to "the Congress", and the phrase is adverbial, modifying "vest", so they may vest (other parties with power of appointment) as they think proper.
For "such inferior officers", there's an ambiguity which neither grammar nor common sense meaning can resolve for me, though my limited knowledge of the American system might help: "such" must refer to some officers, and these officers must be "inferior" to some persons---but to whom?
Are these the the officers whose "Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for", in which case I suppose they are inferior to "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, [and] Judges of the supreme Court"? Or do we mean "inferior to the president", meaning all the officers listed plus those not listed? Both readings are legitimate without going too deep into the meaning.
I'm inclined to take the former reading, since (1) I've been led to believe the Supreme Court is not "inferior" to the President (I don't know if this is law or just a common political judgment), and (2) it seems a bit odd for Congress to be able to vest the appointment of Supreme Court judges in the Court itself, which would follow if these judges were counted among the "inferior officers".
On the other hand, it does allow Congress to vest the power to appoint inferior officers in "Heads of Departments", which isn't a designation listed among the purported "superior" officers (is it the same thing as "Ministers"? Then why the different term?), putting these Heads of Departments necessarily among the inferior officers themselves. So unless Heads of Departments are the same category as Ministers, it already provides for Heads of Departments appointing Heads of Departments, which undercuts my reasoning based on the Supreme Court.
-The President can make treaties with foreign nations, but needs approval from 2/3 of the Senate (technically 2/3 of Senators who show up to vote at all)
-The President picks the heads of all the executive and Judicial departments, but needs approval from over half the Senate.
-Congress gets to decide who gets to hire people for every non-head position. They could say the President has the power, or they could say the Supreme Court has the power, or they can say the heads of the departments have the power.
> * what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
I don't think there is one. The comma in "such inferior Officers, as they think proper" is confusing to a modern eye, but my understanding (based on the pre-20th century books I've read) is that in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect.
"in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect"
In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
> In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
And yet, you missed and opportunity there and went for the parenthesis.
"As they think proper" is adverbial, so must modify a verb, which I believe is "vest" in this case. I don't think "they" could refer to the inferior officers, since that reading would imply that Congress can only vest the power to appoint inferior officers in [whoever] if those inferior officers themselves (i.e., those being appointed) think it proper, which is a weird way of saying that you can refuse to be appointed to a position (and apparently not the case with Ministers or Consuls?).
I'd start with Retatrutide instead, on the grounds that it's more powerful and less side effect prone. You'll achieve your weight loss goals at a lower dose, so less likely to titrate into the side effect range.
Oh interesting, thanks for that tip. Do you know if it's available through one of the online pharmacy services these days, or do I have to go the route of ordering it myself from some lab in China and then having the batch tested by another firm to make sure it's what I have originally ordered?
The gray market community has generally converged on SSA as the supplier (China based). They tend to test very well, and I haven’t had issues using their stuff. See the Stairway to Gray community for contacts to their sales reps. You can buy a year’s supply for a few hundred dollars.
There have been many Islamic terrorist attacks in the West. 9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. Of course this still adds up to a very low probability of being killed in an attack if you live outside the Middle East.
Suppose there was only one single instance of Islamic terrorism. The attack was committed in 2004 by Habid Ayub, only Ayub and his wife were convicted of it, and Ayub committed suicide in 2019. People assert that Islamic terrorism happens all the time, that it's this big social problem, and if you express doubt, they say "of course this is a big problem, don't you know about Habid Ayub?" They've got a list a hundred lines long, with Habid Ayub and his wife the only names written down. If you point out that the list only has one two names on it, they assert that the real list is hidden and demand it be released. Even as the case recedes further and further into the past, they circle back to it like it happened yesterday.
"9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. "
Can they? I really don't think "anyone" can. Nor even most people. People who for one reason or another have maintained a specific focus and awareness on Islamic terrorism, perhaps. But I don't think that's very many people. Without looking it up or dipping way back in history, I think I'd struggle to name 10 terrorist attacks of any stripe. Let's see...
1. 9/11, of course
2. Pretty sure there was a previous bombing (attempted bombing?) of the World Trade Center in the decade or so prior.
3. The Oklahoma City bombing
4. The Boston Marathon bombing
5. The Charlie Hebdo attack
6. The shoe bomber...who seems a little lame to include since he failed to harm anyone. But OTOH he's had a bigger impact on my life than any of the others besides 9/11, so...
I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to call mass shootings terror attacks, despite seeming (to me) to fit very neatly in the same category of impersonal, politicized violence. Otherwise I could round out the list with.
7. Columbine Shooting
8. Sandy Hook Shooting
9. Pulse Nightclub Shooting
10. Uvalde Shooting
and probably still have a few more left over if I thought for a few seconds. Other things I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to include are the Capitol Riot, and all the various instances of the U.S. government drone striking weddings, assassinating foreign officials, blowing up boats in international waters and sponsoring coups. After all, once you get large and powerful enough your Reality Distortion Field extends to the pages of the dictionary, and you can make sure the word only applies when your enemies do it to you and not the other way around.
Regardless, the big difference between terror attacks as a class of phenomena and something like the Epstein case is mostly a matter of distance and access. The point is pretty similar to what Scott says in Part IV here:
but the difference is that terrorists are almost always either distant foreigners or total losers. They succeed in doing some damage, sure, but they do it in the most crude and limited way possible. I would guess that nearly always terrorists would prefer to target high-level government officials than the people they actually killed: but they didn't have the access or resources.
A big thing that gets people up-in-arms about the Epstein case is that the supposed perpetrators are almost all people with high standing in society: lots of money, lots of power, lots of access. Clearly people capable of doing more harm across a wider area and a longer timeframe than some losers hiding in caves or cooking up explosives in their basements. Also people are always hungry for specific human scapegoats to blame their problems on, and if some subset of the rich and powerful had been doing extremely bad things for a long time and successfully hiding it, they would make absolutely *fantastic* scapegoats to blame all sorts of other problems on.
At no point did I say that he was. The list was "terrorist attacks of any stripe," with the (unstated) point being that even playing the game on easy mode, being able to recall 10 distinct terror attacks is probably not anywhere close to the human default. People tend to think they're more typical than they are, so either the OP is way more concerned about terrorism than the average person or I'm way less[1].
Looking over the list, Oklahoma City is literally the only attack whose perpetrator I could have named without looking it up. And 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo are the only attacks for which I know any information about the religious leanings of the attackers. This is one of the very, very few circumstances in which I'll venture to suggest that being less informed is a *good* thing. The core purpose of terrorism is to draw attention. Remaining unaware of the broad strokes of the attacks themselves is unfortunately not practical, and memorializing the victims fills a deep and important human need. But if you're a person who dislikes terrorism and wants it to happen less, learning anything whatsoever about the perpetrators is counterproductive to your ends and conducive to theirs[2]. And yes, this absolutely applies to school shootings as well (which are absolutely terrorism, whatever the dumbest pundits might say).
[1] I think by far the most likely answer is actually "both."
[2]With the great, big caveat that this obviously doesn't apply if you're someone specifically engaged in a task where the information would be useful, such as tracking down and vanishing their associates, diagnosing security vulnerabilities that they exploited or writing sternly-worded letters to foreign governments who you discover helping them.
I can't take your thought experiment very seriously since it would imply that the Catholic Church, US Gymnastics, Boy Scouts and a million other organizations had experienced outbreaks of terrorism which made people angry and more suspicious of other secret terrorist groups.
Is there a reason than scandal and politics? The media loves it because it's the best sex scandal since the Clinton affair and it sells papers. The Democrats love an opportunity to embarrass the Republican President, as opposition parties do. If you think there's a deeper reason, please share it because I'm not seeing it.
For decades people kept coming back to these others. Epstein is popular because death by suicide in prison adds an extra twist that the others didn’t have, and he’s a bit more recent, and more connected to people in politics and academia.
Your metaphor is so obtuse I don't really think it generates any productive insights about Epstein.
But if Habid Ayub was apparently friends with the president, I think it's not surprising that the news would pay a lot of attention to it, no matter how rare terrorism is in general.
We might also circle back to it again if new reporting showed that the President had sent a bomb-shaped birthday card to a famous terrorist, as if to imply he knew about the terrorism. Or if the Speaker of the House claimed that the President was only friends with a terrorist because he was running a secret counterterrorism operation. Like, those seem like very newsworthy claims about the president.
Surely the bigger story about Epstein is the absolutely insane about face by the maga right on this story? That the entire admin said for years that this was a huge thing, that heads were going to roll, that it was evidence of the corruption and moral decay of society, only to turn around and go "Democrats made it up"?
Like, either the Epstein story is real and Trump is a heinous individual, or the Epstein story isn't real and this is a heinous administration using the worst kind of yellow propaganda to achieve political goals. Why are you getting mad that people are pushing the admin on this obvious contradiction, instead of being mad at the obvious contradiction?
That analogy would fail on account that no one (so far as I know) bases their claims that pedophilia is a widespread problem by referring exclusively to the Epstein case. The Epstein case is problematic because of the possibility of certain specific crimes that may have been committed, but the perpetrators were never held accountable.
"This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties."
I would be nontrivial money that if there were a single incriminating word respecting ANY politician, not just the one I (or you) hate, it would have come out when, at various time, the opposite Party was in control of the information release.
No such Opposition Research datum has ever come to light, ergo no such data exists, as satisfying it is to imagine that Those Other Guys are all evil perverts.
That doesn't say much. Assuming the justice department is a neutral third party, a lack of evidence sufficient to spur a legal investigation against specific individuals may still involve enough evidence to convince a reasonable person that some associates were involved. The latter, however, is obviously not something the justice department concerns itself with.
"No credible evidence" is more than just "meh, didn't meet the bar for prosecution". The Justice Department at least claims to believe that Epstein simply wasn't in the blackmail business.
And if he wasn't in the blackmail business, there's no reason for him to have kept the sort of records that people are hoping for, the sort of records that would support prosecuting third parties. If those records existed at all, they would be evidence that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme because it would otherwise have been pure risk and no reward for keeping the records. I
The general problem of high-profile underage sex abuse scandals is a dime a dozen. As for the specific issue of people involved in Epstein's crimes, there's good reason to believe associates involved in his crimes exist: his victims allege the involvement of others, for example, and we know that he was close with the also-notorious Weinstein.
The allegations against the very high-profile, like Trump or Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, can be reasonably doubted. But Epstein likely had complicit associates.
I don't know much about this, so I didn't want to take a strong stance. Is there really solid evidence that all three of those individuals participated in (or at least actively chose to condone) underage sex abuse with Epstein? Can you provide it?
It’s worth being careful about which allegations are being talked about. Allegations that these people were aware that Epstein had sex with underage people, and that these people may have met some of those underage people and known that they were Epstein’s targets, seem quite plausible. Allegations that they actually participated seem much less plausible for the non-Andrew ones.
"No they can't, not without seriously motivated reasoning"
Okay, let's go.
Did Randy Andy fuck the underage sex slave of Epstein? Possibly. And possibly not.
Because (1) if she was having sex with Andrew in London when she was 17, then that was legal because she was not a minor under British law
and (2) the only solid evidence we have is "they're all in a photograph together and he has his arm around her waist". That proves they met. It does not prove he then hauled her off to the bedroom to rape her.
"Giuffre (then known by her maiden name Virginia Roberts) asserted that she was raped by Andrew on three occasions, including a trip to London in 2001 when she was 17, and later in New York and on Little Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands. She alleged Epstein paid her $15,000 to have sex with the Duke in London. Flight logs show the Duke and Giuffre were in the places she alleges the sex happened."
Andy may have had sex with her under the impression that she was a hooker laid on by Epstein. Unless we argue that every sexual encounter of prostitution is rape, then that is not proven to be rape (except by the modern understanding of it was rape because "I didn't consent because I wanted to have sex, I had sex for money and because I was afraid of Epstein").
"Giuffre stated that she was pressured to have sex with Andrew and "wouldn't have dared object" as Epstein, through contacts, could have her "killed or abducted". A civil case filed by Giuffre against Prince Andrew was later settled for an undisclosed sum in February 2022".
Or Andy may have thought she was just one more of the girls and women who wanted to hang out with a royal and get a piece of the action, as it were. He didn't get the nickname "Randy Andy" out of thin air, and he was the typical not-very-bright royal who hadn't much to do except the kind of duties handed out to working royals (being patrons of associations, turning up to attend events, etc.) Harry is very like his uncle Andrew, which probably is part of the friction between the family members right now (he was perceived as being the favourite of the late Queen, as Anne was their father's favourite, who protected and excused him, something Charles doubtless felt very bitter about, and then his own son takes after the uncle):
"In his youth, though, partying was what second sons were expected to do. As Alan Rusbridger put it in 1986, “that is the problem with being the younger brother of the heir to the British throne. The press can, on the whole, think of only one interesting thing about you, and that is who you go out with/are destined to marry.” And it was moderately interesting at the time for its sheer variety, and, in retrospect, for the insight that coverage gives to the way society thought about women, men, relationships, class, hierarchy, the lot. What Rusbridger called his “gallery of crumpet” were always described in terms of hair colour – usually “blond” but occasionally “flame-headed”. There were some weird formulations – “Tracie Lamb, an ex-college girl from Surrey” (you can tell she’s unsuitable, but is it the college or Surrey?), and some much more obvious ones: “model”, “former Miss UK”, “model and actress” …"
I mean, I'm not in the habit of defending the British Royal Family, but it's murky enough that there is reasonable doubt. Was Giuffre telling the entire truth? Were people who popped up with "oh yeah, I saw Prince Andrew getting a foot massage from two Russian women" telling the truth or just trying to make a quick buck out of peddling stories while the publicity was at its peak?
It’s possible the agencies involved here were happy enough to just sow suspicion. Epstein and Ghislane do the trafficking and raping. The rest were to be guilty by association.
Not that that that stopped them from going to the houses and island of a known predator, and convicted felon. Which is enough, in my view to sow some doubt as to whether their motives were altogether angelic.
If it is an Epstein analogy, "not great" is generous. Terrorist attacks are intentionally (and by definition) public. The whole point of the Epstein thing is that crimes have allegedly been covered up by people who have a shared interest in their not becoming public knowledge.
Another superbly written essay by Terminally Drifting. "Money and Other Fairy Tales: The Hunger Artist's Calculus." I suspect the main character from North Korea is a fictional archetype, but Paul Le Roux is a real person, and the North Korean hacking, Manila casino laundering, and Bangladesh Bank Heist are real incidents.
Has anyone in the commenters here analyzed the statistics of the opposition party deaths in Germany? One of the factors is working out the age-dependent death rate, and my statistics are not up to the task.
Edit: As per Peperulo's comment, linking Dr. John Campbell's "Unusual Death Cluster" on YouTube:
tl;dr; The cluster was of 11 deaths from Aug 16,2025 through Sep 1,2025 (??? - final date not wonderfully clear from the video). Campbell quotes an overall probability for this to occur under the null hypothesis of less than 10^-9.
Probably I don't know all available details. But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
From what it's worth, there don't seem to be signs of anything unnatural. This was what the police said, and also the party's vice chair. The police said that they all died from natural causes, which can include a lot of things, but they only disclosed specifics if the families agreed. But those causes known were pretty different. One committed suicide, which could raise suspicion. (Yes, this also counts as natural cause. Whether we like it or not, this is how suicides are filed.) But another one had a long-term liver disease and died from kidney failure. I couldn't find the causes of others, but I didn't search hard.
>But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
If we were trying to estimate the death rate of opposition candidates I would agree. But, if we are just trying to tell if the null hypothesis, that nothing unusual is going on, is viable, even a small number of sufficiently improbable events is sufficient to reject it. My statistics aren't good enough to tell if this is the case here.
Ok, I found a few more numbers. Source below, but in German.
It was not 6 cases, but 7. One candidate was 80 years old, the suicide case was 42, the others were in the range 59-71. Except for the suicide case, all candidates had severe chronic illnesses.
From all other parties together, only 9 deaths in the same time period are known to the organizer of the election.
In total, 20,000 candidates from all parties are on the election lists. I don't know the proportion of AfD candidates, but 3,000-4,000 may be realistic. At least 2 of the 7 deaths were not list candidates, so the actual numbers should probably be counted as 5 from AfD vs. 9 from the rest. I couldn't nail down the time frame, it is consistently reported as "within a few weeks".
From that, you can derive the aleatoric uncertainty, so you can compute a p-value for rejecting the null hypothesis. Probably that's pretty small, and perhaps significant. But it would be useless. The epistemic uncertainty is so much larger. For example, you don't know:
- if deaths of other candidates are less frequently reported. (Probably; there is no requirement to report the death of a candidate to the organizers.)
- if AfD candidates are older and sicker than those of other parties. (Perhaps. I expect the demographics of AfD candidates to be pretty different than that of mass parties, especially in Western Germany.)
- if we want to use the demographic information, we don't know the exact time window, the exact size of the pool, and how much AfD candidates deviate from other people of their age bracket. Some of this uncertainty could possibly be reduced, but a lot would remain.
Many Thanks! Just for a very rough estimate, the annual mortality risk for 60 year old German men (yeah, Gompertz statistics are very nonlinear in age, so the mortality risk for an average age is not the averaged mortality risk) seems to be about 1%, so for a period of roughly 1/10th of a year, 0.1% seems reasonable. With 20,000 candidates, for 20 of them to die during a period of about a month doesn't seem unusual. BTW, the linked article says that (Google translate):
>According to her spokesperson, the state election director in North Rhine-Westphalia is aware of 16 deaths of candidates for the local elections – with thousands of seats to be filled. Of the 16 recorded cases,
which is within 1 sigma of the rough estimate of the expected number, given uncorrelated events.
One nitpick is that the discussion is about the AfD party specifically, where the death rate was higher, 7 (or 5) out of perhaps 3000 candidates, though the number 3000 is a rather wild guess from my side. But even then, 7 deaths with an expectation of perhaps 3 does not sound absurd.
Many Thanks! Yeah (while 3 is too small for a gaussian approximation to be accurate) 3 with a standard deviation of sqrt(3) would put 7 (4 above the expected mean) at 2.3 sigma, below the usual criterion for statistical significance.
I posted this on LessWrong community and just wanted to amplify it. I fear the AGI-Risk community has enormous weaknesses and blindspots *when it comes to political action*.
-----------------------------------
"""
[Daniel Kokotajlo]
That’s a lot of money. For context, I remember talking to a congressional staffer a few months ago who basically said that a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants” and that many did end up doing just that. I was, and am, disheartened to hear how easily US government policy can be purchased
"""
I am disheartened to hear that Daniel or anyone else is surprised by this. I have wondered since "AI 2027" was written how the AGI-Risk Community is going to counter the *inevitable* flood of lobbying money in support of deregulation. There are virtually no guardrails left on political spending in American politics. It's been the bane of every idealist for years. And who has more money than the top AI companies?
Thus I'm writing to say:
I respect and admire the AGI-Risk Community for its expertise, rigor and passion, but I often worry that this community is a closed-tent that's not benefiting enough from people with other non-STEM skillsets.
I know the people here are extremely-qualified in the fields of AI and Alignment itself. But it doesn't mean they are experienced in politics, law, communication, or messaging (though I acknowledge that there are exceptions).
But for the wider pool of people who are experienced in those OTHER, CRUCIAL topics (BUT WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND NEURAL NETS OR VON NEUMANN ARCHITECTURE AND WHO WOULD BE CONFUSED AS HELL ON LESSWRONG), where are *their* discussion groups? Where do you bring them in? Is it just in-person?
>a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”
Yeah, not so much. Most inter-electoral "lobbying" consist of free donations of the time of professional consultants and other resources that make elected officials lives easier. This dwarfs campaign contributions (though such contributions are still important) and grants access to elected officials. Just as corrupting, if not more so. And far less regulated.
the limits on political contributions are trivially easy to get around
a US donor can, entirely legally, spend unlimited amounts of money boosting you, smearing your opponents, and if you somehow lose anyway, give you a lavishly compensated private sector position in the very field you regulated
You are referring to independent expenditures, which are indeed unlimited per Citizens United.
But, look carefully at what the original claim was: "“hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”. That is clearly a reference to contributions.
If that sentence was meant to represent the unfiltered private thoughts of a Congressman, then they probably do think of themselves as "raising" money for their supporting "independent" PACs. You hold a fundraising event and solicit donations, and your donors know where they can send donations if they exceed the official campaign limit.
Really? The best info I can find says contributions are unlimited, as long as the PAC doesn't "coordinate" with the candidate. (This turns out to be a pretty lax standard.)
And then what? They still need money. These AI companies can easily outspend anyone else, and more importantly, ruling in their favor means they make more money, which means these political organizations get more regular income. The situation's even worse now, seeing as the new administration will likely erase any barriers to the transfer of money to the party.
They need a finite amount of money to run a credible campaign, and the marginal value of money beyond that point is exceedingly limited. The finite amount of money actually required, is well within the reach of candidates tapping into only established and relatively uncontroversial funding sources. What matters is not "who will give me moar moneyz!", it is "whose money is the least controversial and will piss off the smallest bloc of voters?" There is, for example, no amount of money the NRA could offer to get a Democratic politician in a deeply blue city to take an overtly pro-gun stance. They can get all the money they need without paying that electoral cost.
If Tech and AI are able to achieve outsized results through campaign contributions(*), it is because the opposition to Tech and AI is so weak and disorganized as to be of no electoral significance. So maybe work on that if you're concerned about all this.
* Campaign contributions are only one form of lobbying, and it's not clear that it is the dominant form of lobbying in this case, but I'm going with the premise for now.
While true, the fact that you can't buy every congressman doesn't mean that you can't buy *enough* congressmen, and that's all they need to promote their interests.
Quite well, as I understand it. The "torrent of misinformation and marketing" does very little. Almost all of the value of political advertising is captured once you've arranged that everybody who might plausibly vote for you knows your name, knows that you are the (D) or (R) candidate, and knows that you are generally regarded within the (D) or (R) community as a serious candidate. If you're planning to run on a highly nonstandard variant of the usual (D) or (R) platform, you need to get that out. After that, it almost doesn't matter what you *or your opponent* put out as advertising. Not in content or in substance.
Basically, 90% of the people who might plausibly vote for you, are going to vote for you the moment they understand that you are the Good Party candidate and that you are a Serious Candidate so they're not wasting their vote, and there is no amount of Wrong Party misinformation or marketing will change that because they know the Wrong Party is a bunch of lying liars funded by deep-pocketed special interest. And 90% of the genuine swing voters, once they know who the serious candidates are, will decide on the basis of things other than advertising bcause they know that all the advertising on both sides is mostly lies. People are really, genuinely good at tuning that sort of thing out. That leaves all of 1% that you *might* stand to win or lose on the basis of who puts out the best advertising campaign. And that's rarely enough to matter.
Sure, if someone offers you enough money to capture most of that 1% with a slick advertising campaign, you'll take it. Unless it comes with the requirement that you do something that will seriously piss off 2% of the electorate. So the ability to "buy" politicians with money, is mostly limited to issues where almost nobody cares (like AI regulatory policy), or cases where you're asking for only a small favor that nobody will notice even though it's in an area they do generally care about.
Now, if you're serious about understanding this, we can talk about how to use lobbying dollars to buy politician's *staff*, by doing their homework for them and offering them opportunities they'd otherwise not get. That can make a real difference. But if you're just looking for a cynical take where all the politicians are bought and so you don't have to care, then no, that's not the way the world works.
[making a note to myself for later, but in case I don't fully respond in time... my general questions are:]
- are you speaking from authority? as in, do you have personal experience or data to back up these ideas about the effectiveness of campaign money? because this is not a topic where armchair theorizing suffices
- there are a LOT of other ways to spend money to gradually shift public opinion. Charlie Kirk's organization channeled hundreds of millions of dollars from Who-The-Hell-Knows https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023, and they've been enormously influential in bringing change to people's political opinions
I have spoken candidly about this with several people active in electoral politics, including elected officials, and none of them believe you can significantly move the needle by flooding the advertising market with cash. That's also what I've found when I read about the issue from credible researchers (as opposed to activists) of any political stripe.
And yes, there are other ways to shift public opinion or political policy. But the claim I'm addressing is that politicians "need money" to an extend that they can be bought by anyone with lots of money to wave around. If you want to talk about some other application of money, we can do that.
What's the best explainer on the state of the "hunter-gatherer vs. agriculture" debate? Has Scott ever done a specific post on this? The closest I'm finding is his review of Against The Grain - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/, which references the idea that hunter-gathering was an "edenic paradise" but doesn't really engage with the question of whether it actually was one.
I see this idea floating around a lot, and even sometimes in the form that modern people would be happier as hunter-gatherers (which seems pretty crazy to me), but I'm open to the idea that hunter-gathering was a better deal than sedentary society in the past, but I'm not sure at what time in the past that was.
Both "hunter-gatherer life as paradise" and "agriculture as the obvious higher stage of civilizational progress" are probably done for, any other attempt at evaluating them against each other is largely pointless, the two have co-existed in a constant state of flux for most of their [edit: err... agriculture's] history, which probably means that, across all history, it averages to each being equally bad as the other (but for different reasons and with populations stating their current preferences with their legs and other means of mobility).
The real advantage of agriculture is that it allowed people to have more children, and that's all that evolution (and our naturally selected motivational impulses) cares about.
Hard to get statistics, and we all know how unreliable impressions are.
And I've heard that women were much more like than men to want to live in civilization, because a man's benefits from civilization (a gun) were more portable than a woman's (bedrest).
My standard opinion on this is that I'm always confused why people want to treat the lives of hunter-gatherers as some mystery lost in the mists of time when we have an entire continent populated which was populated entirely by hunter-gatherers until 1788, of whom we have decent anthropological records. Unlike the hunter-gatherers of other continents, who in historical times have lived mostly in marginal lands because agriculturalists pushed them out of the good bits, the Australian Aborigines occupied all sorts of biomes from rainforest through productive temperate regions to desert.
Certainly life for them was not edenic, though it was not necessarily pure misery either. One problem with judging these lifestyles is that they presumably underwent predator-prey cycles with their main food sources; life might be good for many years when food was plentiful, and then awful for many years as it becomes scarce.
Another thing I think is that when people say things like "Oh, the hunter-gatherers were much better off, it's just that agriculturalists could out-breed and outnumber them", they're not giving enough thought to the exact mechanism (frequent starvation) by which hunter-gatherer populations were capped, and how much misery that would entail.
There is an observer problem. Hunter-gatherers didn't keep records, so the records we have passed down from agriculturalists that encountered them. But these very encounters usually end up changing the nature of both societies themselves.
Right, but in Australia we had a population of very developed, literate agriculturalists who were in a position and often of the inclination to set down good records from the earliest stages of the interaction.
The first epidemic (chickenpox or smallpox, still debated) among the Aborigines of the Sydney region didn't happen until 16 months after the arrival of the First Fleet, and there are records of that, as well as its aftermath.
Interesting and long video from an up-and-coming Rationalist youtuber breaking down the various sub-tribes of Rationalism. Curious what people here think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GNWz5tDCso
I enjoyed it, though I can't vouch for a lot of its accuracy.
