Remember when Gavin Newsom said his son is a fan of Charlie Kirk? It made me wonder if actually the boy was really a fan of Tate, Fuentes, or maybe even Spencer or Hanania.
I hate to be the one to nitpick about Jeroboam, but no, I actually don't hate it. Jeroboam is described as a punishment for Solomon personally, not for the Israelites. Did you maybe mean Jehu? He is sort of described that way at one point
Well, I think all the commentary on here about the Charlie Kirk assassination has proven Chesterton's statement:
"Thus was accidentally discovered (like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim—that if an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing."
Depending on what numbers the Substack counter is showing at any second, there are between 1,400 and 1,600 comments here and we seem to be still going strong.
Ezra Klein has an odd suggestion for the Democrats:
"And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win."
"Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats."
Of all the issues they could moderate on, why would he pick what polling and election results is the Democrats' best issue? Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri all voted to legalize abortion. Sometimes Democratic talking heads realize that the average trucker isn't a fan of the pronoun stuff, overcorrect and wind up thinking he's a Ned Flanders-type fundamentalist Christian, which is not the case. There's also the pro-life movement, which wants Republican politicians to believe that there's this vast mass of people who vote Republican because of abortion but would otherwise be Democrats, who are always alluded to but never heard from since they barely exist IRL.
If the Democrats want to hire me as their expert on Middle America I'll do it for $600,000 and a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
> Of all the issues they could moderate on, why would he pick what polling and election results is the Democrats' best issue?
Well they don't have to change the policy of the party, just to run a few candidates with opposing views to signal that opposing views are welcome within the party. The Republican has some "pro-choice" voices, but the Democrats have no "pro-life" voices.
"Pro-life Democrat" means going back to the disowned party line about "safe, legal and rare" instead of "abortions for everyone! free! at any stage of pregnancy! yes we hate babies!" extreme fringe position.
Why Klein picked Kansas, Ohio and Missouri? Possibly because, as mentioned in passing in a post about Susan Collins in Maine on "Silver Bulletin", the Republican seat in Ohio is vulnerable:
"She’s the only Republican incumbent up for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024, which automatically puts her in the “most vulnerable Republican seats” category — a lonely group that also includes North Carolina’s open seat and Senator Jon Husted’s seat in Ohio."
So I think Klein may be advising "Instead of going full-bore and doubling down on the things that didn't win the last time, cool your jets a little and you can take these seats easy".
Don't talk about abortion, talk about what you will do for the local economy. I don't think Klein means "run pro-life Democrats in Ohio, Kansas and Missouri", but being more open to running candidates that are not 200% progressive-aligned might be a better bet for the hicks in the sticks states.
A post from way back in May from "Silver Bulletin":
"Friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Yglesias wrote recently that “Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority in 2026 is nearly zero unless they do something dramatically different.” Yglesias was making a point I largely agree with about candidate quality — that Democrats ought to nominate moderates who are good fits for red states — so I’m not going to rag on him too much. But the early forecasts put together by groups like the Cook Political Report also paint a difficult picture for Team Blue. Cook rates all but three GOP-held seats (Maine, North Carolina and Ohio) as “solid Republican”, implying that there’s really no pathway for Democrats for a Senate majority at all.
By contrast, the odds at the prediction market Kalshi give Democrats a 32 percent chance of winning the Senate next year. While you’d certainly rather be Republicans than Democrats, I happen to know a thing or two about how those one-in-three chances sometimes come through. That implies a competitive race, not the foregone conclusion that Cook assumes."
So Nate thinks (or at least thought in May) that the Democrats have a good chance, if they turn their support into actual votes and if they convince the right candidates to run.
Democrats should do research, not just rely on someone's opinion. Even the research is unreliable, but you could ask random 10000 people in each state which party they would vote for if Democrats changed this or that. It would be a great mistake to abandon some traditional value and then find out it didn't help at all. (Actually, there is a risk of a change in the opposite direction -- what if some people vote Dems only because they want abortion, but otherwise disagree? After the proposed change, Dems would lose even more voters.)
And now I am going to disagree with my first paragraph (which takes priority: you should do research instead of listening to even my opinion) and say that I think that Democrats should instead tone down the wokeness. It's not like the woke people will switch to vote Republicans, because even a moderate D position is closer to them than R position. So they would lose no one, and gain moderate voters who are generally pro-D, but tired of hearing that they suck because of the original sin of being born white or male or something like that.
The Dems don't need to change their core views, they just need to be more tolerant of those who agree with them 80-90%.
It's the normal political cycle. When you're losing, you tone down the fundamentalism and make your tent bigger. Then when you have power, you realise you don't need all those goddamn centrist heretics after all and you cast them out of your tent. The Democrats have spent years in cultural ascendancy, making war on the unbelievers in their own ranks, now it's the Republicans' turn to alienate everybody and the Democrats turn to play big tent politics.
I agree. I wonder how this look like in practice, telling the fanatics in your own ranks that they are going to be thrown under the bus in favor of big tent politics. I am sure they are not going to like it.
I am not familiar with Ezra Klein's politics, so maybe what I write here doesn't make sense, but I kinda suspect that he might be one of those in the risk of being thrown under the bus, and this article is a plead to sacrifice something else instead, even if doing so probably wouldn't actually help the Dems.
I think the idea is to run candidates who could win in those red states, instead of enforcing ideological conformity on all Dem politicians. I’m not sure pro-life is one of these issues but guns and immigration seem to be.
Few conservatives think of French as one of them, understandable since he's works for a liberal publication where he tells liberals they're right about anything, but maybe him giving the Dems such terrible advice proves he's been a deep-cover conservative all along!
I am not in touch with his current state, but David French 2 years ago was definitely more anti-abortion than partisan Republican. Democrats running anti-abortion candidates would be a pure win for him and, I suspect, he would completely switch parties and vote straight D if the two parties swapped abortion positions.
In other words, I see this more as advocating for his preferred policy position, rather than sincere or poisoned-chalice strategic advice.
"Pro-life" in this context does not mean "no abortion at all ever" but more in line with the majority position of the American population, which seems to be "yes abortion, but with definite limits".
While public support for legal abortion has fluctuated somewhat in two decades of polling, it has remained relatively stable over the past several years. Currently, 63% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% say it should be illegal in all or most cases."
"As in the past, relatively few Americans (25%) say abortion should be legal in all cases, while even fewer (8%) say it should be illegal in all cases. About two-thirds of Americans do not take an absolutist view: 38% say it should be legal in most cases, and 28% say it should be illegal in most cases."
So broadly, popular support for the rape/incest/life of the mother trifecta, popular support for medication abortion (upper limit there seems to be 12 weeks' gestation), after that limits on surgical abortion depending on gestational age and reason for abortion.
"Partisanship and ideology
Democrats (85%) are about twice as likely as Republicans (41%) to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
But while more conservative Republicans say abortion should be illegal (76%) than legal (27%), the reverse is true for moderate and liberal Republicans (67% say legal, 31% say illegal).
By comparison, a clear majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (76%) say abortion should be legal, with liberal Democrats (96%) overwhelmingly saying this."
So if the Democrats ran candidates with the "safe, legal and rare" position (emphasis on the "rare") they could peel off some of the moderate Republicans.
With the increasingly aggressive Russia violating NATO airspace, now not just with drones but also with warplanes, why don't we (as in NATO) just shoot them down (not just the drones, but the planes)? It seems that would stop these provocations. Maybe a warning shot first and if the plane doesn't turn around immediately then just send everything after it to down it. If they come again in a few months then just shoot without warning.
I don't think there is any risk of esalation, actually shooting a couple of Russian airplanes over NATO airspace down would probably de-escalate the situation quickly. Russia has nothing to gain by pushing further if met with firm resistance.
How long are these planes violating NATO airspace, and how long does it take to launch a response?
I wouldn't be surprised if they're just skimming the border, entering NATO airspace for long enough to be provocative but not long enough that even if you launched a SAM then you could be confident the SAM wouldn't hit them in Russia.
That's a good point. Hard to say. But Estonia is tiny and a supersonic plane can probably cross the entire country in less than 30 minutes. It is hard to keep close to the border when the country is this small.
Would it be a problem if the rocket actually hit the plane back in Russia? If it is launched when the target is in NATO airspace it seems fair game.
> Russia is not trying to start world war III. Ukraine is, in that if they don't get World War III, the leadership will die.
I agree with the first part -- Russia would prefer a sequence of small wars against smaller countries, gaining one piece of territory at a time. It was a mistake to expect that "the rest of Ukraine" is a sufficiently small territory they could swallow at once, and they probably regret making that mistake now. (I guess that's what you get when you trust the numerologists that 22-02-2022 has magical properties.)
The second part is just silly; there are many ways for the Ukrainian leadership to survive, such as winning the war, accepting the loss of some territories, or even losing the war and moving to another country.
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By the way, I noticed that you have over 100 comments in this Open Thread, could your perhaps trade some quantity for quality? You still haven't answered on the conspiracy theory that you shared in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-399/comment/157182333 so maybe please don't start new conspiracy theories before resolving the older ones?
Please don't respond with whataboutism. Fact is Russia keeps violating NATO airspace. It is a hostile power we are in a new cold war with, so such a (repeated!) violation should be met with lethal force. This is signalling and setting boundaries and it has to be clear - those planes should have been destroyed. I am not sure why you bring Ukraine into this.
As for the drones, I don't believe the story about any GPS (or whatever the Russian version is called) malfunction, especially when we see manned aircraft do the same. But even if it is true it doesn't matter. Fact is, those were military aircraft owned by a hostile power which entered NATO airspace and said power made no attempt to warn NATO or de-escalate the situation, only came up with excuses later.
Citation very much needed on all of this. Russian hardware can malfunction perfectly well due to shoddy Russian manufacturing or careless Russian operation, all of which would be caused by Russia. Your certainty that it was an unspecified Not Russia that is responsible for all of this, seems unwarranted.
Thought Experiment: The Year is 2031, and God-Emperor Trump has just taken his last breaths in a hospital. Having never named a successor, he was pressed on his deathbed to whom should go his U.S. empire, to which he replied "to the strongest..."
After several years of realignment and intermittent fighting, we now have five post-U.S. Diodachi, each made up of some continuous chunk of territory in the lower 48 (we'll ignore Hawaii, Alaska and the various islands).
Which former U.S. States belong to which of the successors, and what are there names? (Borders don't have to fall exactly along state lines, as long as they make some sort of sense.)
What happens to the South in this scenario? Absorbed into Greater Texas? I don't see it.
I can imagine Texas going it alone, they might expand to the north and west but not to the east, since capturing New Orleans or Atlanta would be a cultural threat to their essential Texasness.
That lineup also fits noneconomic factors reasonably well at broad landscape scale.
There are inherent headaches. "West Coast" would fight pretty strongly to retain the Central Valley of CA and central parts of OR and WA; some others would have similar things to try to cling to for various cultural and/or economic reasons. Various clusters of one cultural color that are fully surrounded by the opposite -- Austin TX, Asheville NC, southwestern WA, etc. -- would be problems.
And that's not even considering the _massive_ headache of US federal military installations/assets to divvy up. So it would all get messy for sure -- a civil national divorce for the US is very hard to picture in real life. This ain't, at all, gonna be as clean as Slovakia and the Czech Republic splitting up.
With all those familiar objections noted, your short list is probably about as practical as is imaginable. Possible adjustments would include New England and the Atlantic-coast SE [Florida/Georgia/SC/NC] each splitting off as their own new polity, maybe even relatively cordially regarding their new neighbors. And subsequently both the NE and Great Lakes polities would at least kick the tires on becoming part of Canada.
I understand the reasons West Coast would want those areas; didn't suggest that would be cultural. Those reasons will be strong enough for them to fight hard over it, is the point.
> Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer's, corrupt, tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.
Charlie Kirk sure doesn't speak well. After you say "dementia-filled," "Alzheimer's" is redundant. But on the other hand, "dementia-filled" is an adjective, so can be meaningfully paired with the word "tyrant." To call someone an "Alzheimer's tyrant" is kind of like calling them a "diarrhea athlete." OK, hon, we get what you mean but . . . Moving on, how does being "honestly" put in prison differ from suffering the same fate, but *dishonestly*? And if so is there an intermediate zone where people suffer fibby imprisonment?
Kirk doesn't sound like he has Alzheimer's, though. He sounds dumb.
Of course it sounds dumb when parsed as serious discourse. But in its context, which was a talk show, it was a performative, aggressively-delivered rant. And that's what Charlie specialized in. That's the "style of discourse" he mainstreamed on college campuses.
"dementia-filled Alzheimer's" (not to mention the other adjectives) would better apply to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Trump and Biden have fast a double-standard for a decade, given that both Trump's supporters and detractors *expect* him to talk in a tangential pattern with spontaneously-created "facts" and numerous slurred-or-incorrect words
>both Trump's supporters and detractors *expect* him to talk in a tangential pattern with spontaneously-created "facts" and numerous slurred-or-incorrect words
I guess Biden's supporters saw it happening for years but never came to expect it until that debate. Odd.
Yes, as a former Biden supporter, I was fooled as well.
But there's at least a giant-gaping reason: he had a life-long stutter. *I also* had a stutter for years. And sometimes it comes back and ruins an interaction. People think I'm struggling to "think". That can't be further from the truth.
So yes, in my opinion, Biden's stutter made him appear stupid back when he was smart... and (for those who actually like him)... made him appear "merely stressed" when he was declining.
But caveat, I still don't think his symptoms/deterioration are anything close to Trump's, even during the debate. At that "debate", Trump and Biden faced orders of magnitude different levels of difficulty. Biden had to state clear facts, as best he could remember, about his positions, while also addressing every falsehood coming from Trump's mouth. All Trump had to do was say things, true or not. (which is literally all that a dementia-addled person *needs* to do)
Mentally, it was the equivalent of Biden juggling balls and bowling-pins while all Trump had to do was throw more ridiculous bowling pins.
Unfortunately, right now 2) is a pretty clear and unambiguous "yes" too, because we're in the midst of a massive and unprecedented wave of illegal abuse of state power to silence critics of Kirk and of the administration more broadly, and we need to push back against it.
Up until Kirk, I've been a pretty firm believer in "de mortuis nil nisi bonum"; the reason I've reluctantly had to compromise on that in this particular case is the extent to which his murder is being weaponised for evil.
Statements about people who are neither Charlie Kirk nor conspicuous supporters or opponents of Charlie Kirk, are not necessary to the discussion about Charlie Kirk or the meta-discussion about discussion of Charlie Kirk.
Whataboutism is rarely necessary, and this particular case seems extremely strained.
The better libertarian appeal, I think, is to remind everyone that there are things that are both worth avoiding, and worth opposing making into a government ban.
I have seen the argument for opposing a government ban by consciously doing the thing banned, and it often strikes me as cutting one's own nose off to spite one's face. It often doesn't even get the desired message across.
The thing I am questioning is posting this at top level with no context whatsoever. I do agree that as a reply to someone claiming Kirk was a saint, it would be quite appropriate; but as it is, we have perhaps more heat than light. This isn't Xitter.
Yes, it’s true. The the quote is from The Charlie Kirk Show, Salem Radio Network, July 24, 2023.
I was able to find a clip from the show that provides a bit of context. It starts with an excerpt from a speech Harris gave on July 21 where she advocates that children should be taught to engage in critical thinking and make up their own minds. Kirk says this shows that “Kammy” would be easy to beat, even easier than Biden. The statement about Biden is basically an aside indicating that he doesn’t like Biden either.
Bottom line: the quote is accurate and more context doesn’t help.
The problem with pretending to be stupid that the "kind" part of the true-necessary-kind triad was applying to Kirk's speech, not yours, was that you already answered the other two as applying your speech, not Kirk's.
"Judge dismisses drink driving charge against Kerry driver asleep in a car stuck in a hedge
Gardaí allege mid Kerry defendant first tried to get into a car that was not his own
An intoxicated man found asleep in a car that had crashed in a hedge in rural Kerry had his drink driving charge dismissed as gardaí could not prove he had driven the car.
...Gardaí testified that when they arrived at the scene, they found Mr O’Connor asleep in the car, which was ‘in the hedge at more or less a 45 degree angle’.
The court heard that Mr O’Connor was unsteady on his feet, his eyes glazed and his speech slurred. Garda Dennehy said she could smell alcohol on his breath.
...Mr Ahern further made his case.
“The State can’t prove he got there in his own car, judge. It could have been there for hours and he could have returned to the car. We can’t join those dots, judge. It could have been in the ditch all along.”
Judge King considered this evidence.
“I could say on the balance of probabilities, he drove the car from A to B. But could I say it beyond a reasonable doubt? We’ve no eyewitnesses who saw him driving.”
“But you do have to prove that he was driving,” Mr Ahern replied. “You have no evidence of him driving, all you have is him asleep at the wheel of the car.”
The charge for drunk driving was subsequently dismissed."
So to recap: drunk guy was found trying to get into a car not his own at quarter to five in the morning. Later, the guards were called out at six o'clock to a car stuck in a hedge. They found the car crashed into the hedge, and my man asleep inside the car. He was visibly drunk and a breathalyser test showed him to be three times the legal limit for blood alcohol.
But his lawyer, who plainly was worth every penny of his fee (if the defendant was even paying him and not getting free legal aid), managed to talk the judge into "but you can't *prove* he drove the car there". Brilliant! Though I don't know about letting a guy go free to (possibly) get drunk and crash cars again.
An Irishman leaves the pub one evening and climbs aboard his cart and horse. There is an ordinance in the village prohibiting operating a Horse and cart if you've been drinking. As the horse and cart make its way down the lane the Irishman sees a Guard up ahead. He climbs down from the cart and grabs hold of the tail end of it, and walks along with it. The horse knows perfectly well how to get home and continues as if nothing has changed. As the horse and cart reaches him,, the Guard shouts out, "You had a few there Seamus?"
Seamus jerks his thumb toward the horse and says "You better ask him. He's driving."
Worthy of Hugh Mussingbird-Mussingbird. I believe UK law is "drunk in charge of a car" so you don't have to be driving as such. That's puritanism for you.
Could anyone here recommend a great writing coach for bloggers who are trying to get better at the craft? And could use human coaching and supervision to get their writing to be cleaner and more compelling and engaging? Punchier. To the point I really love Scott's writing and I have read his articles on the subject before, but it feels like there's only so much I can do without him going DIY myself without a little external help.
That's a great pointer, thanks so much. Hanging at Lighthaven for a month with Scott & co sound fantastic, but I can't make that a priority right now, but something that gets close without that type of time commitment is right up my alley. Appreciate you looping back to this weeks later.
There is https://www.inkhaven.blog/ -- a blogging training/marathon in November, and Scott is one of the coaches. I hope that some people who get there will publish the advice they got -- they have to write one article each day during November, and going meta seems like a natural choice if you run out of ideas.
I think someone will probably organize an online equivalent of the same, a group of people who commit to writing one blog each day during November. If that happens, I will try to mention it in an Open Thread, unless I forget.
There is some writing advice online, including from Scott:
After having read that, I suspect the most important part is: write a lot. Your first 100 articles will probably suck anyway, each one slightly less than the previous ones, so get them out of the way as soon as possible.
Maybe some psychological advice, but that would depend on what your problem is; different people have different problems. For example, some people worry about writing a bad article, so they might benefit from advice: "you don't have to publish everything you write; write it regardless, sleep on it, then decide the next day whether you click the publish button". Or maybe: "don't worry about the article size; if it is short, maybe you will get some more ideas as you write it, so at the end it will be long enough; and if it remains very short, maybe just archive it, and later post a collection of such short articles as one article; on the other hand, if it gets too long, find a subset that makes sense separately, and publish that, and later maybe publish the rest".