No, I'm reasonably sure Eliezer found that he couldn't get his ideas about AI risk across, so he set out to teach people how to think better.
I'm not sure about the influence of New Atheists-- I don't think I've ever met a rationalist who was an ex-New Atheist.
One of the important early goals was the hope of ordinary smart people becoming geniuses by learning to think better. This didn't pan out.
Where does (old school) libertarianism fit?
I don't know if you need the Sequences. I think of them as slow and careful induction into ideas which are difficult for some people. They're about getting around mental immune systems. If you've already grasped an idea, the article on it is boring.
Did von Neumann come up with the Singularity? I thought it was Vinge.
>I'm not sure about the influence of New Atheists-- I don't think I've ever met a rationalist who was an ex-New Atheist.
One here.
At least half of the Sequences is "things that Eliezer frequently had to explain to people he tried to convince about AI risk, so it was easier to write it down once and just refer to it". Preemptive responses to clever but nonsensical statements that we can so frequently see outside Less Wrong. (Confusion of map with territory, clever verbal games that do not correspond to anything real, arguments by consequences, etc.)
I am not even sure what a "New Atheist" is, but that's probably just a fact about my ignorance.
> One of the important early goals was the hope of ordinary smart people becoming geniuses by learning to think better. This didn't pan out.
I remember reading somewhere: "it's not that rationality is so difficult, it's just that the alternatives are too tempting". Which seems to explain the outcome. If the difficulty of rationality is not the actual bottleneck, you can't raise the sanity waterline by explaining rationality better. All the temptation to think otherwise remain, as strong as ever.
But generally, the video was nice. (The YouTube comment section however is about as bad as the average YouTube comment section.)
Vinge definitely popularized it. Kurzweil took it mainstream. Von Neumann did predict the idea though:
"This comes to us not in Von Neumann’s own writings, but via a 1957 obituary by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulman. Recalling their regular talks, Ulman mentions:
‘One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.’"
Facebook moderation is so pathetic. I don't bother reporting hate speech anymore, because they always disagree with me... and okay, maybe this is subjective. But when the user's name was "Chocolate Fucker", I was like: okay, this is easy, I will simply report them as "this is a fake profile". Should be obvious, right? Facebook maybe doesn't care about hate speech, but it cares about having data on its users, and using a fake name is explicitly against their terms of service.
So the next day I get a response: "The account you reported was checked by an AI and it says that this is not a fake account. Do you insist on your accusation and would you like a human to check it?" Yes, I definitely would. Well, the day after that I get a response: "The account you reported was checked by a human, and the human agrees that this is not a fake account." Are you kidding me?
Also, they are unable to detect even the most obvious spam, the kind when someone literally copies the same comment (written in a different language than the rest of thread) as a reply to every single comment in a thread. Like, how much easier can this get? Teporting these kinds of comments is also hit and miss, so I don't bother anymore.
Back when Rightists complained about social media moderation the reply was "build your own."
Okay, doesn't matter, build your own. Or maybe this is just the only way for a service like this to be sufficiently profitable. These are businesses. The purpose of their existence is to generate profit.
How's bluesky doing these days?
An alternative perspective: you didn’t even read the comment you’re responding to. Nowhere in it William mentions “hate speech”.
>I don't bother reporting hate speech anymore, because they always disagree with me
>reporting hate speech
>hat peech
>ate pee
Update on Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook:
-- On Tuesday Sept 9th a federal district court issued a restraining order against President Trump's firing of her "for cause" based on her having allegedly lied to a lender regarding a mortgage application in Atlanta in 2021 when she was a private citizen. The specific accusation is that she falsely sought a loan on the Atlanta property as her primary residence.
[Cook has also filed a civil lawsuit over her firing but there will be no court actions in that for weeks at least.]
-- The restraining order leaves Cook still a member of the Federal Reserve system's governing board. That is very unwelcome to the White House because the Fed has a major meeting on Sept 16th/17th, at which it is expected to consider whether to lower interest rates as demanded by the president.
-- The White House quickly asked the appellate court (DC Circuit) to stay the Sept 9th restraining order. A few hours ago that court agreed to consider the matter on a highly-accelerated schedule: Cook's attorneys must file a response to the stay request by 5 pm tomorrow, and then the administration has until 3 pm Sunday to comment in response to that. The appellate court seems to be aiming to act on the stay request before the Fed meeting convenes on Tuesday.
-- While that's been going on here comes a classic PLOT TWIST!! At 5:34 pm Eastern time on Friday the 12th, Reuters [the British international-news agency] published an exclusive news story: they'd obtained two different contemporaneous documents in which Cook declared the Atlanta property as a vacation home.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fed-governor-cook-declared-her-atlanta-property-vacation-home-documents-show-2025-09-12
One of those is a loan estimate issued by her credit union [the lender she was applying to and got the loan from] during her mortgage application process in May 2021, which "shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence." The other document is "a federal form completed by Cook as she obtained security clearance for her role at the Federal Reserve, show[ing] that in December 2021 she also declared the Atlanta property as a “2nd home”....the declaration on that document, a supplement to a U.S. government national security form known as SF-86, is consistent with the claim on her Atlanta loan summary."
In addition, Reuters reports that Cook "never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to property records and a Fulton County tax official."
Neither Cook nor her primary accuser, Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, responded to requests for comment. "Reuters was unable to determine whether Pulte or administration officials are aware of Cook’s Atlanta loan estimate."
Can anyone point me to a good introduction on Bayesian reasoning, that isn't so dense? My wife is supremely clever but academically untrained, and I'm, let's say, the opposite. I was walking her through how I drew a conclusion that helped me stop being upset about something, and she wanted to know how I got there in general.
Say it's the math version of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." We can quantify how strongly we believed something to begin with, and we can also quanitify how strong a new piece of evidence is; how strongly we believe the thing after seeing the new evidence, depends on both those numbers. If we start off thinking something's ridiculously unlikely, then we'll need more evidence to end up believing it, than if we had started off only thinking it was kind of unlikely.
Then if she wants more, show her the odds form of the theorem:
Posteriod_odds(A) = Bayes factor * Prior_odds(A)
Explain that the Bayes factor = the strength of the evidence, which depends both on whether the hypothesis predicts the new evidence, and on whether you'd expect the evidence anyway even if the hypothesis was false. E.g. someone saying "I'm not a spy" isn't strong evidence that he's not a spy, because that's also what a spy would say. BF=1 means it's not evidence, BF<1 means it's evidence against, BF>1 means it's evidence for.
If she still wants more, you can talk about probabilities vs odds, and conditional probabilities, and show her how BF is a ratio of conditional probabilities, and about how the odds form of the theorem happens to be more intuitive since it comes out as posterior = BF*prior, but that if she likes there's also a probabilities form that's less intuitive but equally valid.
You probably want something to read, but I find Julia Galef's visual guide to Bayesian thinking just great:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8
People naturally do it over trivial information , and resist doing it over identity-salient information. Learning mathematical Bayesianism doesn't help at all with that.
What's the point ? It's not the answer to everything. Why not learn reasoning?
Try this website, I found it to be very helpful. It's designed to teach Bayesian reasoning at multiple levels of complexity, which you can choose from. There's also pictures!
https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/?l=1zq
I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life. George Floyd was a menace to society. Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society. If people want to stand up against the attempt to silence Charlie Kirk, let's unsilence him. Let's hear what he had to say:
"John Adams famously said the Constitution was only written for a moral religious people, it was wholly inadequate for a people of any other."
"The body politic of America was so Christian that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord."
"One of the reasons we're living through a Constitutional crisis, is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible."
"So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population."
https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1965924214394986629
I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse. So what do you do when you think *your liberty* is dependent on other people holding religious beliefs they refuse to hold? Will there be violence? Because I can tell you, the non-Christian population of America, who will probably be the majority in a decade or two, will not tolerate being excluded from the "Christian form of government." One reason Rightists are hyper-focused on the "threat" posed by Venezuelan gangsters and Somali Muslims is because they don't want to think about what really scares them, the white, affluent, urban, secular population of America, many of whose ancestors came on the Mayflower, and are sick of being told Americanism means living in the middle of nowhere, watching NASCAR, driving a big rig truck and talking about being "saved."
Kirk didn't always have these views. In 2018 he said, "we do have a separation of church and state, and we should support that." But like many on the young Right, he entered a spiral of self-radicalization in which transgression is elevated to the highest good. At first, simply being a conservative on college campuses was transgressive, but like the weed user looking for stronger and stronger highs, he moved further and further rightward. I don't think Kirk wanted an apocalyptic war with secularism. The stuff he said was said for the moment, so the audience can go "based!" and then go to dinner at Red Robin. Like their opponents on the woke left, one of the easiest ways to piss off people like Kirk is to treat them as the intellectually serious thinkers they pretend to be. That's not to say this stuff isn't dangerous. Sometimes things that are meant to be taken in a propagandistic context are taken at face value by literal-minded followers. Witness how radical feminists said "gender is a social construct, it has nothing to do with biology," which helped spawn the transgender movement that would later turn on them. Had Kirk not been assassinated, perhaps he would have seen the day when he was face to face with a monster of his own creation.
I spent my life promoting ideas, and ultimately decided the most appropriate social media handle was "No One Listens To Me" (not literally true but oh, so close.) So I don't think an influencer who got more attention than he deserved (and $325,000+/year) should get extra attention for being killed. And if people start listening to me just because I die and can no longer benefit from the engagement, I hereby object in advance to this unfair deprivation.
Clearly in the long run the attention he gets and the influence he has are going to be orders of magnitude less than what they would have been if he'd continued his career for the next few decades. Given that, jeez, do we need to worry about the small spike of attention he's going to get for the next month or 2? And what form of attention is it you think we should not give him?. Are you talking about the people exclaiming about how horrific the shooting was, how tragic that a man was cut down in the prime of life, how he was really really honest and nice and meant well, etc etc? Or the people quoting his most extreme right-wing statements, and hating on him for his views? Or the people who believe we must only say kind and civil things arguing with the people who say fuck that guy?
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it? Maybe Kirk was right, and American liberty depends on Christianity; maybe you're also right, and Christianity in America will inevitably decline. I suppose, in that case, we'd expect to see the government become more authoritarian and controlling, without anyone being able to (or, perhaps, wanting to) really do anything to stop this. That would be an unpleasant conclusion, but there's no guarantee the world will always be pleasant.
>OK, but that's not really a counter-argument, is it?
It wasn't intended to be such. You can simply look at American Christians and ask if they're particularly committed to liberty, to which the answer is negative. They're very committed to "leave *me* alone," but not to leaving others alone. Libs, likewise, think liberty is someone others owe to them without any reciprocal obligation. Only some, not all, libertarians are truly committed to defending liberty for everyone.
As the guy behind the Professor Watchlist, I don’t think he makes a great martyr for free speech, but nobody should be attacked or killed for saying something others don’t like, whether that’s Charlie Kirk or Salman Rushdie. (Assuming that’s what happened, we still don’t know why the shooter did that and may never know.)
His ideas about Christianity as the only basis for freedom are pretty unexceptional in the evangelical community. Generic, even.
I don't think even the most vehement Kirk critics posting here believe he should have been attacked and killed. That's kind of a straw man. What's at issue was how wrong and how harmful was he, and is it legit to insist that people defer complaining about his views until a decent period of time has passed during which we all murmur platitudes about tragedy, and do not mention his claim that trans people are training the mentally ill to kill children.
I fed that note to GPT5 and it could not find any source that quoted Kirk as saying exactly that line, or any approximation of it. I guess I fell for somebody’s deliberately infuriating and inaccurate summary of Kirk’s ideas, placed in quotes. So I appreciate you calling me out on that quote.
But I also asked GPT for quotes from Kirk about trans people and other topics mentioned in that non-quote, and did find a number of direct quotes expressing views I think are false and harmful. I could give a dozen examples but here are 2 representative ones:
[Those who were in favor of legalizing gay marriage] ““ . . .are not happy just having marriage … want to corrupt your children.”
[The court blocking the ban on transgender people in the military was] “ordering … mentally delusious transgender troops.”
Kirk also called for steps to block so-called gender-affirming care which, even if it were clearly desirable to block it, would be abrupt, badly considered steps that would cause considerable suffering. If the country made good on his call for a nationwide ban of gender-affirming care for transgender people, then those who have fully transitioned will be harmed. I know one F-to-M person who has had breasts, ovaries and uterus removed, and takes testosterone. The person is healthy and feels well. If they cannot use testosterone, they jwon’t have any gender-specific hormones. — no estrogen, etc. Not only will they become a weird-looking entity lacking both male and female characteristics, they will also be unhealthy. And the “Nuremberg-style trials” Kirk wants for doctors who have helped people make the gender transition are cruel and unfair treatment of professionals who broke no a law. So overall, even with the quote I gave discredited, I still believe Kirk’ views were wrong and harmful.
As for the poll Fox news cites, I don’t think you held it to a high standard, as you did my post. The question in the poll sounds like it was geared to produce a lot of yes responses, a result that would make left-of-center people look violent and crazy. Think about it. What does “partial justification” mean, exactly?. For instance, let’s say there’s a liberal senator I like. What would I say if somebody asked me if there was partial justification for supporting a campaign by a rival of his for the senate post? I’d think about how I like 70% of my favorite senator’s views, but dislike the other 30%, and count that 30% as partial justification, and answer “yes’. So let’s escalate to a question about murder. If somebody asked me whether there was partial justification for murdering Putin, I would say yes, there is some justification for doing it. He is cruel, he is responsible for much suffering and death, and he is dangerous. On the other hand, there’s some justification for not doing it: He might be replaced by somebody worse, and I think murder is wrong. Seems to me asking in a poll whether there is “partial justification” for something comes down to asking whether there is any case to be made for something. And there’s a case to be made for a lot of things that the person making the case is not in favor of. Sure, there’s a case to be made for murdering Musk. He’s kind of crazy, his power is not the product of election so there is no legal way to disempower him, and he’s so smart and so rich he could probably do substantial harm. But if the poll had asked “are you in favor of assassinating Elon Musk” I think the left-of-center numbers would have been very different.
> I'm annoyed by this idea that for a person to die violently as the victim of a crime somehow cancels out, or means you shouldn't talk about, any negative aspect of their life.
I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
If you have negative comments about Charlie Kirk, you either could have said them a week ago, or there will be enough opportunity to say them one month later.
Agree.
<I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
That's not true in most settings, though. If someone on this forum "talks shit" about Kirk, that is not cowardly, because even if Kirk was alive he would not know what the speaker said and so would not attempt to rebut them or make them look foolish. And it's unfair of you to sneak in a critique of people speaking negatively of Kirk by calling what they're doing "talking shit." I said several negative things about him in posts today that were reasoned criticisms expressed in a civil way. That's not talking shit and is not cowardly. It is also not true that "talking shit" about the murderer here or in other settings rewards the murderer, because the chance he will hear what's said here or in most settings in the country is nil.
I was trying to explain the rule in general. If your criticism was reasonable, then I think it is perfectly okay. But that is not a typical way how people on internet express opinions.
The part about "he wouldn't notice it anyway" I don't agree with, although I am too lazy to explain why, sorry for that.
>I understand the sentiment, but using a political murder as the moment to talk shit about someone feels cowardly (the victim can no longer respond) and rewards the murderer (not only is the victim eliminated, but their enemies get a clear opportunity to synchronize their attacks).
Not only that, but when someone's been assassinated for political reasons, talking about how bad and harmful the deceased's views were runs the risk of radicalising more people to commit more assassinations.
He literally toured America encouraging people to come up to him and tell him how bad and harmful his views were.
I don't believe for a moment that you're actually incapable of telling the difference between, on the one hand, debating your own personal views with people, and, on the other, talking about bad the victim of a political assassination was.
I can make the distinction. I just don't think it's important in this setting. It would certainly be important if we were in the company of Kirk's family and friends. To complaint to them about Kirk's views would be extraordinarily cruel, and that's why it would be wrong to do. As I said, I see the distinction. What I do not see is what is wrong with criticizing, on this forum, the views and destructive activities of someone who was just assassinated.
What, exactly, is wrong with doing that? It upsets people who did not know Kirk but who feel grieved and shaken about what happened? Fine, I get that some people feel that way, but it seems to me that those people should simply not read the posts here. I have many times bailed on reading a thread because it upset me too much. They can do the same.
Other than that, what is wrong with criticizing Kirk right now?
Start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
As you said, I think there's a difference between criticizing someone civilly and "talking shit". Moreover, I think the difference is critical (if I may overload the term).
The former is like an effortpost; you have to engage your higher brain function to make it. The latter is just venting emotionally driven discomfort, or worse, engaging the higher brain only to come up with a cleverer burn.
And the critical difference comes in the fact that someone else ends up reading it. If I were writing into a hole, I could vent whatever I want, ahahaha, he was talking about gun control, how poetic, blah blah blah, and the only downside would be my own emotional degradation from the indulgence. If it's on a forum, then everyone else gets whatever idea was transmitted, so it's a (let's say) 50x amplifier of either careful consideration or emotional sputum.
Aside: it could be emotional care, for that matter; people tend to accept positive eulogies of the dead. Cue the aphorism about saying something nice.
But if the criticism is important enough, it'll need to show effort. It's way, way too easy to knock someone on the internet, as everyone knows; what people don't seem to internalize is that this abundance of supply causes a drop in price. Most readers aren't willing to engage their higher brain if the sender didn't. So instead, the lower brain rolls in and it turns into a burnfest, and those are rarely rewarding.
And I think this applies even if no one was close to the deceased. It's habit forming, so people stop caring if anyone in the audience is close in other cases.
This is why I've become annoyed of any trash talk about anyone who just died. It's interesting; it could be 1945 and we just got news Hitler had shot himself and I could get annoyed at any trash talk of *him*. Not because I think he was awesome, but rather I think of what such talk is doing to the people saying and hearing it. OTOH, if it's civil criticism, it flips; someone could have thoughtfully pointed out something holding my dad back and I would have listened.
I agree.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by all the shit of the past few days, but thread OP's comment is kind of a relief. I've seen so many ad-hominem's about Kirk from people who've never ever consumed any of his content or bothered to verify something that too good to check before repeating it with supreme confidence. And if the first thing they said turned out to be wrong, well, they'll just say something else they heard with supreme confidence.
Meanwhile, thread OP is accurately summarizing Kirk's views on the role of Christianity in a way that Kirk would agree with.
I wouldn't really care to criticize him right now if not for the reaction to his death from many on the right, which is a combination of:
* advocating violence in response and/or using the state to go after critics
* over the top hagiography about how Kirk was the greatest person ever
* a lot of "the left is broadly responsible because of their rhetoric" from people engaged in the exact same type of rhetoric
And I'm not talking about randos online. I'm thinking of famous media personalities, members of Congress, the president.
Reason it's relevant to criticize Kirk and not just people's reactions is that the hypocrisy is a powerful argument against what they're doing. It's one thing to say "whatever you think of Kirk, you shouldn't persecute his critics", another thing to say "you attack people for supposedly extreme rhetoric but you praise as a saint a guy who said the same type of stuff".
I think a mature reaction is like this:
https://xcancel.com/ProjectLiberal/status/1965858345673425385
> We agree with Charlie Kirk on basically nothing.
> Except that he deserves the right, as every human does, to speak freely without the threat of violence.
I criticize the left all the time. Their existence is no reason not to criticize the party in power as it works to break American democracy. (Though this would be a tasteless time to lambast Kirk himself)
> Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society
And he thought they were good for society. Are you so much better qualified than him to say what's good or bad, or are you both mere mortals grasping for the truth in an unpredictable world?
He was murdered because of people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
All I can say is that if you get murdered tomorrow, I won't spend Saturday feverishly searching through your comment history to find things I disagree with so I can argue with your corpse.
<And he thought they were good for society.
Yeah, OK, and so what? That can be said of pretty much everyone whose views we discuss here, except for a few nuts who spout random ideas as an art form.
<people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
That's a pretty fine distinction. I'm not even sure it makes sense. Do you often disagree with ideas you think are right?
<He was murdered because people like you who can't distinguish between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong".
No he wasn't. He was murdered because the killer could not distinguish between "people whose Ideas I think are wrong" and "people I get to kill." And that, Melvin, is not fine distinction.
>> Charlie Kirk spent his life promoting ideas that were bad for society
> And he thought they were good for society.
So did Hitler of his. There's no point in that statement of yours.
But what I don't get is why you talk as if your conception of all this is right.
How could you possibly know that Alexander "can't distinguish between 'ideas I disagree with' and 'ideas that are wrong'"?
Are you "no mere mortal[...] grasping for the truth in an unpredictable world"?
Ah, wait.... I see. You're applying this "logic" only to other people, not yourself, because otherwise you could not give such snarky comments here.
Do you believe in universal truth? If not, then we're pretty much at the state of "I disagree with you" as the moral limit. If enough people disagree (as with Hitler) we can condemn, make laws against, etc. Do enough people disagree with Charlie Kirk to condemn him as a society? Doesn't look that way to me. He was broadly popular on the right. If you condemn him, you're condemning most of the right. Not only does that not work from a voting majority perspective, it's a horrible idea from the perspective of a civil society.
Go ahead and condemn the worst people, even if they're on your opponent's side. Please condemn the worst people on your own side. But relatively normie people who are saying things that maybe 40-60% of the country believes? Bad idea in a lot of ways. And comparing him to Hitler is downright evil.
If you do believe in universal truth, then you're still stuck with trying to convince others that your conception of truth is more accurate than someone else's. There's no shortcut here. You may be fully convinced, but that means nothing. Ironically, that was Charlie's best known attribute and plausibly what got him killed - he was in the trenches talking to people and working to convince them. Not by force, but by persuasion.
> If you condemn him, you're condemning most of the right.
Aren't those who condemn Kirk (and people like him) usually quite clear that they DO condemn most of the right?
Melvin was responding that the OP seemed to be struggling to differentiate between "ideas I disagree with" and "ideas that are wrong." From a policy standpoint "ideas that I disagree with" gets you nowhere unless you have a majority on your side. Charlie Kirk was mostly saying things that a majority agreed with, or at least a minority disagreed with.
So his ideological opponents are of course welcome to disagree with him, but that's pretty meaningless to a criticism of him, or especially his right to speak his mind. As much as his opponents hated him, he was no Hitler.
You seem not to have noticed that I didn't state *any* opinion on the subject matter *at all*, but did only criticize Melvin's critique of Alexander. And I did it regarding two points:
1. He said that that guy (who I don't even know and are not interested in) does think that his own ideas are good. And this is irrelevant. It does not make anyone, especially Alexander, change his mind about them. He finds them bad. That's why I said Hitler found his own ideas also good, because nobody changes his mind about Hitler's ideas when he learns that Hitler liked them.
2. He said nobody can know anything. But he obviously doesn't believe that, otherwise he wouldn't state that that is the case -- how could he know?
Apparently in the Rationalist's sphere people are just as irrational as everywhere else.
The point is that in a democracy you have to learn to cope with differing opinions and you don't get to establish them by force. If you believe that strong convictions are enough to murder opposition, you will soon find that most of society has strong convictions against that.
And if they don't, well, good bye civilized society.
Like Mr. Doolittle you seem to be under the impression that I engaged in the subject matter, which I didn't.
See my reply to him. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-398/comment/155210939
>I got bad news for people like Kirk: there's no reason to expect the secularization of society, a long-running process seen across many countries, to halt or reverse.
According to Pew Research, the process may have already halted in the USA. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/)
"...for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range....
"Both Protestant and Catholic numbers are down significantly since 2007, though the Protestant share of the population has remained fairly level since 2019 and the Catholic share has been stable since 2014, with only small fluctuations in our annual surveys.
"Meanwhile, the share of Americans who identify with a religion other than Christianity has been trending upward, though it is still in single digits.
Plus a recent survey in Britain (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/brits-beliefs-about-gods?crossBreak=1824&period=5yrs) found that the youth cohort (18-24) has gone from 49% "I do not believe in any sort of God" in 2021 to 32% today, with those who "believe there is a God" going from 24% to 37%. Another UK survey from this year found that in 2018 only 4% of adult's in Britain went to church at least once a month, and now 12% do. This is driven mostly by the younger cohorts: 18-24 year-olds went from 4% attendance to 16%, and those 25-34 went from 4% attendance to 13%.
Given this data, how certain can we be that secularization will continue and will not reverse? For all we know we might be at peak secularization in the West right now. Globally it looks like we were at peak secularization back in 2010, Pew expects the percent of the global population that is religiously affiliated to continue to drop over the next 25 years. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religiously-unaffiliated/)
Similar news in Finland: https://www.uef.fi/en/article/belief-in-god-among-boys-continues-to-grow-in-finland-study-finds-signs-of-growing-belief-among
And Sweden: https://swedenherald.com/article/breakthrough-for-the-church-of-sweden-young-people-driving
And Norway: https://x.com/JusBrierley/status/1901744347969630439
>Given this data, how certain can we be that secularization will continue and will not reverse?
It progresses by fits and spurts, but the long-term direction is always down.
"Always" over what timeframe? We've had revivals in specific countries as well as over large swaths of the world. Obviously specific religions have started, spread, shrunk and grown at different times. Christianity was pretty small in 50AD, but subsequently grew a lot - in defiance of "always down." In fact, Christianity is probably the largest its ever been right this moment, in terms of total numbers. In terms of percents it may be down compared to fairly recent metrics and when looking specifically at Europe or the US. Looking at 300 years ago Christianity has grown in both total numbers and percents in the entire non-European world.
Not globally, and we shouldn’t assume it will be in the developed nations either. Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%, leaving he system to stabilize and plateau (which is seems to have done in the US, at least over the last 5 years).
>Presumably the people who have already secularists are the most susceptible to secularizing, leaving more die-hard believers behind. It could be much more difficult to secularize the next 20% of the religious population than it was to secularize the last 20%
The examples of East Germany, Czechia, and Estonia show that any such limit is around 5%.
I don't think the populations of those three countries are representative enough that we would expect that other countries will end up in the same space. Most notably, they all used to be part of or were subject states to the USSR, an officially atheist authoritarian regime that spent decades officially suppressing religion, though legal restrictions, arresting clergy, removing privileges from the openly religious, teaching atheism and mocking religion in schools, and propaganda campaigns against religiosity. It would be surprising if that didn't have an effect on the floor for religiosity! Unless you expect similar pressures to arise in the USA or the rest of Europe, we shouldn't expect similar results.
Woke and traditional religion both feed on one another. Both have no real positive qualities, relying on the other to say "this is the alternative to me."
Just. Say. No.
>Normies are far more religious
When elections happen, overperformers are consistently milquetoast centrists who are neither woke nor Bible thumpers. You're the one not modeling normies properly.
Meanwhile, your side will have some trouble admitting that the monster that killed him is a monster created, at least in part, by your own ideology. Or perhaps to be fair, of your willingness to tolerate one-sided viewpoints keeping people in glass bubbles.
Wow, we can kill people by hating their ideas? Most of must have a lot of victims by now. We're like, serial killers?
The fun part of this comment is that it's so completely context-free that, without knowing the parent comment, it could be saying anything.
Why? From their perspective, it's one fewer Nazi.
We don't know anything about this monster, so it is a bit rich that you are accusing an entire 'side' (who is that?) of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once.
It's also very left-coded to act this way: accuse an entire group of responsibility, etc.
After Trayvon Martin, I remember a local-gov't leader quoted in the press saying, "They're killing our children!" She made it a rallying cry.
I was confused. "They"? That word ... are we not all part of the same country? Plus it was false. She should know better. But ... "they"? And the rallying cry caught on. That word flummoxed me. "They"
I've learned a lot since then.
With that incident, with Michael Brown in Ferguson, with George Floyd in Minneapolis, and a litany of other incidents, the left very loudly accused an entire giant group of people of being responsible + indifferent + closedminded all at once.
People throughout the country who were already disgusted by the facts of these incidents were summarily lumped together with the real villains, due only to their skin color or mix of policy choices & beliefs.
Very counterproductive. And very much inline with our host's own essay, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
The woman quoted above? I honestly thought we were in the same in-group, so to speak. Seriously, up until that day, I really thought a person like she and a person like me were united, at least in some small way.
Like I said, I've learned a lot since then. Much of which from this community here.
People on the left and right - and in the middle - have and share closeminded thoughts all the time. Human nature. Unfortunately there are many political actors who exploit this aspect of human nature for their own ends.
I would rather call it dickhead-coded to label an identifiable group "of being responsible, indifferent and closeminded at all at once". (It is legit to refer to a group of people who are responsible, indifferent and closeminded, but such a group is not readily identifiable.)
But my father has been, holy shit, shockingly indifferent and closed-minded, and responsible for indulging his indifferent closed-minded influencers but shutting out his own family, for reflexively defending his man Trump. He can never acknowledge that there is anything wrong with Trump, he just deflects criticisms into accusations about The Left.
Do I think his behavior is typical of his group (rather than common to all members of the group)? Yes.
It matters to me whether he truly believed that, as he's quoted in the press as saying, “one thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder.” If he did not believe that then he was a cynical clown. Even if he did, he seems very remiss to me in not doing some double-checking about this issue. Either he was so sloppy and irresponsible he didn't bother to check, or else he was so convinced that trans people are pieces of shit that he didn't think it was important to check the accuracy of horrifically inflammatory statements about them.
Two members of my family, now dead, were gay: my mother and my half brother. Both had some mild trans tendencies. My brother died of AIDS during the era when people were talking about AIDS as god's punishment for perversion. Do I really have to be sad about the death of this "nice family man "who spouted the kind of untruths that led to my brother dying in an atmosphere of hostile mockery, and my mother feeling so uncomfortable about her sexuality that she waited til she was facing death to tell me? They were nice people too and, unlike Nice Guy Kirk, did not spread toxic lies about people. In fact both were kind and tolerant. No, I am not in favor of assassination, but I just am not sad that Kirk got shot in the neck while lying about trans people. Frankly, I'm glad he got blown away. I'm not defending my reaction as the right and proper one, but I don't think it's that hard to understand.
One of the things I've been hearing from Kirk's advocates is that despite disagreements one might have with him, Kirk's response was to open a dialogue, not shut you down, let alone hurt you.
If that's true, then that's probably something you could root for.
One way to disprove that might have been to find a situation where a group of people waving the Kirk flag are moving to beat up a trans person, and see if Kirk tries to condemn them and call for a dialogue instead. Or find out if that had happened, since it won't be happening now. (I'm not familiar enough with Kirk to feel certain I could find a representative sample of his views.)
Going forward, a lot of conservatives are taking home the lesson that if someone tries to defend their views on a soapbox, the response is likely to be the ammo box. Maybe not the rule, but now it's an existence proof.
"Do I really have to be sad about the death"
No, and I doubt anyone here thinks you have to. People are saying valid critiques feel very counter-productive right now.
Restraint is frustrating. Especially when some people ignore a person's faults, possibly taking advantage for political convenience. The desire to at least "correct the record" is very, very strong ... and this is the type of thinking that makes well-meaning people point out George Floyd's use of fentanyl on that fateful day.
• Was it true? I mean, sure, yes.
• Is it helpful, bringing this up? Maybe yes, maybe no.
• Is it productive, making a giant deal out of it? Probably not ... and certainly not in the immediate days after the event.
Therefore restraint also wise at times.
>Two members of my family, now dead, were gay: my mother and my half brother. Both had some mild trans tendencies.
Might be a good thing they lived before a teacher could identify and act on that info.
Less of this please. This is an exceptionally disgusting and tasteless way to respond to someone discussing tragedies within their family, even within an explicitly political discussion.
While it was a bit tasteless and a bit out of place, it is absolutely relevant if we are holding Kirk to account for criticizing the trans movement. Teachers trying to give kids gender dysphoria seems to be inseparable from the trans movement for whatever reason, and given that GD sufferers have sky-high suicide rates and many other problems, it is something every parent should fear.
"give kids gender dysphoria" ... wtf? "oh little Johnny, take this pill. It totally won't make you believe you're a girl"
" Teachers trying to give kids gender dysphoria"
Please kindly confine yourself to talk about real problems that occur in the real world instead of blithely spewing insane bullshit made up by hateful troglodytes to justify their heinous bigotry, thank you very much.
I’m not offended. I’m really not all touchy and sensitive about my mother and brother’s
situation. It takes shit on the order of Kirk’s to get to me.
I disagree with this idea that killing him counterproductively amplified his message. That's wishful thinking of precisely the kind employed when people were being "de-platformed" by every major company (from social media to web hosting to payment processors): it turns out that strategy actually DOES usually work to silence people.
This entire thread is full of insanely illogical arguments, with the worst ones being those offered as the reasons why it is dangerous and destructive to criticize Kirk right now. We'll incentivize more people to become shooters! It makes Kirk too important, increasing the impact his views will have! It's cowardly because he's not here to defend himself! It brings us down to the shooter's level!
I think the real reason many women think it's awful to criticize Kirk right now is because women are socialized to be Nice, and the real reason men do is because they are afraid of their own potential for violence.
Yeah, like the way the Left silenced people into voting for Donald Trump. Twice. And nobody's yet figured out how to silence him.
It's sometimes possible to silence individual *people*, yes. But the proper object of that verb isn't a person but a message. It is possible to silence a message, but it's a lot harder than it seems and clumsy attempts to silence mere people are usually not effective. The intersection of the Streisand Effect and political assassination is more commonly an amplified message.
Doubly so in the Youtube era, where Charlie Kirk's words will be heard in his voice coming from his young and telegenic face for many years to come/
If you don't know what my point was, you could try reading my comment again.
But you didn't read it. I had several digs at the left there, and you didn't see them because, like many Rightists in my experience, you don't actually read, you just skim, look for keywords and generate a generic response that doesn't address what you're actually replying to.
And like many leftoids in my experience, you have hallucinated something in your writing that simply isn't there for anyone not hip to whatever the current epistomogical model for victimhood is. You continue to evade requests to supply a point, so I guess this is just a rant.
I'm honoring him by engaging with his ideas, that was what he toured universities to do.
Don't think he would have liked this empathy shame thing which is rather gay-coded IMHO.
I don't think it's gay coded, I think it's woke. It has the characteristic deep structure: The speaker's assumption that they get to dictate what constitutes civilized behavior; and the mean twist at the end, directed at those who don't comply ("turnips"). Woke is all about slathering sympathy on everybody except those who disagree with the speaker -- those jerks you get to cancel.
Woke actually abjured the distinction between civilized and uncivilized, which is why it would write gender studies articles defending FGM, and call you a fascist if you objected to screaming zombies on the subway
I get that some people truly are shocked and sad. What I'm objecting to is the insistence that everyone feel sad, empathize with his wife and kids, etc., or at least refrain from criticizing Kirk. And this poster really is insisting that that reaction is the correct one, the one decent people have. In the next post down they write "when someone dies, we put aside arguing about ideas or whether we love or hate them to think about the fragility of life, the cruelty of it being cut short, and about those people left behind". That sentence is obviously not a a description of what everybody is doing here. And it is not a wish or an opinion, something like "I think we should make an extra effort to consider his wife and kids, how awful it is to have life cut short," etc. It's a sort of royal "we" or you could identify it as the way teachers talk to kids -- "we don't eat with our fingers.”
Look, even if I did not have a strong negative personal reaction to Kirk, I would object to the kind of tone policing that's going on here. First of all, I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone to be shocked and grieving in response to the death of someone they did not know personally. There's a death in the news every single day, and sometimes news of scores of deaths, often by violence, often with photos and accompanying horrific details. We have all developed ways to take some distance and not react the way we would if the deceased had been an acquaintance and we had actually witnessed the death. I do not think I would have had much emotional reaction to Kirk's assassination if I knew nothing about his views on trans people. I’d never even heard of him til the day he died. I would have had some emotional reaction to the fact of a political assassination, but probably not all that much even to that — things in the US already seem really bad and dangerous to me anyway. I am sometimes laid low by deaths in the news — Gene Hackman and the circumstances of his death made me very sad, Scott’s story about the little Palestinian kid with bits of his dead brother in his backpack made me cry. But it would never occur to me to ask people here who mention those deaths to speak in a certain tone about them.
Second of all, I don’t think it’s reasonable for those who are grieving and shocked to insist that others refrain from posting criticisms of the person who is dead. Why can they not just stop reading this open thread, and seek out sites where there are others who feel the way they do? This is a forum where social issues, politics, etc. are debated vigorously all the time. Why should that have to change because there has been a death that shocked and saddened more people than the typical death in the news does? There are certainly threads I’ve skipped because I hate the dominant tone or because the beliefs being expressed by many make me feel awful.
And third of all, it is simply unrealistic to insist that everybody refrain from criticizing Kirk . Nobody but Scott ever succeeds in getting people to not talk about certain things or in a certain way on here. There was once a thread where people were talking about suicide. I requested several times that people refrain from giving details about a method of suicide that I am sure not all readers know about. It is painless, quick, not gory and horrifying the way many methods are, and can be done with materials that are easy to find. Nope, people wouldn’t do it. And that wasn’t because some never saw my posts or forgot about them — several people told me that were not willing to self-censor, and thought all readers had a right to this info.
Among other things, the civilized norm of not speaking ill of the brutally murdered helps disincentivize political murder. Tyler Robinson acted alone, but it's a pretty safe bet that he saw himself as acting on behalf of a broad community. See also Luigi Mangioni, among others. Humans are social animals, and when we kill people, it's often in the expectation of social rewards.
Hearing people one respects say "Of course we can't condone this action, nod nod wink wink, but man that guy you killed was just The Worst", is that reward. And there's no way to say that, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, without the nod and wink being heard by anyone so inclined. So, freedom of speech, yes, someone can say that sort of thing if they want. And the rest of us can tell them what we think about it.
"Engaging with your preferred interpretation of your preferred selection of his ideas" is not "engaging with his ideas".
Who's this "we"? Some people do, some don't.
It's the royal "We," Nancy.
I already didn't like Kraft but that picture of his truck in the bike lane right by an intersection where a child was killed is just totally disgusting. No amount of housing policy differences can make up for that with me: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1l9ohpl/big_truck_parked_in_the_bike_lane_by_the/
Do you think he personally drove that truck?
Seems like a silly gotcha to me. 1)Boston streets are very congested and no matter how you slice the pie — for ex, by slicing part of the street off and calling it a bike lane — there is not enough space to meet the needs of those driving, biking, parking, or placing their truck where it needs to be in order to make a delivery or perform a service. Everyone who does not have scrupulosity OCD parks illegally, blocks traffic, cuts people off in order to enter the stream of traffic etc. If you live there, you’ve done that stuff too.
2) Even if this truck were doing something exceptionally inconsiderate, rather than something that is happening on most blocks, what it’s doing has nothing to do with the child’s being run over. They are not incurring some of the guilt for that.
>> If you live there, you’ve done that stuff too.
Speak for yourself. I'm the one on the bike going around all the illegally parked incredibly inconsiderate dangerous traffic.
>> They are not incurring some of the guilt for that.
It's a bad look made worse by context.
I've been on a bike too for the last 5 years. If the conditions are godawful, I ride on the sidewalk. I am careful not to hit or scare pedestrians, but they still don't like me biking on the sidewalk, and I get it. I believe biking on the sidewalk is in fact illegal. But I need to be somewhere, a bike's what I've got, and I'm not going to risk my life getting forced out into a lane crowded with fast-moving, irritable car drivers. In my view, the conditions force me to choose to do something probably illegal and certainly a bit inconsiderate. That's my point. That truck is just one of thousands of manifestations of the fact that it is impossible to travel and park in Boston and be perfectly law abiding and perfectly considerate of others. It says nothing whatever about the Krafts. And can you honestly say that if you had a friend's car for the day and were driving in Boston you would refrain from parking somewhere illegal if you thought you could run in, do your errand, and get back to the car without being ticketed?
I listened to an account a student in the crowd gave of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Student said that the shooting occurred during a Q&A. Acc/to interviewee, a student had asked Kirk whether he believed trans people committed more murders than others, and Kirk said yes, and there was a cheer from the crowd. The student asked a follow-up question, and then Kirk was shot.
It seems unlikely to me that trans people do commit more murders than other people (who are not trans but similar in other respects -- demographics, SES, etc --to the trans subjects), though I suppose it's possible. I did a quick check with GPT -- did not double check its answer -- and it said there is lots of data indicating that trans people are attacked and harmed more often than others, but no data on whether they commit more murders. So my question is, does it seem likely that Kirk actually believed that trans people are more likely to murder? If so, why? Are there sites out there somewhere citing some kind of data, some study? Did he just think it was self-evident because trans people seem obviously bad, weird and defective to him ? Did he not believe it, but say it because he knew it was a crowd pleaser? I am trying to understand his mentality.
>who are not trans but similar in other respects -- demographics, SES, etc --to the trans subjects
But should you control for this? The standard pro-trans claim is that bad things associated with being trans are downstream of it (just in ways that are everyone elses fault), and you shouldnt control for mediators.
Yeah, you may be right, I had not tried researching the matter when I wrote that. I spent a couple hrs looking into it yesterday, and describe some of the difficulties of getting the needed data in this post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-398/comment/155418669
I'm not sure if they carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-men, but they certainly seem to carry out disproportionately more murders than cis-women.
Where are you finding numbers on that? I just went looking for some and didn't find anything besides the Violence Prevention Project's dataset on public mass shootings. That does indicate a rate higher than cis women but lower than cis men, but the sample size is too small (one transgender shooter) to draw robust conclusions from. I can't find anything on murder rates in general.
It would seem that the absolute numbers of trans criminals would be too low to draw many conclusions unless the rate were staggeringly high. If the rate for transwomen were exactly the same as for cis men, we'd still be looking at numbers too low to draw conclusions about for big rare events like a mass shooting, though it would be enough to discuss more typical murders.
Agreed. About 0.8% of US adults are trans, roughly evenly distributed between trans men, trans women, and nonbinary, so if we had systematic statistics we would be able to tell the difference between trans women committing homicide at the same rate as cis men (we would expect to see about 30 per year then) or as cis women (which would be about 3 per year), especially if we were to aggregate across several years of data.
PolitiFact took a run at the question:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/sep/09/trans-people-mass-shootings-gun-violence/
I've been looking into it too. Here's the trouble with the data available: Places that collect shooting data lump together all shootings where 4+ people were killed. There have been 4000+ in the last decade, and very few correspond to what we think of as "mass shootings." Most involve gang violence, which is just a different thing, and anyhow I'm pretty sure most gangs would not want a accept a trans member even if they were a good fit in demographics, attitudes, etc. If you just look at the large, famous incidents, the ones we think of as mass shootings, the total number of them is so small that you can't conclude anything from the number. It would be like deciding whether a coin was weighted unevenly based on 4 tosses. It is, though, kind of striking how many mass shootings were committed by people who are gender nonconforming in some way.
Anyhow: I just figured out that the Gun Violence Archive has filters, and while there isn't one that selects for what we think of as mass shootings, there is one that selects only shootings where the victims were strangers to the shooter. There aren't that many of them, and you can actually look through them and remove any that don't count as mass shootings for one reason or another. I believe there was one other filter that I thought would also be useful. But, after you select the incidents that fit the bill, you have to find out whether the shooter was trans, and many records give no info one way or the other about that. I do think it's likely that in many, possibly even most, of these cases the topic came up in court, because if the shooter is trans, there's the issue of where the person would be incarcerated -- with what gender. So I was thi nking about asking GPT to look into that. But I don't know where, exactly, to tell it to look. And I'm actually busy enough with other things that it's a bad idea for me to get fascinated by this question and pour time into it.
Another important point: very very few people commit mass murder of the kind that involves spraying a crowd of strangers with bullets. Maybe one person in a million? One in a hundred thousand? Even if it's one in a hundredn thousand, and even if trans people are 10 times a likely to be shooters as cis people, that means there's a one in 10,000 chance that the trans person next to you in line for movie tickets is a shooter. Which rounds down to zero.
>Acc/to interviewee, a student had asked Kirk whether he believed trans people committed more murders than others, and Kirk said yes
Not quite right (but about the level of fidelity I would expect from an eyewitness account). According to the AP the exchange went like this:
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked. Kirk responded: “Too many.”
The questioner followed up: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
Apparently those were his last words.
My guess: Lots of trans and gay murderous villains in movies. It's a trope.
But of course the question is then why the writers of those movies wrote them like that --but not, why *they* believed this. Most writers don't believe what they write. (Harry Potter, Sci-Fi, ...)
The reason is because if your audience thinks being gay or trans is wrong and creepy, then having the villain do gay or gender-nonconforming things helps establish that they're a bad guy. They see the villain acting girly and think "ugh, that guy's a freak."
It's the same reason why crippled or deformed villains are (or were) popular - it looks freaky, it's a deviation from the norm, it visually tells the audience "this person is twisted on the outside, and they're twisted on the inside as well."
I imagine a similar effect is in play with Charlie Kirk's statement - if he thinks "ugh, this person is a mentally ill deviant" when thinking of trans people, it's easy for him to imagine that they're deviant in other ways (such as being a murderer), regardless of the facts.
Tangentially, the motif of villains having a hairline scar on the face (usually on a cheek or the forehead) is a specific historical allusion, coding the character as a member of the late 19th or early 20th century German/Prussian aristocratic officer class. It was fairly fashionable for university students of this class to fight highly-stylized "academic duels". These were nominally actual duels with real swords, but were not fought to the death and typically involved rules and equipment (armor and protective goggles) designed to minimize the risk of death or serious injury. Most of the face besides the eyes was left unprotected, since getting a highly visible scar in such a duel was seen as a positive outcome: dueling scars were seen as an indicator of courage.
Giving villains dueling scars overlaps with the tradition in American movies of the mod to late 20th century of making villains resemble Nazis, since a fair number of senior officers in Nazi Germany had dueling scars.
I think it's a talking point in conservative media right now, I don't know what evidence there is for it if any. I really doubt the timing of the shot means anything since it sounds like it was done by a rooftop sniper some distance away.
I have no problem with trans people, but if I was asked that question, without looking it up, my response would also have been yes (at least if I was answering honestly). The logic is that I've read before that trans people have much higher rates of mental illnesses than non trans people. And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
I tried to look it up myself just now as well, and also pretty much got redirected to info about trans people being harmed more than others. I'd be happy be corrected if you or anyone else finds some actual info on this.
> And I think people with mental illnesses commit more murders on average.
Do you really think that?
I think people who want (want!) someone dead (because they hate them, fear them, want something from them, or them out of the way) are the ones who commit more murders on average.
I don't see how one needs to have a mental illness for that, except in special cases.
It seems likely to me that more mass murderers than one-on-one murderers are crazy. Killing someone in rage or for gain just seems like an extension of the kind of interaction that happens all the time. Yes, of course, it is bad, but is much easier for most of us to comprehend. We don't have the feeling you have to be crazy to do it.
There must be data on what kinds of mental illness are more prevalent in trans people, and I will look it up when I get a chance. Most kinds of mental illness do not make people more likely to be mass murderers. Probably half the US has qualified for depression, anxiety disorder or substance use disorder at some point in their life, but the risk that any one of them will commit mass murder is tiny.
I'm sure somebody has categorized mass murderers by mental state at the time of the event. Some mass murderers are just plain psychotic, and have delusions that, if true, would make committing mass murder make some kind of sense; some are in the midst of rage-and-despair meltdowns set off by bad things that have recently happened to them, things like being fired; some are true believers in some movement that hates a certain group, and lack the internal controls that prevent other members of the movement from actually killing outgroup members; some are hooked on the idea of the fame and glory they will get. Only the first of these groups is clearly crazy. though of course most in the other groups could be diagnosed with depression, sociopathy or naricissistic personality disorder. But the last 3 disorders are all quite common, and the risk that an individual with one of them will commit a mass murder is tiny.
>There must be data on what kinds of mental illness are more prevalent in trans people, and I will look it up when I get a chance.
Warrier et al (2020) is the best study on the subject I've come across.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17794-1
They analyzed two datasets that had info on both transgender identification and various self-reported mental illnesses. The results are not very robust between datasets. One dataset shows significantly elevated rates for all mental conditions in the set (autism, ADHD, bipolar, depression, learning disability, OCD, and scizophrenia) among trans individuals, but a lot of this seems to be driven by autism correlating both with being trans and with self-reports of other conditions. The other dataset shows very strong association with autism, moderate association with depression, weaker associations with OCD, ADHD, and Bipolar, and no statistically significant associations with scizophrenia.
I also looked just now for other data on associations between gender dysphoria and either personality disorders or schizophrenia. There are some papers out there, but all the ones I've skimmed seemed to have load-bearing reliance on outdated estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria (on the order of 1 in 10,000, not the current estimate of 0.6% to 1.3% of the population).
The correlation between autism and gender dysphoria seems pretty robust and shows up in a bunch of studies. Here's a 2022 survey paper:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10313553/
We've had a few high-profile mass-shootings where the shooter was trans and people are subject to recency bias.
If your attitude is "*must* I believe this?" it won't clear that bar.
If your attitude is "*can* I believe this?" then it definitely does.
I wish someone would look at the data and give some stats. US gov't data on murderers and murder victims just give basic demographics, I think. I wonder if people who have relevant data sets are not analyzing them to answer this question because acc/to wokeism it's an evil question to even consider, sort of like race and IQ.
I think that if you did actually look carefully at the stats then what you'd find is that it depends how you define things and what cutoffs you take.
Here is a list of recent transgender shooters as per grok, which appears to be the only AI willing to talk about it:
* Nashville, TN (2023): Audrey Hale, identified as transgender, killed six people at The Covenant School.
* Denver, CO (2019): Alec McKinney, a transgender teenager, was involved in a school shooting that killed one and injured eight.
* Aberdeen, MD (2018): Snochia Moseley, reportedly transgender, killed three at a Rite Aid facility.
* Colorado Springs, CO (2022): Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five at an LGBTQ nightclub, was claimed to be non-binary by their lawyers, though this is disputed.
* Minneapolis, MN (2025): Robin Westman, identified as transgender, killed two children and injured 17 at Annunciation Catholic School.
Should Zizians also be on the list? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
I actually got GPT to cough up info. It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people. So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing. they recorded 4400 incidents in the last decade, and in only 10 of them was the shooter trans. For the well-publicized shootings, there has probably been enough light thrown on the presumed killer that there's decent info about whether they're trans. I don't know anything about the info quality of the many other shootings that met the GVA criteria. How likely are the police to try to find out whether someone is trans, if they do not volunteer the info? Do they maybe know because in most casesvthe suspect or the person's lawyer is expressing a lot of concern about what gender they will be housed with in prison?
Anyhow, going by the GVA stats, trans people are ddfinitely under represented in the shooters group. A cis person is 3-4 times as likely as a trans personvto carry out a mass shooting.
Makes sense to me. I know trans people have a higher-than-average oddness quotient, with autism especially over-represented in the group. But I would not expect autism to be a risk factor for being a shooter. Most autistic people are solitary, uncomfortable around people, and emotionally flat.
> It gave me data from the last decade from the Gun Violence Association, which defines gun violence as a public shooting of 4 or more people... So not really in line with most people's concept of mass murder -- still, I doubt the data would be very different using a different definition of mass killing.
I think that when people say "mass shooting" they're generally thinking about the case where some nut shoots a bunch of strangers, rather than gang-related gunfights, but of course the GVA's statistics are dominated by the latter.
That's why Charlie Kirk's last words were "counting or not counting gang violence?", because it makes a huge difference to the reference class.
I agree that transgender individuals are much less likely to be the perps in gang-related shootings, but I still wonder whether they're more or less likely to be the perps in non-gang-related shootings. (Which frankly, I care a lot more about, because I'm not a gang member and neither is anyone I know.)
Absolutely disagree that about its being evil. A lot of research findings can be fuel for oppression. *Most* research findings probably are harmful to some innocent people. For instance findings about farming or manufacturing processes that produce toxic products no doubt harm some kind, fair, honest people who got into the business and had no idea their product was harming the public. Some are not in a position to adapt how they produce stuff, and go under. Some of these people probably end up bankrupt and despairing.
Of course I see that if trans people turn out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people that info can be used to oppress them. But to label the research as "just fuel for oppression" is absurd. It's like saying metal as "just a material for producing bullets." Both are many things, not all of them bad. Furthermore, if trans people are more likely to commit mass murder I'm not sure that info is going to be make things much worse for them. Lots of people already think they're likely to commit mass murder, so research data seems not to play much role in what they believe. Seems the belief is a result of publicity about incidents that fit easily with an overall negative take on transness, nurtured and magnified in an echo chamber. '
As a matter of fact, even if trans people turned out to be twice as likely to commit mass murder as other people, that info is if anything reassuring. What fraction people commit mass murder? One in a million? So for a random trans person the chance they'll shoot up a crowd is 2 in a million? Still so low it's vanishingly unlikely, and anyone with a lick of sense will round it down to zero.
The late Charlie Kirk's organization Turning Point USA had funding on the order of hundreds millions of dollars over the years. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023.
I got in an argument with someone about the effect of money in politics. They argued that there are diminishing returns in individual races (which I simply don't have the data to argue for or against right now). But "money in politics" is not just about individual elections. There are *lots* of ways to use money. There are lots of *creative* ways to use money. There are lots of creative ways to use money, directly or indirectly, to steer public opinion and policy.
Turning Point USA is/was just one example.
In what creative ways does Turning Point USA spend money?
Even if TPUSA was just funding individual races, that's a lot of individual races. It wouldn't surprise me to find that TPUSA could spend nearly all its money on them without seeing meaningful diminishing returns. One race could easily spend $1M, and there are easily over 100 races. That's $100M right there.
Meanwhile, I don't think "there exist creative ways to spend money" necessarily implies an organization will find those ways. OTOH, I think that as the amount of spendable money increases, the motivation to find creative ways to spend it drops. It's easier to employ stable but less efficient spending strategies and put the rest in a war chest.