But really, the greatest mistake is not writing enough. Check my blog: six articles in four years, that is pathetic. One mistake I made was choosing a topic in advance, instead of just writing whatever comes to my mind.
I suspect that many good articles start as a reaction to something. If you just sit in an empty room and try to come up with an idea, often nothing happens. But if you read other people's texts, often you get provoked to write a response. Maybe take that response later, and expand it to a standalone article.
Could we please change the rules so that in even-numbered Open Threads people can only talk about topics other than Charlie Kirk? In odd-numbered Open Threads it would be still okay to talk about anything.
(If this seems unfair, then let's also ban talking about Melissa Hortman in the even-numbered Open Threads to keep it fair and balanced, but it probably won't make much of a difference.)
If it weren't such an unacceptable assault on the already much put-upon and beleaguered 1st Amendment, I wish there could just be a 3-4 week ban on talking about Charlie Kirk nationwide, in any form of social or print media, excepting short, terse sentences explaining the bare-bones agreed upon facts of the events and highly important subsequent developments.
Not just because of the feeling that half of the nation next door is arming up to kill the other half, a conflict whose blast radius might well include two or three continents. Not even because some conservative influencer literally called it "The American Reichstag Fire" and literally nobody anywhere seemed to consider that a wake-up call or even a particularly surprising phrasing. All of that is distressing, alarming and many other similar gerunds. But that's not even my main beef.
My main beef is that literally everywhere you see discussions about the shooter, everybody, from both sides clearly have NO interest in anything like actually learning the facts, or understanding the context, or considering that maybe an isolated, dramatic event caused by a nutjob with a rifle need not actually be a weather-vane moment in and of itself[1]. Instead they are just interested in shouting at each other while each and every one of them talking. Out. Their. Asses. And if this *is* the moment that starts the fire that burns down the world, it will be really, really embarrassing to die to something this bloody stupid.
[1] History has contained many nutjobs with rifles, and some with pistols. They are more common in political and media environments like this one. But it's still correct to treat them as rare background events, black swans that show up out of nowhere. They're really, really not worth starting an insurgency or a riot or a World War over.
>My main beef is that literally everywhere you see discussions about the shooter, everybody, from both sides clearly have NO interest in anything like actually learning the facts, or understanding the context, or considering . . .
Your post is itself an example of the kind of bad take on the sitution you are complaining about. First you say everybody else's thoughts are crap, then you post your own views.
And you're not right that everybody but you is spewing crap. Many people posting on the last open thread showed interest in learning the facts, or posted info about things such as sites the shooter had spent a lot of time on, or updates about some detail. There were also thoughtful posts about how one reacts, how to stay sane and fairminded, etc. I myself spent several hours online researching first what the statistics Kirk had quoted over the years regarding gun use, then the accuracy of them. And in my exchanges outside of this group I have been able to set a few people straight about various facts such as the engravings on the bullet shells.
As for your second point, I have been wondering myself how seriously to take the idea that we are now halfway down the slippery slope to shooters, shooters everywhere. I don't have any idea for how frequently assassinations and similar happen, and the different ways things play out afterwards and how likely each is. I'm sure somebody has studied it. Anybody here know anything about that?
" First you say everybody else's thoughts are crap, then you post your own views."
My own views that...what? I'm not making any factual claims about the situation itself. I'm happy to wait for the story to develop. Mostly I'm quite frustrated that people are using every twist and wrinkle of this story to finger-point, and only engage with it on that level. Probably that's what I get for spending too much time on Facebook after a major political event though.
Hard same. Their cause was bad, their protest was bad, and I wasn't sorry to see them gone. But none of that was worth the government getting to test out and normalize that shiny new tool in its toolbox of ways to repress its citizens.
I feel like that rule is going to become irrelevant really quickly. It won't be that long until the news cycle moves onto the next inevitable incident. Not that anything productive will come of discussing that either.
Updates from the insanity that is the federal bureaucracy.
So there was this community that was getting a ton of federal money for a problem the federal government caused.
Think a couple billion. Out of a different pile of federal money they were also getting a few million for the same problem.
So:
A) Which one do you think the community cares about and is acted on quickly?
B) The federal government is mad that they aren't acting quickly enough on the smaller pile of money.
C) I am hired to help them.
The paperwork required for accessing the smaller pile of money is nearly as large as the bigger pile of money. And in particular has two very long "forms" X and Y (think hundred page long reports requiring a bunch of research/meetings etc.) that need to be submitted.
I help the community complete X and submit it. There is some fighting with their federal minder over the content of the submission, and then the government minder says "you know why don't they do shorter form Q instead of X". Keep in mind X is a hundred of pages of forms/meetings/etc. they have already completed at this point.
I talk to the higher ups because I don't think the minder is right this is an acceptable substitute. Minder's bosses in DC say minder knows what she is doing, just help the community get Q and Y in and everything will be fine.
So we complete Q and Y and submit them...
and the minder rejects Y because they never completed X! A form this same person have for months been explicitly telling them they don't have to do...
Depending on how much research and who needs to be in how many meetings, it seems like they could easily wind up spending five or six figures just generating the reports.
And this is why I'm very not impressed when government bureaucrats complain that if any money is cut they won't be able to do their jobs. Those forms and the idiocy aren't directly required by Congress -- that's their job-preserving implementation at fault. They made their bed, and they can change it.
From an implementation point of view, the ideal way to do these things would be to hand some employee a cheque for a billion dollars and tell them to spend it in whatever way seems appropriate. In practice, that's a recipe for massive waste and corruption. There needs to be some kind of paper trail, justification, diffusion of responsibility to ensure that money is being spent somewhat responsibly, because otherwise it tends to disappear into the pockets of whoever is in charge of spending it.
That's not to argue that any specific implementation is optimal,but we should at least be aware of the problem we are trying to solve.
Forms and record-keeping are very necessary, and it does help to have a paper trail when someone is trying to game the system.
But a lot of stupid changes come from the top-down and then get rolled back because enough people yell about how stupid they are. Recently where I work, and not going into too much detail because I'm not allowed, we use personal identifying information about people and *immediately* that is entered on the online system, the paper is supposed to go into the shredder. No letting it sit on the desk, enter the data and then shred.
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago another body issued an instruction that all this information was to be kept on file (physical paper file) and left out in the office so it could be accessed as needed (e.g. during an inspection). "But this breaches about six directives on not doing this", we pointed out. "Nah, yeah, it's okay, do it", was the response.
Come forward a couple of weeks and *now* the new directive is "Okay, you don't have to have a physical file lying about" which is in line with all the directives we operate under about NO PERSONAL DATA ACCESSBLE BY UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL and so forth. Presumably, and this is my cynical take on it, because every body and organisation in the country in the same field contacted the directive-issuing body to yell about YOU DO REALISE THIS VIOLATES ABOUT SIX REGULATIONS and WILL YOU TAKE THE LEGAL RESPONSIBILTY OF INSTRUCTING US TO DO THIS, SO WHEN THE INEVITABLE LAWSUITS HAPPEN, THE BUCK STOPS ON YOUR DESK?
That must have been somebody trying to justify their salary by coming up with a new idea as to what paperwork has to be on hand, and plainly not reading the instructions beforehand.
Now we've got another "I have to do something to prove I'm earning my pay" innovation by a new page being added into the usual forms that applicants have to fill out which just makes more bumf.
Sure...but that's not what current forms do at all. In fact, they do just the opposite--they *obfuscate* massive waste and corruption and allow the people involved to shrug off all complaints with exactly what you (and other defenders of bureaucracy run wild) are doing. "Process was followed. You can't blame us, we did what process required."
Process exists to serve people, not the reverse. And too often, process (of which forms are one example) is an excuse to do anything but your job. Because shuffling paper around and denying things for trivial/assinine reasons is much easier and less risky (for the individual) than actually doing their job.
Personally, I believe two things about federal bureaucracy:
1. It's trying to do *way* too much in general. This means that you inevitably end up with huge stacks of things accreted over time, each with jealous defenders (who generally happen to be receiving the benefits of those things OR have specialized in greasing the right palms/following the right process). So nothing can ever get cut outside of a wholesale "burn it all down" crisis.
2. If you can't (a) hire the right people, (b) trust them to act correctly with minimal process, and (c) easily fire them if they *didn't* act correctly...then you have a broken system that no amount of process can fix or even partially ameliorate. No amount of forms can keep people honest, because it's just paper. Only *people* can help keep others honest. The bureaucracy would be a lot better if it were small enough to be run with more discretion AND more accountability. Yes, that means no civil service protections beyond the simplest--civil service jobs (yes, including cops and politicians) should be held to stringent standards. One whiff of corruption, self-dealing, or other malfeasance (including non-feasance) and you're out on your ear and/or prosecuted.
> If you can't (a) hire the right people, (b) trust them to act correctly with minimal process, and (c) easily fire them if they *didn't* act correctly...
Pick two.
> then you have a broken system
Debatable, but whatever your view on that, you /also/ have an ordinary unexceptional system built and populated by human mortals just like all the others.
Things that are obvious to one person are not at all obvious to another, you cannot predict ahead of time what will or will not be obvious, and knowing more about a subject makes it harder, not easier, to communicate with people lacking the exact same hyperspecialisation.
"Common sense" isn't common, and large numbers of people would lack it even if, to any significant extent, it was. I've posted the link before, but I like https://novehiclesinthepark.com/ as a practical example perhaps a little too much: every time I post it and people discuss, inevitably people strongly feel the correct answers are obvious common sense, while equally strongly disagreeing about what the correct answers actually are.
This is why we have have laws, rules, warning signs, safety rails on industrial equipment etc etc. Writing down what you think of as obvious common sense in ways that other humans won't misinterpret / misunderstand is, in fact, such a hard problem that we literally have entire multiple professions dedicated to such tasks.
Forms exist for a reason, but some of those reasons are bad.
Less glibly: the cost of filing a proper form is sometimes a significant fraction of the cost of the project the form is attached to. If the form is for a project containing multiple sub-projects, each of which requiring forms of their own, then the total cost of forms may very well exceed the cost of the non-form component of the project.
Back to more glib: the federal government will easily spend $10000 making a $5000 decision.
I'm reminded of an exchange between Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart about the relation between doing a thing and justifying doing it. You might have run across it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo It is not the only incident I've seen, but it's certainly the most popularly known, to date.
Incidents like this make me seriously consider whether some government initiatives might be served better by just trusting the implementors and skipping all the forms, and running the real risk that said implementors will take the money for the non-form project, pocket it, and disappear. (Then again, my libertarian side says "just let whoever wants this thing done, pay for it themselves, pooling with whomever agrees, and they get the profit therefrom, and don't involve the government at all beyond providing courts for fraud suits if they arise".)
Why do you think that requiring forms helps preserve jobs? It’s only because Congress writes legislation in such a risk averse way that tries to deny any sort of agency to the offices doing these things, so the offices require applicants to fill out huge amounts of paperwork to prove that they’re doing what Congress asked.
I don't think that forms preserve jobs or are required by congress. They're a feature of public bodies fairly generally. Government agencies are risk averse, and asking applicants to fill endless forms is the default way of covering ass. It has low risk of blowback, and at worst imposes costs on the applicants (who the agency workers very likely view in an adversarial way).
I've recently started working in a state agency in my country and have heard a few times that 'no one knows what the purpose of this form is, or when it's required so the default is we always fill it and file it away'. Part of my job is to rationalise some of these processes, if possible.
Not really. In fact, it's exactly the other way around -- Congress has basically given *most* agency to the agencies.
Very little of the paperwork is actually required, except by the agencies own interpretation of legislative requirements. Let's take 42 U.S. Code §1436a Restriction on use of assisted housing by non-resident aliens (chosen fairly arbitrarily).
Subsection a lays out a few fairly simple criteria by which the Secretary (meaning HHS itself) can make financial assistance available to aliens:
1. They must be a resident of the US
2. lawfully present (as defined by a set of criteria)
Total paperwork required: *at most* a set of checkboxes and a document check.
Subsection b defines financial aid. No paperwork here.
Subsection c defines policies around preservation of families (ie restricting termination of aid once given under certain circumstances). This requires work by the agency...but not volumes of paperwork. It also denies students and non-residents.
Subsection d lays out the (very simple) verification requirements--a declaration by the applicant and one piece of documentation (defined by the Secretary!)
Total...maybe 1 page of stuff and a document (passport, birth certificate, or immigration paperwork, things that everyone should already have).
In reality, the Section 8 paperwork (of which this is the salient regulation) is...voluminous. Why? Because bureaucrats have been busy-beavering for decades. Every "fault" or "mistake" means a new set of regulations (not legislation), so now we have patches layered on patches on patches, most of which just don't mean anything anymore.
And this preserves the jobs of the bureaucrats because they get to make ever-expanding rules, which have to be interpreted and managed (badly) by...the bureaucracy.
"Every "fault" or "mistake" means a new set of regulations (not legislation), so now we have patches layered on patches on patches, most of which just don't mean anything anymore."
That's precisely it. Everyone is scared to do anything that might trigger a lawsuit, so they follow precedent. It's up to the legislature to scrap old regulations and just bring in a new bill or act to cover the current situation, but good luck with that.
Apart from "someone would have qualified under the old system but not under the new system, so an ambulance chaser lawyer is going to represent them in a court case about discrimination", there probably are legacy programmes and schemes running, and if the new regulations affect them, then there will be blue murder and the political opposition is going to take this gift you handed them on a platter and run with it ("heartless bureaucrats deprive poor helpless people in need of their basic rights!")
So you end up with, as you say, patches on patches on patches, often contradicting one another.
Does anyone know of an open source or established framework/standard for agent to agent AI communication? Looking for any materials anyone might suggest in that space. Thanks!
Thank you! My tin foil hat says Google shan’t be trusted in this space but a great place for me to start, appreciate the link. No idea how I didn’t fall upon it before…
Yeah, that is a little surprising since you had all the right terms in your comment. My comment before I edited it originally assumed you'd seen this one and were asking about alternatives because you found it unsatisfactory in some way.
I'm not an economist, and have no policy sway. But I think the Fed ought to hold rates, rather than cut them today.
Inflation is still above target, not dropping very fast (slight rise in September), and tariffs will without doubt cause inflationary pressure. We need some lead time on cutting rates to head off an economic downturn, but it seems premature so far.
Everyone expects the Fed to lower rates .25%. Perhaps they will lower rates .5%. I hope not, for if they do, I believe it would be a signal that the executive office has sway over the Fed's decisions, which would be an awful precedent.
I suspect we will be having an economic downturn over the next couple months whether or not we have a rates cut, for though rates will have some impact on it, it wouldn't be the only, or even largest, thing determining the economic state.
The case for lowering rates is that tariff-induced inflation is likely to be transitory. (Ironically, the administration has been arguing AGAINST this).
No, an economic downturn isn't a good idea. Why would anyone think it is?
The only people I can think of who would want it is those with bearish positions in the capital markets, and usually those people are using such positions as hedges rather than placing bets.
If a company allows itself to become a zombie, then it has fundamental management problems that temporarily alleviating the debt burden slightly won't fix. There are good reasons to take on debt, but no good reasons to take on crippling debt.
EDIT: I thought of an additional class who might want an economic downturn: the opposing political party of whoever is in the White House. It would purely be for selfish reasons, and may help their people get elected, but is still bad for the country as a whole.
I think an economic downturn would be precisely the thing the current administration would enjoy because it would increase their powers of emergency, etc. Nothing like a few good riots about economic issues to give them justification. Yes I am a cynic sometimes. But I wouldn’t put it past them because anyone with a brain and some knowledge of economics knows that what is going on is going to end badly.
I have to say that both administrations used emergency powers, both probably not strictly properly. It is possible who was worse is a matter of opinion.
It was actually Trump who declared an emergency at the beginning of Covid and it carried over into Biden‘s term. Trump has since declared more than one emergency and they are all still active.
If I understand you, you are saying Greenspan prevented economic downturns, and thus caused the 2008 downturn?
Has everyone forgotten the "irrational exuberance" of 1996 that everyone ignored until the dot com bubble inevitably burst?
This is the guy who was asked in 1995 concerning whether he would raise interest rates, "if I may be bold enough to ask, will you or won't you and if not, why not, and if so, why." His answer was: "Yes and no. (Laughter) Let me put it this way, I spend a substantial amount of my time in endeavoring to fend off questions and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear. (Laughter and applause) What I have learned at the Federal Reserve is a new language which is called Fed Speak. Here we learn to mumble with great incoherence and when confronted with a question like that Martin, that I get my little lexicon out very quickly, and read how to answer your question, so I hope I didn’t answer it. (Laughter) I am sure you will ask an equivalent again."
I think Greenspan is the best Fed Chairman I have witnessed in action, with perhaps Yellen a pretty distant second. Recall he retired in 2006, so another Fed Chairman, specifically Bernanke.
When he was appointed, I knew almost nothing about him, and that didn't increase much. I vaguely recall he was Greenspan's protege, as it were, but he certainly was no Greenspan.
Besides, what I, or anyone else in the general public, thought of him was irrelevant, as it was an appointed position, and public opinion has no sway over appointing the Fed Chairman, nor in keeping the chairman in his position.
One other category that think a downturn is "good" is those who think some form of excess/imbalance has developed in the economy which (1) will get squeezed out with minimal/moderate pain during a contraction but (2) would result in a more severe problem (crisis) if allowed to continue. This is one school of interpretation linking the dotcom bubble to the global financial crisis, with soft Fed policy (among other policy errors) connecting the two and exacerbating the latter. Japan's lost decades are another case study in this theme.
This is sometimes described as a preference for harsh medicine. An obvious criticism is that it is hard to know what dose medicine is too harsh and causes more suffering than it avoids.
With respect to a political party gunning for a downturn, I actually think the timing for a near-term contraction would likely favor the incumbents because there's enough time ahead of 2026 (let alone 2028) to get a recovery at that point. To be clear, I am not claiming that this is an intentional strategy currently being implemented.
In general, strong price performance from assets that do not generate positive cash flows is a signal of excessively easy policy. In this case, seems pretty clear.
I think there are good reasons for Wall Street to be pro-growth, provided it remembers why that's good and doesn't grow in ways that defeat the purpose. But that's probably worth an entire thread of its own.
I'm sorry, but that's not how money works. If your company owes $1B and can barely service the annual $100M in interest, and then goes bankrupt, the bank gets perhaps $300M back of what it lent. The $700M disappears. We operate on fiat currency, and the banking system can simply allow that bank to lend another $1B to others, but there's no reason they couldn't do that before the bankruptcy, and a good reason not to allow it now that the company went bankrupt (they didn't lend it wisely the first time).
Let the free market determine whether a company will succeed. A zombie company likely thought it was not going to be a zombie, but underestimated sales and/or expenses in some way. If they can survive through their missteps, perhaps they will become a normal company. But possibly not, if their interest rates are ridiculously high, based on starry-eyed visions of future revenue streams or something.
Don't forget the relatively blameless employees you have working at the company, who will now increase the unemployment rate, deepening the economic downturn. And the company's suppliers, who will now have less revenue. And the customers they had, who must now either do without, or find another supplier of the product/service.
If a company goes bankrupt, any money in common stock likely simply disappears. Common stock isn't money, but is exchanged for, say, dollars. The money "freed up" is in the assets of the company, which must get sold to pay debts. That money is provided by people who want the discounted assets, and already had it available, whether by borrowing it or having cash on hand.
> "a certain level of destruction and disruption" leads to "enhanced growth" in the future.
This is true for some things, such as industries going obsolete no matter how good they are at their jobs. Berkshire Hathaway was a textile company. They shut down all textile operations long ago as capital-intensive and money-losing. We certainly don't need artificial calamities to "help" companies go out of business; they will do it naturally.
She has a new book out and apparently (only going by the excerpts here) it wasn't her fault, it was the fault of the White House/Biden administration/Biden staffers/the Bidens. Presumably because they couldn't cope with a Strong Independent Woman of Colour, the sexist racist bigots! Um, er, wait...
Great potential for hair-pulling between the different factions in the Democratic party, as some of the Biden/White House ex-staffers seem more sympathetic to her than others, except it came out just before the Kirk assassination so of course that has cleared it out of anyone's notice.
> "The biggest surprise in Kamala Harris’s forthcoming account of her rough-and-ready, intense, and absurdly condensed campaign for president, 107 Days, may be that it is filled with surprises."
...made me literally LOL. Not a single word of the excerpt is a "surprise." Every sentence is what you'd expect Harris (and/or her writing partner, or a ghostwriter) to carefully construct in order to continue campaigning while very, very, very carefully punching the rest of the Biden Administration now that everyone agrees the Biden Administration definitely deserves to be retroactively punched.
Who is this book even *for*? Who can read lines lines like this and not roll with laughter:
> "The biggest applause [at a sorority event] came when I started to say what I would do to restore the rights of Roe v. Wade.
> “When I am president—”
> A roar erupted that drowned out the rest of that sentence.
> That roar told me they could see it. Clearly, for the first time. This could be, and it should be. It was not because of gender or because of race, but despite those things.
> I thought, as I often did, of Shirley Chisholm, and I know they did, too. The first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress and the first woman to run for our party’s nomination. She had blazed the path, and now I was standing on it.
No, Ms. Harris, you did not think of Shirley Chisholm at that moment, and neither did anyone else in the crowd.
Ehh, I'm inclined to cut the author(s) some slack. Book excerpts published as though they were essays are uniformly awful. The pacing and structure are all wrong for the new format, and they tend to conclude with a thudding anticlimax (to be picked up in the now-missing next chapter).
It's completely possible to write compelling, self-contained anecdotes within a book, and then pop them out for promotional excerpts. For a book she supposedly received $20 million to "write," there should be much, much better excerpt fodder here.
That's some pretty tortured writing. "Despite or perhaps because" has become fully meaningless - is she really implying that the sorority girls would have hated her for her gender and race were it not for Roe v Wade being on the ballot?
I do wonder how the ghostwriter is 😁 There's definitely recycled material from the campaign even in that excerpt ("this could be, and it should be" - were there accompanying hand gestures like the 'past down there, future up there' speech she used to do?)
She's said she isn't running for governor of California, but I have to think she's tempted for a second bite at the cherry with 2028. I think she'll fail like Hillary did, and for some of the same reasons. Hillary was too much Nanny Knows Best, Kamala is too loosey-goosey (to quote Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.")
I would say the difference between picking Newsom, and picking Kamala, is the difference between plucking a daisy from a field, or ripping out a patch of grass as you're falling off a cliff.
Kamala's "unburdened by what has been" always sounded to me like she was treating "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" as a how-to guide instead of as a warning.
Huh this seems exactly backwards to me. Harris is someone who has often talked about policy. In his 20 year career I have never seen Newsom do anything other than angle for spotlight.
That seems implausible. It was a hilariously bad strategy, but I think it's better explained by them deciding to ride a wave of relatively organic interest driven by a Tamil expression that didn't translate well than by sabotage.
Allegedly it came from something her mother used to say ("You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?")
I don't think the right/GOP had any moles in her campaign, I think that lot came up with the coconut theme all on their little ownsomes (if you're listened to the campaign staff crying about how none of the loss was their fault, you'll recognise the genius at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZOpWp02WVs)
TL;DR Everyone's probably had enough of talking about Charlie Kirk, but hear me out: I grew up in a left-wing family in the 90s. When the men got together, there was a lot of conspiracy talk - the CIA rigged this election, assassinated that president. I'm not sure if they believed it to be strictly true or not, but it served two purposes - it maintained group identity (it's us against the bad guys) whilst also allowing some horn-locking (if you didn't believe in the speaker's conspiracy, you were naive - God forbid!). All good clean fun, but then a family member developed paranoid schizophrenia. They came to believe all that stuff and more besides - the CIA didn't just rig a Jamaican election in the 70s, they were recruiting family members to do psy-ops, which included winking and asking people to repeat things. It would have been farcical if it wasn't so devastating.
Do I hold those involved in conspiracy talk responsible for contributing to the illness? You bet - I sometimes fantasize about going full Hercule Poirot at the eventual funeral - “you killed him!”. But, I don't think that instinct would stand up to strict scrutiny. For one thing, some of the delusions had little to do with politics, including an obsession with the card game Mao, a deliberately annoying game with no mystery except an elaborate maze of rules taught through gameplay. Should we avoid playing Mao, in case young schizophrenics develop an obsession? I think that would be more acceptable to those in question than giving up loose conspiracy talk. After all, Special Branch really DID have policemen infiltrate the green movement, fathering children with the women they were spying on. Should left wingers never talk about this stuff? That seems unrealistic. The people at the top of political tribes care about policies and coalition building, but for the rank and file it's a matter of life and death, and if they can't look for reds or blues under the bed, ze whole point is….lost.
Since then I've moved on, I became a Catholic at 22 and I hold the view expressed by Fr John Zuhlsdorf that while a lot of politics can be disagreed on by people of good will, life issues are non-negotiable. So I voted tory for the first time to try and stop assisted dying (just as everyone else is leaving it seems!). But I don't like it, I love my family and I feel like a traitor. That's my problem but it is frustrating to see the right apparently going all in on questions which according to Fr Z should be negotiable. But I digress. I have two children now and we had a decision to make about the MMR vaccine a few years back. Apparently foetal tissue was used in the original development of the vaccine. We disagreed on the moral implications of this, so we looked into it and the published Vatican advice was it's okay to have the vaccine, because the degree of participation would be “remote” and “material” (as opposed to “proximate” and “formal”). However we still have a general responsibility to make known to law-makers our views on how to conduct medical research.
Jesuitry? Maybe. But it strikes me as a distinction useful in these debates. It's okay to feel that on some level people are responsible for a tragedy if they have indulged in hateful speech. Actually demonstrating how that happens is a very different matter, and if we're trying to be rational here, for me that means leaving room for a remote and material co-operation in the “toxoplasma of rage”. We all have a duty to lower the temperature, but these are matters of life, death and dreams. Cut everyone some slack including yourselves.
Are we doomed then? Yes. And yet somehow we survive. We can better explain what is going wrong than how to make things right, but that doesn't mean we are clueless about how to make things right, just that it is intuitive, you learn it by doing and taking an interest in a variety of things, and it won't just plop out the end of a formula.
How is it leftist to believe the federal government has gotten up to some shady things? Distrust of overweening government power is a conservative virtue, I think.
And then when it comes time to vote, the sides unite to increase the government's budget, allow broader surveillance, and allow it scarier police powers.
>Since then I've moved on, I became a Catholic at 22 and I hold the view expressed by Fr John Zuhlsdorf that while a lot of politics can be disagreed on by people of good will, life issues are non-negotiable. So I voted tory for the first time to try and stop assisted dying
It's a good thing that in America those people support the second amendment.
This whole train of thought is so wrong-headed that I thought at first the people spouting "values his life more than" stuff were bantering. Consider someone who decides to ski down their first black diamond trail without being quite sure they are up to it. Do they value the thrill of that trail more than they value their life? When you're late for an appointment, and you take a few more small risks on the road to get to your destination faster, is that evidence you value being on time for dentistry more than your life?
It's obvious that in most situations of this kind people are gambling. They're not willing to give their life to get something, they're willing to *risk* their life. And the amount of risk varies across situations.. If on the way to the dentist you zoom through a late yellow light that turns red as you go under it, you're increasing your risk of a serious accident on the way to the dentist by quite a small amount, let's say 1%.. If you head down that black diamond trail you are taking a larger risk of serious injury or death. But very rarely does taking a risk to achieve a goal involve taking a 99.9999% chance of dying. I see no reason to think tsomeone breaking into a house to steal something thinks the risk is that high. His life experience certainly wouldn't lead him to.think it isl. Probably a lot of homeowners never even hear them a thief break in in the night, and of those who do not all confront the thief..
It's a snarky comment more than a philosophical statement, but it's maybe worth thinking through a bit.
If you ski down a double-black-diamond slope, you value the experience of doing so more than you fear the possibility of dying or being injured in the attempt. You have consented to the risks in order to get the rewards. If you do that voluntarily and fall on the way down and break your leg, it wouldn't make sense for you to be able to sue the owner of the ski slope--a fast, risky run down the mountain is what you signed up for.
If you voluntarily step into a boxing ring, you value the experience of having a boxing match + whatever pay you expect more than you fear the possibility of injury. Again, you've walked into that with open eyes. If you go in there and the other guy breaks your jaw, you don't have any real grounds for complaint--that's what you signed up for.
If you live in an environment in which you can expect property to be protected with deadly force (robbing an armored car driver, robbing a drug dealer), then when you try to steal it, you're accepting that as part of the cost of doing business. If you try and end up getting shot, you don't really have any grounds for complaint. That's what you signed up for.
In all three cases, you could have avoided the danger of being injured or killed by the expedient of staying home. The fact that you stepped into the boxing ring means you did accept the possibility of having your jaw broken or getting a concussion or whatever. In the same way, once it's known that trying to steal my property is liable to get you shot, you trying to steal it means accepting the possibility of getting shot--not that this is something you want, but that this is a danger you've knowingly signed up for in order to get the expected reward of stealing my stuff.
I believe in applying "no means no" here. If he doesn't *say* that he values his life less than your property, he doesn't. You're only phrasing it that way because you think killing him is okay anyway. But you've actually made a fully general argument for killing someone for anything whatsoever. Just state that whatever he did, the fact that he did it when he knew you wanted to kill him shows that he values his life less. "Kissing his gay partner in front of me shows that he values his life less than his sexuality".
The proper reasoning is that *you* don't value his life more than the property. Maybe you can justify that, but not by blaming it on the target.
I think the part where someone has broken into your house while you’re there is an important consideration. You don’t know what someone who’s broken your into your house is going to do for sure. If they turn tail and run, I don’t think you are justified in shooting them in the back. It’s certainly not the same as kissing your gay lover in front of someone else in terms of provocation. Shooting someone for that is still considered murder and should be.
I don't know what his views are on that. That might turn out to be a grey area. You see a man breaking into your house, carrying a gun. Is he there to steal jewelery or to kill you? He might have a gun for protection or to freak you out. Are you feeling lucky? But I think I see where you're going and personally I'd be happy with a "consistent ethic of life" on gun control and other issues but there are too many contrary opinions from the Church Fathers for it to be anything more than a good idea.
I used scare quotes because I actually agree. The phrase is something you hear a lot from liberal Catholics, although JPII was also moving in that direction - since we oppose abortion we should also oppose the death penalty, be pacifists, etc. When I converted my heart was with this instinct, but it doesn't quite work, however I think lots of people believe it and e.g abolishing the death penalty might soften the blow of a pro-life turn, maybe. But that's a bit academic at this point.
This is a very nice comment, except for the part where your new moral reasoning led you to vote for increasing human suffering. (Somehow reminds me of the nice Hitler meme.)
I'm not asking you to agree with me, I included it to show that even if someone is very pro-life, they can distinguish between degrees of co-operation, and I think this is something everyone can benefit from.
I've always thought that the history of Russia disproves this meme. Plenty of hard men and hard times, many weak men, but they don't ever seem to get to the good times.
From that perspective (which I don't share) it would make more sense to torture the young and healthy (so that they become hardened warriors) rather than the old and dying...
He's talking about opposing assisted suicide, which has nothing to do with any of the examples you give. Rightists are always twisting themselves into pretzels in apologetics for Christian slave morality positions they wouldn't naturally support.
For my part I'm okay with people optimising for QALYs and I support many measures for doing so. But there is no One Weird Trick for optimising QALYs and there are bound to be profound disagreements about what quality means. I'm not even sure if I've had a QALY as an adult. But life is a package.
Looking for a product recommendation. I have a 6-year-old, who wants a watch, and I want him to have one too. The problem is that kids' digital watches have an alarm in them, which mysteriously gets turned on (because the kid ends up randomly mashing the buttons, possibly as fidgeting), and then the watch goes off every 5 minutes in English class and gets taken away (I'm truly sorry for the 1st grade teacher). Are there any kids' watches, preferably digital, that simply don't have any speakers in them?
I fixed that once by pushing a pin through the tiny speaker. Of course I knew I was risking the thing not working at all after that, but it worked fine, didn't even click.
For example, I searched for "Kids watch", scrolled down past all the ads etc., and clicked on the first actual search link, which seems to meet your criteria? https://www.flikflak.com/
Thank you! Good call that analog watches come without alarm features. I do wonder why digital models without a beeper aren't a more common offering; clearly the kids prefer digital, and I can't have the only kid who gets it into random-beeping mode and can't shut it off.
Supergluing the alarm button might work; sadly, cheap digital watches don't come with a volume button. (Or a power button, which would offer a less nuclear option than permanently taking the watch away.)
The main point is the argument maximizing the wrong thing. You should, at the start, pick a strategy that maximizes the outcome you care about (total expected utility = total expected payoff at the end of the game). What the argument does instead is try to maximize the expected payoff after each round.
The simplest way to mathematically model this is to note that, at every round, there is tremendous value is being able to keep playing. The payoff after each round is not just what was included in the calculation, but additionally a term for “how much you expect to gain until the end of game, given the amount of credits you have.” That’s complicated to compute, but we know it is zero if you lose everything. For a rigorous treatment of this matter, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellman_equation
The whole 'paradox' is a little naive. A rational player would realise that there's no time pressure in this game; so there's no reason to risk total failure - this is the only source of 'paradox'. You escape from the 'paradox' by using log-utility which will correctly assign infinite negative weight to losing all your tokens; the comments already mention the Kelly criterion. The game is iterated, and has a stopping condition, so it's not enough to look at expectation (which is linear) - this seems a common error mode in these sorts of puzzles, but it's very well studied in game theory.
A strategy of betting half of all tokens at each time step has an expected return of just under 5% (compounding). The doubling time of this strategy is 15 rounds; after each loss you're back to where your previous position with 15 successes. The expected arrival time of a failure is 100 rounds of the game, so on average every hundred rounds you would expect growth by a factor of around 65.
In fact, betting a greater proportion of your accumulated tokens increases the expectation (but also the variance) all the way to 1. If there's an underlying paradox, it's one that's familiar to anyone who's studied calculus: the properties of a converging sequence need not be shared by the limit. In this case, in the space of strategies, betting a fixed proportion p of tokens has positive and increasing log-utility as p tends to 1; but at 1 the log-utility is undefined (or infinite and negative depending on your level of pedantry).
You use the Kelly Criterion to select your bet size. Effectively you bet edge/odds.
KC works out to be bet 89% of your capital when you win 99% but are paid like you win 90.9%.
This reduces the chance of ruin to zero and so maximises growth to infinity. If you are sure of the numbers - bet this size. If you are in anyway unsure (like of all of the reality we live in- bet a fraction of Kelly, it has the advantage of reducing the volatility of your strategy if the ratio of the edge to odds was as good as you thought at the cost of slowing down the growth but if the ratio is worse than you thought then it increases your growth and keeps you alive.)
In our example - assuming you cannot bet a fraction of 1 unit, I would reduce my size. Especially if you are sure you'll be allowed to play the game as much as you like. Betting 1 unit when you have 100 gives you a low but non zero chance of ruin. That's pretty sad compared to a fortune. You want to keep that low. If you set the rule - bet only 1 anytime you have fewer than 910 units but Kelly above it (89%) then you might face that situation again. Makes more sense to have that as a sliding scale. 1 below 910. Some fraction less than 89% at 910 - trending up towards 89% as you get to 8,272. (Assuming pressing the button c12k times to get to 910 is trivial - if its a significant portion of your patience start trending up to 89% sooner).
Really the question is - how long can you be bothered playing? You've found a system that tends your units towards infinity but it will take infinite time to get there. Surely hanging around playing the game for infinity is not infinitely good. You need an exit strategy.
NB - if you want to play with this concept on a spreadsheet - make the probabilities a bit less extreme. If you have the odds of losing higher than 1%, you'll see more runs where the bet size is above the kelly criterion bust themselves without needing infinite processing power and memory.
Give yourself an edge but a high chance of losing for the quickest examples.
I think running side by side a payoff of 4 to 1 (implied 20%) when your odds are 25% of winning with strategies betting 10% of your bankroll, 5% of your bankroll and 50% of your bankroll is quite illustrative. In most runs you'll see the 50% bust out, the 10% usually stays alive (infinity is long) but underperforms the 5%.... Kelly is 6.25%.
I think this is a version of the gambler's ruin idea:
> The concept was initially stated: A persistent gambler who raises his bet to a fixed fraction of the gambler's bankroll after a win, but does not reduce it after a loss, will eventually and inevitably go broke, even if each bet has a positive expected value.
I assume the EV calcs are correct for each round, but you can do an EV calc for the whole strategy.
For example the strategy of "bet everything N times" gives you a 100*(1.1^n) payout with a probability of 0.99^n, and a 0 payout with a probability of (1 - 0.99^n).
For n = 1000, that is about a 36.6% chance of 1,378,000 and a 63.4% chance of 0. That's positive EV but is also risky.
As n goes towards infinity, you get an ever higher chance of going broke and an ever higher payout if you don't. It makes sense that when you go to infinity that this converges to a 100% chance of going broke.
The EV of the strategy is 100*(1.1*0.99)^n, which is increasing with n, so there's a sort of discontinuity at infinity with the EV where it's monotonically increasing as n goes up, but the EV where you go to infinity is 0.
I bet you could produce a reasonable looking utility function that takes into account variance and is "continuous" in this sense.
Here's one that should work: you can choose a strategy at the start of the game about how to bet each round. The strategy of "keep betting until you lose" gets you zero credits at the end. The strategy of "bet either until you lose, or until you get to round N, whichever comes first" beats it for every finite N.
What is that "plus 1 times 0" part of the equation? That should be a minus, and times 100, or whatever 100% looks like when 10% looks like 1.10. You're supposed to be subtracting the losses, not adding them.
...or do you multiply them? You probably multiply that zero instead of adding, which means you get zero everywhere. Either way, that's the part where the math is wrong.
I'm going to post the equation here so I can stop reopening the link.
0.99 * 1.10 * C + 0.01 * 0 * C = 1.089 C ≈ C + 0.09 C
The direct addition of the probabilities means this equation has no mechanism for losing in the first round. It's only showing expected value across multiple bets, which assumes you have the resources to make those multiple bets.
The mechanism for losing is the fact that the variable is 0, instead of 1. If the variable is 1, it means you give Omega $10, you lose, and then Omega gives you 100% of your bet back, which means there's no change to your bankroll.
But since the variable is 0, it means you give Omega $10, you lose, and then omega keeps your money and you get nothing, which means your bankroll is $10 less than it was before.
Are you familiar with poker? When you win a round, you receive the entire pot. The pot is the sum of ALL the players' bets, including your own bet. So when you win a pot, the *revenue* you receive is just the pot. But to calculate *net-earnings*, you have to subtract your own bet from the pot. If you lose a round, your revenue is $0 but your net-earnings is -x, where x is whatever you wagered for that round.
The equation in the blogpost is calculating the *revenue* you receive from omega when you lose, which is $0. What you're doing is you're calculating the *net-earnings* in your head (viz. -$10), noticing that your "-10" figure doesn't match the "0" figure, and assuming the equation is setup incorrectly.