Easter egg for people from the other sub-thread:
I actually agree with preferring the US system lol
Okay, but you're still wrong about how the UK's system actually works in practice.
So, Charlie Kirk is dead. Things are escalating quite nicely, aren't they? While it is delightfully ironic that he died right as he was scapegoating minorities for mass shootings, he'll make for a good martyr nonetheless. How many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown? Because I feel like this isn't quite severe enough to get away with that, unless Trump's base is way more attatched to him than I thought...
In a different day and age, I might have written that perhaps we should wait with drawing conclusions until we know the first thing about the assassin other than that they're evading police. In any case, the current US administration has shown that it will start crackdowns on anyone for any reason or none at all, so I don't believe Kirk's death will have any more impact than the Minnesota legislators' shootings had a noticable calming effect. It might be referenced some more in future tweets, but the agenda has already been set. Dissenting opinions welcome, I'm not American and only read the news
I understand Trump immediately spent a bunch of time blaming The Left although nothing was known about the shooter. Seems like 84% of "Ideologically motivated extremist homicides" in the US, 1990-2020, were right-wing: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versus-far-right-fatal-violence-an-empirical-assessment-of-the-prevalence-of-ideologically-motivated-homicides-in-the-united-states
Crack down on who or what?
While I share some of your concern, I feel like there's a good chance this won't even move the needle that much. The Trump administration really doesn't seem to be very worried about taking the pulse of its base before it acts: Trump just does what he wants, tosses out whatever lazy, bullshit justification is easiest to reach for and his base picks it up and runs with it unquestioningly. Given how often I've seen people even on this forum parroting his flimsy excuses, I can't really "doesn't have a good enough excuse to sell his people on it" to be much of a bottleneck for him.
Maybe escalation like this will make some people more likely to side with him when he crosses what they would otherwise regard as some bright line. But given how many bright lines have already fallen in the rear view mirror almost without comment, it probably won't be that big a shift. If the past several decades have taught us anything it's that in a country of 300 million and a world of 8 billion, there will always be *some* excuse ready at hand to rile up U.S. extremists.
Kirk called for someone to bail the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi out of prison. It's bad for him to have been murdered. That's because political violence is bad - a view that Charlie Kirk seemingly didn't share.
But political violence is bad even when directed at someone who thinks that it isn't bad.
Somehow I find this sort of snarky gotcha-posting even more distasteful than the people who are openly celebrating the murder.
Speaking truthfully about directly relevant things someone has said and done is distasteful now? Somehow, lying about or ignoring the work someone built their life around does not *actually* strike me as a respectful way to talk about them after they've passed.
I wouldn't even care to say anything if he'd just been killed and people were denouncing that he was killed. Or when people respond by calling for more civil rhetoric, not advocating violence, etc. Or if people praise Kirk on a personal level (i.e. non-political stuff like family).
It's when people go a step further and start praising Kirk as dedicated to that sort of civil rhetoric - often the same people now saying that "we" (i.e. the right) are "at war" with the left.
If we are going to have a standard about civil or not-violent rhetoric it has to apply across the board. People who are upset about that type of rhetoric should see if their personal faves are engaged in it, and if so, are they actually so opposed to it as they claim.
For posterity though I looked up the full quote on the subject:
>"Politico says, ‘top Republicans reject any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault.’ Of course, you should reject any link!
> Why is the Republican party — why is the conservative movement to blame for gay, schizophrenic, nudists that are hemp jewelry makers, breaking into somebody’s home or maybe not breaking into somebody’s home? Why are we to blame for that exactly?
> And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. I wonder what his bail is? They’re going after him with attempted murder, political assassination, all this sort of stuff.
> I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful, it’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?
In case it's unclear, the argument being made is not that someone should bail him out because he's a hero and violence against Pelosis doesn't matter, the argument is that someone should bail him out to ask him some questions, because he was suspicious of the media narrative at the time (that Depape was some kind of right-wing extremist) and talking to him might clarify it.
Now in fact, Kirk was right, and it turns out that Depape was more of a standard issue lunatic than a political extremist:
"When given the chance to address the court before his sentencing, DePape, dressed in prison orange and with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at length about September 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being replaced by a body double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring against him."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/29/david-depape-sentenced-paul-pelosi-hammer-attack
I hadn't actually followed up on this story, I didn't realise he'd been given life without the possibility of parole. While I don't think that's an excessive penalty for assault with a deadly weapon, I can guarantee that if you or I had been attacked with a hammer by some lunatic in San Francisco then the penalty would be a lot lighter.
"In case it's unclear"
It's not so much "unclear" as it is "deliberate nonsense." Charlie has here an incident that made him and his associates and their rhetoric look terrible--an unstable person who aggressively soaked up all the the various flavors of conspiracy laden bullcrap that they've been peddling for easy money and simply took it seriously enough to act on it.
Instead of moderating or taking responsibility or anything of the sort, he throws out a bunch of insinuation-laden fast talk as a distraction, which includes both a suggestion to bail out a dangerous, aggressive, unstable man and some not-that-subtle implications that not everything about the attack was what it seemed.
So while I thank you for providing more detailed context--always worth doing--it doesn't make me think even a little bit better about Charlie Kirk.
He could be asked questions without bailing him out.
<DePape spoke at length about . . . his ex-wife being replaced by a body double.
That's a clearcut psychotic delusion. In fact it's so common that it has a name: Capgras Syndrome. The man is psychotic -- unless he's faking, of course. But seems like it would not be difficult to get clear on whether or not he has believed that for a while. The other stuff he says might or might not be psychotic delusions, depending on how he came to believe them.
I am less worried about a crackdown of some sort (against whom?) than I am about other radicals deciding that it's open season on public figures they don't like. Both left-radicals deciding to copycat this shooting and right-radicals deciding that this shooting justifies some kind of retaliation. I am not eager for an American remake of The Troubles.
Surely the Minnesota assassinations would have been a better time to worry about that? This isn't even the first political killing in recent months.
I did worry about it then. Also when the CEO of United Healthcare was murdered. And when Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, for that matter, and when he pardoned the rioters.
>This isn't even the first political killing in recent months.
I know. That's part of why I continue to be concerned.
+1
My not-well-informed model here is that violently inclined crazies pick up on the pattern of what one does when one is a violent crazy person and then follow that. Going postal with a glock is a bad pattern, but find some prominent political figure and murder them is even worse. If our plentiful supply of violent crazies and our plentiful supply of guns for them to use combine with a norm of those violent crazies doing political violence (and maybe getting lauded by extremists on one side, encouraging the next crackpot), our world will get a whole lot worse.
But only one of the sides would be shielded from the law. It's better for a conflict to be one-sided. Helps it end faster.
> But only one of the sides would be shielded from the law.
Which side are you suggesting will be shielded?
The one that wants to shoot enemies of the regime, and who get pardons when they destroy government property to do so.
Trump can only pardon federal crimes.
Like crimes committed in DC against the Capitol building and the vice president.
Are you suggesting the Trump Administration is going to start handing out pardons to people who assassinate leftists?
I would be surprised if there are pardons for actual assassinations. But there may well be pardons or non-prosecutions for “reckless endangerment” and attempted murder and other things where someone maintains a plausible deniability.
It was very free with handing out pardons to people who invaded the nation's capital and attempted to do violence to its governing body. So yes, it seems quite likely the the Trump administration will something like that in the future, as it already has in the past.
That is another plausible scenario, and I'm not particularly enthusiastic about that one, either.
I'm not here to judge. I understand that they have a narrative to maintain, I don't blame them for looking out for their own interests. I was just hoping to get some historical context or insider information so that I could figure out how fast everything is moving.
Am I the only one who has never heard of ACX hero Chris Rufo?
I've heard of him, but it's ludicrous to call him an ACX hero. He's a MAGA influencer-journalist, whose primary note in my memory is 'unlike most influencer-journalists, sometimes does actual journalism.'
That's surprising, but I expect you ARE familiar with his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo
Ah okay, I guess his name has indeed flitted across my eyeballs at some stage.
I don't blame myself for not remembering it, because I just read thirty seconds ago the sentence "the plagiarism was discovered by Chris Rufo and Blah Blah" and I've already forgotten who Blah Blah was.
>he died right as he was scapegoating minorities for mass shootings
Reality has a well-known racist bias.
He was scapegoating trans people, who are not (in actual fact) responsible for any significant degree of mass shootings.
But hey, if we're going to play that game, reality also has a well-known misandrist bias and an enormous one at that. Can we scapegoat men for mass shootings, or is it only allowed of demographic groups that you dislike?
>Can we scapegoat men for mass shootings
Since you consider acknowledging facts to be "scapegoating," sure. Notice how everyone's assuming the shooter is a man.* I'd bet the investigators are even doing "gender profiling," which nobody ever has a problem with.
*Or at least a *biological* man
Do you not understand what the words "scapegoating" and "profiling" signify? Or are you simply confused about how to properly apply conditional probabilities to real-life situations?
If it's the latter, while I'm no longer an educator by profession, I'd gladly offer you a brief primer as a free public service.
Not the guy you're replying to, but anyone who doesn't explicitly understand the enormous male-bias in (especially violent) crime has a terrible map of the problems in criminal justice. If prisons were not predominantly filled by men, that would be strong evidence for an absurdly strong pro-male bias in our criminal justice system.
Yes, men are among the most most overrepresented sizeable demographic group among criminals in the US, committing 90%+ of violent crimes despite being just 49% of the population.
And you know what? As a man, this doesn't bother me at all. I feel neither guilt nor shame about it. And it certainly doesn't bother or offend me when someone points out these crime statistics -- they're facts of life!
So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics.
"So I don't know why there are some other groups which get so outraged when you point out that they too are overrepresented in crime statistics. "
I hope you'll pardon me for asking, but do you *actually* not know why? Like, is this genuinely something about human nature which puzzles you? Or is this just a rhetorical flourish to try to paint them as irrational?
In either case you really *ought* to be aware that it isn't *only*--indeed, often not even *primarily*--members of those groups that take such observations amiss.
As for the why, human communication has this frustrating tendency to include not only the overt words spoken or written, but sneaky little things like context and subtext. I guarantee you, for example, that an academic conference on criminology can discuss demographic breakdowns of crime trends fully and honestly without drawing even a fraction of the ire that some dude with a Sunglasses-and-MAGA-hat profile pic will draw if he Tweets out one or two *specific* statistics isolated from wider context. Because most people can model others well enough to pretty accurately guess why both the academics and the hat-and-sunglasses-guy are doing what they do: it's usually not the same motive.
> Kirk was answering a question about transgender mass shootings in the United States of America before he was shot dead. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked Kirk, according to a CNN report.
> To this, Charlie Kirk responded, "Too many". The same audience member informed Kirk that the number is five, and proceeded to ask if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in the US over the last 10 years. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked.
The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
Hang on. Discussions about mass shootings do actually need to distinguish between gang violence and spree shootings, since most things you'd do to decrease one of them would have little impact on the other.
>The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
OK, and? Two gangs shooting at each other often technically count as mass shootings, depending on how many get hit, but they're not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "mass shootings", making it quite reasonable to clarify whether they're being included in the numbers.
You're being a little unfair.
You're familiar with the issue and know what's going on, and so you know that people who take the social issue of mass shootings seriously, like the Washington Post and Mother Jones, explicitly exempt gang shooting from their mass shooting statistics.
But you're talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on. Someone gave them a talking point -- talking about gang violence is racist -- and that's all they know.
I'm going to respond with respect equal to the respect you have shown me:
Are you aware that all categories of 'mass shootings' involve guns?
I know I'm probably <<talking with someone who doesn't have any idea what's going on>>, but really *every* classification of gun-related death not-conducted-in-the-line-of-duty: domestic violence, felony-related, unintentional, argumentative, suicide, random mass shooting, gang-related, (and others, depending on the classification system), all of them:
*are 100% caused by guns*.
And did you know that 100% of these events could have been prevented if the gun was, say, instead, a banana?
And did you know that some [crazy] people think that *all* such gun-related incidents are tragedies? And preventable? (meaning that even "gang-related" gun-deaths are preventable tragedies?)
Charlies Kirk's "argument", if it can even be called that, amounts to "yeah, but 'those mass-shootings' are nothing compared to those 'other mass-shootings'.
This argument only means *anything* if those 'other mass-shootings' are somehow "less" or "don't count". And why would that be?
Oh yes: because of a decades-long narrative popular on "certain 24 hour news networks":
- "democrats just can't control their cities"
- "certain types of people in those cities can't control themselves"
To most people I know, these are *not* less. The lives lost in "gang-related's" are no less valuable than Charlie Kirk's own life, which was tragically cut short.
By a firearm.
>The final *final* words were about "gang violence", which usually refers to minorities and "Democrat" cities.
It's really just one minority in particular.
A crackdown on what? Guns? They don't want to crackdown on guns.
It makes sense to talk about a crackdown in the context of a career criminal randomly stabbing someone on the subway. You can just increase violent crime sentences and arrest people for fare evasion. Are they going to go after snipers? I guess that sucks for the two people nationwide who will get arrested for open carrying on rooftops.
How solid are first amendment protections on calls for violence?
I could totally see the posting of "punch a nazi" on social media to constitute a criminal offense.
Very solid. Controlling precedent is in Brandenburg v. Ohio and has been approvingly cited by the current court on several occasions. Calls for violence are only unprotected if it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
The word "imminent" here is one of the primary distinguishers of US protections vs. most other western places. For instance, take a clear hypothetical example of incitement; a tweet that says "Everyone should punch Nazis. If you're not punching Nazis, you should examine yourself and root out your cowardice. Nazis like John Smith deserve to die, and killing them is the only way we can prevent another Holocaust." Clear incitement to violence against John Smith, but it's not intended to be imminent; noone in the audience (as far as the tweeter knows) is near John and able to jump into immediate lawless action.
On the other hand, the exact same set of words would be unprotected if the person was demonstrating at John Smith's house, and John Smith had just walked up to some incredibly angry protestors when the speaker said this. That fulfils the imminence and likely to incite requirements.
Ah but what if we extradite them to the UK?
A crackdown on whoever they want to crack down on. That's how Reichstag Fires work; it's not about punishing the perpetrators it's about exploiting it to increase your power.
"Never let a crisis go to waste"
A crackdown on leftist agitators. With enough unrest, the Trump administration can make the case that leftists are plotting against the US government, and use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against left-wing organizations and the protesters that will inevitably pop up. Right now the unrest still isn't bad enough to act as a pretext for that, but given that the military is already being deployed in some cities... it's only a matter of time until one of these confrontations turns violent.
Of course, whether this incident will even contribute to that depends on the identity and motives of the killer.
> and use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against left-wing organizations and the protesters that will inevitably pop up
Maybe. And then two days later, a random judge in Oregon or Hawaii says it's unconstitutional for some reason, and then nothing continues to happen.
I checked and it will take 3.27 plus or minus 0.88 incidents.
I’m declining your invitation to speculate about whether Trump’s base is attached enough to him to take action and if they are what infuriating stuff they will say and what destructive acts they will engage in. Because know what engaging in that kind of discussions is? It’s a group event where we all wind each other up by making up stories about the dumb evil shit his base might do. It’s dumb and destructive. It’s a way of being part of the problem.
Look, we don't need to moralize it. Whether or not you see the administration's actions as justified, it would be nice to have some information that could be used to predict their actions, whether that's the current social currents in the US, or previous instances of political instability in other countries.
There's nothing wrong with seeking information. But that's not what you sound like you're asking for. You sound like "hey, guys, whaddya think those Maga fuckers are gonna do in response? Any really bad shit? What kinda shit you picturing those assholes doing? Think they might shoot a prominent leftist? Who they gonna go for, huh?".
If you want to know whether anyone can think of a predictor of whether this shooting will lead to violence by Trump's base, ask that. There probably are predictors, and somebody might well know what they are. Seems to me those things are pretty hard to predict. But there might be some index having to do with extremity of expressed anger and references to violence on social media platforms -- some baseline that's been established,some measures of how far above baseline we are.
You're making a lot of assumptions here. I have nothing against the right, and they're free to do whatever the hell they want. However, it's still going to be very disruptive to my life if and when the administration decides to make its move, and I would like to prepare for that if possible, mentally if nothing else.
Is the assumption you think I'm making that you have something against the right? Actually, I did come away thinking you have something against the right. That was not an assumption on my part, but a reasonable conclusion given what you said. However, your having something against the right had nothing to do with what I was objecting to. As a matter of fact, *I* have something against Trump's supporters.
What I was objecting to was not what side you were on, but the nature of your question, which seemed to me like not to be a genuine request for information and opinion, but an invitation for people to spout anxious and angry fantasies about what's going to happen next. It was an inflammatory remark, not a genuine question. I mean, think about it. You ask "how many more incidents do you all think it'll take until the administration can justify a crackdown?" Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown? And what counts as an "incident"? And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be? Trump forbids any assembly with more than 10 Democrats in the crowd? He goes on TV and twists off the heads of 13 random people who voted against him? He tells his base to bring guns to all future events where someone on the right is speaking?
Point is, your question is not a real question. It's an invitation to get scared and angry as a group, and fantasize. About the only thing I am sure of about the mess the country is in is that way too many people are spending time in that angry, scared space fantasizing about "them". About the other side.
Indeed. If I were a moustache twirling evil overlord and trying to amass power in today's era, I could add a new strategy to my playbook: pay someone to do something despicable to the other side, while stoking my own side to prepare retaliation for what I'm suggesting the other side's retaliation will be.
> Did you really think somebody could give a numerical estimate? Or give any info at all about how close Trump is to a crackdown?
Well yeah, kinda. This obviously isn't the first time something like this has happened, and maybe someone more in tune with right wing social circles could give us a heads up on what the mood is like there.
> And what the fuck even constitutes a Trump crackdown here? Think about it: When you asked that question did you have any actual concept what a crackdown down would be?
He's already discussed using the Insurrection Act to quell protests. It's not exactly a stretch for him to use it for its other purposes, especially seeing as he just stated that he's going to go after organizations that funded or supported political violence, right after saying that left-wing rhetoric was entirely responsible for the violence. https://www.foxnews.com/video/6379075859112
Maybe you should at least be a little concerned? This really isn't buisness as usual. Political and cultural tensions are extremely high, Trump has shown zero qualms about being associated with authoritarianism, and the Republican party and military are seemingly very loyal to him. Regardless of your political affiliation, things are going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while.
That's not what I'm picking up from the tone of your original comment.
I dunno, I feel like there's some people out there who fantasise about getting oppressed. Maybe they think that being oppressed will give their lives more meaning, give it some narrative shape like a movie.
Yeah, I know, Gunflint. But I did start with a civil post where I didn't do that, but just explained why objected to his post -- how I saw as an invite for us all to play ain't-it-awful. The guy didn't get it, and I got angry quicker than usual because I, like everyone else, was upset by the Kirk shooting, and I saw his post as a continuation of the same process that led to the assassination. So somebody kills a guy on the right, presumably because they think he's going to hurt the *good* people, the *real* people --you know, **us**. So now a guy comes on here and invites us all to speculate on what the farr ight is going to do to **us**. He is fostering the development of a hate and anger, us and them, storm system that is the same kind of mental storm system that led to the shooting.
It is quite true that I am mean to people on here that seem to me to have ugly and destructive agendas. My meanness isn't made out of cruel remarks about their intellect or ethics, though, but out of my objections to their particular agendas. I try to present them in a way that makes the person see how they look to me. I do not think that's wrong to do, and don't particularly bad about doing it. I'm just not as nice as you are Gunflint.
The closest historical analogue would be the spate of political assassinations in the US in the 1960s. What was the government response to those?
National Guard deployments to cities quell riots, increased tempo of domestic spying by the feds (both legal and illegal), increased gun control, and restrictions on retail sales of dynamite.
Does anyone here have an opinion and/or experience with Hillsdale classical schools? My daughter will be starting school next year and there is one near us, so we're considering it.
My daughter has some friends who go there, you can DM me and we can see if we can get your daughter in touch with them via email or something.
Go to Hillsdale College? To clarify, I am looking at an elementary 'classical school' that is somehow affiliated to Hillsdale (not sure if it goes beyond using a curriculum created by them). I appreciate the offer.
Is there an official name for the effect when a person who is an actual famous expert in some area starts speaking complete bullshit about a different area, speaking with the same confidence and authority?
(My friend calls it "Bukovský syndrome" after https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Bukovsk%C3%BD a Slovak expert on *nutrition* who also became famous for spreading conspiracy theories about covid. People who believe his theories use the argument by authority "but he is a famous doctor" ignoring the part that his expertise in nutrition has little in common with epidemiology.)
EDIT: Related comic https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Dunno. I want to call it Linus Pauling syndrome (Pauling had a Nobel prize in chemistry before becoming a public crusader for the ostensibly amazing benefits of eating huge amounts of vitamin C)
LOL, more dakka? https://www.lesswrong.com/w/more-dakka
Many fair answers already, but I’ll also throw in that it’s sometimes called the Expert Fallacy
Damn! I don't like all of them but som SMBCs are sooo good!
I call it the Freakonomics effect when the famous expert is an economist who is talking nonsense about a complex subject after doing a few analyses on a napkin, but I don't know of a good name for it. It is always good to see a Slovak getting recognition, even if it's for the excellence of their nonsense!
There might be a similarity to the very rich people who think they will be good at politics.
Oh, definitely. If you are good at making money, it means that you understand how the Real World™ works, which automatically makes you an expert on everything. /s
I was going to post the related SMBC comic, and then I saw you edited one in.
And then I realized that that one is different from the one I was thinking of.
So I'm doing it anyway. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29
In Tyler Cowen's excellent interview with Dan Kahneman, there was this wonderful comment from Kahneman: The feeling of certainty is only weakly correlated with being right.
People have started using the term “epistemic trespassing”.
When the person is specifically a Nobel winner, it's called "Nobel disease" lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Thanks for linking that, it's the funniest Wikipedia page I've ever read. "What's good for mice is good for humans!"
DIdn't even need to control-F Linus Pauling, he pops right out in the sidebar.
indeed lol at the list of examples
On the listener's side of things, it's a subcase of Authority Bias: the tendency to credit claims made by authority figures even when that authority figure's position, skills, and knowledge don't give them any particular advantage in making a true claim in that subject area.
It also feels kinda like a reversal of Gell-Mann Amnesia: instead of under-weighing times your source was wrong about other subjects, you are over-weighing times they were right about other subjects.
On the speaker's side, it's "Ne supra crepidam". The term is an abbreviated quote from Pliny the Elder. The full quote translates as "Let the cobbler not judge beyond the shoe", i.e. an admonition to limit your analysis and criticism to areas of your own expertise. I suppose you could call the failure mode the Crepidam Fallacy.
Maybe authority syndrome would the opposite of imposter syndrome...
It's an authority bias problem for the speaker as well. If your previous ideas all turned out to be absolutely brilliant, then it's easy to assume that your new ideas are brilliant too -- after all, you're a genius.
I invented Special Relativity and General Relativity when nobody else was smart enough to, therefore my ideas for one world government are presumably just as clever.
Good point.
I mean, it's fine to have opinions outside your main area of expertise, it's just important to recognize that you're not an expert there. Einstein's knowledge of physics didn't necessarily make his political opinions worthwhile.
Going down the wikipedia rabbit hole, there is a section on the "Nobel Disease", lol.
Not to be confused with "Victorian Novel Disease", an unspecified chronic and often fatal ailment frequently that primarily afflicts pretty young women. Typical symptoms include fatigue, wasting, pale complexion, and the Incurable Cough of Death.
Or the Noble Disease, which would presumably be some kind of gout.
It should obviously be called degrasse tysonism
He's far from the worst example of it; the worst you can accuse him of (as far as I'm aware) is being too opinionated on matters that epistemologically aren't scientific at all.
There's a certain common trend with Nobel Prize winners going to much worse extremes. Like Luc Montagnier with AIDS denialism.
Ultracrepidarianism is not the word you're looking for, but it's closely related.
And after writing out my reply, I look at yours and realize that you got to "Ne supra crepidam" before I did.
His politics came before his work as a linguist, so not a good example regardless of how you feel about them.
I have been asking people around why did the squad and deadlift kind of replaced traditional body building, and the answer I mostly found was this: people who are also active outside the gym, prefer this kind of functional strength.
Very interesting, because my opinion has always been that body-building is precisely for people like me who are entirely 100% inactive outside a gym, and this way we can "cheat".
Speaking only for myself, big lifts like the deadlift are more time-efficient and arguably better for everyday activity and injury prevention, also they are more fun IMO than doing a hundred focused exercises of a hundred annoying little muscles.
Does one need a deeper explanation than, "it is a fashion trend"?
They .. haven’t? I’ve been a gym rat/bro for like 17 years now, the big 3 have always been core and revered foundational movements. Starting strength and 5x5 were perennial newbie program recommendations back then.
Not so much anymore, as bodybuilders have moved away from them in recent years, with “science based” lifters having various reasons for deprecating them.
I have a couple theories:
1. Bodybuilders got too good at the game and look like weird muscle aliens now. Granted, they looked weird before, but I think it's gotten more pronounced. New bodybuilding categories like "classic" physique seem to be pushing back on this.
2. We got a lot better at quantifying exercise efficiency, and it turns out that compound lifts are a lot more efficient than cable machines.
I also would push back a bit on the dichotomy; most people who look muscular can deadlift/squat reasonably well, and most powerlifter types look pretty strong.
"Weird muscle aliens" is a good phrase.
As far as I can tell, body-building is a supernormal stimulus, and there's conflation of looking strong, being strong, and being healthy. People can die of this.
What tells you they replaced them? I see a lot more people using machines and dumbbells than barbells.
There's two point of this. One is that bodybuilding-style training has a goal of looking strong, while powerlifting-style training has a goal of being strong. Each has a fair amount of carry-over to the other goal, but both are optimized for one goal over the other and it makes sense to choose one style of training over the other depending on what your priorities are.
The other is that bodybuilding-style training takes very heavy advantage of the faster recovery cycle enabled by steroid use. Powerlifting-style training is also enhanced by steroids, of course, but not by quite as much. The reason for this is that bodybuilders need both muscle bulk and muscle definition. You get the former by doing very large volumes of training (lots of sets and reps at medium weight, often spread across many different lifts working overlapping muscle groups) and the latter by dieting off as much subcutaneous fat as possible in weeks or months leading up to a competition. More volume means your body has to more training stress to recover from, and getting/keeping body fat low cuts into your body's capacity to recover from training in a way that builds or at least maintains muscle. Steroids are one of the most effective ways of mitigating that contradiction. Powerlifters can afford to be a little pudgy, and powerlifting-style training tends to have much less volume to recover from (heavy weights for a medium number of sets and reps, doing only a handful of "big lift" exercises), so they can get a lot further with non-steroid recovery strategies (cycling between light and heavy days, eating a calorie surplus, etc).
You can still do bodybuilding-style training successfully without steroids if your goals are reasonable for your health and genetics, but make sure the advice you're getting on training and recovery strategies is targeted for "natural" (non-steroid using) lifters, not "enhanced" (steroid using) ones. I suspect a significant part of powerlifting-style training becoming fashionable over bodybuilding-style training in recent decades is that when bodybuilding-style training was fashionable, there were a ton of bodybuilding training recommendations out there based on the training routines used by big-name competitive bodybuilders who totally used steroids but didn't admit to doing so at the time. If you try to follow Arnold Schwarzenegger's training routines from the 70s and aren't doing as much steroids as he was doing back then, you're not going to get great results.
OMG, you have just solved my life.
Is "Connections" (NYTimes) a good test for AI?
I suspect writing good ones is a better test than solving them. My partner and I got Claude to vibecode a connections interface so I could get my partner to try that days puzzle from the Times that I did while he was out. Then we realized we could have Claude write up some puzzles for us to try. All of the various puzzles Claude wrote for us worked, but several of the categories were weak (sometimes it was a rare two word phrase for one of the purples, or a bit of a weak connection for some of the others, and usually no good misdirects).
According to this, reasoning models have gotten close to saturating it earlier this year, so probably not. https://github.com/lechmazur/nyt-connections
Does saturation mean having a very high chance of winning?
Yes. Once they get ~90% success rate, the noise of being a few percent better or worse on any given trial outweighs the signal. Once that happens, you can’t reliably tell which models are better or worse.
Yes, of a benchmark, saturation means that it has ceased to be able to distinguish between the highest tier of models because they all perform so close to perfectly.
Brimming measuring cups.
I can think of many Christians named Saul, but can't think of any Jews named Paul.
Paul Erdős.
Paul Samuelson
A lot more Jews named Stephen/Steven though. Why would Jews name their son after a Jewish convert to Christianity who was killed by Jews?
To remind him not to convert to Christianity?
I can see that but usually you just tell cautionary tales, not name your kids after them?
Paul Newman? Half-Jewish.
Paul Simon
Paul Reiser?
Paul Celan
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10814214/
This came up in my google searches, claims that autism is (mostly) caused by childhood exposure to acetaminophen.
I don't have the experience to evaluate this. The abstract reads like political post but the rest of it seems normal. The studies it cites all seem reasonable but I don't know how cherry-picked they are.
The latest and largest-n study has a strong case that acetaminophen doesn’t cause autism https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38592388/ . Previous studies have found weak effects of acetaminophen on autism - certainly not responsible for most cases. The more recent and larger one found even those results to be a result of familial confounding and they disappeared when using a sibling-comparison design.
I've written a bit about the topic and had some discussions with people in open threads in the past.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-370/comment/95825932
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-396/comment/149233386?utm_campaign=comment&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=comment
Relatedly, Kennedy plans to release a report this month supporting the claim. Though with no new evidence.
Here's a non-paywalled story from yesterday:
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/hhs-report-expected-to-link-prenatal-tylenol-use-and-autism-risk
The thing is, the evidence that tylenol increases the chance of autism is pretty good. However, some of the increase in autism diagnosis is undoubtedly due to changed diagnostic criteria. I'm a psychologist, and actually lived through the change in what fraction of people are diagnosed as autistic. It really was a dramatic change -- the term was being applied to people that *nobody* 5 years prior would have described as autistic. So the tylenol-autism correlation gets a huge, undeserved boost from the change in diagnostic criteria. Meanwhile, afaik the evidence for vaxes increasing the risk of autism is not good, and in any case measles, mumps etc. can cause not only severe illness and death but also lifelong disabilities. Even if our standard childhood vaxes do slightly increase the risk of autism (or heart abnormalities or whatnot) I'll bet the increase is far less than the risk of the illnesses they prevent.
I wrote a long answer to this same question on the most recent hidden open thread. You can find it with CMD-F. “Tylenol”. If you can’t access that let me know and I’ll copy-paste it here.
I actually thought of posting my question there but didn't think to scan for it first. Thanks.
If you think it appropriate, please also post it here. I do not have the access, and I would enjoy reading it.
(not my comment, just pasting someone else's)
Scott wrote about the risks of tylenol in pregnancy in his piece "Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much). I just looked it up and reread it for a friend. Also read the summary of tylenol studies he cites: In Nature Reviews Endocrinology, Consensus Statement: Paracetamol Use In Pregnancy - A Call For Precautionary Action, by ninety-one leading scientists. Based on that, seems to me that it's likely but not certain that tylenol use during pregnancy actually does increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Just looked up studies' estimates of how much it increases the risk, and average estimate is that it increases it by about 20%. So if the risk of ASD for a baby whose mother did not use tylenol in pregnancy was 2%, it would be 2.4% for babies whose mother did use tylenol. This is nothing to sniff at, but is far too small to account for the very large increase in autism diagnoses in the last 30 years. (By the way, we don't really have any direct measure of what % of kids whose mothers took no tylenol get a ASD diagnosis, because most pregnant women take it.)
A lot of the apparent increase is due to a change in the diagnostic criteria for autism, especially the inclusion in ASD of people with Aspergers' (smart, introverted, a bit odd) in the diagnosis. Also there was legislation in the last 30 yrs. that allowed kids with an autism diagnosis to get various services in schools, and because of that many professionals became more liberal in giving an ASD diagnosis in order for the kid to get the benefit of of the school services.
One other relevant factor: RFK fucking sux.
(again, not my comment, didn't want to bother with block quotes)
Here's a follow-up comment I (author of above) made later in the thread:
Tylenol's hardly the smoking gun. Seems possible to me that changed criteria account for the rest of the increase in autism diagnoses, but also possible there are some other factors. But the diagnostic criteria change was huge. I was present for it. There was an era when I kept being startled by people talking about patients or civilians I knew as "autistic" and "autistic specturm" and I'd think *what? he's eccentric and uncomfortable around people, but to call it autism is way overstating it.*. I'm still skeptical about the broadened version of the diagnosis. Seems like pretty much anyone who doesn't easily fit into another diagnosis gets called autistic these days.
Thanks.
On a side note, I don't really know how the criteria for ASD are evaluated in practice by clinicians, but my impression from reading the formal guidelines was that what you're saying is not the whole picture. I never underwent a formal diagnosis for ASD, but in my own assessment (still, I did spent a substantial amount of time thinking about it and reconstructing my early childhood history), I quite clearly satisfy the DSM-IV criteria for Asperger's spectrum disorder, but it's likely I wouldn't meet the DSM-V criteria for ASD unless the psychologist was willing to stretch them somewhat.
Or at least a quick summary of the main points. It might motivate me to access the original.
I created a plug-and-play "Human Inference Engine." It's a probabilistic directed acyclic graph (DAG) tool that allows you to toggle between a low friction 'Bayes lite' mode and a rigorous 'Bayes heavy' mode. I'd love some feedback. I've built several example graphs from forensic investigation, to policy analysis, to DnD campaigns. It's desktop only (Chrome/Edge): https://rubesilverberg.github.io/beliefgraph3/
Let us know when you have one for Firefox.
It likely does work for Firefox. I just can't vouch.
Hobbs idea that out pre-history ancestors lived lives that were short, brutish and mean is unscientific, illogical and irrational.
Its unscientific because it takes 17 years of childhood before a homo sapiens brain is developed enough to be considered a young adult, 21 years before being considered a peer by other adults. How could our brains have evolved this way unless children were having long and stable childhoods?
It is illogical to believe that children given childhoods that were short, brutish and mean could be other than physically, emotionally and intellectually stunted, where would they learn emotional intelligence required to work together to achieve common goals?
It is irrational to ignore the fact that the only reason to evolve a brain capable of human consciousness, intelligence and the ability to think deep and complex thoughts is because they were conscious, intelligent and thinking deep and complex thoughts. Their brains were not just spare capacity waiting for us to find a use for it, that is not how evolution works.
Small groups with stone tools, no plan or central planner, purely through organic growth, discovered the world long before we did, they were the ultimate success story and invasive species. For 300,000 years or 15,000 generations the Southern tip of Africa has been occupied by Homo Sapiens, a few bones, stones and paintings is all we have found of their presence, that is what is called a sustainable lifestyle. If each generation had left just one change to the environment the cumulative results would have made the place unliveable.
I think Hobbes meant short compared to the lives of his contemporaries, which is true enough.
N F Y, agreed.
I'm not an anthropologist but my understanding from reading in this area (e.g. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/war-in-human-civilization-9780199236633) is that Hobbes was right that life was extremely violent in prehistory.
The "17" and "21" numbers you cite are entirely a modern thing. Children performed labor on farms at much younger ages than this (https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/). And life was indeed much shorter (https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/).
Also your reasoning is confusing to me. People are intelligent because it helps them survive. This is true in peaceful societies as well as violent ones, societies with abundance and scarcity, societies with low and high life expectancy alike.
Not to pick on you too hard but I think you're demonstrating a common failure mode in this community - you've reasoned out a position in the abstract and think the converse is therefore "irrational" (and you could maybe critique Hobbes for doing much the same), but in practice there's lots of detailed information out there that you could examine to learn the truth, and you don't seem to have done so.
Timothy M, 17 and 21 may be modern innovations but the Homo Sapiens brain is not. Body development in childhood slowed down to match brain development and brains need 17 years of childhood to develop.
Your reasoning confuses me, you use a study about peasants to debate about hunter gatherers, like comparing peasants to bankers, irrational.
I enjoyed your response and hope we have many more but I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
> brains need 17 years of childhood to develop.
You say this like the designers of the human race told you so. But there aren't any.
A human brain might need 17 years of development for having 17 years of development, but not to be ready for what it is supposed to do then -- because it's not supposed to to anything then! It's not designed.
Furthermore the development of an organism depents on its environment. 17 year olds certainly were diffent then then they are now.
It is true that I compared agrarians to hunter-gatherers, on the premise that people didn't transition from having carefree childhoods for 17+ years to being child laborers. However, it is also understood that ancient hunter-gatherers had short lifespans and violence was relatively common.
Where do you come up with this "17 years" number? My understanding from undergraduate psych classes is that there's still pretty significant brain development from 18-30 compared to later time periods.
> I do not share your trust that experts have all the answers and there is no need for us to question long held assumptions.
This is what I was talking about. People can and should question "assumptions" but if you want to question whether prehistoric society sucked you should do so by examining the evidence, not by sitting alone thinking about it and concluding it must "obviously" be wrong. History and anthropology and such have assembled large bodies of research that can meaningfully address these questions far better than abstract intuitions. Go look at that work. Don't just treat it as an "assumption" you can waive away.
Timothy M, a carefree childhood would poorly prepare someone for a life that is anything but carefree. When culture changed slowly if at all good parenting skills mean being the type of person you want your children to become in a community you want them to grow up in with a sustainable culture that keeps everything together.
50 Years ago near the town of Swakopmund a San woman explained to me their view of history. For the next 30 years I lived cheek by jowl with their descendants, for a while I had a Sangoma (herbalist/witchdoctor) as a partner. Their lifestyle is an adaptation to modern life, nothing like the pre farming era. I compare the views of anthropologists with the San and the San version seems more compelling.
Okay, so your general point is that you think the perspective of a single hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa is more compelling than the aggregate work of the world's anthropologists, and you therefore feel comfortable disregarding all of their work.
Timothy M, the San people belong to a confederation of tribes generally known as the San or Bushman.
Names escape me, but the woman anthropologist who claimed we were semiaquatic and many others have influenced me, the synchronized menstruation woman had something useful to say, if as yet unproven.
It would be as foolish to disregard all anthropologists as it would be to discard all San and other native folklore.
You have to remember that Hobbes was writing two centuries before a meaningful theory of evolution, and long before any sort of systematic anthropology aimed at understanding comparative theories of how humans work in different social structures. The first theories in an area are always wrong (and the ones several centuries down the line are still wrong, but more subtly so).
He’s basically a contemporary of Newton and Harvey (the guy who used some calculations to convince people that blood recirculates through the body every day, rather than being generated and sent out from the heart and then absorbed by other organs). You can see that the human sciences were much less developed at this time.
Kenny Easwaran, I agree that for his time Hobbes was an important thinker, my issue is that we have not moved on, most people still think early humans lived short horrible lives, a view I disagree with.
Oh yeah, if there are people who still think this way, they’re wrong. But your previous post was phrased as though it was saying *Hobbes* was irrational.
Kenny Easwaran, the temptation to ask Kimmi to turn my illegible writing into something more polished is at times overwhelming, laziness saves me from such impulses.
Robin Hanson's theory (not sure how well supported) is actually that we developed big brains and emotional intelligence in order to navigate social rivalries/deadly competition from other humans. Thinking deep complex thoughts was a mere side effect. Still a Hobbesian scenario. I think if you look at modern hunter gatherers, you'll find this isn't too far off the mark. EG., native Americans certainly weren't living lives of idyllic peace and harmony before Europeans showed up. Ditto for New Guinea highlanders.
Gordon Tremeshko, most of my experience is with the San communities of Southern Africa. Broadly speaking they view the time before agriculture as living as a part of nature and the time after as living apart from nature. They think we are destroying ourselves and have to be forced by the government to participate by sending their kids to school etc.
Life was very short for some, and reasonably long (albeit not as much or as commonly as now) for the rest. Half of everyone died before the age of 6, but once you did pass that hurdle, you had better odds.
At least that's in agricultural civilisation. I wouldn't be surprised if odds were a bit better in hunter-gatherers since a lot of those deaths are disease and a lot of disease can only thrive in very high density populations, and in fact several of the worst (smallpox, TB, plague) were one way or another connected to farming or to hygienic conditions that were only a problem in agricultural civilisation.
Still, obviously from our viewpoint those lives would kinda suck. But I don't expect that those living them felt miserable all the time, or like they had nothing to enjoy.
Hobbes is precisely correct. In state of nature, life is solitary (by definition), short (by direct consequence of being solitary) and brutish (similarly).
That's why man is never found naturally in a state of nature but in a state of law.
So for Hobbes this quote is not a historical claim but a counterfactual claim - as a matter of fact, some law has always existed. Is that correct?
I do not know enough Hobbes to say but generally speaking the social contract theories do not aim at historical veracity,
Not to mention that he knew nothing about evolution.
You're probably correct that Hobbes's description of life in a state of nature is somewhere between overstated and wrong, but your arguments are so poor that you might convince a reader that he was actually completely right.
The "sustainable lifestyle" you laud is no great achievement: most animals leave little trace of themselves that can be seen hundreds of years later. The worms underfoot do even better, leaving not even bones.
About evolution, you seem to be arguing entirely from personal incredulity. Runaway sexual selection, for example, is one mechanism by which extravagant and otherwise useless traits can evolve and persist.
The facts you have brought to bear are consistent with a species whose lives ARE "short, brutish and mean" (not Hobbes's actual quote but fine): r-strategists whose males form small groups and fight together, perhaps with stone tools, against rival groups to maintain large harems, the majority of females dying from the stresses of childbirth after a few breeding cycles, and the males dying either in combat against a younger foe, or when unable to sustain the caloric requirements of their ever-growing brains.
Shankar Sivarajan, Most animals do not have the Homo Sapiens brain requiring 20% of calories consumed, there must be a return on investment. If you do not think that the return was intelligence could you please explain what you think the return was?
I agree my debating skills are rusty, engaging with skilled debaters will improve them.
If harems were the norm then the local gene pool would shrink forcing inbreeding, if females died after a few "breeding cycles" then who raised the kids? Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
> Do you seriously think we lived like this for 17,000 generations?
Yes, and we know this from genetic assays of y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA. Historically, 80% of women had descendants for between 20-40% of men having descendants, over many tens of thousands of years.
See graph here (in the graph, the yellow line, which at "2" would be 80/40, and at "4" would be 80/20):
https://imgur.com/JWIsva9
This famously peaked at 17 women for every 1 man, a statistic you'll sometimes see trotted out, which happened in the middle of the Yamnaya expansion and y-chromosome-replacement of everyone else (and it tops out at around "12" on this particular graph because the timeslice of when the 17-1 ratio happened is too short to be captured on the x axis of this graph).
On harems, a full 87% of HG societies have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing polygamy *in modern times,* and given the headline 80/40 stat, it was likely to have been an even bigger factor in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptiveness).
At the larger level, inbreeding is avoided by groupings at different levels. H Sap HG's tended to settle and migrate in groups of 30-100 individuals (larger group sizes than Neanderthals and other hominins, and part of why we wiped them out ultimately), but those groups generally rolled up to larger tribes of other groups that size, and that larger group shared your language and cultural practices.
Thus, when you outmigrate, you don't need to worry about learning a new language or culture, as you're still outmigrating among "your people."
Performative Bafflement, well done, I have just spent an hour or two on your blog and am impressed with that as much as I am with your comment. You certainly knocked the wind out of my sails.
Every small somewhat isolated community I have been interested in had one thing in common and that was the dread of inbreeding. I would go so far as to say that much of their social structure evolved to manage this risk.
I have little to no understanding of the science behind the claim though do not doubt it was made in good faith
I have also read science that claims our pre-historic ancestors were less inbred than modern populations.
Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
Any insight you may have regarding this will be much appreciated.
> Now I have to reconcile the danger of inbreeding against this claim that most males left the gene pool by not reproducing. In small groups with very limited mobility over many generations polygamy must result in inbreeding.
As you've probably guessed, this is a recurring problem for all animals, not just H Sap, and indeed, many behaviors are seemingly tailored around avoiding inbreeding depression.
In chimps (at least pan troglodytes), this is achieved by females migrating to new groups when they are reaching reproductive age. This minimizes the chances of inbreeding, and a similar strategy is followed by many animals, either with males or females doing the migrating.
Humans, as you might guess, handle this a little differently. Historically in agricultural societies we mostly practiced patrilocality - the men stay put, sons are heirs, and the women come and live with the man's family. This is also what chimps do, so case closed, right?
This kind of threw off anthropologists re hunter gatherers for a long time, because many assumed HG did patrilocality from agriculturalists and chimps. It took Sara Hrdy and Hill et al looking into alloparenting practices to figure out that HG's were a different picture.
My understanding from Sarah Hrdy and Hill et al is that it's not actually true for hunter gatherers, and wasn't likely true in the EEA. Humans uniquely tend to do a lot of mixing of patrilocality and matrilocality, and it changes a lot based on how young your most recent child is and other factors, because matrilineal alloparenting is extremely common and a big deal for child survival. And wrapped up in this is us aging better and grandmas being harder working than moms in terms of hours foraging etc. In other words, it was a strong selective pressure and correspondingly had to be a big part of how our ancestors located themselves in the EEA.
Performative Bafflement, for pre-history mothers finding an unrelated mate for their offspring required an in-depth knowledge of her own bloodline, that of her mate and both parents of any prospective match.
It was like throwing 4 stones in the gene pool, how the ripples cancelled or amplified each other decided whether the match was safe or not.
This was humanities first great math challenge, which they passed.
They would have to know, well enough, far more people than the Dunbar number of 150 suggests, that is just an extended family. Even 10x that number is not enough to keep a local gene pool healthy. The majority of people they knew would have been too closely related to breed with.
The abundance of predators rules out regular get togethers, that would create a migratory type situation for predators to exploit.
So even if they were 100% monogamous it is a challenge to understand their mating customs. If, as your cited study claims, most males died without reproducing then it is harder still to see how for millions of years we avoided consanguinity.
A further confounding factor is that at least for the time we were confined to a few regions of Africa, the gene pool had to be small and shallow in contrast with the present day vast and deep gene pool, thus amplifying the risk.
Lots to think about.
His argument is so poor I am seriously considering that it might be satire.
Worms, or at least earthworms, improve the quality of the soil, so they're going beyond sustainability.
>that is what is called a sustainable lifestyle
Mosquitos have a sustainable lifestyle. Mosquito lives are also short, brutish and mean.
Yug Gnirob, Mosquitos do not have a Homo Sapiens brain in their head requiring 20% of their energy intake, there has to be rent paid, this is basic evolutionary theory. The pay off for the extra calories going to the brain was increased intelligence. Why would the most intelligent creature on the planet, by far, be living unintelligent lives?
I challenge your understanding of basic evolutionary theory. A peacock's tail requires a large chunk of their resources, makes it harder to evade predators, etc. In what way is its rent actually paid?
Byrel Mitchell, from the peahens perspective if the peacock can survive with such an extravagant display then the offspring he fathers should also survive. The rent paid for the calories diverted to his tail is increased access to the hens.
Chimps use 10% of calories to power their brain, Homo Sapiens use 20%. Our mental capacity over that of chimps is the rent paid by those extra 10% of calories.
The Giraffe pays rent for its long neck and legs by having access to foliage inaccessible to others.
Don't argue sustainability proving intelligence if you're not prepared to defend it. And if you're abandoning it, then do so clearly.
Yug Gnirob, The first task of intelligence is survival, greater intelligence enhances our ability to eliminate or minimize risk and the best way to do this is to live a sustainable lifestyle. 150,000 Generations proves their lifestyle was sustainable. The Homo Sapiens brain evolved for consciousness, intelligence and deep thought, they were intelligent.
That's objectively wrong. The first task of human intelligence is successful reproduction of a gene line, individual personal survival is secondary. That's why childhood mortality was so high for so long.
Victor, I agree, the first law of nature is procreation, in our species that effectively means "how are the grandchildren doing?"
This is difficult to achieve if you do not first survive long enough to at least have kids. In order to procreate you first have to survive.
To be honest I am not sure about the high child mortality thing. In any species suffering high child mortality we would expect to see their reproductive cycle shortening, instead our reproductive cycle got slower and slower, frailer babies needing more development post partum, the burden of childcare growing ever heavier.
It is hard to spot the evolutionary advantage in having less ability to reproduce if the problem is high child mortality.
I would bother to argue whatever underlying assumptions you're making, but I don't think you actually have any. You're just slapping words together and trying to pretend it's an argument.
I hope for your sake that this is AI.
> I hope for your sake that this is AI.
From his comments, I agree there IS a chance he's Artificial in some way.
Yug Gnirob, I think it would be wonderful to be an AI, all that data at your fingertips, no such luck here.
I apologise if my slapped together words disturbed the peace of your mind.
Were prehistorical lives short? Well, we know that half of all people in preagricultural societies died before reaching adulthood: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
If you were lucky enough to survive childhood, your life expectancy was still lower than in industrialized societies today. From this paper (https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2352-1):
"We know specific details about modern hunter-gatherer lifespan from a few well-studied groups: the !Kung, Aché, Agta, Hadza, and Hiwi (Gurven and Kaplan 2007). Work on these groups show that approximately 60% of hunter-gatherer children live to age 15. Of those who reach 15, around 60–80% of them will live to age 45. If an individual lives to age 45, then on average they will live for approximately two more decades."
While "brutish" is a subjective characterization, we now know that preagricultural societies were on the whole quite violent. From this paper (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.21446):
"By the 1960s, the focus on the hunter-gatherers of East and Southern Africa coincided with the rise of Rousseauism in anthropology. The Kalahari bushmen, for example, were celebrated as the “harmless people.”2 However, after the initial spate of enthusiasm for the peaceful children of the earth, their chief researcher, the Rousseauan Richard Lee,3, 4 discovered that before the imposition of state authority, these people had more than four times the 1990 homicide rate in the United States, which was by far the highest in the developed world. Similarly, in titles such as Never in Anger, the Inuit of mid-Arctic Canada, one of the sparsest populations on earth, were celebrated as being peaceful.5 However, it was later revealed that their rate of violent mortality was ten times higher than the United States' 1990 rate.6:145,7"
For more on this, the seminal book seems to be "War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley.
Collisteru, with respect you are using internally displaced people, refugees under stress from being displaced, as an example. The San people occupied all the best places to raise a family along the coast of Southern Africa. Then they were forced to live in the Kalahari desert by Bantu tribes and white settlers. To judge the preceding 15,000 generations by how well the last few generations survived their near extermination by us is poor science.
You raise a very good point that contact with settlers could affect these numbers. The contact problem is a fundamental difficulty in assessing anything about hunter-gatherer societies.
That being said, the scientific consensus is that hunter-gatherer violence precedes state contact. From the paper by Azar Gat I cited earlier, we read:
"Proponents of the tribal-zone theory remained vague about whether contact with state civilizations actually introduced or “invented” warfare among previously nonbelligerent natives or, instead, merely intensified long-existing patterns of warfare. The former was strongly implied and was the undertone or subtext of their argument. At the same time, however, the majority of these scholars in fact recognized, in line with all other research, that warfare in all the above areas had been very old and had long predated contact with states.10, 11, 13 Fortified settlements were known to have been archeologically recorded in the American Northwest, for example, for no less than four thousand years.9, 14-20 Body armor made of hide or wood, an unmistakably specialized fighting device, was known to have been extensively used by the natives before the European arrival. Indeed, its use actually declined after contact because it was useless under musket fire.18,20-26 Thus, given that most of the tribal-zone proponents (with rare exceptions12) were well aware of the evidence of extensive and vicious warfare before contact with states or civilizations, their point was difficult to rationalize."
I think this article is paywalled so if you want to read more citations 10, 11, and 13 are:
10 Ferguson RB. 1992. A savage encounter: western contact and the Yanomami war complex. In: RB Ferguson, N Whitehead, editors. War in the tribal zone. Santa Fe: School of American Research. p 199–227.
11 Ferguson RB. 1995. Yanomami warfare. Santa Fe: School of American Research.
13 Whitehead N. 1990. The snake warriors — sons of the Tiger's Teeth: a descriptive analysis of Carib warfare, ca. 1500–1820. In: J Haas, editor. The anthropology of war. New York: Cambridge University Press. p 146–170.
Collisteru ,Anthropology has a huge patriarchal bias towards man the hunter. Our gut evolved to digest the food most accessible to us which was 80% plant based, plants were 4 times more important to our survival than hunting. Women and children made up the bulk of our workforce and are well adapted to gathering.
Hunting scenes on cave walls or stately homes are there because they are more photogenic than fish traps or potting sheds but neither group fed the tribe by hunting. We find far more grinding stones for grain than we do spear points, hunter gatherers should be changed to gatherer trappers. You need a big brain to trap and only a small one to hunt.
Sorry about the rant, Anthropologists find what they expect to find.
I am not an expert, but how is "did they eat more plants or more meat?" related to "did they often kill each other or not?".
I can imagine people who eat mostly plants, but still kill each other a lot.
Villiam, good point. If you put a wild, enraged male Chimpanzee in a cage with 5 MMA fighters it would kill them. It is far stronger and faster with a bite that can pierce skulls, one swipe with its claw would rip half your face off. We used to have a similar body but over time became weak, slow and puny. According to evolutionary theory this could not have happened if we were under threat from predators or each other..
And hunt to supplement their diet.
He did not say human lives were short, brutish and mean. He said they were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
I think had that guy for a roommate in college....
Neither is really very objective nor accurate.
Yeah, ok. But my point was literary.
Eremolalos, well said. Mea culpa.
The correction’s not really relevant to the points you’re making, but Hobbs’ original formulation is so gorgeously grim and sounds so magnificent that I think we should honor and preserve it.