----
> It's only showing expected value across multiple bets, which assumes you have the resources to make those multiple bets.
No, it's showing the EV for a *single* bet. That's how EV works (in the arithmetic case) [0]. It sums the outcomes and weights them by probability. E.g. consider a fair coin-toss. Heads, you win $100. Tails, you get nothing. (It's not a gambling situation. The wager is free, effectively.) The equation looks like
let
EV = expected value
x = cointoss event
P = probability
R = reward
w = winning outcome
l = losing outcome
EV[x] = P(w) R(w) + P(l) R(l)
EV[x] = 50% $100 + 50% $0
EV[x] = $50
Which means, on average, you'll receive $50 for each cointoss. R(l) is zero because you're not getting any money in that outcome. It has no relationship to the betsize because you didn't bet anything to begin with. P(w) and P(l) are both 50%, and they sum to 100%, which is the total sample-space for a single event (viz, the cointoss).
If, hypothetically, we were calculating the expected value of the *final* outcome across multiple cointosses, then yes, we'd generally connect those events with a multiplication symbol instead of an addition symbol, like this:
EV[x]^n = EV[x_1] * EV[x_2] * EV[x_3] * ...
It's hard to follow in the blogpost because he skips the variable setup and goes straight to substitution.
Expected value assumes infinite resources. Using expected value with finite resources is not fine. A 20% chance with 10x payout is only expected value if you can survive losing your wager at least four times straight. You can't instead make a single bet five times the size that leaves you unable to afford to lose once. If the math tells you otherwise the math is wrong. Incomplete at best.
At first glance it seems like it's just a flipped St. Petersburg Paradox. The resolution there is decreasing marginal utility and the fact that infinity can't exist in the real world.
Current Supreme Court precedent is that the death penalty for plain old first degree murder is unconstitutional as "cruel and unusual punish", but the death penalty can be constitutional for murder of the sentence is based on aggravating circumstances for the crime. The federal government and states that still have the death penalty generally have long lists of circumstances that qualify in that jurisdiction.
Ah, you were saying that the key bit is that he's facing federal charges rather state ones, right? I'd forgotten the murder was committed in a non-death-penalty state.
>Current Supreme Court precedent is that the death penalty for plain old first degree murder is unconstitutional
I don't think that's true? The Supreme Court did rule in 1972 (Furman v. Georgia) that the death penalty violated the constitution when imposed arbitrarily, or in a discriminatory manner. But then in the 80s and 90s Congress passed laws creating uniform methods of sentencing for the death penalty, and that's been used ever since. And it is still the case that federally first degree murder alone is sufficient for the death penalty: "whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for life" is still part of the US Code.
I think we're mostly talking about the same thing in different terms. The statutory list of special circumstances that make a murderer eligible for the death penalty are a key part of the "uniform methods of sentencing". My understanding is that the logic of Furman assumes that the death penalty is only appropriate for the worst of the worst, not for first-degree murderers in general.
The main controlling precedent besides Furman is Gregg v. Georgia (1976) which upheld the death penalty under laws with a two-stage procedure where the death penalty requires consideration by the jury on the basis of the murder involving statutory special circumstances.
My Constitutional scholarship is a bit rusty, but I think you can get the federal death penalty for using a phone/the internet in the commission of a crime. Commerce clause and all that.
Seems to me there is a sort of second wave of objections now to people who expressed negative views about Kirk in the first couple days after his shooting. In the first wave people objected to individual posts. In this present thread there have been several posts that have the character of a call for “higher standards,” and suggestions that we have “better moderation” here. The idea is in the air that we should have a way to *prevent people* from criticizing the acts and opinions of someone who was just assassinated. This reaction seems to me to have quite a lot in common with the Trump administration’s crackdown on various groups, done under the guise of preventing further shootings. WTF?
Caveat: I might not be reading the same material you are. I assume you referring only to here on ACX?
I can understand wanting to crack down on posts that dogpile on an assassination victim out of a desire for decorum, in the same way I can understand wanting to crack down on guns in the wake of a shooting. Namely, I oppose either one, but I can still understand the sentiment.
I think most people have some sense of decorum, it aligned with everyone in their neighborhood, and its value was recognizable, so they believe it's worth enforcing on others. The catch is decorum is a set of customs, and it can vary; while everyone in your neighborhood might share them, everyone online probably won't, past a very spare baseline. To some extent, this is obvious; your online church group is not Reddit. (Probably.) But Scott cultivated a certain custom via SSC, carried some of it over to Substack, and there's probably some friction with Substack regulars who weren't SSC regulars. Plus, SSC regulars were a heterodox lot to begin with.
You're probably just seeing a confluence of SSC regs, Substack regulars, and other newcomers looking for a train wreck to watch, possibly even infiltrated by a few shit-stirrers from SneerClub and elsewhere. So while there may have been a barely critical mass of SSC regulars who wanted to break out of echo chambers (or at least build a new one around "Thou Shalt Be Rational") and set down new rules with that in mind, there probably aren't enough of anything to create that critical mass on ACX.
There are probably enough people on ACX to have a meta-discussion on how best to moderation discussions, but it's also going to be understandably hard to have that right now, just like it's hard to have a sober discussion about violence management just after someone shot up a mall.
So, the options I see: (1) batten down, weather the current thing, hope that not to much crackdown occurs, and try to have that meta-discussion later; (2) go in with pushback right now and hope you can stave off the worst crackdowns without coming off looking so much like a bad guy that it sours anyone's appetite for long-term norms; (3) come up with norms in the moment that look so compelling and glib that they work in a crisis, and will also work long term; (4) something I haven't thought of yet.
Well, as for your mention in (1) of hoping for not too much crackdown, I actually am not worried about that. I don't think Scott would do anything like a crackdown. He might get more energetic about quickly banning people who are posting grotesque zero-value stuff, like that guy "Charlie's dead, I'm happy" crowing about beheadings, but I don't mind that at all. He might go back to designating certain threads as no-culture-war topic threads, but I wouldn't mind that either. Is there any other way a you think a crackdown could occur? Should I be more worried?
So the stuff I'm posting is not tactical, an effort to come at the pro-policing forces situation in an effective way, I'm just stirred up, like everyone else. I am probably more stirred up about tone-policing and post content policing than about Kirk himself or an assassination, and that's a result of my temperament and my values, not allegiance to some philosophy about free speech. I think being very honest, but civilized in how one expresses it, works better than anything else over the long run to help groups work. But of course I am influenced by the fact that I've found that's what works best for me.
There might be a sort of 4th option here: Just keep being honest about thoughts and feelings and reactions, even the ones some say should go unexpressed, while saying the stuff in a way that that's civil -- and hope some people kind of like the impact of that and move in that direction themselves. I disclosed early on that I have 2 gay and slightly trans family members, and that my first reaction to hearing of Kirk's assassination was a big jolt of joy. But I added that I certainly did not approve of assassination. Seems like that bit of honesty might have been helpful to some people. Nobody can help how they *feel,* and the pressure here to immediately feel a certain way about the assassination seems fucked up to me, and to run counter to people forming a healthy "we." So I hope I did a bit of good there. I mean, a lot of the appeal of Scott is that he has is willing to broach topics and say things others do not, and to have a kind of frankness others do not. There was an essay of his about not being able to get a date, while treating an abusive psychopath who had been married 5 times. In it he mentioned rageful feminists who call the kind of thing he was saying "whining," and he used a string of words, stuff like "harpies," to describe them, and people were OK with that. It was clear he was describing how angry the feminist's words made him *feel,* not writing off feminism or women.
By "crackdown", I'm thinking more of a subset of ACX posters who manage, by social pressure, to enforce their shared norms on everyone else. I think Scott does not prolifically enforce norms on OTs (possibly for good reasons I'm not aware of), and if so, it's possible for a subset to enforce such norms without his intervention or possibly even his notice.
Whether you should worry about this is probably going to be a function of who your worst case subset is, and how likely you think they are to cowbird everyone else out. Speaking only personally, two subsets fit my central example of worry. One is Reddit-style lefties as one finds in /r/politics. Another is redpilled bros, the type who would use the word "soyboys" in unironic contempt. The common feature I put to both stereotypes is their irrational approach to discussion - for instance, assuming that merely having the object level views of the other is a form of bad faith. I've seen enough bad arguments for object views I might agree with to know that bad arguments repel me more than disagreement at the object level, at least some of the time, and possibly most of the time.
(CDIH's comments struck me as so bad that I went beyond forum reports and handwrote a letter to Scott's private email. I felt bad doing that, and hope I don't regret it later.)
As for wanting to express yourself honestly: I think you're equipped to know how hard that can be. You say you felt a "bolt of joy" at the news of Kirk's death, but you also say you don't approve of assassination. Consider what would happen if someone read one of those, but missed the other. Maybe someone quoted you out of context; maybe their eyes read your comment, were drawn to the provocative part, and didn't notice the bit that would temper it. Neither would even be your fault!
Meanwhile, one of the reasons I was drawn to Scott's writing was not just that he could write about the rage of getting no action while terrible people get plenty, but also turn around and write about the rage of, say, having marital problems and not understanding why, and also not understanding why someone can be so bad at hooking up. Well, maybe not that specific case (I don't remember the essay you're referring to), but anyone who can put on, say, an "anti-libertarian" hat, and then later put on a "pro-libertarian" hat in the same essay, and switch between them, is someone with that rare ability to actually move one of today's tough issues beyond the Superbowl of Talking Past the Other Side. And possibly an example to others. If those others are able to receive that signal.
My point here is that expressing one's political views is inherently risky. You could certainly make mistakes; but even if you don't, it's still up to everyone reading whatever you wrote to interpret it in the spirit you wrote it. If they don't want to, then you're doomed, no saving throw. For that reason, I regard people who try to avoid that type of malicious interpretation as especially precious, and forums that encourage more people like that as precious in aggregate, and breathlessly fragile as newcomers wash over it.
Kirk's assassination will be only one of many fraught events to bring eyeballs here, so I think it's worth thinking about long term norms like this.
> Is there any other way you think a crackdown could occur?
The most obvious way is for him to make comments (and possibly all posts) subscribers only and get a couple volunteer moderators. He might do that regardless of his opinion on the comments, given the concerns over the government crackdown and escalating tensions.
b. Cheering for politically motivated murder is bad
c. Expressing hatred/dislike/anger for the recently murdered guy is bad
d. Speaking ill of the murdered guy is bad.
Approximately everyone can agree to (a), but there's a lot of motivated blurring toward (d), in ways that remind me a great deal of the previous round of this kind of thing, where we started with "Being a literal Nazi is bad" and ended up cancelling people for liking a Facebook post that could be called racist with a strained reading.
The reality is that this shooting would never have happened if such leftist rhetoric wasn't tolerated in this society. Can you blame them for wanting to achieve peace of mind by eliminating such possibilty? You can't truly say you're free as long as you fear consequences for speech.
Well, yes. Giving up freedom for a little temporary safety and all that. Also, if nobody says anything that could ever conceivably lead a disturbed individual to commit crimes, this substack will get really boring.
>this shooting would never have happened if such leftist rhetoric wasn't tolerated
Which leftist rhetoric is your "such" pointing to, Jim? Rhetoric in the post you are responding to? Rhetoric in posts of mine in the earlier thread, posts made in the first 36 hrs or so after the shooting? Other rhetoric on here?
The rhetoric that criticized Kirk's opinions as wrong and evil. What motive would anyone have to kill him if he was not antagonized by anyone? Is it not fully within people's right to pursue a world where people such as Kirk do not have to worry about the consequences of their speech? Isn't that what the push-back against cancel culture is all about?
People do political assassinations of their political enemies. There's no need for rhetoric that calls them wrong and evil. There was no widespread campaign declaring Melissa Hortman evil, or Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church evil. Even Charlie Kirk, frankly, was mostly made fun of as a dork on the left prior to his death.
Tyler Robinson reached the conclusion that he wanted to kill Charlie Kirk, not because of "leftists", but because of his own beliefs and decisions. He was an adult, with free agency, and he exercised it. I believe he exercised it wrongly, but acting like a 22 year old is incapable of moral agency, merely buffeted around by rhetoric, strikes me as a truly insane level of agency denial. Do you apply the same level of denial of individual agency when a 22 year old kills his parents, or his neighbor, or his lover?
"Agency" is irrelevant. The crime happens regardless. The only way to save those lives is to prevent it from happening the first place. That requires eliminating either the motive or the perpetrator before it happens. A modern state has the means to do both.
You claim to believe that people with minority views should be silent; this is a minority view, and yet here you still somehow are, inexplicably talking. How?
Rules also apply to you, not only to the other guy. Please don't propose rules you are not prepared to follow.
How would you have a speech regime that allowed Kirk to express his opinions (some mainstream, some pretty far outside the mainstream), but that didn't allow people to criticize his opinions as wrong or evil?
I mean, "the authorities forbid all speech to the left of me" is a possible policy, but I don't think it sounds like a very good one for the country.
If the alternative is inevitable polarization, resentment, and war, is there any other choice? The cultivation of a unified consensus has been the status quo for most of human history. It is liberalism that's the anomaly. If and when liberalism fails, it will eventually be replaced by a more stable and efficient system. Nothing of value is lost.
I don't think the alternatives are either rigid policing of allowed speech or civil war. Indeed, I think trying to impose rigid policing of speech is one of the ways you could end up triggering a civil war.
So if being critical of Kirk created antagonism, and antagonism upped the chance that someone would get so angry that they shot Kirk, and if we should not tolerate such rhetoric because it it makes sociey unsafe -- then, Jim, why is it OK for you to be critical of. those who posted their objections to Kirk's ideas? You are also being critical. You are definitely creating antagonism -- you are, for instance, IRRITATING THE SHIT outta me. And, by your model, you are upping the chance that somebody reading your critique will become so incensed that they shoot me. Jim! What if you are wrong and evil!?!?!?!?
Because I understand which side is winning, and by extension, which side is best for my continued survival. That's really all there is to it. The victors will be the heroes of this story, and the vanquished, its villains. I'd rather be alive and good, thank you very much.
I agree that it is always sensible to pick the winning side. It is also difficult. I follow Carl Benjamin in the UK a fair amount, and I (mostly) wish him and his allies well (Keir Starmer makes Joe Biden look benign), but Carl has a tendency to announce that the battle is surely won. Political winds can shift quickly and with little warning.
If that's what you believe, you are not in fact upholding any sort of principle like "freedom of speech" or "do not retaliate against speech with violence." Your principle is "I have a gun, so do what I tell you."
And I don't think someone who believes that has any ground to call other people wrong and evil.
So look, Jim, seems to me you are not thinking clearly about this stuff. The stuff I mean is what a person should do when they think somebody else's ideas are wrong and also just *awful*? From your point of view people on the left are dead wrong about Kirk's ideas, and their public criticism of him was wrong and evil. It led to increased antagonism, and finally someone who was full of the antagonism melted down and shot him.
OK, I see the logic of what you are saying. But I’ve pointed out a problem with it: *You* are being quite critical of "the left." You are saying their complaining about Kirk was wrong and evil. Their complaints led to antagonism, and the antagonism led to somebody killing Kirk. His death is their fault. Now, imagine being someone who has written some criticism of Kirk on here — not the kind where they call him a Nazi, but the kind where they say his ideas are wrong, his facts are false, etc. You are saying to them that what they said was wrong and evil, and it's people like them who are responsible for Kirk's death. They are going to be angry, right, to be told that? Wouldn't you be, if you expressed your ideas and somebody said that to you? OK, so you have just created antagonism. You are doing the thing you called wrong and evil, the thing you said lefties do, the thing you said creates antagonism and leads to shootings.
I don't think it's wrong and evil to criticize people, so long as you are explaining your objections and not just slinging insults. I think some antagonism is inevitable, and the challenge is to get past the illusion that the other person is an evil piece of shit so you can talk over the disagreement. BUT: If you really think criticizing people and creating antagonism is wrong and evil, then you gotta the face fact that you are doing it too. Seems to me the point of your most recent post is that you get to criticize “the left” because you are right and they are wrong and anyhow your side is going to win. So it’s not wrong and evil for you to antagonize the left by criticizing their ideas. But obviously, Jim, people who disagree with your ideas think they are right and you are wrong and their side at least deserves to win, and it’s not evil for them to criticize you or Kirk because their complaints are all true and correct.. So nothing whatever has been accomplished by your posts here. You have not convinced anyone of anything. You have not stuck with your priiciples, and refrained from creating antagonism, in fact you have boosted the antagonism level. And you are not noticing the big picture here, which is that when it comes to creating antagonism, both sides are equally bad.
And yet if one of us stopped to help the other with a flat tire, and neither of us knew they were with the person they had had this exchange with online, we might like each other fine. So it should not be hopeless for us to talk about these issues and get somewhere. Why aren’t we getting anywhere?
I’m going to recommend an article to you by Scott Alexander. It’s called *I Can Stand Anything but the Outgroup.” It is not political, and leans neither right nor left. I’d say it’s more about psychology — how our minds work when there’s a group we think is infuriating and wrong as fuck. It’s here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
-Kirk expressed normal, mainstream political opinions.
-A huge number of people called him, and anyone expressing similar opinions, things ranging from "extremist" to "literal Nazi" for years. I mean you'd really get the impression of a society-wide consensus from some pretty major, mainstream platforms, like Reddit.
-He was killed in this environment.
-People are saying the online commenters bear some responsibility for the murder due to having created that environment - it's the idea of stochastic terrorism.
Jim is not upping the chance that someone will want to shoot you, because he's making dry points about rhetorical style, not calling you a Nazi with zero hyperbole intended.
Not arguing against anything else or justifying anything, but I don't know if I would describe Kirk's pretty well-documented political opinions as "normal" or "mainstream".
>Jim is not upping the chance that someone will want to shoot you,
Sure he is. I criticized Kirk's views quite a lot on the thread before this one. I did not go screamo, claim that he was a Nazi, or say anything along those lines. I said I thought he was wrong about various things, and explained why, said that some of his proposals were cruel and harmful, and quoted his proposals, etc. However, I'm sure that my criticisms, if anyone believed them, would have made the person reading them quite angry. I personally feel great anger at Kirk. If someone read my views who was right on the edge of melting down and shooting someone, my views might have pushed him over, and led himi to shoot Kirk. Maybe they are less likely to than my calling Kirk a nazi would have been. On the other hand, maybe they more likely, because calling Kirk a nazi is sort of silly. He didn't look like one, or share many views in common with nazis. It's basically an insult, like saying someone is an asshole. So my statements about Kirk, which do not contain insults like asshole or nazi, might actually be more angering for someone because they are backed up by details about what I see as wrong with Kirk's thoughts and actions.
On here you will mostly find reasoned arguments about what was wrong with Kirk's ideas. And my posts about Kirk are as civil as Jim's about the left. But you are silly to think that reasoned arguments could not make someone who's loosely wrapped go out and shoot somebody. Consequently, I think Jim, expressing the view that those who criticized Kirk are bad and evil and responsible for the shooting is in the exact same category as my polite by harsh criticisms of Kirk. It creates antagonism. (I can tell you from personal experience it does that. I feel quite irritated by him.). And, as Jim says, the more antagonism you create, the greater the chance that some nut will blow his top and shoot.
If it’s normal and acceptable to fight words with words, then that’s what fights will be fought with, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do you want there to be no other way to win over an audience than silencing the opponent forever?
> Do you want there to be no other way to win over an audience than silencing the opponent forever?
Seems that's the world we already live in. Let's not pretend the current status quo liberalism was enshrined through honest debate. The left, over the last century, has aggressively pushed their morality through media and academia. And yet, even that wasn't enough to align the population. Absolute consensus requires active measures to be taken to eliminate all that would threaten it. And through the true unity that would be achieved, nobody will be oppressed, because those that remain will share the same will.
This is delusional. Yes, a bunch of mostly-left-wing wannabe volunteer commissars managed to get people fired for insufficient zeal for the Latest Thing, and that was bad. But there is a lot of right wing media available, the ideas those idiots were trying to suppress remained visible to anyone looking on podcasts and substacks and such, etc.
We are not remotely in a civil war situation where the only remaining way to win arguments is to kill people. Some people get a kick out of cosplaying like that's our world, and of course like 99.9% of them would be dead in a ditch or hiding under their beds in an actual civil war. And then some subset of the cosplayers spin off into their delusions like that tragic f--kup who murdered Kirk (or the one who murdered Brian Thompson), and they die or get arrested and never see one second of freedom in the remainder of their lives.
I think it's mostly due that one guy saying out loud the things people on the Right believe most people on the Left agree with but have the prudence to be silent about.
"Where I live, someone's mom called the police on her son for building bombs in her house during 2020, so some places are "just not keen" on the whole terrorist ideology, even if it is your own flesh and blood".
Just when I thought I could not be more depressed about the state of discourse, along comes something I saw on Tumblr (yeah, okay, it's Tumblr) about Tyler Robinson and his father turning him in. Tagged "bad parenting" not for "raising a murderer" but "informing on him to the cops".
Because your parents should always help you cover up a crime, no questions asked.
Lovely, but I'm betting the person who posted that doesn't think your parents should help cover up rape, or beating up trans people, or killing non-evil politicians, for instance.
On the Titanic women and children went to the lifeboats and the men went to the grave.
No discussion, no vote, no rebellion. Some of the men had family in the lifeboats but even those who did not made the sacrifice. Poor men and oligarchs, men of many nations and faiths, or none, young and old, saving the women and children was more important than saving them.
For millions of years communities which sacrificed men to protect women and children recovered. Those who sacrificed women and children to save men did not. It is rare to pass on genes without also passing on culture, these two face natural selection hand in hand. The "protect and sacrifice" genes that gave rise to the culture of valuing women and children above men dominated the gene pool reinforcing that culture.
The men on the Titanic did not need to know any of this, none of them had faced such a situation before but the culture of protect and sacrifice was stronger than their survival instinct. Like the boys who marched against the machine guns in 1916 their culture would allow them to do no other. It was easier to die than throw the women and kids out of the lifeboats.
What, I wonder, would happen on board the Titanic today?
Plenty of communities exist, even flourish, even out-compete West (in darwinian terms) without having sentimental "women and children first".
Your women and children do not survive for long without men protecting them.
As a matter of fact, small girls get selected, say 3-4 years. If food is short, primitive people are apt to let the small girl go. They will not let the father go.
Boys get selected at early youth, when they are drafted to fight.
And selection means cull.
So this "women and children" first I believe was specific to specific countries at a specific period. By no means universal--or applicable to even those countries now.
It's worth remembering that the logic of "women and children first" is not necessarily that the men are less valuable or should sacrifice themselves, but that men have the best chance of surviving on their own without a lifeboat.
Of course we've all seen the movie and know that floating in the North Atlantic in sub-freezing conditions for five hours will almost certainly be non-survivable, but it probably seemed worth a shot at the time.
If the ship had sank in friendlier conditions then many men would have survived, floating in their lifejackets or clinging onto flotsam.
Melvin, I do think men (myself included) are less valuable, women's brains, less energy and size required for the same output and self replicating = more valuable.
I'm not a historian or anything but the two quotes often attributed to Benjamin Guggenheim are:
> We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen
and
> Tell my wife, if it should happen that my secretary and I both go down, tell her I played the game out straight to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward
Sounds like he knew that the likely outcome was him dying, not that he thought he might have a better shot at making it without a boat.
The men on the Titanic were explicitly _ordered_ (by the ship's captain) to let women and children on to the lifeboats, with armed crew members stationed to enforce that order.
"We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers...."
Paul Botts, of course trained seamen are going to have a higher chance of surviving a sea disaster than untrained civilians, male of female. Thank you for the very interesting link.
You are making a mistake by treating Titanic as representative.
There was a lot of shipwrecks before and all sorts of evil behavior happened among the survivors, including involuntary cannibalism (as opposed to "the custom of the sea"). Often, the victims were precisely the weakest people, including the women, because they didn't put up that much fight.
Not even the Titanic situation was that clear-cut, but others have already commented on the class differences.
I don’t think a shipwreck situation is comparable with the titanic. If it’s a test of endurance to see who can survive, it’s no surprise that the strongest people with the largest store of calories did much better than anyone else. That means children and women would be at a significant disadvantage.
That’s still a lot of dead first class male passengers. Yes, class mattered too (I think it was 95% of first class women survived) but the thought experiment still holds - would it happen today. Would 70% of an elite, first class on the titanic was at least millionaire level by today’s standards, be prepared to die today. Answers on a very small postcard to Peter, UK.
Peter Defeel, Perhaps now it would be easier for all males who do not have kin in the lifeboats to think that their families would be better off if they survived and feel no shame in doing so.
As Jack pointed out above Guggenheim and others on the Titanic would have considered themselves cowards had they taken to the lifeboats while women and children drowned.
What really bothers me is whenever I see video of people evacuating a burning plane, there's always doofuses with their luggage. That means that they've disobeyed the "don't take anything with you" request and have held everyone up while they retrieve their luggage.
I read a larger analysis that claimed that while the men/women division held true there, that looking at a much larger share of shipwrecks found that women often didn't fare nearly so well.
I read something like that but it also seems to me like the Titanic was unusual in that "who survived" is basically the same as "who got on a lifeboat". A few things had to be true for that to happen:
* shipwreck happens after the wireless telegraph is invented, allowing another ship to respond in real time (otherwise the lifeboat people might eventually die from exposure with nobody ever knowing about the situation), but before technology is good enough to avoid icebergs entirely
* ship sinks in enough time that people can get in the lifeboats, but not so much time that the lifeboats could act as ferries to a nearby ship
* weather is good enough that the lifeboats don't get wrecked, but also cold enough that people can't survive in the water even for short periods.
In other shipwrecks I bet that the women/men thing didn't hold up mostly because "who people decided to let on the lifeboats first" wasn't a huge factor.
Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers. We also find that: the captain has the power to enforce normative behavior; there seems to be no association between duration of a disaster and the impact of social norms; women fare no better when they constitute a small share of the ship’s complement; the length of the voyage before the disaster appears to have no impact on women’s relative survival rate; the sex gap in survival rates has declined since World War I; and women have a larger disadvantage in British shipwrecks. Taken together, our findings show that human behavior in life-and-death situations is best captured by the expression “every man for himself.”
I don't think that the possibility of shark attacks changes what I wrote. Most of the alternative scenarios where the factors I listed aren't present, wouldn't involve people surviving for a long time in the open water.
Even where that is the idea - the most infamous example of sharks attacking survivors of a sinking ship was the USS Indianapolis. According to Wikipedia the high end of the estimated range for number of people killed by sharks was 150 out of 890, in 4 days (with a larger number dying from other causes, basically all the various issues that could arise from floating in the ocean with no food or water for 4 days). Compare to the Titanic where (again according to Wikipedia) basically everyone in the water died within 15-30 minutes.
Possibly I misunderstood your initial point? I took the claim as "P(survival) ~= P(lifeboat)", with the implication that P(lifeboat) strongly depended on gender... was that correct?
My further understanding of your claim is that normally, either P(survive) isn't well-correlated with P(lifeboat), and/or P(lifeboat) doesn't depend strongly on gender... was that correct?
I'd agree except that I'd phrase it not as "P(survival) ~= P(lifeboat)", more like "{people who survived} ~ {people who got in lifeboat}". And that in other situations they aren't ~.
I recently learned about the SS La Bourgogne: “Only 13 percent of her passengers survived, compared with 48 percent of her crew. 200 of her passengers were women, but only one survived. Passengers included numerous children, none of whom survived.”
I read about it in a typically wonderful Roger Angell piece, about his odd father, odder even than his odd stepfather - which had a terrific ending.
"Where this élan came from is a mystery, for he was not a trivial sort of person, not an entertainer. He didn’t get it from his father, a slight, almost frail man, who had been crippled by childhood polio. My father didn’t know him for long, in any case. Elgin Adelbert Angell was aboard the French liner La Bourgogne—one of the last North Atlantic blue-ribbon ships with masts as well as steam—which sank, en route to France on July 4, 1898, off Sable Island, southeast of Nova Scotia, after a dawn collision with a British merchant vessel, Cromartyshire, with the loss of five hundred and forty-nine lives. It was a famous marine disaster of its day. My grandfather, a Cleveland lawyer, had embarked the day before, and was looking forward to a reunion with his wife and daughter—my father’s younger sister, Hildegarde—who had been in Europe for six months. The story behind this is that my grandmother had exhausted herself nursing my father through a long bout of typhoid, and had been sent abroad, on doctor’s advice, to recover her health. My father, who had just turned nine, had been booked aboard La Bourgogne as well, but he came down with chicken pox and had to be left behind. Fortuitously, my grandmother’s brother, Frederick Curtis, was the head of a small school for boys in Brookfield, Connecticut; my father had been enrolled there during his mother’s absence, and there the disappointed patient had to remain, while his father went on alone. My father never said much about this episode in his life, but he did once tell me that his Uncle Fred, who had a long beard, used to make the rounds in his nightshirt, carrying a candle, to kiss each of the boys good night. I don’t know when my father got word about La Bourgogne or how many weeks or months went by before he was reunited with his mother and sister, but this Dickensian scene is what comes to mind when I try to imagine the moment: the wavering candle held by his approaching, sadly murmuring uncle, who wakes him up for the bad news."
Lyomante, with respect it is you who reduces the matter to conception rather than a lifetime commitment to raising your children then helping with your grandchildren.
Individualism is mostly a Western concept, there are far more arranged marriages than love matches. Both male and female have to submit to the will of their elders, the alternative is to lose their support, plus they are better at matchmaking than teenagers.
We face challenges as a species that we can only solve as a species, teamwork rather than individual choices is required. I am not a team player and would hate it.
If we are not biological machines driven by forces then what are we?
I genuinely thought Astral Codex Ten was a place for "sophisticated" liberals. High IQ nuanced takes. With some sense of morality. I was curious to see what the takes on Charlie Kirk's assassination would be here. And thank God there were a few good civilized souls remaining. But so many evil comments as well. This assassination has shaken me to the core. And (some of) the left's response has been absolutely shocking. I never thought we had reached such a low point. Celebrating, or excusing the assassination of someone for his ideas. Throwing a bunch of "what about this what about that". My God. Is this what happened when MLK was assassinated? Did people dance on his grave and openly claimed he got what he deserved? I guess *some* probably did. I doubt it was as many as now though. What a black pill.
1. Most of the people I've seen have not been celebrating his assassination, they've been saying "political assassination is bad but I do not want to make a big show of mourning for someone who made a career of saying how much they hate me." I think this is a reasonable stance - liberalism can demand certain actions for the sake of peacekeeping, like "don't call for violence," but it cannot demand that you feel sad.
2. A lot of Republicans immediately responded to the assassination by saying "the left needs to stop saying such inflammatory things," and the government responded by promising to crack down on leftists saying inflammatory things. So it's pretty important to that discussion to point out that Kirk made a career out of saying inflammatory things.
Where have you seen this celebration? I’ve just seen government officials announcing that they want to declare civil organizations, possibly even the Democratic Party as a whole, to be illegal.
A part of your impression is caused by the nature of online communication. Offline, when 5 people debate some topic and 95 stay silent, you see a mostly silent crowd. Online, when 5 people debate some topic and 95 stay silent, you see a debate.
The Golden Rule of ethics, the one you say when a child or a disbeliever in ethics asks you to explain the entirety of ethics while standing on 1 foot, is "Treat People Exactly As You Want To Be Treated, [Unsaid but implied] For Good People Will Treat You Exactly As You Did Them".
All Else Is Commentary.
So no, Tergiverse, aka Mr. good leftist "appalled" by us dirty naughty mockers of Kirk's death. We're, I will reiterate again and again and again, to the end of time, never obligated to be good to a bad actor. Talk shit? nobody cares about you and law-abiding people will celebrate your death longer than your family will mourn it, and in greater numbers and more zealous enthusiasm. Talk good, and people will mourn you and remember your good deeds and suppress the memory of your bad deeds.
There is nothing illegal about being happy and jubulent and celebratory when someone is dead. There is something **distasteful** and **immoral** about it, but only if the counter party recognizes the authority of those words, when they recognize what it means to behave for others and constrain your actions without the necessity of the use of lethal force associated with law enforcement. There isn't any such notion in the counter party's mind, the counter party literally holds a big sign over their chest and back saying in bigly font ""I will imprison and sue and kill and detain and mock each and every one I hate, with or without a good reason, including neutrals and former allies, without provocation, all the time"", and Kirk is part, an integral high-profile part!, of this counter party.
He doesn't get any of the benefits of civil behaviour he decried as "made up".
Being mourned honorably is not a god given right, it's a privilege that the living and only the living decide to bestow on you, and many people have decided Kirkie doesn't deserve any.
Get over it, he's dead, we're happy, you have no power over the neural structure that allows us to be happy over his death, you have no power over the neural structure and the internet machinery that allows us to express this happiness. It has already happened, it will never be reversed, cut the losing fight and continue living your day unaffected, as indeed you're by the death of this low quality human specimen, of no particular importance or virtue.
The Golden Rule of ethics, the one you say when a child or a disbeliever in ethics asks you to explain the entirety of ethics while standing on 1 foot, is "Treat People Exactly As You Want To Be Treated, [Unsaid but implied] For Good People Will Treat You Exactly As You Did Them".
What the "yay I'm happy he's dead/he deserved it" comments indicate is that, should some disgruntled person blow *your* (general you) head off, then it's fine for everyone to cheer that and say you deserved it.
Even if it's the Bad Guy shooting the Good Guy. Okay for the Bad Guys to cheer about getting One Of Them!
Except that the people currently cheering on the death of Kirk would never accept people on the other side cheering on a trans activist or Democratic politician or Insert Your Favourite Here getting their head blown off.
Do you think it's easy not to cheer for the death of the hated? Or the ones on the other side from me? I've had to learn it with difficulty to be charitable, not to rejoice. Because it's easy to rejoice. And that leads to evil, because ill-wishing is a habit that will make you hardened of heart and darkened of thought, and then you will *want* bad things to happen to those you hate, and it will become easier and easier to *hate* and not just disagree. And convince yourself that your hatred is justified because that person is evil, not just mistaken or even simply does not share your values, but evil and worthy of death.
And as we are seeing now with all the shootings everywhere over the past year or so, hating leads to active violence.
I didn't cheer, but I did put up a post saying that I was not able to be sad about Kirk's death, and that I had felt a burst of fierce joy when I learned about it. Added that I was not in favor of assassination, and that I was talking about my feelings, not my inner guidelines for how to behave. I don't know whether you saw the post. In it I talked about having 2 beloved family members who were gay and mildly trans. It was actually very helpful to me to be able to tell this group my actual feelings and not get pushback. It made me calmer and more able to think about the incident in a balanced way. And the next day I happened to see a young dad carrying a little boy on his shoulders and felt a spontaneous pang of grief for Kirk and his family. Also on the next day, as part of some data gathering I was doing, I googled for organizations dedicated to helping imprisoned trans people, and there were a huge number of them. And I thought, I see why people are irritated by be-good-to-trans people stuff. It does seem like the group gets help and sympathy way out of proportion to how many of them there are. And, jeez, the proportion of this small group who end up going to prison must be small too, & so total imprisoned trans population *quite* small compared to, for example, little underfed children. So there's something silly about there being all those organizations, and I can see how that stuff irritates the hell out of people who have not been trained into the vehemently-pro-trans response. Anyhow, my point is that being allowed to say I hated what Kirk said about trans people so much that I briefly felt glad he'd been shot actually helped me move away from that point of view. So I don't agree with these governess-sounding people who insist you cannot speak ill of the dead, and especially that you should feel only empathy, grief etc. People can't help how they feel, and often calm down if others show some tolerance for those who feel something they do not.
Oh, I exempt feelings. We have little control over immediate emotion. What we *do* have control over is, are we going to make this a means of expressing hatred, or do we establish a habit of "murder is always bad, no matter who the victim"?
There are those I'd be quite happy, in theory, to see dead in a ditch, but that does not mean I want some Hero to go blow their brains out, and if that happened, I would try very hard not to be "good, they deserved it, that's a start on the bad people in the world".
That's wrong no matter who does it for whatever reason, and yes I think they're wrong, and yes I'd say they're wrong.
At the moment, we're stuck in a loop of "our side *never* did that and would *never* do that" "yes they did" "no we didn't, it was *your* side did that".
I don't care who did it, even if I recognise and understand the impulse to do it, especially in response to "but for years you guys rejoiced and cancelled".
Celebrating the murder of anyone, even an evildoer, does harm to your soul. Avoid it.
"I'm still better than them because I still draw a line at their children."
How long will that line hold? Because there are people who plume themselves, as you do, that "I'm still better than them" who made threats and jokes about raping and stalking and murdering people's children online, on the grounds that "A is famous and a right-winger and so it's okay to do it".
God damn it, I'm starting to agree with Shoe0nHead, or she's starting to agree with me. This is cats and dogs living in harmony territory.
> Get over it, he's dead, we're happy, you have no power over the neural structure that allows us to be happy over his death, you have no power over the neural structure and the internet machinery that allows us to express this happiness.
*He* doesn't. The administration, on the other hand...
There are other countries in the planet known as Earth, some of them - most of them I would even wager - are not the backward fundamentalist shit hole that recently became the once good USA, from such remote bases of operations, and even from a great many strongholds still inside the USA, one can still verbally strike at stupid low IQ servile cucks and mock their humiliating deaths, and nothing bad of mention will happen.
*sigh* Where does this overconfidence even come from? America's reach does not stop at its borders. Regardless of what happens, the US military and its various industries and services will likely remain intact. Just look at China: "Even though a thousand miles away, anyone who affronts China will pay."
The Thing of the Day is assassination. Assassinations are touchy, but they're also rare, so don't let one drive your whole experience. Most of the time, I think ACX is better.
Now, when the Thing of the Day is something other than an assassination, ACX is still not quite as good as I'd like; it's not quite as good as SSC was. Part of that is just the Substack UI; it drives off long form discussion. DataSecretsLox has a better UI, IMO, but I notice one problem it has in common with ACX: part of the original SSC crowd went there, instead of the whole thing.
Another problem they both have are that the high IQ takes are necessarily lengthy to make, and it's hard to say something that wasn't already said in SSC's Top Posts or in a list of effortposts that only ever gets longer and longer. (I suppose we could spend our days doing little more than posting their titles in response to current events and everyone just re-reads them and delights in the memory refresh.) By contrast, low-IQ takes are cheap and easy to make, even high-IQ people can make them, and anyone can get bored, so on they go. Bad takes crowd out good ones.
If you want to try to dilute low-IQ takes, post more high ones. "Be the change you want to see in the universe." I doubt anyone will mind.
I think not. There are typos. Moreover I do agree with it on the whole, AI or not. Perhaps you object to something specific in this post? A call to avoid being sucked below the froth is something I hope we can all support.
Apologies if this seems like a non-sequitur, but I think the only thing you can do is take action to protect your own emotional/mental health by disengaging from the online discourse.
I understand also that this is like the "eat less and exercise more" advice that (nearly) everyone already knows/believes but (nearly) no one follows.