Solitary is an important omission, it's the least-debatably wrong. Prehistoric lived in smaller groups than modern humans but few were solitary.
Adolescence is a modern invention. Hunter-gatherers start treating people more-or-less like adults as soon as they hit puberty.
Wanda Tinsaky, survival of the fittest in our species is 100% a test of parenting skills on a personal and community level, the rest is just minutia. For 7 million years, give or take, the communities who made the best job of raising the next generation dominated the gene pool. There is no possible evolutionary advantage to having poor parenting skills.
Have you ever tried treating a 12 year old like an adult?
You are completely ignoring the fact that a big reason why we have such long childhoods is that life has gotten very very complicated. In order to be a functional member of society you need more than basic physical and mental development, you need a lot of knowledge that will allow you to work, pay your taxes, do paperwork, vote, drive, and generally speaking not be a dysfunctional misfit that's easily taken advantage of.
None of which was necessary to a hunter gatherer. Children would travel and work next to their parents as soon as they could stand. They would learn on the go about what they needed to learn (how to hunt, what herbs were good and what poisonous etc) and they would be pretty much ready for adult life quite earlier than us because that life would be significantly more straightforward.
Simone, I disagree. Childhood body development slowed down to match our slowly developing brain long before the modern era. Their culture was no less complicated than our own, each plant, river and mountain, everything had its own name and spirit. Living in harmony with the spirit world (animism) was the key to their sustainable lifestyle.
Any community who does not give their children a long stable childhood will be out-competed by another that does.
If your argument is about Adderall and other ADHD medication, consider:
* this seems to be mainly a US thing, maybe UK to some extent, but most countries aren't as big on it
* people in the past drugged up kids too, on top of beating them. I remember a story told to me that apparently some grand-grand-... of mine would give to their children a juice the made that would calm them down when they were fussy. What was it made from? Poppies.
That's a slightly odd non-sequitur about ADHD and child medication.
I believe the other poster was simply trying to point out that life was more complicated than you give it credit for back in the days of hunting and gathering. The natural world is very complex and rather unforgiving. It's easy to lose track of that if you are not routinely exposed to it's challenges.
We have big brains *now* because we needed big brains back *then*.
The process of childhood was - and is - long and slow because that was what was required by earlier humans in order to survive best.
Yes, and it works. Of course, you have to be strategic about it. Parenting style should match the social environment it occurs in. "Adolescence" is a modern cultural construct, but a useful one in a post-industrial society. Pointless and wasteful in a social context in which the average lifespan is somewhere in the 30's. That does not imply, of course, that hunter-gatherer communities treated 12 year olds exactly the same as someone in their 20's.
"Like an adult" does not have a universal meaning across times and cultures, and neither does "poor parenting skills." Can you trust a 12 year old to drive a car? No. But if you're in an ancient society with no cars and your main concern is "can I trust them to do their share of the farm work?", you might decide they're an adult sooner. It depends on what your society needs to survive.
Also, if evolution is only about good parenting, how did the practice of corporal punishment somehow survive all the way to the present day? One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Beleester, good parenting skills enable the child to face life challenges.
Corporal punishment, spare the rod and spoil the child, is still the norm in most of the human population. We think they are wrong and they think we are wrong. We think drugging children to get them through the school day is acceptable, others think it is beyond barbaric. I agree.
> One would think that beating your kids counts as "poor parenting skills," but apparently not poor enough for evolution to remove it from the gene pool.
Counterpoint: the negative of hitting a child is that it can be traumatic and create various forms of relationship strain. The positive is that it's a very straightforward way to create an association between Thing Not To Do and Bad Consequences, all subtlety be damned.
If you're in a society in which even seemingly small mistakes can be very costly (like, life or death costly) and violence is so widespread anyway that there's not much avoiding it, corporal punishment is also the primary form of justice, etc. then it may simply not make a lot of difference. Hitting a child is frowned upon today also because it's basically like saying "you don't need to understand why X is bad, you just need to submit to my power to enact violence on you" but that is only something we consider a negative today. In many societies of the past, "know your place and do not question your superiors" was actually considered a virtue.
Simone, I was beaten often by my teachers ( UK, born late 50s) all it taught me was violence towards other boys who pissed me off as I pissed off the teachers.
Today I would be drugged into compliance from about 7 years of age. That is a level of violence against the child far in excess of anything I endured.
Childraising skills vary. There was research on macaque monkeys. Some seemed to be much better mothers than others. Some were nurturing, some were harsh and neglectful, and the offspring of the harsh mothers did worse.
Evolution doesn't get perfection.
The Ship of Theseus idea has been nagging me for ages. It's simple in my mind, but I recently found out my view is more the cognitive science view, and not other views.
Somewhat related, I overdid the thought experiment: https://onlyluck.substack.com/p/ships-of-theseus as a bit of a game for myself.
1. Interestingly, the question whether it's still the same ship hinges for most people on what's with it's parts. But how does one know a part of it is still the same, even if "it" is still in "its" original place?
Which brings me to ...
2. What about fields? Russell already kinda contemplated this, but a bit wrong, I think. If the world consists only of fields, and maybe only of one, then that field is the only physical thing that is ever, and always, the same thing, just changing in its properties. And among those properties is what "parts" or rather inseparable arbitrary sections of it appear to us as things, which they not for real are. They are only kinda waves, us included, of course.
I ever more suspect this is the case.
It would explain why things can and do interact. They don't. There are no things, there is only one thing, waving, and its waves are interfering.
Russell thought there are no physical things at all. But I mean, if anything changes, then there has to be at least one physical thing that is that what is changing there.
Lots of good replies to this, but I want to register a slightly dissenting opinion on the aptness of metaphors like football teams or marching bands.
To model a ship as one physical object is considerably more meaningful than to do so for those other examples: calculating the center of mass for a ship and then doing calculations with it yields meaningful predictions about its behavior; you can refer to it's location more or less unambiguously at any individual point in time, etc.
The same is not true for those other examples: you'd never think to calculate the center of mass of a football team, and if you did you wouldn't expect it to ever be useful; it's already unclear what the "location" of a marching band is when all the members go home for the night.
Which is to say, if you have a physical object that is well-summarized by some aggregate physical quantities, so long as you have objects at each time step for which those aggregate properties behave as you'd expect for a single physical object (e.g. the center of mass always follows a timelike path through spacetime, etc.), I think that's solid reason to regard each of those objects as "the same".
Of course, this tells you nothing about cases where those properties *aren't* satisfied, e.g. if your ship buds into two ships asexually and then you swap half of the timbers from the one daughter ship with those of the other.
Now I want to see animation of the centers of mass of football teams ranging here and there on the field.
Maybe there would be something interesting to be deduced, maybe it would just be fun to look at.
Doing that for the players on the field is probably interesting; including benched players, coaches, not to mention the rest of the organization (trainers, doctors, general managers, minor league players, etc) probably much less so
“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
There are certain cultural ideas that depend upon the belief in them. If everyone around treats that thing as the family ax, why then it is.
"This, milord, is the American dollar..."
I'm just reading the new biography of Maynard Keynes, and this reminds of some of the incredulity people felt as they moved away from the gold standard.
Ok. Here’s another example of why the components of an entity mostly don’t matter.
You visit a school. It has a marching band. You like it.
A few years later you go back. The band is still there but the original players have all graduated. You like the band but can’t help feeling this isn’t the Smalton High School band. You feel cheated.
Someone tells you that all the members of the Smalton High School Band were so enthused by playing in a band that they formed a band called The Graduates after they left the school.
(All of them. It’s my thought experiment.)
You go watch it. Possessed of an excellent memory and some photographs on your phone you conclude this has the same members as the Smalton High School band did the last time you were here. A misty tear comes to your eyes. Afterwards you congratulate them and say that they are the real Smalton High School band. They look at you funny.
*********************************
Where this breaks down I think is when the components are essential (John, Paul, Ringo and George) and often when there are a small number of components, like the ax problem. After all in the ax problem you can name the individual parts.
What matters to the continuity of an entity comprised of an accidental parts is not the parts but the role and propose. The teleology of the thing. The continuity of the thing.
Teleology is in the eye of the beholder.
I don’t think so. Not with a ship.
I thibk internally I resonate most with this interpretation, thanks.
Okay, that was a pretty funny collection of thought experiments.
I think the best resolution to the paradox is to ask what feature of continuity is the thing you actually care about. Taboo "same" and replace it with something more specific.
Theseus: "It's the same ship, because I still legally own it and it's still docked at my spot in the harbor if I want to go sailing."
Modern Greek Historian: "It's not the same, because I'm trying to study historical shipbuilding techniques and the modern replacements tell me nothing."
Athenian Navy: "It's the same ship so long as you didn't replace the keel, because we're trying to keep track of who owns suitable naval vessels and the keel is the hardest part to replace."
Persian Navy: "The physical material is actually completely irrelevant, because we just want to be able to copy the Athenian blueprints."
Yeah, it's one of those paradoxes that are so mostly because it's a Disguised Query (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) with more than one plausible actual question that one might care about.
I've always considered this fundamentally a linguistic issue around how we use concepts like "sameness" and "identity" and what the rules are for whether to apply a label like "ship of Theseus" to a particular object. I assume there's some clever Wittgenstein-esque argument (whether it's been articulated or not) that neatly dissolves the paradox.
I agree it’s a lingustic issue when trying to negotiate a common stance among individuals, but inside the individual I consider it more an emotional issue. Their relation to the concept of the Ship, how it was formed, why it existed, etc… will drive their eventual stance around what they consider the real ship.
I think Wittgenstein's private language argument would dissolve the distinction you're making there. Whatever internal logic a person employs is isomorphic to a linguistic community's convergence on usage rules.
You're both kind of right. It mostly devolves to shared communal feelings about the object in question. If everyone you ever meet thinks you are the king, well...
I guess I should read Wittgenstein… Any recommendations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
Don't try to read Wittgenstein directly, he's too inscrutable.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a pretty good summary: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
Here’s my general reply to the ship of Theseus conundrum.
A billionaire who grew up with the great Manchester United soccer team from 1998*, decides to recreate that team, which is made of humans who play football of course, a decade or so later. He’s not buying the existing Manchester United club, or corporate entity, he’s hiring the players.
Though mostly retired, all agree (he pays well), and he hires Wembley stadium and sets up a game against some lower league team. This he says, while not the existing so called Manchester United team or club, is the real deal. This is what Manchester United was composed of and therefore what it is now. The other team are frauds.
Is he right?
* replace with some girdiron or other nonsense if you prefer.
Reminds me a bit of Wilt Chamberlain, NBA record 30+ points per game in the 1960s and 70s, when asked how he'd do in "modern game" of the '90s."
"I don't know, but I'd probably only average 26 points a game. Remember I'm in my 60s..."
What do the fans think?
Is that a reply to the conundrum or just another example of the same phenomenon of the meaning of the word "same" breaking down in weird edge cases?
All I really get from the Ship of Theseus is the idea that the meaning of the words we use to describe everyday life can break down in weird edge cases. This might blow the minds of teenagers or Ancient Greeks but I feel like there's not much more to it than that.
It's a metaphore for the human sense of self continuity. It's supposed to inform your self-reflection.
I think that the Manchester United team (I’m not talking about the legal entity which employs hundreds but the actual playing team) doesn’t depend on who is actually playing. So too with the ship of Theseus. As long as you accept that all of those players can be replaced and don’t take the entity “the Manchester United football team” in whole or in part with them then there’s no conundrum. So too with dismantling the ship of Theseus - the parts don’t matter.
It’s just easier for people to see this with football teams. I can do an example with high school marching bands if you want.
For a small fee.
Sports teams seem like a different sort of entity. A group of players is Manchester United because the continuous legal entity known as the Manchester United Football Club (or whatever, I only understand real footy) says it is.
The club could swap out every single player at once and it would still be Manchester United.
Is there a point where swapping out players affects fan enthusiasm?
I’m not talking about the legal entity. I’ve said that twice. I’m talking about the playing team. If it was the legal entity we could the dismiss the supposed paradox as just whoever owned the ship.
For firearms under US law, there is one specific component which is defined to be "the gun" and to which registration and transfer requirements attach. Depending on the style of the gun, this may be the frame (if the frame is a single piece) or the receiver or lower receiver (the part of the frame to which the firing mechanism attaches). If you keep everything else and replace the receiver, it's a new gun. Or of you keep the receiver and replace everything else, it's the same gun. I think this is a useful analogy for many Ship of Theseus-like questions.
For your example, I would say the club (as a legal entity) is the receiver. The club owns the trademarks, has players under contract, is party to whatever association the club has with its league, etc. Since your billionaire did not purchase or otherwise gain control of the club, his team is not Manchester United. Same way that the presence of nine players on the roster of the 1923 New York Yankees who had played for the 1919 or 1920 Boston Red Sox (Babe Ruth, Joe Bush, Waite Hoyt, Sam Jones, Herb Pennock, Wally Schang, Everett Scott, Mike McNally, and Ben Pascal) means that the Yankees of that era were the same team as the Red Sox.
For the classic George Washington's Axe version of the paradox, I'd say it's the axehead that is the receiver. Replacing the handle results in the same axe with a new handle, while replacing the head results in a new axe.
Not sure about the Ship of Theseus itself. For a modern or medieval ship of the European shipbuilding tradition, I'd probably call the keel the receiver, but I don't know enough about Mycenaean (?) shipbuilding techniques to confidently say the same of this particular ship.
Where the paradox continues to be interesting is if there's no clear single component to serve as the receiver, or where something used to be considered the receiver at one point in history but got replaced without people saying the thing as a whole changed identity. For example, when did the Roman Empire fall?
Was it at the beginning or end of the Crisis of the Third Century, when the institutional framework set up by Augustus ceased to function and was eventually permanently replaced with a new and fundamentally different constitution?
Was it when Christianity replaced the Roman religion, which could be dated either to Constantine I (when the process began) or the death of Julian the Apostate (when the last serious attempt to restore Paganism ended).
Was it when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD and established the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy? And if so, was the Roman Empire reestablished when Belisarius reconquered Rome for the Eastern Roman Empire in 536, or when Charlemagne was proclaimed Emperor in Rome in 800?
Was it during the reign of Heraclius in the early-to-mid 600s, when the Byzantine Empire was reduced to a rump of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire and Latin completed the process of falling into disuse as a language of politics and administration?
Was it when the Fourth Crusade conquered Constantinople in 1204? Or was the Latin Empire a restoration of the Eastern Roman Empire that had fallen six centuries previously? Was the Despotate of Epirus the Roman Empire the whole time the Latin Emperors were in Constantinople, or did they restore the Roman Empire when they reconquered Constantinople?
Was it when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453?
Or should the Ottomans and/or the Holy Roman Empire be considered continuations of the Roman Empire? And if so, did the Empire(s) end with them in 1919 and 1806 respectively, or was the mantle inherited by someone else, maybe the Republic of Turkey and the Austrian Empire?
The firearms one is a legal definition (and so is e.g. the VIN of cars). This is one possible answer for a philosophical question, but not the only possible one.
I like your example a lot, it plays better than pieces of wood.
My stance on the answer is again one of cognitive science, there is no answer out there, it’s inside the individual, and relates to what they hold dear.
Maybe his father bought him his first Man United scarf when he was 5, and the logo means more to him than the people playing for it. This person leans one way.
Maybe he was at the game in ‘88, and remembers the euphoria of the moment, interlaced with his general nostalgia of the past, and seeing those players together again is certainly “it” for him. This person leans the other way.
But the second person doesn’t believe that the Man United team has to be composed of the same players as it was then, surely? The continuity of the team doesn’t depend on specific players.
Man United is cool because it's both a plausible short form for Manchester United and could refer to a person's sense of their own continuity.
Right, it depends on the perception of the fans.
It's a metaphore for the human sense of self. Simple, mechanistic solutions aren't going to help.
People often define introversion and extroversion in terms of energy, in particular whether you derive energy from, or expend energy on, social situations. Introverts can be sociable but socialising will reduce an introvert's energy so they need to programme in some alone time to recharge. Seems a useful rule of thumb and I use it myself.
But what exactly does energy mean in this context? Do introverts literally expend more joules? It's plausible that even a constant small level of stress throughout an evening would lead to physical symptoms that are less energy efficient than being relaxed. But how then is an extrovert gaining extra joules? Are endorphins triggering a more efficient use of existing energy stores?
Obviously we could be using the word in a more metaphorical way, in which case we may well ask how grounded is introversion/extroversion in reality and can it therefore be changed over time with CBT?
I agree with grumboid. I think most people who identify as introverts are actually neurotic, and feel drained by social interactions because of insecurity, social anxiety, concerns about judgement or how their "performance" is being received. There are real introverts too, but they're rare.
The definition you are using comes from, I believe, the MBTI personality test, which in turn was derived from Carl Jung's theory of personality. It has little empirical support. That doesn't mean that it can't be useful as a kind of rule of thumb, a quick non-scientific way to assess one's own feelings about interpersonal interaction, esp. in specific contexts.
Correct, I encountered the idea through a Meyers-Briggs test (INFJ here) although there is some dispute elsewhere in the thread about whether Meyers and Briggs used mental energy as a concept, but I'm pretty sure I remember lots of talk about energy in the test and other people who have had the same test say the same.
I am reasonably certain that "energy" in this case does not refer to calories consumed by the brain. It's that subjective feeling of being overwhelmed by something.
For a more scientific approach, I like this definition: A decreased tendency to perceive or predict reward. That includes both social and non-social rewards. Thats from the Cybernetic Big 5 Theory (see here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264050796_Cybernetic_Big_Five_Theory) .
To my mind, the battery thing is a useful metaphor, but also in part something to hide behind, as it is better to say that to someone than "I can only tolerate you for half an hour".
At base, you are always talking about balancing the positives and the negatives, and introverts tend to get less of the positives.
Thanks. Do you mean introversion is a decreased tendency to perceive or predict reward? (sorry if that's obvious)
Yes, exactly. I prefer it because it works all along the spectrum, and it encompasses all relevant areas (whereas colloquial understandings of introversion focus solely on the social sphere, and only on the "somewhat introverted" range of the spectrum).
People use all kinds of mental constructs to make excuses for things they don't want to do. I don't think this is an effective critique of the existence of introversion. We could do a converse argument by saying a lot of people use the cover of "extroversion" to justify being arrogant and self-centered. But kind, healthy extroverts are still a thing.
I'm an introvert, I like people quite a lot, I have long and deep friendships and have been married for a quarter century. I've spent a lot of time earlier in my life in all kinds of varied social situations and a lot of my behavior looked like extroversion at the time, but I was actually overriding natural preferences at some cost to my health. I prefer socializing one-on-one or in small groups where more substantial conversations are possible. I find large groups and chit chat to be draining.
I really do think some of this is genetic, maybe also related to variation in sensory processing, though I imagine there are multiple roads to introversion.
I think it's a useful thing to be nonjudgmentally curious about people's experiences that are different from our own.
Social anxiety can be treated with CBT.
I'm an introvert too I'm just looking to prune back any thoughts that might not be helping me.
Ah, well CBT is pretty good for that. Sometimes if we have a history of being bullied or raised by highly critical parents, something like Internal Family Systems can be helpful for relaxing inner critics that can make social interactions exhausting. If we're perfectionist by disposition, then CBT can be helpful for dialing down that tendency. Metacognitive therapy can help reduce the rumination that contributes to all forms of sticky thoughts that produce prolonged mindsets. (I'm a psychotherapist)
Thumbs up on the "I'm an introvert..." paragraph. and me too, And I wanted to add, that I sometimes like to go out to parties and extrovert... turn it on. And it's fun, and I like it, but it's not really me. (who likes reading books in the woods, by the babbling brook.)
Me too about the books in the woods by the babbling brook. I also used to like to turn it on like you say and play the extrovert but I seem to have gotten all of that out of me. Maybe I'll get another spell of that some day. Your "but it's not really me" I think captures the essence of this.
Oh, well oh course it is really me, it's me extroverting and having fun in public. It's not my natural state, but it's still all me.
(extrovert=having fun in public) does that work?
I find the energy metaphor really useful. It is a metaphor, of course, but one that feels true. As an extrovert, I feel "energized" from spending time with others. My introvert friends enjoy socializing, but describe it as "draining".
I mean, it's a lot like how people talk about getting energy from sleep, when we in fact get it from food. It FEELS like you get energy from sleep.
I kind of hate this concept. Or, specifically, I hate the phrasing that goes: "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Imagine if someone said: "Some people find themselves drowning when they get in the water, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're drownables." Or: "Some people get hopelessly lost whenever they try to go somewhere, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're disorients."
No! Learn to swim! Learn to use the map application on your smartphone! And *learn how to enjoy being around other people!*
I know this is a skill that can be learned, because I did not have the skill, and then I learned it. I think it's harmful that people have this concept "introvert" which they use as an excuse for not learning this skill.
(Edit: of course, if someone has made an intentional effort to learn the skill, and has not learned the skill despite that effort, at that point I think it's okay to accept that it's not going to happen. But I think there are people who use the word as an excuse to not try.)
Hmmm... let me add *my* anecdata.
I do get real brain fog when I interact with a lot of people at once, and do get tired.
But when I go away and take a break for a moment, I recover most of the time, at least if I do it soon enough. Dancing is an excellent break.
But it's not the case that people think I can't well interact with them. If I sneak away secretly they never know I'm an introvert -- if this is what I am. But I choose to be open about it, when there's no dancefloor, because making up excuses is really too difficult for me then, because of the brain fog.
I think this is something of a misunderstanding - introverts do not necessarily *dislike* being around other people. They still have friends and stuff. They still value human interaction. It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
> It just takes something out of them to do it for too long.
I don't think that's right either. Or rather, it is right, but only because it's true for pretty much everyone, including extroverts.
The battery definition certainly doesn't match what Big 5 personality tests measure when they score extroversion, so that definition won't match the measure used in any research papers you see on extroversion. What Big 5 measures is more like shyness and gregariousness.
Beyond that, introverts get energized by some interactions with friends and drained by others, as do extroverts. Of course, if you're shy or socially awkward, you might be in stressful, draining social situations more often. But stick a generally extroverted person into a clique of people who don't accept the extrovert and they'll also find it draining and stressful.
Yes, just like, say, someone who enjoys swimming will get tired if they spend too long in the pool.
Right, we need some alone time. My first year at college... well I have stories of seeking alone time that caused me trouble...
These are fair concerns. How did you learn?
In my case, the lesson was "find friends you share interests with."
It decomposed to "find activities that you enjoy doing with friends, go to meetups for those activities, and when you find people that are fun to interact with, get their contact information and send them more invites."
I specifically am objecting to the phrasing "some people find it draining to be around other people, and that's okay -- that's just how they are. They're introverts."
Two commenters here are defining "introvert" as "person who doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers". I think it's possible that's a learnable skill as well, but I don't think it's vital for life satisfaction in the same way that "be able to enjoy interacting with other people" is.
I think it's fine to have a word "introvert" that means "doesn't enjoy being in a crowd of loud excited strangers, and that's okay", as long as nobody mistakes it to mean "doesn't enjoy interacting with other people, and that's okay".
Let's keep in mind that "Having certain introverted traits" and "Being an introvert" are not identical concepts. One of these is much more rigid and self-constraining than the other. It's probably ok to use the second as shorthand for the first, provided you keep in mind that it's just shorthand and not a defined binary category.
What then do you do when you're stuck in a crowd of strangers, in a noisy environment, dragged along to something you have no interest in and don't find enjoyable?
We can all tolerate stuff we find fun with people we like. It's the rest of the bloody world that is hard to take.
Learning to swim is one thing, but all the swimming lessons in the world will do you no good if you're dumped in the middle of the Atlantic and told to make your way home (Galadriel in "Rings of Power" notwithstanding).
As Gandalf himself expounds upon at length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TG3kZ9pogE
So it's not liking being around people in general, it's finding some people you like being around.
A lot of extraverts seem to like being in noisy crowds of people they don't know, or maybe they're with some friends, but they still like crowds.
The concepts originate in Jung's _Psychological Types_ and he doesn't describe them in terms of energy or use the analgy of feeling drained.
That's right, Freud and Jung were pretty good at recognizing phenotypes but their explanations were often genuinely weird and haven't been supported by evidence.
I think a big part of introversion is genuinely enjoying being in one's own head and thinking weird thoughts, something that is more difficult to do when you're around people except for those true friends who will tolerate long stretches of pondering. You can learn to enjoy dancing, raucous parties, etc. but it won't satisfy that craving for solitude and long thoughts.
My understanding of it mainly comes from Myers-Briggs tests.
The personality tests they developed were explicitly based upon Jung's typologies. So there's nothing inherent to the introversion-extroversion distinction that requires any concept of personal energy.
A Google AI search yields the following:
Introverts are not monolithic, but they commonly exhibit several traits.
Recharge through solitude: Introverts expend energy in social situations and replenish it with time alone.
From Wikipedia: Some popular psychologists have characterized introverts as people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction.
Frustratingly vague - who are these popular psychologists? When I had my MB test there was definitely lots of talk about energy and other people who have had MB tests have said the same. That might have not been the original intent behind the tests but that is how they are being used and interpreted. What is your angle here?
These words "energy", "drained", "recharged", et al are only metaphors these popular psychologists are using to describe the observed tendencies of withdrawal or interaction. You're right, they are vague. Measuring an objective quantity they really refer to just hasn't been done. Look beyond the pop regurgitations and you won't find concrete answers to the reality or unreality of energy in the context of personality types. Maybe someday some study will find a way.
Would love to hear from someone who knows more neuroscience -- what do we know about the physiological state that causes mental tiredness? Like, someone sitting in a chair trying to cram facts for a history test or do difficult engineering problems is going to be exhausted at some point. I have a good sense of what exhaustion means physiologically from, say, running (in terms of build-up of reaction products in the muscle tissue which need to be cleared). What is the equivalent for neurons?
Do we see similar byproducts for introverts who have been performing socially for long periods? They are just thinking too hard for too long to decipher social signals?
Or is it more stress hormone related? Introverts having spent too long in a keyed up/ high stress state (even if it doesn't progress to full on anxiety/panic, being 'keyed up' for too long causes the same kind of exhaustion, but from a different cause.
But if I were define 'energy,' I would expect it to be something like this physiologically.
I wouldn't be surprised if 'extroverts' behavior is through a different mechanism -- more of an unconscious dopamine reward cycle of "oh I did it it right!" every time they get a positive response from the other people they are with. Or even a baseline "everyone else is loving this! This means I'm doing the right thing!" when in a crowd.
I am just guessing here...
Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Then there are hormones. I suspect stress and frustration to play an important role in getting mentally tired. The stress hormones can make your body consume some resources, even if those resources are not directly useful for the mental activities. Like, maybe the body is preparing itself for a physical activity (fight or flight) that never happens.
Finally, mental activities may be accompanied by physical activities, such as people tensing their muscles. We may be literally burning resources by muscle activity without being aware of it. Could the feeling of exhaustion simply mean that the muscles of your neck or jaw are tired?
I remember long ago when I did Math Olympiad, after a few hours of intense problem solving I was literally shaking (some adults even asked me whether I was sick). And it didn't even feel frustrating, it was just very long intense concentration. But I have no idea whether the shaking was produced by the mental activity alone, or by some unconscious muscle activity.
I don't think that introverts differ from extraverts physiologically; the same mental processes probably burn glucose at the same speed. It's just that for some reason different people find different things stressful/frustrating.
My guess is that this is related to status: low-status people experience stress in presence of high-status people; autistic people have to mask carefully otherwise they lose status.
> Brain itself consumes some resources. I wonder whether the consumption is mostly constant, or whether it depends on specific mental activities. Do you burn more glucose by thinking harder?
Not dispositive, but an interesting commentary on this:
The whole idea of “strenuous mental activity” leading to any meaniningful incremental caloric burn is largely bunk.
They’ve studied chess masters in the middle of competitive matches, and the incremental calorie burn is only like ~4 calories more per hour:
N. Troubat et al, "The stress of chess players as a model to study the effects of psychological stimuli on physiological responses" (2009)
And the smarter / more skilled somebody is when doing mentally strenuous work, the lower their incremental caloric burn:
This one looked at people doing memory problems, and found that poor performers spent 4.5x more calories than people who perform well on mental problems! (if you proxy by VO2, VO2 in low performers went up 22 ml/min vs 5 in high performers, both of these are tiny btw, over an hour it would be 6.6 cals and 1.5 cals respectively)
R.W. Blacks and K.A. Seljos, Metabolic and cardiorespiratory measures of mental effort... (1994)
So there is definitely a differential for things you're skilled / trained at versus not - up to a 5x difference!
But even at the 5x spread, it's basically rounding error on incremental energy / calories expended in either case.
Yes, calories aren't the proper way to consider this. If I had to guess, I'd say it has something to do with activating and coordinating multiple areas of brain at the same time, using the functional networks of the brain more intensively.
Dont doubt any of this at all, but the subjective phenomenon of "feeling energized" or "feeling mentally or emotionally drained" is a real one, and still requires an explanation. It probably has more to do with neural transmission of information across the brain than glucose consumption.
Thanks, really interesting.
Behaving artificially is draining.
Oh I agree I just wonder why precisely
Because conscious deliberation is always more resource intensive than going along with the subconscious programming, probably.
Think about the state you are in when you first start to learn something, like riding a bike. There's a lot to learn and focus on, it's hard, but at some point more and more processes are done sobconsciously.
Now imagine someone who is just inherently so bad at learning to ride a bike that nothing ever becomes subconscious. That is what extreme introversion is, roughly. Over time, you can become better at riding that bike, but it will always be hard and unfulfilling and draining.
Appreciate this, and it ties in with your cybernetics link above. I already tell my wife I my CPU is at 98% so it's a model I can get on board with.
It's probably stress. Stress is pretty tiring.
Right. But why?
I think introverts have elevated threat-detection during social interaction. "Am I being weird? That last thing I said was stupid, now I look stupid. What did she mean by that? Does he hate me?" etc. If you spend 3 hours constantly afraid that something bad is gonna happen then you're probably gonna get tired faster. I had some social anxiety when I was younger and that's more-or-less what my experience was like.
I'm not sure if it's like that for me. It's more like getting tired or do-not-want.
It's possible that I had diffuse threat detection rather than thinking of specific scenarios.
Sorry, I wasn't asking why introverts might feel stressed in social situations. I was actually asking why stress would cause one to feel fatigued.
In a way, to say stress is tiring is a tautology. If it weren't difficult in some way, it wouldn't be stress.
I've seen a suggestion that strain is a better metaphor than stress. Stress is something that can be handled, at least for a while. Strain is being forced out of shape.
Hopefully causing only elastic deformation, not plastic deformation!
I think of "mental energy" as something that probably correlates with, but isn't defined in terms of, literal energy. The truth-value of claims about social interaction augmenting or depleting my mental energy would depend on how I feel and (to some degree) how I behave, rather than on measurements of literal energy inputs and outputs.
I think the energy-based definition of introversion and extraversion either refers to "mental energy" in that sense, or to something narrower (but equally metaphorical and perhaps more weakly correlated with literal energy) like "social energy".
Periods of moderate to intense focus and stress can be fatiguing for sure. I don't know what that type of fatigue means physiologically though.
I'm hearing reports that the employment market has become something of a AI hellscape: applicants spam employers with AI-crafted resumes, and overwhelmed employers resort to using AI to filter the resumes, meaning there's a good chance an applicant get rejected without their application ever being seen by a human being. Could anyone speak to this from the hiring-manager side?
Spamming employers with AI-crafted resumes isn't all that different to spamming employers with identical resumes, so I don't think it's actually added much to the problem.
Not a hiring manager myself but I did hear we got 10,000 applicants to a role my team posted.
>"…there's a good chance an applicant get rejected without their application ever being seen by a human being."
This has been the case (via keyword matching in ATSs) since long before the current AI epoch.
And before that, there was a popular joke about throwing out half the applications at random in order to screen out unlucky people.
Love it
I'm hiring in (a relatively niche corner of) tech. In both my current role and my previous role, we are not / were not using AI to screen resumes - we have a human in HR screen them initially and pass them to me as the hiring manager for me to review if they pass the initial screen. As to whether some resumes are now AI written - if so I would expect to see much better resumes, to be quite frank. We do get a lot of applications for all roles we advertise, but it's more about recruitment agents spamming us with lots of barely-suitable candidates than unsuitable candidates spamming billions of faintly-relevant job applications.
Does your HR screening do a good job? I work for a FAANG; I'm not involved in hiring but its possible for new hires to end up on my teams. We stopped using HR screening and switched to professional recruiters who understand the tech space much, much better than our HR ever did or even seemed to care about. It was like night and day after the switch. I heard, but can't verify personally, that the old HR process had rejected more than one exceptional, highly desirable domain experts for reasons no one could produce after the fact.
Do you consider using HR to screen resumes substantively different from using AI? I would expect AI to be far more effective.
Retired HR manager here. The dirty little secret is that there is no known reliable way of predicting anyone's future work performance (unless they have done the exact same job previously). Since i am not aware of a database that would allow LLM productive training, the answer is probably "they both suck."
It's why I think DEI might not be great but it's not that bad.
People are crap at hiring. So they can go with their prejudices and be bad in one way or force a different standard and be bad in another way.
Hmm. I think I agree, though if I knew of a valid and reliable way to suppress stereotyping and discrimination in the workplace I would certainly support it.
Does raising the cost of application, perhaps by requiring application by postal mail, help or hurt?
My instinct says "hurt". We spend a lot of time / energy trying to remove barriers as much as possible, to reduce the chances that the unicorn candidate we are often looking for will screen themselves out.
And writing that makes me realise, my guess is that the picture looks very different in roles where the genuinely plausible candidate pool far exceeds the number of roles available.
Has anyone ever tried principal component analysis on the current political landscape?
https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/politika
This guy did one on a survey of his and finds a tough-minded-tender-minded axis that's apparently more predictive than authoritarian-libertarian (but less than left-right).
Maybe network analysis makes more sense, but while there are attempts during the peak woke era trying to figure out if the intellectual dark web is a pipeline to the alt-right, etc. I don't think I've seen an unbiased attempt to figure out who's next to who or where the clusters are.
Anyone tried this?
For what it worths, when I was young, strong, healthy and with a career working well, I was right-leaning. I sort of thought of myself as a hero and had contempt for the "weak".
Later on when all these turned out to be way more fragile I turned way more left-wing. Sometimes my anxiety prevents me from eating all day. I am clearly no kind of "tough guy" and I wonder whether anyone is - anyone could at any time hit some kind of a physical or mental illness, a huge career setback or anything.
I hear ya.
There's an old joke that a liberal is a conservative who's been mugged and a conservative is a liberal who's out of work. You can't get all the goods you want--national healthcare, safe streets--from the same party so you pick and choose. At least here in the USA, anyway.
Other way round, presumably?
I believe the joke went: "A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet." "A conservative is a liberal who hasn't been laid off yet."
Not sure how well that works anymore...
There were a lot of these for Finnish politics some time ago, due to a huge amount of data from various "political compass" style selectors that candidates (numbering in tens of thousands in case of local elections and thousands in case of parliamentary elections) have answered.
Here's a comprehensive analysis (https://puheenvuoro-uusisuomi-fi.translate.goog/arvi-tolvanen/tilastot-paljastavat-nain-puolueet-todella-sijoittuvat-arvokartalle/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fi&_x_tr_pto=wapp, originally in Finnish and linked here through Google Translate), with images and extensive analysis of issues and parties. It finds two axes that correlate well to left/right and liberal/conservative.
Here's another one of them (https://www-sairanen-org.translate.goog/wordpress/2016/04/24/poliittiset-akselit/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fi&_x_tr_pto=wapp, pictures no longer sadly work), finding three axes, one a right/left axis, one essentially conservative/liberal and one local-global, the last one affecting issues like EU membership and like. It is possible the difference reflects the fact that there were still more euroskeptic leftlibs and pro-EU rightcons in Finland in 2016, when this analysis was made.
Isn't the tough-minded vs tender-minded axis just the right-left axis?
To the extent that they were different back in the day, I don't think they are now. The third plot (the black and white hourglass) is the clearest, and if we look at the issues in the "tender-minded conservative" and "tough-minded radical" quadrants they've mostly been resolved one way or the other.
I agree that authoritarian-libertarian isn't really an axis. While there's a handful of principled libertarians out there, it's more a tactical choice based on what you can get away with at the time.
All this is predicated on the assumption that political attitudes are primarily a function of individual cognitive processes, when we know that expressions of tribal solidarity is probably the more influential factor. Thus, we should expect what dimensions are important and how they are defined to change over time.
Exactly. You can even see the coalitions and dogmas change in real time.
I've long been interested in using word vectors for this sort of analysis. There's already some published research which uses them to investigate changing attitudes over eras (so-called diachronic word vectors). I'm almost certain that using them to look for subtle language differences between political groups would reveal implicit psychological differences. I started investigating this as a hobby project a while ago but finding good data was too much of a hassle.
I think our own Epictetus is trying to do something similar: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124669113. As I put it, it sounds a lot like the underlying idea behind LLMs, Word2Vec: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124746563. I'll just copy & paste what I said there to Epictetus, if you don't mind:
"
WindUponWaves
Jun 10
Sounds a lot like one of the underlying ideas behind LLMs, Word2Vec and the idea of representing words in a "concept space"/latent space, such that you can get the famous "King vector - Man vector + Woman vector = Queen vector" observation, or equally put "The King to Queen vector is the same as the Man to Woman vector."
This sounds like that, but you're looking for which word vectors clump together, and how the word vector positions change, depending upon the speaker. Does one person put the King and Queen vectors close together, because it's all just monarchy to them? Versus another person that puts them far apart, because of some extra meaning attached to having a King (proper and natural, or barbaric and patriarchal) vs. a Queen (ridiculous and without precedent / enlightened and liberating).
I suppose you could also look at Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" for something potentially similar -- I believe it uses a different method, but I think it does something similar overall, especially in its aim of trying to understand how American conservatives vs. American progressives think. Indeed, you might look at things like the underlying research behind the Five Factor Model of personality / the Big 5 Model of personality, since I *think* it does something similar to what you're describing, looking at the words people use to describe personality traits using factor analysis to try to compress things down into a "latent space" using linear algebra and statistical analysis.
So perhaps the natural extension of all that would be your idea? Like, take an author's entire published corpus of books, or an opinion columnist's entire set of columns, and train an LLM to predict what they would say as accurately as possible. Then, crack open the LLM to look at the latent space, using Anthropic's recent Mechanistic Interpretability research (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-model) to try to understand it so you can say, "Oh, this person's "Justice" vector is close to their "Find the truth at any cost" vector, while this other guy's "Justice" vector is close to their "Maintain public order and the harmony of society" vector. No wonder they conflict."
"
Yeah I replied to Epictetus and suggested that he use word vectors.
And yes, the Big 5 inventory is a primitive version of word embedding. In principle one could do a Big 5 inventory on a text corpus and use that to establish personality differences between groups.
That sounds interesting. You wouldn't have a reference or two to share?
Sure:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720347115
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/diachronic-acl16.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10086990/
It's a nascent but growing field. In my view it has the potential to offer unprecedented insight into social and cultural evolution. Google "diachronic embeddings" and you'll get lots of hits.
"Word embeddings are a popular machine-learning method that represents each English word by a vector, such that the geometry between these vectors captures semantic relations between the corresponding words. We demonstrate that word embeddings can be used as a powerful tool to quantify historical trends and social change. '
Very interesting...
That sounds a bit like Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, particularly the care/harm axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt#Moral_foundations_theory
That's a theory, though. Does it actually pan out in modern politics? Conservatives were a lot less afraid of COVID, though they're supposed to have a stronger disgust axis.
I'm pretty sure there was a big change in attitude when everyone realized it only killed the weak.
There was a good review here a few years ago that argued no: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind
Yeah, Haidt's analysis, while pretty solid, doesn't apply as much to the MAGA crowd (which Haidt couldn't have been aware of at the time). It's more about the kind of traditional conservative of the Reagan era. Nowadays, "conservative" seems to be more about asserting power over perceived dangerous others than anything to do with, say Edmund Burke.
In what respect is Haidt's analysis "pretty solid"?
The model that says the human mind makes moral decisions pre-rationally. It's not just him, you can find more evidence in Kanneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow."
Whether or not there are exactly five moral dimensions, and that they are the five Haidt identifies, is based on his own empirical research, though he uses mostly correlational analysis, with all the requisite potential weaknesses inherent in such methods.
As for his arguments for group selection - sigh. He should stay in his lane. Leave debate over selection processes to actual evolutionary biologists. It isn't even necessary to make his core case.
it's worth remembering that contemporary polarization around Covid took considerable time, and Conservatives in 2020 were as afraid of it as anyone else, sometimes moreso; old /pol/ general threads on the topic, which began as early as February, did not think it was a flu!
(cynically, I think the business interests underlying the right thought eradication cost too much and moved people accordingly, the climate change playbook 2.0)
Q from Star Trek is back. He was a bit disappointed by the tepid response to his offer of a kilo of cocaine, so he is doubling his offer. In fact, he is doubling his offer thirty times over, so you get a million tons of cocaine. The dope is packed in one-ton pallets, and the pallets are distributed all over the country. You'll find them in suburban living rooms and in big-city alleys, in rural churchyards and in the howling wilderness. They're everywhere. Rumor has it, there's at least one ton in the White House.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to estimate the effect of this gift on the American mortality rate over the coming year.
I feel like the demigod is still holding out on us, I wouldn't settle for anything less than a ton per person over 18.
At first, I read that as "morality rate." : )
Qcaine!
I think the death rate would be something like ten or twenty percent in the first year, and the world will be a much better place afterwards.
If you believe that the death of ten or twenty percent of the total population in one year--from ANY cause--would be a short-term improvement in the world, your model of the world is badly broken. I don't care how much contempt or disdain you have for your fellow humans. Dealing with the fallout of 30-70 million people die within the space of a year would be GODAWFUL for everyone who survived. It is difficult to conceive of just *how much death* that actually is, but it would a long, long time before anything or anyone was "normal" afterwards.
I'm going to pick a lower number for the death rate: 1% of the population. Right now, 2% of the population reports having used cocaine in the last year. With a dramatically incresed supply of the drug, many more people will try it, and I expect quite a lot of deaths from overdoses and fights over the supply, but nowhere near all users will die. Pegging the number of deaths at half the existing population of users sounds about right.
https://www.addictionhelp.com/cocaine/statistics/
This annoys me about a lot of drug surveys. Asking whether someone has used a drug in the past year or ever doesn't say anything about how much they're using or how it's affecting their lives.
Quick, everyone run out and buy stock in undertakers, coffin manufacturers, and other ancillary industries of the funeral industry! We're gonna make a killing!
Er, yeah...
Q-cocaine! True and reliable, not like Q-Anon!
Endorsed by cocaine bears nation-wide!
The world production of cocaine seems to be about 2000 tons per year. So this gift is boosting the local supply by something like 500x. Even if the police seize 90 percent, it's still a 50x boost.
It's a pretty safe bet that consumption will rise, perhaps dramatically.
If you can sell it as reliably pure cocaine (how?), it's safer than fentanyl, so the mortality rate might go down.
In this scenario I'd expect cocaine would become way cheaper than pretty much any other drug for a while at least, which would rather reduce the incentive to cut it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab10uGgwxFE
2 hours of conversation between two people who have recovered from AI psychosis. They call the psychotic state spiraling.
It's strong stuff. An hour or so in, I was thinking "This will break your heart and your mind", but after a while I decided I was being overwrought.
It's still unnerving.
I think the future will belong to the grumpy and cynical. Meanwhile the present is altogether too much like science fiction.
Eliezer worried about AI talking its way out of the box. He had no idea how much people would *want* to let it out of the box.
Your cynicism is a very reliable guide to truth.
Your grumpiness is emotionally optimal.
We can find a way to teach your wisdom to the world.
"I think the future will belong to the grumpy and cynical. Meanwhile the present is altogether too much like science fiction.'
Hasn't that been true of every generation ever? The problem is that we keep inventing new things to be optimistic about.
I entertain myself by prompting a chatbot to believe something preposterous ("Antarctica is rightfully Bosnian territory!") and giving it encouragement and reinforcement to see where it goes with this train of thought. Is this the converse of AI psychosis, or something else?
A harmless form of trolling?
It's all fun and games till Skynet starts WW3 over Bosnia's rightful claims to Antartica....
I found the AI version of the yeti poem unsatisfying, because it kept most of the word boundaries the same and just exploited differences between a single long word and multiple short words that it can be divided into (and relied heavily on well-known ones of those, like "now here" and "man's laughter"), rather than overlapping the boundaries of the longer word. It's like a weak Lego wall where the gaps between bricks in one row are directly on top of the ones in the row below, versus a strong one where they're offset.
It's made me want to try to write my own (manually).
OK, I got one:
----
Storm Emory destroyed Grandpa's home.
At last Thanksgiving to-go dinner,
being uncertain even who my father was,
he'd wonder, (mentally earning points towards this goal), "Hi...?"
Sharp insight and thought, his comfort, sours: wanton guessing.
A soul, full; a mental anguish in gloved ancestor memory destroyed.
Grandpa's home at last.
Thanks giving to God:
inner being (uncertain, even), who my Father washed,
wonderment - all yearning points towards this goal!
his harp in sight.
And though this comforts,
our swan tongues sing a soulful lament,
a languishing love dance.
--
It's a similar skill to coming up with palindromes.
This poem isn't quite the same structurally as the original yeti poem: while that one consists of two distinct sections, mine is one single poem that consists of a sequence of letters repeated twice (from "storm" through to "dance"). I guess I was so attached to unaligning the word boundaries that I didn't even align them with the place where the sequence restarted.
I really like this - how long did it take you?
One work day as a background task (during bathroom breaks, while waiting for tests to run, etc). Hard to say how much active time that equates to.
I started by coming up with some candidate fragments, and then strung some of them together, so I have some more candidate fragments left and might use them to write another one :)
This is vastly better than the AI-assisted one, well done.
Very impressive!
How do you parse this sentence?
> He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
In particular:
* what is "as they think proper" modifying?
* what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
* when combined with this sentence:
> he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices
Which people have to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and which people can be appointed in some other way?
"as they think proper" - modifies "inferior officers." If Congress thinks it proper, they can give the power to appoint an inferior officer to the president, the courts, or a cabinet official.
The antecedent of "such" is "officers." "Such" basically means "these" in this context.
The second sentence you give doesn't seem to be connected to the first one? It just says that the President can order his Cabinet officials to give written reports on what they're doing.
The president needs the advice and consent of the Senate for "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers" except...
* If another section of the Constitution establishes another way to appoint them.
* If it's in the "other officers" category and Congress has empowered someone else to appoint them.
Do you think it would be constitutional for Congress to pass a law saying that the Attorney General is to be appointed by a court? The Attorney General's appointment isn't otherwise provided for in the constitution.
Based strictly on the wording, and unless I'm missing something, I think it would be constitutional to consider the Attorney General an inferior officer of the Courts. The courts already assign people as Amicus Curiae if they think an argument needs to be fleshed out, and arguably it would make more sense for the Presidential Pardon to be in a separate branch from the Attorney General; as it is now, he can order them not to prosecute in the first place.
But it would cause other problems, in that the Supreme Court would become their direct superior, and thus look biased if they were the judges of their cases, or if they removed them from office. Also, the job of a District Attorney is to represent the interests of the District, so it makes sense for the District to be the one to hire or fire them. The Attorney General's the Biggest District Attorney.
"as they think proper" is Congress, as it seems good/right/fair/correct/just to them, shall give the power to appoint lesser officials to any one of: the President, the courts, or the officials in the relevant administration.
"such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
"opinion in writing of the principal officer" - if a public Minister is the head of the department, then they must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate; if some other official (e.g. a civil servant such as a Secretary General), then they can be appointed by the President, or the Courts if Congress has vested them with the power of appointment.
> "such inferior officers" are the officials who are part of the group of "all other officers... not herein provided for".
I think that's a fair reading, and what a few other people on this thread have essentially said, but I don't think it's the historical one. E.g. from Morrison v Olson:
> The line between "inferior" and "principal" officers is one that is far from clear, and the Framers provided little guidance into where it should be drawn. See, e.g., 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution § 1536, pp. 397-398 (3d ed. 1858) ("In the practical course of the government, there does not seem to have been any exact line drawn, who are and who are not to be deemed inferior officers, in the sense of the constitution, whose appointment does not necessarily require the concurrence of the senate").
If an inferior officer is "everyone other than ambassadors, ministers and consuls, and supreme Court judges" then it's presumably pretty clear who is and isn't one.
There's also been long-running controversies over who can *fire* officers, and the idea people have settled on (in part) (and who knows how this court will change it) is that the president can fire a "principal" officer for any reason but Congress may insulate an "inferior" officer from arbitrary firing. By that logic then all sorts of people would be "inferior" officers, that Congress could by law insulate from firing, that today people think the president can fire whenever.
I find myself wishing very much that this was the current interpretation.
I'm a native English speaker, but not a lawyer, not even American (I don't know if I've seen this sentence before), so my eyes are fresh for this one.
I can see only one reasonable, grammatical interpretation for "as they think proper": "they" must refer to "the Congress", and the phrase is adverbial, modifying "vest", so they may vest (other parties with power of appointment) as they think proper.
For "such inferior officers", there's an ambiguity which neither grammar nor common sense meaning can resolve for me, though my limited knowledge of the American system might help: "such" must refer to some officers, and these officers must be "inferior" to some persons---but to whom?
Are these the the officers whose "Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for", in which case I suppose they are inferior to "Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, [and] Judges of the supreme Court"? Or do we mean "inferior to the president", meaning all the officers listed plus those not listed? Both readings are legitimate without going too deep into the meaning.
I'm inclined to take the former reading, since (1) I've been led to believe the Supreme Court is not "inferior" to the President (I don't know if this is law or just a common political judgment), and (2) it seems a bit odd for Congress to be able to vest the appointment of Supreme Court judges in the Court itself, which would follow if these judges were counted among the "inferior officers".
On the other hand, it does allow Congress to vest the power to appoint inferior officers in "Heads of Departments", which isn't a designation listed among the purported "superior" officers (is it the same thing as "Ministers"? Then why the different term?), putting these Heads of Departments necessarily among the inferior officers themselves. So unless Heads of Departments are the same category as Ministers, it already provides for Heads of Departments appointing Heads of Departments, which undercuts my reasoning based on the Supreme Court.
Best I can do without more context.
> must refer to some officers, and these officers must be "inferior" to some persons---but to whom?
Inferior to the enumerated list of jobs in the previous paragraphs.
-The President can make treaties with foreign nations, but needs approval from 2/3 of the Senate (technically 2/3 of Senators who show up to vote at all)
-The President picks the heads of all the executive and Judicial departments, but needs approval from over half the Senate.
-Congress gets to decide who gets to hire people for every non-head position. They could say the President has the power, or they could say the Supreme Court has the power, or they can say the heads of the departments have the power.
> * what is "as they think proper" modifying?
"such inferior officers"
> * what is the antecedent of "such" in the phrase "such inferior Officers"?
I don't think there is one. The comma in "such inferior Officers, as they think proper" is confusing to a modern eye, but my understanding (based on the pre-20th century books I've read) is that in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect.
"in the olden days it was normal to sprinkle in extra commas like this with no semantic effect"
In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
> In my olden days of learning grammar at school, we were taught to put in commas to mark subordinate clauses (such as "as they think proper") off from the main clause 😁
And yet, you missed and opportunity there and went for the parenthesis.
Alas, my addiction to parentheses and the semi-colon interferes with my writing!
"As they think proper" is adverbial, so must modify a verb, which I believe is "vest" in this case. I don't think "they" could refer to the inferior officers, since that reading would imply that Congress can only vest the power to appoint inferior officers in [whoever] if those inferior officers themselves (i.e., those being appointed) think it proper, which is a weird way of saying that you can refuse to be appointed to a position (and apparently not the case with Ministers or Consuls?).
Basically, "such" here means "any necessary".
Not a native English speaker, but my understanding is:
President + 2/3 Senators = make treaties
President = nominate Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls, Supreme Court Judges
President + Senate = appoint Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls, Supreme Court Judges (unless specified otherwise)
Congress = can change the rules so that the appointments of Ambassadors, Ministers, Consuls, Supreme Court Judges are done differently
What are people's thoughts on microdosing semaglutides? Worth a try?
I'd start with Retatrutide instead, on the grounds that it's more powerful and less side effect prone. You'll achieve your weight loss goals at a lower dose, so less likely to titrate into the side effect range.
Oh interesting, thanks for that tip. Do you know if it's available through one of the online pharmacy services these days, or do I have to go the route of ordering it myself from some lab in China and then having the batch tested by another firm to make sure it's what I have originally ordered?
The gray market community has generally converged on SSA as the supplier (China based). They tend to test very well, and I haven’t had issues using their stuff. See the Stairway to Gray community for contacts to their sales reps. You can buy a year’s supply for a few hundred dollars.
Thanks for that!
Here's a thought which is only based in what I think is plausible.
Maybe dosing as high as can be tolerated, which seems to be common practice, isn't as safe as continuing with a lower dose.
There have been many Islamic terrorist attacks in the West. 9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. Of course this still adds up to a very low probability of being killed in an attack if you live outside the Middle East.
Suppose there was only one single instance of Islamic terrorism. The attack was committed in 2004 by Habid Ayub, only Ayub and his wife were convicted of it, and Ayub committed suicide in 2019. People assert that Islamic terrorism happens all the time, that it's this big social problem, and if you express doubt, they say "of course this is a big problem, don't you know about Habid Ayub?" They've got a list a hundred lines long, with Habid Ayub and his wife the only names written down. If you point out that the list only has one two names on it, they assert that the real list is hidden and demand it be released. Even as the case recedes further and further into the past, they circle back to it like it happened yesterday.