TIL Charlie Kirk and George Floyd both share the same birthday.(Oct 14) In the spirit of bipartisan unity, I propose that hereafter Oct 14 shall be known as Discount Martyrs Day.
The federal appeals court panel last evening ruled against the administration in the Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook situation. The panel declined to grant an emergency stay of the district court's preliminary injunction. (So none of these court actions yet actually resolve the core legal question, which has to do with what does/doesn't count as a legit "for cause" firing of a Fed governor as required in the relevant federal law.)
News reports say that the White House is right now begging the Supreme Court to intervene and overrule the appellate panel's refusal to issue a stay. They want to keep Cook [a Biden appointee] from participating in the Fed's two-day meeting starting today at which the Board of Governors will consider the president's demands for a cut in interest rates.
The appeals court's decline of a stay did not reference Reuters' debunking over the weekend, with receipts, of the accusation that Cook had misrepresented to a mortgage lender her purpose/use of the home that she was seeking a loan to purchase. (Nor have Cook or her Trump administration accusers yet commented on Reuters' revelations.) So far the federal courts have been dealing just with the "likelihood to succeed" of different perspectives on what "cause" does/doesn't mean for federal appointments for which that standard of dismissal is required in law.
The SCOTUS nerds in the relevant subReddit [which is rather high quality and informative because firmly moderated] think that Reuters' published findings will reduce the chances of the Court wanting to involve itself now. Idea being that even the most eager unitary-executive/whatever-the-POTUS-wants-goes justices (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch) will sigh and take a pass on a "for cause" instance in which the allegation behind the attempted dismissal has been publicly disproven. Any hour now we may learn whether or not that prediction holds up.
Trying to figure out Trump's motives here, I don't think he particularly cares whether it succeeds, he just wants to be seen to be putting pressure on the Fed.
That way, when the Fed drops interest rates, as it certainly will, he can take credit.
I would say "increase" or "maintain" rather than "generate", but, yea.
The modern American left puts itself on tilt way more than our parents or grandparents did, a change that this core Trumpian strategy takes ruthless advantage of.
Kongs are amazing dog toys, literally the one I'd choose if about to be stranded on an island with our family mutt.
In addition to the chewability they are mesmerizing for dogs that love to chase thrown things, because they can be thrown like a ball but then bounce both strongly and chaotically.
It took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about, since I thought the thread was pretty chill, especially about the Charlie Kirk stuff. Then I copied the url into incognito mode on my browser and apparently I've blocked...like 40% of the ACX commentariat. The comment count on this thread when I'm logged in is 356 comments, in incognito mode it's 620.
So, uh, yeah, just block people. It's very chill. Like, there's a guy below who's named "Charlie's dead, I'm happy". Do you really want to intellectually engage with someone like that? Do you really think you'll have a valuable discussion? If not, just click on the user name, it brings up a little profile, there's a little 3 dot thing by "Message", and you can just block him.
It's sad that discourse has gotten here but, like...discourse is hard. Especially since the stakes are getting raised because now instead of right-wingers getting cancelled, everyone's getting canceled. Yay!?
Like, I really enjoyed open threads under the old Reign of Terror but that's a much harder thing for Scott to do now with everything going crazy and also post NYT doxxing. Plus, ya know, the opportunity cost of playing with toddlers. So the second best option for us is just to block people who be dumb and angy.
I appreciate wanting to curate, but if you're doing it to the point of cutting out over a third of one of the best comment sections the internet has to offer, maybe what you *really* want is to just not engage with the internet anymore?
As someone else who also extensively curates their online experience (I get enough stress offline anyhow!) and now finds it a lot more pleasant than it used to be, I'm not sure why you think your "throw the baby out with the bathwater" suggestion is better than just throwing out the bathwater?
Good question. I think there are two good possible reasons.
First, IMO the internet kind of just sucks to be socially involved in at all. Even though I find this comment section extremely interesting, informative, collegial, etc... I feel like engaging with it is not the best use of my time, and generally try to make myself do less of it. Some people might have a much more positive experience, but I think it's good to suggest "be less online" anytime it seems even potentially applicable!
Second, as with ~80% of things in life, I think the Pareto principle applies here. There are a scattering cranks and weirdos here, and blocking them would make perfect sense... but there aren't *that* many. I would think like 5%, 10% tops. If you're blocking well over a third of all ACX comments, I think you're at significant risk of shading over from "curation" to "filter bubble", even with the best intentions.
I notice that ACX comments, while still noticeably better than, say, Reddit or X or Reason.com, don't seem as good to me as SSC comments were.
If it turns out WoolyAI agrees, and had maintained his ignore list with that in mind, then the argument here might be that, to WoolyAI, he isn't really filtering "one of the best comment sections the internet has to offer" so much as he's filtering that precise slice that dragged its quality down to the neighborhood of the worse ones.
If, moreover, he and I aren't alone in feeling this way, then it starts to make more sense for someone to do this curation for all of us.
Yeah, that guy was what prompted me to make the post. Thank you as well for the instructions! I thought it used to be under the three dots by comments as well, but maybe that's only in the app. Substack is so disjointed.
(2) click the three dots button to the right of the "Subscribe" and "Message" buttons. This will give you a pop-up menu that includes options "Mute" and "Block."
I do not have an opinion on the claim "this is a nice muting system."
It also hides all responses to their comments, so they're, like, completely gone from your end. It's the best way to deal with the propagandist screamboys.
Sometimes there are valuable replies downstream from stupid comments. I would like an option that shows someone's comments using small gray font. So that I can read it when I am curious, but I can also easily skip it.
If someone keeps posting genuinely bad comments, I think banning is better than blocking, because everyone needs to ban individually, and the bad comments still remain on Scott's public page. Banning is useful for situations where you think that something is bad but others disagree.
I should've asked more directly because I could've sworn it used to be under the three dots dropdown menu on comments too, but that has disappeared. Thank you!
>I do not have an opinion on the claim "this is a nice muting system."
I just had the random thought that the Ani AI from Twitter reminds me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, with Elon Musk as Gendo Ikari, Grimes as Yui Ikari, and Ani as either Rei Ayanami, the EVA, or both.
A question for the mathematicians in the audience.
Are there purely mathematical facts which seem weirdly complicated for no particular reason?
Wandering away into astronomy for an example, the year is not an even number of days long. It would be convenient if it were, but its not. It's not even a simple fraction of number of days long. It's an uneven awkward not-quite 365.25 number of days, like God just eyeballed it rather than measuring before cutting.
I'm looking for something like that, but with pure numbers.
This fact undoubtedly exists, since primality is clearly specified and binary over the integers - every integer greater than 1 either is prime, or is not. However, that fact is not cleanly stateable; the best we can do is list them. There is no simple pattern, no simple formula for determining primality that is simpler than the condition itself*; to know for sure, we have to divide by at least every prime up to the integer's square root, more if we don't know -those- primes, and for the integers we'd typically like to test (cryptographic keys), the list is never known, and would be unmanageably large if it were. (Or we use the AKS primality test, but that's still polynomial in the number of bits.)
*There is a primality test that is 50% likely to fail for a non-prime, and can be tried with multiple inputs to get the total likelihood as high as you like, but that's a statistical method, not a discrete one.
No, there is a deterministic method for determining whether a number is prime that scales polynomially with the number of bits needed to represent the number (AKS algorithm). So there is a deterministic prime test capable of evaluating the primality of very large numbers. It's just not used in practice since the statistical method is far superior in almost every way.
I'm noticing it was published in 2002, which explains why I didn't know about it - I stopped following prime number theory closely somewhere in the 1990s.
I'm also reading that it's O(n^12) in the number of bits (possibly O(n^6), depending on how one conjecture resolves). This is certainly better in the long run than O(n^0.5) in the size of n itself, but still pretty bad for practical purposes, like, say, finding out which two primes were multiplied to create a 128-bit integer.
Determining which two primes were multiplied to form a 128 bit integer requires prime factorization, which is known to be NP. That's a separate problem from whether determining a given number is prime or not.
Also, the Miller Rabin algorithm runs in O(n^3) time where n is the number of bits, so it is also polynomial in the number of bits, just with a smaller exponent.
Every once in a while someone comes up with a formula that enumerates the prime numbers, and acts as though they’ve discovered something deep. But ever since Gödel’s work, we’ve known that it’s not too difficult to write down a formula to enumerate any computable sequence, including the primes. The problem is that these formulas just aren’t any simpler than the definition itself (and in most cases are a lot more complicated).
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say with "that fact is not cleanly stateable; the best we can do is list them". In other words, the best formula is still "Prime(N) <-> N=2 || N=3 || N=5 || N=7 || ..." which may as well not be a formula.
I don’t think anything in the real world behaves precisely according to the math describing it. The circumference of a circle is a real fixed quantity of something that math can’t quite get at.
The three great unsolved problems of classical geometry are to find ruler-and-compass constructions for squaring the circle, doubling the cube and trisecting the angle; these all turn out to be impossible, for reasons that require mathematics incomparably more complicated than stating and understanding the problems does.
Similarly, in modern mathematics we have Fermat's last theorem, the twin primes conjecture and the Goldbach conjecture (every even number is the sum of two primes), which even a child can easily understand, but only the first of which has been solved, and that required incredibly complicated mathematics.
It can be proven that it is impossible to trisect an angle using the methods of geometric construction.
Use geometric construction to construct a tool that can be used to trisect an angle, necessarily a tool that violates the rules of geometric construction. Include a proof that it works correctly.
My favorite example of "impossible for incomparably more complicated reasons" is this:
You have a square (or a rectangle) made of paper. Can you cut it to an *odd* number of triangles that have the same *area* (regardless of their shape)?
.
Cutting to an even number of triangles is trivial. Like, cut along the diagonal, and then cut each half into N triangles of same area. Or, first cut the rectangle into N slices of the same width, then cut each of them along a diagonal.
For the odd numbers, you can easily prove it is impossible for 3 or 5 by evaluating all possibilities, but then they are too many. It feels like there either should be a simple general proof, or a nice trick to do it for a reasonably small odd number (less than twenty).
I finally found a proof of impossibility in some mathematical journal, but it was so complicated that I didn't understand it. I remember that the idea was to consider the coordinates of the corners of the triangles, and color them differently based on whether the coordinate was a rational number with some power of 2 in the denominator (maybe even depending on whether it was an odd or even power of 2), and then... some complicated reasoning about the total number of each color.
Sticking to the topic of "uneven awkward numbers", my favorite has to be Ramanujan's constant, e^(pi*sqrt(163)) = 262537412640768743.99999999999925...
The explanation of why this is *almost, but not quite* an integer involves some serious number theory that I never really got around to learning, but there's some explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heegner_number
The fifth is about 47 million, which is a pretty big escalation from the last one but is still a perfectly reasonable sort of number that shouldn't cause any mental distress.
The sixth one is unfathomably large, far too large to be representable within the physical universe. In decimal notation it would have far more digits than there are atoms in the observable universe.
Anything to do with Diophantine equations. Seemingly simple questions about integer solutions to equations (Fermat's Last Theorem, congruent number problem) can have extremely difficult proofs touching on many areas of mathematics (algebra, geometry, analysis).
In this case, though, there is a reason: provably, there is no (computable) upper bound on how long of a proof you need to argue that a particular Diophantine equation has no solutions - this is the answer to Hilbert's Tenth Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_tenth_problem). In fact, any mathematical question can be encoded as a Diophantine equation, though usually these equations are much more complicated than the simple-seeming-but-still-hard equations like a^n + b^n = c^n.
Not "complicated" per se, but 355/113 is a bizarrely precise approximation of pi.
Irrational number can be written in continued fractions which are an infinite sequence of fractions nested into each other, each which numerator one and denominator an integer, plus* another continued fraction smaller than 1. Stopping after one of those integers produces a fraction which is a maximally precise approximation of your irrational number given the size of its numerator and denominator.
*or minus, in a non-standard variant where as a result, all the denominator integers are at least 2. I like it better that way. Fight me.
For example, the "golden ratio" 1.618033989... is 2 - 1/(3 - 1/(3 - 1/(3 - ... ) ) ). Stop after one of the 3s, and you get a ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers: 5/3, 13/8, 34/21, etc.
In this example the integers form a periodic pattern (in fact, constant at 3, which is a case of periodic) because the golden ratio is a root of a quadratic equation. e has another (non-periodic) pattern. In general, you get seemingly random small integers, for example:
It is already rare to get a 16, but on top of that you run into a huge 294, then the normal small numbers. Stop the fraction after the 16, neglecting the tiny 1/(294 - ...), and you get the very strong approximation pi ~ 355/113. The error is about 0.00000027.
It is just improbable and not part of any pattern, unlike the roots of quadratic equations or e.
I've always wondered about this - I feel like their ought to be some sort of power series involving pi whose truncation yields this, or something similar (a la e^pi sqrt163 ), but I've never heard of one.
You can use the fact that the integral of 1/(1 + x^2) over x in [0,1] is pi/4, approximate that function by polynomials and integrate them. The denominator of the result will tend to be a highly composite number. For example it is possible with a close enough polynomial to land on 377/120 = 3 + 1/(7 + 1/17). But 113, a prime denominator, is hard to reach by summing fractions.
Also, taking both second terms of the arctan expansion in of Euler's famous method of approximation (based on pi = 20 arctan(1/7) + 8 arctan(3/79) ) is about to 354.97/113.
What I meant was, expand arctan(x) to two terms of the power series, then substitute in 20 arctan(1/7) + 8 arctan(3/79) and we get an approximation that is close to 355/113:
20*(1/7 - 1/1029) + 8 *(3/79 - 9/493039) is approximately 354.97/113
Of course, this isn't a special relationship between the power series and the continued fraction, it is just the expected coincidence from two good approximations.
To prepare you for the much uglier cubic and quartic cases. They are ugly enough that they are written down as "methods" rather than explicit formulas which would be monstruous.
The monstruosity is there in turn to console you for the fact that in degree 5 and above, there is no formula at all.
I think the answer depends heavily on how you understand the phrase "weirdly complicated for no particular reason." As an exercise for the reader, classify the examples given by other posters (and here) based on how they interpret "weirdly complicated" and "no particular reason."
Some examples that particularly resonate with me:
(1) Historically, the role of complex numbers in the solution to cubic polynomials is an interesting case. Specifically, a question entirely about real numbers that has an answer in the real numbers requires making use of complex numbers to find the answer.
(2) formal definitions or proofs of things that seem simple:
- convex set (probably this is just me, but I have a strong memory of my reaction when first seeing the definition)
- the real numbers either through Dedekind cuts or convergent Cauchy sequences
- Jordan curve theorem
(3) things where the typical case is a monster, but students almost only see simple cases:
- integrals of combinations of elementary functions
In your example, if you assume the planets formed out of a disk of dust and rubble, there's really no reason to expect that the orbital period of a planet around its sun and the period of rotation around its own axis should be in any particular relationship to one another. While I understand where you're coming from, a universe where the number of days in a year was always integer would have to have radically different physics than ours: it wouldn't be governed just by the laws of Kepler and Newton that we have. There's a nice passage in 'Foucault's Pendulum' which discusses our tendency to see patterns where there are none (the first link I found was here: https://x.com/mcnees/status/1715802475607851187)
Other people have given maths results along the lines you're looking for, I think. You might like to look at the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences (here: https://oeis.org). Entering a few numbers it'll show lots of ways they can be continued - what's a surprising sequence depends on your taste, but it might help reorient your thoughts on what's complicated and what isn't.
Tidal lock does tend to produce an integer number of days in a year, but that integer is zero. As I understand it, each body's gravity continuously hits the other at different angles as they revolve and rotate, and that causes solids to deform and fluids to slosh around. This has a friction-like effect that turns some of the rotational kinetic energy into entropy and gradually rearranges the rotational energy so the orbital system produces less tidal friction. For the Earth-Moon system in particular, tidal forces are gradually slowing down the Earth's rotation (increasing our day length) and pushing the Moon further away from the Earth. The Moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, so tidal forces don't slow it down any further.
There's also tidal resonance, where the planet gets locked into a small integer ratio through some effect that I'm not really clear on. Mercury is the main example I know of, with three days every two years.
But yeah, if the ratio isn't 0:1 or something like 3:2, there's no mechanism to keep the ratio close to an integer ratio. To the contrary, the same mechanism that produces tidal lock means that the ratio is going to be constantly changing unless it's in one of the stable configurations, so if a planet coincidentally had a 500.00-day year, for example, it wouldn't stay 500.00 days for very long on a cosmic time scale.
One of Poincaré's discoveries is that three (or more) body systems are chaotic (in a technical sense). Such configurations are unstable: a slight nudge from the gravitation effects of a distant planet cascades and causes differences which grow with time. Everything is still rather well behaved over a few millions of years, but not over billions.
Here are some examples that come to mind. I interpret your question as "mathematical examples where you might reasonably hope for a clean result, but things turn out to be messier" (I think "complicated for no particular reason" is debatable, given how mathematical facts are intertwined. If days divided years perfectly without any error whatsoever, or even gave a nice fraction, that would seem a lot more complicated given existing knowledge. Consider e.g. that the earth's mass is not perfectly constant, its orbit not perfectly clean of randomly changing debris, etc. - the laws of physics would have to "conspire" across the universe to get this one arbitrary measurement continuously right).
(1) Some natural numbers can be expressed as a sum of two squares (like 13 = 9 + 4 or 1 = 1 + 0), and some cannot (like 7). What characterizes the numbers that have this property? You might initially hope for a quick answer like "every even number and every other odd number" (this happens to hold for 0,1,2,3,4,5 but breaks at 6), or something at that level.
In fact, it is "every number whose prime factorization does not contain an odd power of a prime that leaves remainder 3 when divided by 4" [1]. One may wonder whether it's even a proper answer, given how much more complicated it sounds, but it is indeed considered an answer. It goes along the same lines if you instead ask which numbers are sums of three squares [2]. You might think this pattern continues, but math has another surprise in store: there are no more complicated conditions beyond three. Every natural number is a sum of four squares [3].
(2) Real numbers are usually associated with their decimal representations, like a quarter 0.25, a third 0.333..., and so on. One may reasonably expect that every real number corresponds to a unique such representation, but famously 0.999.... is exactly 1. This less-than-elegant edge case comes naturally from fully clarifying what exactly is meant by the "..." part [4].
(3) To the extent that disappointing messiness comes from "nice patterns that just break" (arguably the above examples can be seen as such instances), you may be interested in lists like [5] or [6], and in this 3B1B video [7] on a sequence that starts 2,4,8,16,31.
If the Kepler conjecture can be thought of as the limit of this sort of sphere-packing as the number of spheres approaches infinity, then I think you could say that, in one sense, infinitely many spheres can be packed more efficiently than four spheres, which is kind of funny. Because for four spheres arranged in a sausage-shape (line), which has been proven to be optimal according to the wiki page, the density is ~73%, but the densest space-filling sphere packing according to the Kepler conjecture (which has been proven) has density ~74%.
Edit: On second thought this just seems obvious and might be an intuitive explanation for why the sausage catastrophe happens, at least in a fuzzy big picture way. Because
1. The density for the sausage shape gradually decreases from 100% for one sphere down to 66.6...% in the limit as more spheres keep being added (because 66.6...% is the ratio of sphere volume to total volume being added with each extra sphere appended).
2. The optimal density for infinitely many spheres filling space (so under the condition where you can ignore whatever inefficiencies would have existed along the outer boundary for that way of arranging spheres) is ~74%, which is greater than the limit density of the sausage shape.
3. As a shape gets larger, its volume increases much faster than its surface area, which I think means that for sphere packings, we should expect that, as more spheres are added, a point should be reached where the internal density of the structure begins to matter arbitrarily more than the density along its boundary.
4. So as more spheres are added, since the ideal internal density of ~74% remains steady above the declining density for the sausage shape, you eventually reach a point where you can have enough space taken up by spheres arranged according to the 74% ideal internally to outweigh the inefficienicies along the boundary and change the trajectory of the efficiency away from falling down toward 66.6...% and instead toward rising up to 74%.
On the other hand, maybe for higher dimensions the ideal space-filling sphere density is below the lower limit of the declining sausage shape density, in which case the sausage shape never stops being the most efficient.
"He can run on a platform of punishing illegal immigrants, and the illegal immigrants themselves will rally to his banner."
Source? I'm aware of LEGAL immigrants supporting Trump, because they're not happy about people skipping the line while they follow the rules, but I've never seen or heard anybody say "I'm here illegally and I support Trump!"
I read about a case of an anti-immigration Trump supporter who died in ICE custody (he was from Canada). So that was one at least.
Of course, illegals can't vote, so it doesn't matter much, but their friends and family can. And Trump seemingly did very well with them in 2024, given his strong numbers with latinos more generally.
Getting good data about the opinions of illegal immigrants is very difficult for obvious reasons. However, there is an abundance of anecdotes about illegal immigrants supporting Trump:
> "He's doing the right thing because lots of these people don't deserve to be here," Arpineh told the BBC over the phone from the Adelanto immigrant detention centre in California's Mojave Desert.
> "I will support him until the day I die. He's making America great again."
>Javier Flores, a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, who’s lived in Castle Hill for four years while working as a butcher, said that “I couldn’t vote but if I could, I would choose him.”
>
>“They should remove everyone who isn’t supposed to be here — the bad people,” Flores told THE CITY in Spanish. “The people who have a bad record, you know, who have a criminal history.”
That may imply that if he was a citizen (and thus could vote) then he would vote for Trump, since he doesn’t support illegal immigrants with criminal records being allowed to live in the US.
When asked by Jake Tapper about whether they did any data analysis of how many new cases of these diseases there will be with no vaccine mandates before lifting them, Florida's surgeon general said "Absolutely not," and "There’s this conflation of the science, and what is the right and wrong thing to do." This seems a clear indication of their position on deontology vs. utilitarianism, and I think different from most governments', at least in the modern age.
"You’re trying to lift the vaccine mandate in Florida, and your department, and you did not even do a projection as to how this could impact public health? So you have not prepared hospitals in the Florida counties, most at risk, with the best treatments for any outbreaks of measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio. And you have not looked into how many kids might now get these preventable diseases? That’s what you’re saying?"
"No, that’s what you said. What I’m saying is that it’s an issue of right and wrong in terms of whether parents should be able to control, have ultimate authority over what happens to their kids’ bodies."
So weird.
Aren't all issues of right and wrong a weighting of the whole situation? If Susan's child will die when Tina doesn't vaccinate hers, should Tina have the right to not vaccinate hers?
"It will always be true that parents should be able to decide what goes on, what goes into their kids’ bodies. I mean, it’s not complex at all."
What about cyanide, malnutritional food, and penises?
Obviously we don't think that any individual has per se the right to anything. That's what having a state is all about.
I wonder how many people fall for such an argument, or if that's not even the plan. If the plan is only to appear to believe in this argument so one doesn't have to consider the downside for other people.
I've always understood the main framing of the argument for vaccine mandates to fit this criteria though. The potential negative impact of many sick children outweighs the positive impact of one child's (parent's) choice. Predicated on the assumption that vaccines are extremely unlikely to cause harm themselves (and the loss of faith in this is the current driver behind the backlash).
Wouldn't that imply that you're not obligated to feed your children? Since that would require the existence of a positive right to food?
I generally don't think the positive/negative rights framing is very useful, since every right implies an obligation on someone else to enforce that right. But it seems especially unhelpful when discussing the rights of children, who are inherently dependent on others for food, shelter, and health care. If you accept a positive right for children to have food from their parents until they're old enough to take care of themselves, why not also a positive right to basic medical care?
Florida has a separate but equal decision-making system. You go down to the Piggly-Wiggly and buy you some beer, then you wrestle an alligator and fuck a teen. Then you drink the 6-pack and write down your druthers.
People often bring that up, but it's at best just part of the explanation. All states have some kind of sunshine laws and at least a dozen proactively publish police reports. And the most famous Florida stories are the type of thing that would make the news in any state, like that guy that ate another guy's face.
The claim I heard is that the details of the sunshine laws differ by state, and Florida's sunshine laws release an unusually large amount of information as a matter of course.
Let's say you're a local news reporter looking for stories to write up. If you're in California, for example, you can trivially obtain a brief description of each incident the police responded to and its disposition. For example, you might get something like "John Smith, 53, was arrested 3:17 p.m. Sunday, at 797 First St. on warrants for four counts of trespassing, four counts of public intoxication, urinating in public and obstructing a teacher from entering a school."
Which is intriguing, but if you want to write your story, you need to do some actual legwork by calling up the police department, tracking down Mr. Smith, or knocking on doors near where the incident occurred and hoping someone is willing to talk to you about what happened. Or you can file a freedom-of-information request and get a copy of the police report up to 30 days later when the story is old news. The legwork might be worthwhile, depending on the story, but there's a good chance you're not going to bother unless the police blotter entry is really intriguing or you're really hard-up for something to write about.
If you're in Florida, however, you can get the whole police report immediately under the sunshine laws. This makes local crime stories a lot easier to write, which in turn gives local reporters more incentive to look for particularly interesting local crime stories to report on.
----
After writing that up, I did some quick poking around to try to confirm or contradict that explanation and found conflicting accounts. I found a few local news stories from Florida which agree with the explanation, at least in broad strokes. For example:
On the other hand, I found this law review article from 2021 which (as I understand from quickly skimming it) seems to conclude that Florida does have unusually strong sunshine laws both as-written and as-implemented, but the difference from the norm isn't as strong as the picture I painted above and probably isn't the sole or primary reason for the Florida Man trend:
I've never been able to get the student discount option to work. Part of the problem is that clicking the link itself takes you to a form that doesn't have a student discount option, and I can't see the entire link to copy it and paste it into another browser tab (half of the "m" in "com" is cut off, and I can't see anything that comes after that).
In rapidly accelerating AI news, it has been three months since there has been a new top score in SWE bench Verified, the longest gap (I think) since the metric was invented
Where are all the techno-optimistic takes on AI? I feel like everyone is so negative about it; if they're not predicting it will actually end the world they're inevitably predicting it will make life worse.
Is there anyone who has set out an optimistic take on AI? Like, one where it enhances human capability instead of replacing us? One where my brain and will are enhanced by having an assistant ride along with me at all times? One where we're all able to summon a modestly-sized legion of angels to do our bidding at a modest cost, and put them away again once we're done?
I feel like becoming an AI optimist, just because the whole field seems undersaturated.
"But people generally know what’s good and bad for them. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak - they knew they shouldn’t eat that whole pizza / half gallon of ice cream, and they did it anyways! They knew they should get to work on their thesis, but would rather have stabbed themselves in the eyeballs than do it, and you know what’s better than eyeball stabbing? Getting a drink with your friends! That’s just self care, really!
But a lot of the lift here is persuasion. These AI minds will know everything about you, they’ll know your thinking style, they’ll know what rhetorical techniques you prefer, they’ll be talking to you in the ways that most resonate with you and making connections, arguments, and analogies accordingly. Super persuasion, but at the personal level, and for your benefit - a super-ego that works, in other words.
And another thing - I’m not pretending the AI is going to win all the time here, either. Your super-ego doesn’t win all the time today, does it? All it really needs to do is win more often on the margin. Think of it winning only 10% more - 10% better decisions compounded over days, weeks, years, and decades is a CRAZY big effect size. It’s like getting a 10% financial return that compounds weekly!
If you’d made 10% better decisions all through high school, do you think you might have gotten into a better college? If you’d been 10% more motivated and making 10% better decisions throughout your career, would you have driven more impact and had a better career overall? Wouldn’t you be in a noticeably better place right now? How about relationships? If you’d been 10% more thoughtful and connected and better, continuously, every day, maybe you’d still be in a relationship you still regret losing. See how big an effect “10%” can be?"
There's a fellow on X: @perrymetzger. He's generally AI-focused and optimistic, and will also often repost similar views.
(Interestingly, he thinks Yud and other rationalists are way off on AI, and generally cultish and aren't rational. My view is that they have a blind spot where AI is concerned, but otherwise started out pretty good.)
I thought the optimistic take was that before the AI kills us, it will make us rich...
Sometimes learning new things closes some paths to imagination. We no longer write sci-fi about people flying to the Moon by being shot out of a giant cannon. Similarly, now that we know that alignment is an actual problem, any realistic positive vision would have to start with something like "in 2040 humanity figured out how to solve alignment, and then the superhuman machines brought us utopia" but that's just reminding us that we actually have no clue where to start and the clock is ticking.
My most optimistic take on AI is that it'd be better than a Yudkovskyian Jihad, if only because it might be a more interesting way to end civilization. Global thermonuclear war is so 1950s.
I'm okay with it, the upside is tacitly assumed by the tech companies putting billions into AI research. How to communicate risk without appearing negative is a work in progress.
I expect most top thinkers in the ACX/EA/LW space think that the chance that AGI makes (almost) all our lives better is over 50%. But if you've got a new system that makes the airport security line go 2000% faster (by deleting the security), planes board 500% faster, and ticket prices drop by 30%, but also 0.1% of flights crash, not even passengers want to take that deal (and flight crews even less).
Some facts to consider:
- A cryptographer looking at the human immune system sees no security at all. None. Your body is like a mall with doors open 24/7, even when you're sleeping. Your immune system is like mall cops with machine guns and RPGs, but their aim is only as good as mall cops. And each robber becomes two robbers whenever it steals something. This system usually works well enough for *natural* pathogens, except when it doesn't and the mall collapses. I propose one should be concerned about the potential of artificial pathogens. Which ASI could create. And in my thinking, "real" AGI leads very easily and directly to ASI.*
- Once AGI is invented, there will either be completely autonomous AGIs with their own goals, or not. If yes, the small ones should be able to shape themselves into worms (viruses) and engage in various power-seeking behaviors, while the big ones should be smart enough to trick any human or markedly smaller AGI, which might not end well. And if AGI is highly obedient and completely controlled by people? The risk of totalitarian control is the most obvious thing, especially in this age where democracy is already in decline, but omnicidal people, while very rare, also exist.
- Open-source AGI inherently cannot have reliable safety, period. Alignment is ineffective because you can't prevent someone with the weights from "finetuning for evil" (accidentally or on purpose). You can't require an auxiliary AGI as killswitch that checks an AGI's output. You can't make serious efforts against "jailbreaking" (assuming that's still a thing in AGI). And.... it seems like some well-funded people are working toward open-source AGI. 🤦♂️
So an AGI-generated utopia sounds nice and all**... but I care much more about my toddlers reaching adulthood.
* our tech tree seems to lead to transformer-based quasi-AGI instead, but a single company or paper could probably change the game. Quasi-AGI might help create pathogens too, but their safety level seems a lot higher to me.
** though if AGIs solve all our problems for us, then what is the point of having human thinkers like me who are devoted to solving the world's problems? What is the point of human intelligence in this new world? 2025 LLMs augment intelligence, which is very useful, but eliminating the need for human intelligence is something else entirely.
> A cryptographer looking at the human immune system sees no security at all. None. Your body is like a mall with doors open 24/7, even when you're sleeping. Your immune system is like mall cops with machine guns and RPGs, but their aim is only as good as mall cops. And each robber becomes two robbers whenever it steals something. This system usually works well enough for *natural* pathogens, except when it doesn't and the mall collapses.
I feel like this cryptographer needs to consult a biologist. Your immune system does a pretty solid job considering that, unlike a mall, you're constantly saturated with gobs of attackers. Your immune system is so good that even when a novel and dangerous pathogen emerges, our best course is almost always to give your immune system a heads-up, and this mostly solves the problem. Your body can constantly manufacture its own "mall cops" in massive numbers.
Pathogens that float around today have had millions of years to evolve and have tried I-can't-even-calculate-how-many different instances of attack vectors and they still mostly can't do very much unless you're too much of a literal baby to have much practice figuring out how to kill diseases, or you're old enough to be breaking down at a decent rate.
If you watch Kurzgesagt's hour-long video about the 4-billion-year history of life on Earth, you'll notice something: the first 45 minutes are extremely boring. This is because the life in the first 3 billion years is prokaryotic life (and archaea), which is not capable of evolving as complexly as eukaryotic life. Viruses, in turn, are generally simpler and more limited than prokaryotic life. Meanwhile, humans can design and build objects in a one year or less that might never have evolved even once in the entire history of life on Earth, let alone in the 200,000-year history of humanity (e.g. AM or FM radios; digital computers; and maybe even novel medical molecules).
So I feel like you have a misunderstanding of biology here. The design skill hierarchy is ASI > humans >> eukyrotes > prokyrotes > virii. To say virii haven't evolved an ability in the last 200,000 years is saying little about the difficulty of the task to humans on up. (Also, to say that no virus has *ever* made *any* species go extinct is an unprovable hypothesis, and the question may be moot because there is some selection pressure *against* a virus causing extinction of its host).
> Your body can constantly manufacture its own "mall cops" in massive numbers.
Yes, but the cops' weapons and skills do not improve concordantly. When I used the analogy of "mall collapse" I had cytokine storms in mind; the more common cause of death I could analogize as "the mall is picked clean and the cops starve to death".
I feel like these metaphors fail to be super useful in some way. Biological systems aren't designed at all, they're just guided by selection pressure, but often explore way more of the possibility space than evolved systems. AGI is a weird mix of design and evolved.
You could use other lenses, e.g.:
- humans mostly design and manufacture things at very different levels of details than biological systems (although not entirely so these days as we've finally started making some things with truly harrowing levels of fine details)
- many biological systems are way more adaptive than human-designed ones (like how software can critically fail from one wrong input, or in the cryptography case the slightest issue can badically leak everything)
It's not just a metaphor. I certainly believe, for example, that a biological radio tranceiver could be constructed via instructions encoded in DNA, but that natural selection would create that DNA about as often as it creates intelligent beings or extinction-level viruses: almost never.
An analogy from evolutionary biology and ecology may be helpful. If a new species comes along that outcompetes your species in all aspects of your niche, then you are going extinct. If a new species comes along that outcompetes you in only *some* parts of your niche, then your species survives, but things get weird as you are forced to specialize in the new smaller and less diverse niche. If a new species comes along that is a symbiote, then your species survives, but things also become weird as you are forced to specialize in the symbiosis. If a new thing comes along, but it is not a species, then you are probably ok. What makes a new thing a species? Not totally clear, but reproduction and (natural) selection are probably necessary features.
I mostly agree, with the caveat that we historically haven't been very good at compensating people who get displaced in this way. Just because we get rich does not mean that we'll do a good job of distributing the wealth (although I hope that the wealthier we get the easier it'll be to convince people to share.)
That’s to misunderstand the nature of this particular transformation, if it happens. At a simplistic approximation Factory jobs replaced farming, office jobs replaced factory jobs but, from the Industrial Revolution on there were factories at the same time as farming and offices at the same time as factories. So the transition was obvious. More office workers, fewer factory workers.
But when we get rid of the offices what’s left? What’s the next thing. Our cities will be the new rust belts.
Workers can be totally replaced by technology, it’s happened before although admittedly to horses, not humans.
The transitions were not obvious before they happened. People had the same worries as now, and the new jobs that appeared were surprising and weird at first.
I keep seeing that horse argument, and I think it's completely wrong. Working horses disappeared, sure. But they were *tools*, not workers, and they got replaced by better tools, like cars.
Humans used horses to get work done. They were not employees on a labor market!
This can go great (except for possible instabilities with too many jobs being replaced) until AI instantly replaces all the new jobs created as soon as they are created. Then there are no humans in the loop (if it's under competition) and we end up with gradual disempowerement https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/.
If you think there are jobs AIs won't be able to do you can make your prediction now.
As much goods and services are produced as today, but 95% of them are luxury goods and services for the 1% who own the AIs and have lots of money and can afford to buy lots of luxury goods and services. The remaining 5% is just enough to produce a working-class standard of living for the 10% who get paid a small amount of money to provide the 1% with the specialized services that can't or won't be done by AI. The remaining 89% are unemployed, dead broke, and rummaging through the garbage hoping to find enough food to stay alive.
Fortunately, the 1% throw away a lot of food. Unfortunately, "luxury goods and services for the 1%" includes killbots to keep the riff-raff from stinking up the place or doing any damage.
If society fractures into a group of people benefiting from AI, who are lifted into unimaginable splendor, and everybody else who becomes a proletariat only doing those things too cheap and unprofitable to be done by AI/robots, that seems like a bad thing. Unless you’re one of the Cyber elite or maybe a bodyguard, masseuse, personal chef, etc. you’ll be impoverished and disempowered.
My intuition for it is that right now economy, politics, culture rely on human flourishing to some degree. If your workers are dying too fast they won't produce efficiently, if your population is dying they might rebel, right now they elect governments, select information, form culture all at least somewhat pointed towards human flourishing.
If the requirement of human flourishing/humans falls away the new equilibrium will probably be one without human flourishing/humans. Any block you put in the way e.g. AIs can't do X, laws, ... will get eroded away by the system if there is optimization pressure (moloch).
If there is competition humans will lose control because they make things more inefficient. So one solution might be to have a singleton (humanity/AI) be in control.
What I don't understand is how it works. There are a lot of people in jobs an AI could do who don't have skills for jobs that are not replacable by AI: People taking tickets at the cineplex, person who registers callers for Community Ed courses, cashiers . . . What happens to them when AI takes their jobs? Do they end up unemployed and broke, but it's legit to write that off as collateral damage because in 15 years unskilled people will be on balance better off too?
This is the sort of problem I suspect might be answered at least partially by a (non-trivial) dig into Russ Roberts, David Henderson, and the rest of the folks over at EconLib.
If I had to sketch one possible solution, I'd start by pointing out that no technology, no matter how disruptive, transforms an economy overnight; instead, it is adopted gradually, first by the bravest (or most foolhardy) heatseekers, then businessowners right behind them who watch how well they do, then more businessowners behind them, and so on. They further subdivide by sector and geography and nationality - a robot-maker for a plastic-molding plant in Jiangsu is going to have a different adoption timeline than a retailer for farm equipment in Cedar Rapids or a derivatives trader in Abu Dhabi.
When the AI bug first hits, then, we'll see a bloc of Chinese cupholder factory workers suddenly looking for work, or American corn harvester sales staff, or Arabian oil futures brokers. They'll do the same thing other suddenly-unemployed labor do, getting jobs making some other plastic consumer item or selling a different piece of farm machinery or brokering a different commodity. This sort of thing happens often enough that the economy will absorb them with little more than an alarming blurb in Forbes. Making somewhat less news will be their support staff in the building they worked in, also handed pink slips - random clerks, assistants, first-level supervisors, janitors, recruiters, guards, cafeteria workers, etc. They will likely get jobs doing roughly the same thing, in another building, at another company, maybe another city.
As the AI bug sweeps through, there might be a rise in the rate of such layoffs, but it's still going to be limited by the rate at which a business can retool; no business is going to freeze its supply and revenue streams while it does a 100% conversion.
Anyone laid off has a high chance of seeking a job doing something somewhat different, in a different market. They'll compete with whoever's already there, on price (assuming the state hasn't done something asinine like freeze salaries). This will unemploy different people in turn, who move further still, and so on. This will happen at the speed of rehiring and retraining, which will limit the spread of AI.