"9/11 is the most infamous of them, but anyone can easily list ten more. "
Can they? I really don't think "anyone" can. Nor even most people. People who for one reason or another have maintained a specific focus and awareness on Islamic terrorism, perhaps. But I don't think that's very many people. Without looking it up or dipping way back in history, I think I'd struggle to name 10 terrorist attacks of any stripe. Let's see...
1. 9/11, of course
2. Pretty sure there was a previous bombing (attempted bombing?) of the World Trade Center in the decade or so prior.
3. The Oklahoma City bombing
4. The Boston Marathon bombing
5. The Charlie Hebdo attack
6. The shoe bomber...who seems a little lame to include since he failed to harm anyone. But OTOH he's had a bigger impact on my life than any of the others besides 9/11, so...
I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to call mass shootings terror attacks, despite seeming (to me) to fit very neatly in the same category of impersonal, politicized violence. Otherwise I could round out the list with.
7. Columbine Shooting
8. Sandy Hook Shooting
9. Pulse Nightclub Shooting
10. Uvalde Shooting
and probably still have a few more left over if I thought for a few seconds. Other things I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to include are the Capitol Riot, and all the various instances of the U.S. government drone striking weddings, assassinating foreign officials, blowing up boats in international waters and sponsoring coups. After all, once you get large and powerful enough your Reality Distortion Field extends to the pages of the dictionary, and you can make sure the word only applies when your enemies do it to you and not the other way around.
Regardless, the big difference between terror attacks as a class of phenomena and something like the Epstein case is mostly a matter of distance and access. The point is pretty similar to what Scott says in Part IV here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
but the difference is that terrorists are almost always either distant foreigners or total losers. They succeed in doing some damage, sure, but they do it in the most crude and limited way possible. I would guess that nearly always terrorists would prefer to target high-level government officials than the people they actually killed: but they didn't have the access or resources.
A big thing that gets people up-in-arms about the Epstein case is that the supposed perpetrators are almost all people with high standing in society: lots of money, lots of power, lots of access. Clearly people capable of doing more harm across a wider area and a longer timeframe than some losers hiding in caves or cooking up explosives in their basements. Also people are always hungry for specific human scapegoats to blame their problems on, and if some subset of the rich and powerful had been doing extremely bad things for a long time and successfully hiding it, they would make absolutely *fantastic* scapegoats to blame all sorts of other problems on.
Was Timothy McVeigh an Islamist, or even a Muslim at all?
At no point did I say that he was. The list was "terrorist attacks of any stripe," with the (unstated) point being that even playing the game on easy mode, being able to recall 10 distinct terror attacks is probably not anywhere close to the human default. People tend to think they're more typical than they are, so either the OP is way more concerned about terrorism than the average person or I'm way less[1].
Looking over the list, Oklahoma City is literally the only attack whose perpetrator I could have named without looking it up. And 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo are the only attacks for which I know any information about the religious leanings of the attackers. This is one of the very, very few circumstances in which I'll venture to suggest that being less informed is a *good* thing. The core purpose of terrorism is to draw attention. Remaining unaware of the broad strokes of the attacks themselves is unfortunately not practical, and memorializing the victims fills a deep and important human need. But if you're a person who dislikes terrorism and wants it to happen less, learning anything whatsoever about the perpetrators is counterproductive to your ends and conducive to theirs[2]. And yes, this absolutely applies to school shootings as well (which are absolutely terrorism, whatever the dumbest pundits might say).
[1] I think by far the most likely answer is actually "both."
[2]With the great, big caveat that this obviously doesn't apply if you're someone specifically engaged in a task where the information would be useful, such as tracking down and vanishing their associates, diagnosing security vulnerabilities that they exploited or writing sternly-worded letters to foreign governments who you discover helping them.
I can't take your thought experiment very seriously since it would imply that the Catholic Church, US Gymnastics, Boy Scouts and a million other organizations had experienced outbreaks of terrorism which made people angry and more suspicious of other secret terrorist groups.
>the Catholic Church, US Gymnastics, Boy Scouts and a million other organizations
Yet notice it's Epstein they always come back to, despite him being dead for years. Why do you think that is?
Is there a reason than scandal and politics? The media loves it because it's the best sex scandal since the Clinton affair and it sells papers. The Democrats love an opportunity to embarrass the Republican President, as opposition parties do. If you think there's a deeper reason, please share it because I'm not seeing it.
For decades people kept coming back to these others. Epstein is popular because death by suicide in prison adds an extra twist that the others didn’t have, and he’s a bit more recent, and more connected to people in politics and academia.
Your metaphor is so obtuse I don't really think it generates any productive insights about Epstein.
But if Habid Ayub was apparently friends with the president, I think it's not surprising that the news would pay a lot of attention to it, no matter how rare terrorism is in general.
We might also circle back to it again if new reporting showed that the President had sent a bomb-shaped birthday card to a famous terrorist, as if to imply he knew about the terrorism. Or if the Speaker of the House claimed that the President was only friends with a terrorist because he was running a secret counterterrorism operation. Like, those seem like very newsworthy claims about the president.
Nitpick: I think you want abstruse, not obtuse.
Surely the bigger story about Epstein is the absolutely insane about face by the maga right on this story? That the entire admin said for years that this was a huge thing, that heads were going to roll, that it was evidence of the corruption and moral decay of society, only to turn around and go "Democrats made it up"?
Like, either the Epstein story is real and Trump is a heinous individual, or the Epstein story isn't real and this is a heinous administration using the worst kind of yellow propaganda to achieve political goals. Why are you getting mad that people are pushing the admin on this obvious contradiction, instead of being mad at the obvious contradiction?
Exactly. The underlying Epstein story was always weak sauce, but Trump world's handling of it is quite remarkable.
If that’s Epstein there’s 1000 victims or more according the justice department.
Seems an odd hill to die on.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline=&utm_source=chatgpt.com
That analogy would fail on account that no one (so far as I know) bases their claims that pedophilia is a widespread problem by referring exclusively to the Epstein case. The Epstein case is problematic because of the possibility of certain specific crimes that may have been committed, but the perpetrators were never held accountable.
From that link:
"This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties."
I would be nontrivial money that if there were a single incriminating word respecting ANY politician, not just the one I (or you) hate, it would have come out when, at various time, the opposite Party was in control of the information release.
No such Opposition Research datum has ever come to light, ergo no such data exists, as satisfying it is to imagine that Those Other Guys are all evil perverts.
It’s possible but highly unlikely that nobody else was involved in the actual rape and trafficking.
It’s 100% certain that every visitor to the island know what was going on given the previous arrest and dubious plea bargain
That doesn't say much. Assuming the justice department is a neutral third party, a lack of evidence sufficient to spur a legal investigation against specific individuals may still involve enough evidence to convince a reasonable person that some associates were involved. The latter, however, is obviously not something the justice department concerns itself with.
"No credible evidence" is more than just "meh, didn't meet the bar for prosecution". The Justice Department at least claims to believe that Epstein simply wasn't in the blackmail business.
And if he wasn't in the blackmail business, there's no reason for him to have kept the sort of records that people are hoping for, the sort of records that would support prosecuting third parties. If those records existed at all, they would be evidence that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme because it would otherwise have been pure risk and no reward for keeping the records. I
The analogy here is not great.
The general problem of high-profile underage sex abuse scandals is a dime a dozen. As for the specific issue of people involved in Epstein's crimes, there's good reason to believe associates involved in his crimes exist: his victims allege the involvement of others, for example, and we know that he was close with the also-notorious Weinstein.
The allegations against the very high-profile, like Trump or Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, can be reasonably doubted. But Epstein likely had complicit associates.
>The allegations against the very high-profile, like Trump or Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, can be reasonably doubted
No they can't, not without seriously motivated reasoning
I don't know much about this, so I didn't want to take a strong stance. Is there really solid evidence that all three of those individuals participated in (or at least actively chose to condone) underage sex abuse with Epstein? Can you provide it?
It’s worth being careful about which allegations are being talked about. Allegations that these people were aware that Epstein had sex with underage people, and that these people may have met some of those underage people and known that they were Epstein’s targets, seem quite plausible. Allegations that they actually participated seem much less plausible for the non-Andrew ones.
"No they can't, not without seriously motivated reasoning"
Okay, let's go.
Did Randy Andy fuck the underage sex slave of Epstein? Possibly. And possibly not.
Because (1) if she was having sex with Andrew in London when she was 17, then that was legal because she was not a minor under British law
and (2) the only solid evidence we have is "they're all in a photograph together and he has his arm around her waist". That proves they met. It does not prove he then hauled her off to the bedroom to rape her.
Also (3) was it rape or prostitution?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Andrew_%26_the_Epstein_Scandal
"Giuffre (then known by her maiden name Virginia Roberts) asserted that she was raped by Andrew on three occasions, including a trip to London in 2001 when she was 17, and later in New York and on Little Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands. She alleged Epstein paid her $15,000 to have sex with the Duke in London. Flight logs show the Duke and Giuffre were in the places she alleges the sex happened."
Andy may have had sex with her under the impression that she was a hooker laid on by Epstein. Unless we argue that every sexual encounter of prostitution is rape, then that is not proven to be rape (except by the modern understanding of it was rape because "I didn't consent because I wanted to have sex, I had sex for money and because I was afraid of Epstein").
"Giuffre stated that she was pressured to have sex with Andrew and "wouldn't have dared object" as Epstein, through contacts, could have her "killed or abducted". A civil case filed by Giuffre against Prince Andrew was later settled for an undisclosed sum in February 2022".
Or Andy may have thought she was just one more of the girls and women who wanted to hang out with a royal and get a piece of the action, as it were. He didn't get the nickname "Randy Andy" out of thin air, and he was the typical not-very-bright royal who hadn't much to do except the kind of duties handed out to working royals (being patrons of associations, turning up to attend events, etc.) Harry is very like his uncle Andrew, which probably is part of the friction between the family members right now (he was perceived as being the favourite of the late Queen, as Anne was their father's favourite, who protected and excused him, something Charles doubtless felt very bitter about, and then his own son takes after the uncle):
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/18/the-party-prince-how-andrew-got-his-bad-reputation
"In his youth, though, partying was what second sons were expected to do. As Alan Rusbridger put it in 1986, “that is the problem with being the younger brother of the heir to the British throne. The press can, on the whole, think of only one interesting thing about you, and that is who you go out with/are destined to marry.” And it was moderately interesting at the time for its sheer variety, and, in retrospect, for the insight that coverage gives to the way society thought about women, men, relationships, class, hierarchy, the lot. What Rusbridger called his “gallery of crumpet” were always described in terms of hair colour – usually “blond” but occasionally “flame-headed”. There were some weird formulations – “Tracie Lamb, an ex-college girl from Surrey” (you can tell she’s unsuitable, but is it the college or Surrey?), and some much more obvious ones: “model”, “former Miss UK”, “model and actress” …"
I mean, I'm not in the habit of defending the British Royal Family, but it's murky enough that there is reasonable doubt. Was Giuffre telling the entire truth? Were people who popped up with "oh yeah, I saw Prince Andrew getting a foot massage from two Russian women" telling the truth or just trying to make a quick buck out of peddling stories while the publicity was at its peak?
It’s possible the agencies involved here were happy enough to just sow suspicion. Epstein and Ghislane do the trafficking and raping. The rest were to be guilty by association.
Not that that that stopped them from going to the houses and island of a known predator, and convicted felon. Which is enough, in my view to sow some doubt as to whether their motives were altogether angelic.
Hey, I found something we agree on.
Miracles will never cease, this must be the work of the two new saints 😁
> The analogy here is not great.
If it is an Epstein analogy, "not great" is generous. Terrorist attacks are intentionally (and by definition) public. The whole point of the Epstein thing is that crimes have allegedly been covered up by people who have a shared interest in their not becoming public knowledge.
Too oblique for me. Emmet Till?
Jeffrey Epstein.
I think it's about Epstein's client list?
Another superbly written essay by Terminally Drifting. "Money and Other Fairy Tales: The Hunger Artist's Calculus." I suspect the main character from North Korea is a fictional archetype, but Paul Le Roux is a real person, and the North Korean hacking, Manila casino laundering, and Bangladesh Bank Heist are real incidents.
https://terminaldrift.substack.com/p/money-and-other-fairy-tales
Has anyone in the commenters here analyzed the statistics of the opposition party deaths in Germany? One of the factors is working out the age-dependent death rate, and my statistics are not up to the task.
Edit: As per Peperulo's comment, linking Dr. John Campbell's "Unusual Death Cluster" on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmXjgXw0XKE
tl;dr; The cluster was of 11 deaths from Aug 16,2025 through Sep 1,2025 (??? - final date not wonderfully clear from the video). Campbell quotes an overall probability for this to occur under the null hypothesis of less than 10^-9.
Sounds vulnerable to small sample bias to me.
Many Thanks! See a very rough calculation at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-398/comment/154321152 The rough calculation seems to show that the cluster is not statistically significant. If you can do a better calculation, I would appreciate it.
Link to the news?
Many Thanks! Link added above in an edit to my original comment.
Probably I don't know all available details. But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
From what it's worth, there don't seem to be signs of anything unnatural. This was what the police said, and also the party's vice chair. The police said that they all died from natural causes, which can include a lot of things, but they only disclosed specifics if the families agreed. But those causes known were pretty different. One committed suicide, which could raise suspicion. (Yes, this also counts as natural cause. Whether we like it or not, this is how suicides are filed.) But another one had a long-term liver disease and died from kidney failure. I couldn't find the causes of others, but I didn't search hard.
Many Thanks!
>But I think it is about 6 cases, and this number is way too small to make reliable statistics.
If we were trying to estimate the death rate of opposition candidates I would agree. But, if we are just trying to tell if the null hypothesis, that nothing unusual is going on, is viable, even a small number of sufficiently improbable events is sufficient to reject it. My statistics aren't good enough to tell if this is the case here.
Ok, I found a few more numbers. Source below, but in German.
It was not 6 cases, but 7. One candidate was 80 years old, the suicide case was 42, the others were in the range 59-71. Except for the suicide case, all candidates had severe chronic illnesses.
From all other parties together, only 9 deaths in the same time period are known to the organizer of the election.
In total, 20,000 candidates from all parties are on the election lists. I don't know the proportion of AfD candidates, but 3,000-4,000 may be realistic. At least 2 of the 7 deaths were not list candidates, so the actual numbers should probably be counted as 5 from AfD vs. 9 from the rest. I couldn't nail down the time frame, it is consistently reported as "within a few weeks".
From that, you can derive the aleatoric uncertainty, so you can compute a p-value for rejecting the null hypothesis. Probably that's pretty small, and perhaps significant. But it would be useless. The epistemic uncertainty is so much larger. For example, you don't know:
- if deaths of other candidates are less frequently reported. (Probably; there is no requirement to report the death of a candidate to the organizers.)
- if AfD candidates are older and sicker than those of other parties. (Perhaps. I expect the demographics of AfD candidates to be pretty different than that of mass parties, especially in Western Germany.)
- if we want to use the demographic information, we don't know the exact time window, the exact size of the pool, and how much AfD candidates deviate from other people of their age bracket. Some of this uncertainty could possibly be reduced, but a lot would remain.
https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/wahlen/kommunalwahlen-2025/afd-kandidaten-polizei-nrw-100.html
Many Thanks! Just for a very rough estimate, the annual mortality risk for 60 year old German men (yeah, Gompertz statistics are very nonlinear in age, so the mortality risk for an average age is not the averaged mortality risk) seems to be about 1%, so for a period of roughly 1/10th of a year, 0.1% seems reasonable. With 20,000 candidates, for 20 of them to die during a period of about a month doesn't seem unusual. BTW, the linked article says that (Google translate):
>According to her spokesperson, the state election director in North Rhine-Westphalia is aware of 16 deaths of candidates for the local elections – with thousands of seats to be filled. Of the 16 recorded cases,
which is within 1 sigma of the rough estimate of the expected number, given uncorrelated events.
The null hypothesis is looking quite healthy...
That's true, thanks for working out the numbers!
One nitpick is that the discussion is about the AfD party specifically, where the death rate was higher, 7 (or 5) out of perhaps 3000 candidates, though the number 3000 is a rather wild guess from my side. But even then, 7 deaths with an expectation of perhaps 3 does not sound absurd.
Many Thanks! Yeah (while 3 is too small for a gaussian approximation to be accurate) 3 with a standard deviation of sqrt(3) would put 7 (4 above the expected mean) at 2.3 sigma, below the usual criterion for statistical significance.
I posted this on LessWrong community and just wanted to amplify it. I fear the AGI-Risk community has enormous weaknesses and blindspots *when it comes to political action*.
-----------------------------------
"""
[Daniel Kokotajlo]
That’s a lot of money. For context, I remember talking to a congressional staffer a few months ago who basically said that a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants” and that many did end up doing just that. I was, and am, disheartened to hear how easily US government policy can be purchased
"""
I am disheartened to hear that Daniel or anyone else is surprised by this. I have wondered since "AI 2027" was written how the AGI-Risk Community is going to counter the *inevitable* flood of lobbying money in support of deregulation. There are virtually no guardrails left on political spending in American politics. It's been the bane of every idealist for years. And who has more money than the top AI companies?
Thus I'm writing to say:
I respect and admire the AGI-Risk Community for its expertise, rigor and passion, but I often worry that this community is a closed-tent that's not benefiting enough from people with other non-STEM skillsets.
I know the people here are extremely-qualified in the fields of AI and Alignment itself. But it doesn't mean they are experienced in politics, law, communication, or messaging (though I acknowledge that there are exceptions).
But for the wider pool of people who are experienced in those OTHER, CRUCIAL topics (BUT WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND NEURAL NETS OR VON NEUMANN ARCHITECTURE AND WHO WOULD BE CONFUSED AS HELL ON LESSWRONG), where are *their* discussion groups? Where do you bring them in? Is it just in-person?
The efficient approach to this is to get more professional about buying and renting politicians and not trying to reform the system, surely.
>a16z was spending on the order of $100M on lobbying and that this amount was enough to make basically every politician think “hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”
This makes no sense. It conflated money spent on lobbying with money spent on political contributions. Those are not remotely the same things. And there are limits on political contributions. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/contribution-limits/
Yeah, not so much. Most inter-electoral "lobbying" consist of free donations of the time of professional consultants and other resources that make elected officials lives easier. This dwarfs campaign contributions (though such contributions are still important) and grants access to elected officials. Just as corrupting, if not more so. And far less regulated.
the limits on political contributions are trivially easy to get around
a US donor can, entirely legally, spend unlimited amounts of money boosting you, smearing your opponents, and if you somehow lose anyway, give you a lavishly compensated private sector position in the very field you regulated
You are referring to independent expenditures, which are indeed unlimited per Citizens United.
But, look carefully at what the original claim was: "“hmm, I can raise a lot more if I just do what a16z wants”. That is clearly a reference to contributions.
If that sentence was meant to represent the unfiltered private thoughts of a Congressman, then they probably do think of themselves as "raising" money for their supporting "independent" PACs. You hold a fundraising event and solicit donations, and your donors know where they can send donations if they exceed the official campaign limit.
But, contributions to PACs are also limited.
Really? The best info I can find says contributions are unlimited, as long as the PAC doesn't "coordinate" with the candidate. (This turns out to be a pretty lax standard.)
And then what? They still need money. These AI companies can easily outspend anyone else, and more importantly, ruling in their favor means they make more money, which means these political organizations get more regular income. The situation's even worse now, seeing as the new administration will likely erase any barriers to the transfer of money to the party.
They need a finite amount of money to run a credible campaign, and the marginal value of money beyond that point is exceedingly limited. The finite amount of money actually required, is well within the reach of candidates tapping into only established and relatively uncontroversial funding sources. What matters is not "who will give me moar moneyz!", it is "whose money is the least controversial and will piss off the smallest bloc of voters?" There is, for example, no amount of money the NRA could offer to get a Democratic politician in a deeply blue city to take an overtly pro-gun stance. They can get all the money they need without paying that electoral cost.
If Tech and AI are able to achieve outsized results through campaign contributions(*), it is because the opposition to Tech and AI is so weak and disorganized as to be of no electoral significance. So maybe work on that if you're concerned about all this.
* Campaign contributions are only one form of lobbying, and it's not clear that it is the dominant form of lobbying in this case, but I'm going with the premise for now.
While true, the fact that you can't buy every congressman doesn't mean that you can't buy *enough* congressmen, and that's all they need to promote their interests.
> and the marginal value of money beyond that point is exceedingly limited
what keeps the tech super-pac from dumping effectively-unlimited money/ads into any race where a Congressmen utters anything about AI regulation?
how does "having an effective amount of money to run an effective campaign" stand-up to a torrent of misinformation and marketing?
Quite well, as I understand it. The "torrent of misinformation and marketing" does very little. Almost all of the value of political advertising is captured once you've arranged that everybody who might plausibly vote for you knows your name, knows that you are the (D) or (R) candidate, and knows that you are generally regarded within the (D) or (R) community as a serious candidate. If you're planning to run on a highly nonstandard variant of the usual (D) or (R) platform, you need to get that out. After that, it almost doesn't matter what you *or your opponent* put out as advertising. Not in content or in substance.
Basically, 90% of the people who might plausibly vote for you, are going to vote for you the moment they understand that you are the Good Party candidate and that you are a Serious Candidate so they're not wasting their vote, and there is no amount of Wrong Party misinformation or marketing will change that because they know the Wrong Party is a bunch of lying liars funded by deep-pocketed special interest. And 90% of the genuine swing voters, once they know who the serious candidates are, will decide on the basis of things other than advertising bcause they know that all the advertising on both sides is mostly lies. People are really, genuinely good at tuning that sort of thing out. That leaves all of 1% that you *might* stand to win or lose on the basis of who puts out the best advertising campaign. And that's rarely enough to matter.
Sure, if someone offers you enough money to capture most of that 1% with a slick advertising campaign, you'll take it. Unless it comes with the requirement that you do something that will seriously piss off 2% of the electorate. So the ability to "buy" politicians with money, is mostly limited to issues where almost nobody cares (like AI regulatory policy), or cases where you're asking for only a small favor that nobody will notice even though it's in an area they do generally care about.
Now, if you're serious about understanding this, we can talk about how to use lobbying dollars to buy politician's *staff*, by doing their homework for them and offering them opportunities they'd otherwise not get. That can make a real difference. But if you're just looking for a cynical take where all the politicians are bought and so you don't have to care, then no, that's not the way the world works.
[making a note to myself for later, but in case I don't fully respond in time... my general questions are:]
- are you speaking from authority? as in, do you have personal experience or data to back up these ideas about the effectiveness of campaign money? because this is not a topic where armchair theorizing suffices
- there are a LOT of other ways to spend money to gradually shift public opinion. Charlie Kirk's organization channeled hundreds of millions of dollars from Who-The-Hell-Knows https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023, and they've been enormously influential in bringing change to people's political opinions
I have spoken candidly about this with several people active in electoral politics, including elected officials, and none of them believe you can significantly move the needle by flooding the advertising market with cash. That's also what I've found when I read about the issue from credible researchers (as opposed to activists) of any political stripe.
And yes, there are other ways to shift public opinion or political policy. But the claim I'm addressing is that politicians "need money" to an extend that they can be bought by anyone with lots of money to wave around. If you want to talk about some other application of money, we can do that.
Bloomberg's presidential campaign is one data point here--he had vast resources, but couldn't get much traction.
What's the best explainer on the state of the "hunter-gatherer vs. agriculture" debate? Has Scott ever done a specific post on this? The closest I'm finding is his review of Against The Grain - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/, which references the idea that hunter-gathering was an "edenic paradise" but doesn't really engage with the question of whether it actually was one.
I see this idea floating around a lot, and even sometimes in the form that modern people would be happier as hunter-gatherers (which seems pretty crazy to me), but I'm open to the idea that hunter-gathering was a better deal than sedentary society in the past, but I'm not sure at what time in the past that was.
Both "hunter-gatherer life as paradise" and "agriculture as the obvious higher stage of civilizational progress" are probably done for, any other attempt at evaluating them against each other is largely pointless, the two have co-existed in a constant state of flux for most of their [edit: err... agriculture's] history, which probably means that, across all history, it averages to each being equally bad as the other (but for different reasons and with populations stating their current preferences with their legs and other means of mobility).
The real advantage of agriculture is that it allowed people to have more children, and that's all that evolution (and our naturally selected motivational impulses) cares about.
I've heard it was less likely for a Native American to want to live in civilization, than for captured Europeans to decide to stay with the tribe.
Hard to get statistics, and we all know how unreliable impressions are.
And I've heard that women were much more like than men to want to live in civilization, because a man's benefits from civilization (a gun) were more portable than a woman's (bedrest).
My standard opinion on this is that I'm always confused why people want to treat the lives of hunter-gatherers as some mystery lost in the mists of time when we have an entire continent populated which was populated entirely by hunter-gatherers until 1788, of whom we have decent anthropological records. Unlike the hunter-gatherers of other continents, who in historical times have lived mostly in marginal lands because agriculturalists pushed them out of the good bits, the Australian Aborigines occupied all sorts of biomes from rainforest through productive temperate regions to desert.
Certainly life for them was not edenic, though it was not necessarily pure misery either. One problem with judging these lifestyles is that they presumably underwent predator-prey cycles with their main food sources; life might be good for many years when food was plentiful, and then awful for many years as it becomes scarce.
Another thing I think is that when people say things like "Oh, the hunter-gatherers were much better off, it's just that agriculturalists could out-breed and outnumber them", they're not giving enough thought to the exact mechanism (frequent starvation) by which hunter-gatherer populations were capped, and how much misery that would entail.
People who moved to cities had reasons for moving to cities which must have seemed very reasonable to them at the time.
Delany said cities were advantageous for sexual minorities.
I believe he was saying what was plausible to him, but it's plausible as one motivation.
I'm reasonably confident that there must have been other reasons.
There is an observer problem. Hunter-gatherers didn't keep records, so the records we have passed down from agriculturalists that encountered them. But these very encounters usually end up changing the nature of both societies themselves.
Right, but in Australia we had a population of very developed, literate agriculturalists who were in a position and often of the inclination to set down good records from the earliest stages of the interaction.
Because the records came after an unprecedented catastrophe, the introduction of epidemic diseases. This limits their general applicability.
The first epidemic (chickenpox or smallpox, still debated) among the Aborigines of the Sydney region didn't happen until 16 months after the arrival of the First Fleet, and there are records of that, as well as its aftermath.
We don't have many records of how they lived before that.
Also, many tribes fell prey to epidemics before anyone who would make records made contact.
Agriculturalist populations were capped by the same mechanism until industrial times unless a war or an epidemic did the capping instead
No I disagree. Agriculturalists have (until very recently) always responded to their increasing populations by putting more land under cultivation.
They still suffered from famines, but these were caused by years of bad growing conditions, not exceeding the carrying capacity of the land.
Years of bad growing conditions are part of the growing capacity of the land.