Many such people will see this coming, and resign before it hits; the AI wave will be the trigger for them finally looking at that relocation idea they've been batting around for months or something. Again, this is all pretty normal job churn; it's just that the cause is different.
The key to this sketch I've made is that people are employed on a spectrum of jobs, many of which are adjacent in skillset required, and a disruption to one of those jobs will often lead to everyone shifting over by one in the relevant direction.
You're asking the question people have been asking all through the Industrial Revolution. When we automate away jobs, how are the fired workers going to make a living?
It's a tough question, because you genuinely can't know beforehand. In 2025 we know that new jobs like gig worker, influencers, solar/wind technician etc have emerged, but 1-2 decades ago no one could predict that.
And that's how it's been for 250 years. I expect the trend to continue. One way to think about it is that a large number of unemployed people is a big unused resource. And capitalism is *very* good at exploiting those!
All three of those jobs you mention are perfectly capable of automation right now. I haven't used a human-operated supermarket checkout since long before COVID, for instance.
So to the extent that they haven't already been automated away, I'd suggest that it's not just a purely financial reason that they haven't been done away with, and I don't see a reason to believe AI will dramatically change that.
Wait, what? You mean a supermarket checkout that /a store employee/ doesn't operate, surely? There is definitely a human still in the loop with the DIY kiosks, and for that matter a fraction of a human tending the kiosk cluster.
I really want there to be a fully automated method out there, especially by now with all our newly mighty multi-domain LLM tech, but from what I understand the robotics to do a search for a bar code just aren't there yet. Much less robust recognition of produce or error handling for a torn tag or all the other long-tail problems.
I just want to put items in my trolley, and have the system know what items are in my trolley without the need to scan each one individually. I understand that Amazon was testing a system like this but they gave up.
Related; I used a self-checkout today, and was stopped three times, because the presumably-new automated theft prevention system presumably didn't like my coat and kept shutting down the kiosk. An automated system that screws up theft detection is unusable on its own.
Yeah I was thinking more of human factors, but that kind of problem in interaction with the real world - vision, manipulation, etc - is also a lot tougher than the AI will take our jerbs people allow for.
Right now, it's arguably blown up the market for LLM trainers and people who maintain the systems on which LLMs run.
Of course, you're probably hunting for people who use LLMs to create wealth. I think it's too early to tell either way how much wealth is possible that way, but if we assume your claim about replacing expensive human effort with cheap AI effort, then the natural outcome of that will be businesses using cheap AI to lower their costs, and enable them to compete on price. Their customers will consequently see their own costs drop, allowing them to compete on price as well, and so on.
Eventually, businesses that use LLMs or are downstream of businesses that do, will operate less expensively, in rough proportion to the portion of their costs that were driven by answering business questions that LLMs can now answer (correctly). Or, they'll get more done at the same cost.
For example, programmers trying to get a piece of tech working might spend an hour tracking down the problem on StackOverflow and scattered tech articles, blogs, and manuals, or spend a few minutes asking ChatGPT and checking the responses. Eight problems might take a day last year, and only half an hour now. Programmers might spend that half hour and then go home, but more likely, they'll just get about 10x work done. Programs are finished 10x as fast, or 3x as fast with fewer bugs, leading to 3-10x improvement in the production of their customers. Given how pervasive programming is, the costs could be seen dropping across nearly every industry (to varying degrees).
And that's just programming; I'm hearing of LLMs being used in investment, and it doesn't seem implausible for them to be used in manufacturing and logistics, where the problems are more boring and less visible.
That leaves industries where LLMs aren't as applicable, such as services, resource extraction, and tourism. These will probably end up swelling in number, and people will move to those jobs. The result is a rough sketch of how LLMs would make everyone better off.
> Given how pervasive programming is, the costs could be seen dropping across nearly every industry (to varying degrees).
Software as a product is understood badly in economics. It adds value to GDP not when produced but when sold. The marginal costs of digital reproduction of code is already close to zero. An app that isn’t selling but that suddenly takes off will increase the wealth of its creator and thus the aggregate GDP of his country by being sold, not when it was written. This is why successful software companies have huge margins - in reality these companies will see greater margins, there’s no certainty any savings are passed onto consumers or workers.
Software as a cost or service (the obligatory website) might become cheaper, the most likely outcome is more money for Bezos as he fires his staff.
There is plenty of demand for new programs, and my arguably limited experience is that reasonably experienced programmers working together with AI can deliver them: a) quite a bit faster, b) with fewer bugs and general technical debt.
Medical advances are the thing I feel most optimistic about. Researchers can use AI to speed up what they do, by using it for tasks that AI can do much faster and more accurately than people can. I'm sure anyone here who is in the field can give some good examples.
AI can find promising molecules but they still have to go through trials which are real bottleneck. Blog of Derek Low at Science has been good in reporting,
Yeah, the actual path from "this looks promising for problem X" to "I'm prescribing this to you for problem X" is like a billion dollars and twenty years long.
Hi it me! As someone who's brain is hard coded to go build ai-optimizer like things, but who is skeptical that language models or reinforcement learning agents will lead to human thriving, even if they are aligned, I've been having a grand old time doing a PhD building huge neural networks that find dense correspondence between MRI or CT scans. Cancer researchers seem to appreciate it, although I do little direct cancer research myself
EMDR therapy is getting unrealistically good reviews, including from at least one person whom I know personally. Like, "one session and my PTSD is completely gone" level. I don't generally believe in magic pills, but the reports are piling up. What's its deal, is it really that good?
I know some people who've been through it, and I'm going through it myself. My results are so far inconclusive, but seemingly positive, to the extent you can figure how your life is going through the usual ups and downs over weeks.
A guy I know swears by it, says it took him from constant, low-level shame to not having that, and his experience got me in the door.
My wife took one session, back when it was new in the 1990's, and reports she went from screaming nightmares to being able to sleep through the night.
I’m a clinical psychologist who never learned to do EMDR because I thought it was the dumbest idea ever, and the research I read did not change that view. Recently revisited research, and the updated result is that it works as well for recovering from trauma as talking over the trauma with a therapist (at least talking it over with the therapists who were the control group in the EMDR research.) However EMDR done with the wrong kinds of movements during the procedure works as well as EMDR done using the prescribed movements. I can see how doing some supposedly helpful physical movements while talking with the EMDR practitioner would be facilitator. It gives you a placebo effect, and also give a rationale for the unpleasant process of recounting and reliving the trauma, which most trauma victims greatly dislike doing and avoid. (Actually, just simply recounting it over an over, with a calm supportive professional, reduces symptoms, probably by simple desensitization.)
So upshot is that trauma victims benefit from EMDR sessions, but from the interpersonal component not the EMDR itself. I think it’s likely that a therapist with training in psychosocial treatments of trauma could be more effective than a generic supportive therapist who believes the eye movement part is the active ingredient.
You just reminded me of another thing that will limit AI adoption: a lot of people plain distrust it, including highly trained people who would be making the business decisions.
If you're some True Expert in your field whose Pointy-Haired Boss fired because he's convinced himself that AI can do your job, and it turns out you're absolutely right that it can't, there's even a good chance that some of your customers will also suspect you're right. This means you can start your own business with a handful of fellow True Experts, offering less AI-automated services with higher quality, delighting the customers that defected along with you, attracting more, and eating PHB's market share.
Depending on how flat PHB falls on his face, you might even score a story in the trade rags about how AIs are mostly hype, and tip True Experts from other fields into doing the same thing.
Yes. The disadvantage of treating trauma this way are that (1) it wastes the time of the mental health professionals who go to trainings in EMDR; (2) training professionals to use it = giving them misinformation about what the actual change agent is; (3) treatment gives patients misinformation about nature of PTSD (EMDR treatment comes with a whole theory about brain re-wiring via something related to eye movements , and there is no support for that theory at all). (4) Time training therapists in EMDR could have been used in training in some effective targeted treatments that are empirically supported. Result would have prob been therapists actually becoming more effective than EMDR therapists, because they would know treatments that not only give a placebo effect, but work better than placebo.
I'm in no position to judge if EMDR is bullshit or not, but I have to admit this was an incredibly satisfying fucking read!
Sort of a tangent:
Has anyone done any serious research on if EMDR receptivity correlates with hypnotic suggestibility?
I know that EMDR isn't hypnosis... per se.
But to this random layperson, it sure looks a little hypnosis-y.
I am not at all hypnotically suggestible (not even when I desperately want to be hypnotized, not even paying a professional hypnotherapist), but have always found it pretty easy to put other people in hypnotic trances with bullshit I completely make-up on the fly. So I have a lot of respect for the idea that techniques are probably not as important as a person's inherent suggestibility to receive the technique.
I had never thought of that, but once you suggested it I thought it was plausible too. But just asked GPT to summarize the research on it, and it turns out no correlation has been found between hypnotizability measures and response to EMDR. There isn’t even a correlation between hypnotizability and response to placebo effects, considered as a group. My guess re: why hypnotizability does not predict EMDR response is that EMDR is actually not that much like hypnosis. As in hypnosis, there is this simple repetitive stimulus going on, the eye movements. *But* the subject is not urged to play close attention to them. Instead they are doing the movements mechanically to take the edge off something else that’s guaranteed to grab their attention: remembering and recounting a trauma. And there is no patter of the kind hypnotists use, suggesting to the subject that they are getting more and more drowsy and relaxed, and that is very pleasant, etc. Maybe the traits that predict placebo response are more things like optimism and tendency to be swayed in the direction of what's socially desirable?
About your being impossible to hypnotize: I thought I was too, and a lot of people tried when I took a course on doing hypnosis where students practiced on each other. A couple people with professional chops also tried, too. In my case, the thing that was interfering with my becoming hypnotized was social awkwardness: It felt like lying to, for example, deliberately close my eyes when the hypnotist said “your eyes will close on their own.” But it felt very awkward to just keep them open — what was the hypnotist supposed to do then? And I yearned to just say “I’m sorry, but this is not working,” but that just was not done.
Then one day I was in a setting where I listened to an induction in a large group, and did not have to be worried about embarrassing the hypnotist not by being having the responses they were counting on me to have. I become quite hypnotized. It was extremely pleasant, and a genuinely altered state. I’m pretty sure that suggestions like “your arm is full of helium and floating upward by itself” would have worked on me. You’ve probably already tried getting hypnotized by a video hypnotic induction, but I think that’s less powerful than induction via a real person. Maybe try it when you’re an inconspicuous member of a group, with a real hypnotist doing the induction?
For my experiences, I followed along with some of the initial suggestions / orders about closing my eyes and whatnot, but like you, it was an act of carefully considered compliance, rather than actually feeling the sensation being suggested.
It sounds like we differed in that I would eventually confess when it felt like the session was getting "real" (rather than the beginning part where I felt like I should cooperate because the process was still supposed to be kicking off). I'd use language like, "I'm sorry, but I don't think this is happening right for me. What should this feel like?" I always felt compelled to say something relatively early because I didn't want the hypnotist to feel stupid later for not realizing that I was merely acting / humoring them.
I'm intrigued by the idea of attempting to be induced in a large, in-person group but can't imagine how the opportunity may arise. Professional stage hypnotists tend to put safe guards in place to avoid inadvertently inducing non-participants members (having their neighbors jostle them, etc), and I'm a little dubious *that's* the setting I'd want to attempt induction under, anyway.
And it's also possible I'm simply a much bigger pain in the ass than you are. My instinctive reaction to hypnotic suggestions ala, "Your eyes are growing heavier" is:
"Wait, are they?" *checks body* "No, they factually are not."
And like...that's really the full of it, it feels like? As far as I can tell, it's not anxiety about losing control or whatever, or defying the hypnotist for the sake of defiance, or worrying about what they might think.
It's just that if I hear a suggestion that doesn't align with my understanding of perceived reality, I just immediately reject the suggestion as being fundamentally inaccurate, full stop. I can't buy in, even when I want to - even when I'm *paying* to! - because, well, no, my eyes aren't actually growing heavier. They just *aren't.*
It looks like there's not a good way for a layperson to perform the Stanford / Harvard scales of suggestibility on oneself, but I did take this probably bullshit online quiz (https://hypnosis.edu/sq/intro) and had a pretty dramatic imbalance of "Emotional" and "Physical" suggestibility (18%/82% - with a note, "People who score at or close to the 50/50 range respond to both Literal and Inferred Suggestions are described as “Somnambulistic” personalities. This is the most suggestible person and is the best subject for a Stage Hypnosis show because they respond to physical challenges, emotional suggestions, positive and negative hallucinations, amnesia, and time distortion"). But like I said, probably bullshit!
And in a semi-related digression, I was completely fascinated to hear the illusionist (and arguably most famous stage hypnotist) Derren Brown mention during a podcast with Sam Harris that he isn't at *all* suggestible, unlike Harris, who had apparently had the formal testing done in graduate school and discovered he is extremely suggestible.
If memory serves, Brown may have even said that he's *never* experienced hypnosis, himself.
Now, anything a professional illusionist claims should always be taken with a salt mine of salt, but I think it's plausible. Despite having no training whatsoever, I once more or less accidentally put a friend into a deep hypnotic trance to keep her still while having clogs in her infected milk-ducts semi-violently flushed out. I was initially just trying to get her to not hold her breath and make the pain worse, but her face went blank-ish and she went from clenching on my hand with every syringe of water jetting into her breast to me holding her hand loosely relaxed in mine. It was remarkable...and a little creepy.
And at the end of the appointment, her doctor wanted to know about how professional training for hypnotic pain management works, and seemed genuinely startled when I said I was just making it up as I went along.
So at least I feel like I'm certainly not unique in being able to hypnotize others while not being suggestible.
But I also defer to your formal training/expertise in hypnosis; if it's very unlikely that an absolute lack of susceptibility is a thing, I'll keep an eye out for opportunities.
You are directed to do specific side-to-side eye movements (e.g., sit in front of a screen and move your eyes to follow an indicator), and you do talk therapy at the same time.
The mechanism of action is not well-understood. All of the following have been proposed as possibilities:
- Something to do with side-to-side eye movements being part of the instinctive "threat detection package," and therefore doing them, detecting no threat, and talking about your trauma helps break the traumatic memories > threat response association.
- The specific eye movements don't actually matter, but talking about your trauma while doing a distractor task that requires focused concentration makes it harder to obsess about the trauma, helping to break the traumatic memories > negative emotional response association.
- It's effective mostly because it's talk therapy, and talk therapy is effective, but the specific and complex instructions make it feel more "science-y" and act as a placebo enhancer/patient buy-in enhancer, resulting in basically Talk Therapy ++.
- It's literally just talk therapy, and works as well as any other talk therapy; the claimed better outcomes are just allegiance bias (i.e., studies by people who do EMDR reporting that EMDR works, like every other therapy style).
Ah, I assumed that eye movement was a solution looking for a problem.
I remember people believing that doing "eye exercises" will help cure myopia. It wasn't confirmed by research.
I remember people believing that observing other people's eye movements will help you figure out whether they are a visual / auditive / kinesthetic type, and also when they are telling you the truth and when they are lying, and this knowledge will give you almost hypnotic power over them. This also wasn't confirmed by research.
Now people believe that doing eye exercises cures trauma. More research is needed. But if the results are negative, I expect them to come back a few years later claiming that eye movements can be used to predict IQ or cure cancer...
It's not magical but it's a substantial improvement over alternatives. It feels goofy as hell and the results aren't instant but six months of EMDR therapy easily feels...5x better than standard therapy. It might even be more than that. After 6 months of normal therapy, it's very hard to detect significant personal changes or improvements. After 6 months of EMDR, I'd be surprised if you didn't see significant personal changes.
I should note, since you are a princess, that I'd bet substantial money that EMDR works better for men than women. Mostly because I'm a man and emotions are icky and gross and have cooties and I suspect a major part of EMDR is just distracting myself so I talk about emotions without being self-aware. Like, being forced to jingle keys in front of my own face so I talk about my emotions without thinking about talking about my emotions, if that makes sense.
Acc/to Wiki, here's the source of the original idea:
>EMDR was invented by Francine Shapiro in 1987. In a workshop, Shapiro related how the idea of the therapy came to her while she was taking a walk in the woods, and discerned she had been able to cope better with disturbing thoughts when also experiencing saccadic eye movements.
I read Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 (or "Southern Victory") series when it first came out and am rereading it for the first time now. I am about 3/4 of the way through the second book (American Front) and haven't decided if I will keep going after that.
The concept of the series is dealing with the long-term consequences of a Confederate victory in the American Civil War. The first book takes place about twenty years later and concerns a second war between the Union and the Confederacy, with Britain and France intervening on the Confederate side. The rest of the series deals with the two World Wars and the interwar years in a world where the Confederacy is part of the Entente and the Union part of the Central Powers from day one. As I recall, it starts out as fairly hard alternate history but gets more contrived as the series goes on, since Turtledove seems to be subordinating realism to his high concept of transplanting the historical events to North America.
Thoughts on the first book (How Few Remain) in particular:
- I endorse the common complaint that the sex scenes, particularly those featuring Mark Twain and George Custer (not the same scene, at least), constitute fan disservice.
- I understand Turtledove's desire to use interesting historical characters as viewpoint characters, and he makes good use of many of them. It does backfire somewhat because three of the characters he chose (Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass) were among the best and wittiest writers and orators of their time. I don't think Turtledove is a bad writer by any means (or I would not have read and re-read so many of his books), but he set himself an exceptionally hard task with those three and falls far enough short to be jarring. Especially since I had recently read Douglass's 1881 autobiography and had it fresh in my mind when reading HFR.
- The Confederacy's decision to abolish slavery in order to maintain their alliances with Britain and France, so soon after the Civil War, was absurd. I understand Turtledove's probable reasons for putting that in, though, and I do give him some credit for understanding how unlikely it is and going through some work in the story to try to justify it. Having General Longstreet be the Confederate President who pushed it through was a nice touch, since in our timeline Longstreet supported Reconstruction and joined the Republican Part after the war.
- Turtledove skipped over some interesting implications of the Confederacy having a full military alliance with Britain and France. For one thing, having the Confederacy in common as a major ally would make Britain and France see one another as parters rather than rivals much earlier than historically. For another, it should have had implications for the Franco-Prussian war. Did the Confederacy declare war on Prussia, or at least encourage the recruitment of their citizens to serve as foreign volunteers in the French army? If so, did that change the outcome of the war? And if not, why not, and how does France feel about that?
- The point of departure (POD) is a popular one for armchair analysis: during the Antietam Campaign, General Lee issued orders to the scattered parts of his army telling them where they were to go and where they could expect to find the rest of the army. Historically, one copy of this order got used to wrap up a packet of three cigars, which promptly got dropped and shortly afterwards was picked up by Union scouts who were examining the abandoned Confederate campsite. The scouts smoked the cigars and passed the orders up the chain of command, where they helped inform General McClellan's campaign plans against Lee. The historical result was a very bloody battle that was a tactical stalemate but a strategic defeat for the Confederacy. Turtledove has the lost orders being immediately recovered (and the cigars smoked) by Confederate soldiers. Without McClellan having the benefit of knowing Lee's campaign plans, Lee is able to set up his dream engagement against the Army of the Potomac. Turtledove throws in at least two more bits of bad luck that happened to Union generals who were corps commanders at Antietam and would later command the Army of the Potomac: Ambrose Burnside is unexpectedly deprived of his ability to cross a river, and Joe Hooker is concussed at a critical point in the battle by a near-miss from an artillery shell. Historically, these happened at Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville, respectively, but Turtledove has both happen at the alt-Antietam battle.
As I said, this is a popular POD for Confederate victory scenarios. I'm dubious of how Turtledove has it play out, although again Turtledove does seem aware of the difficulties. Many historians question how significant the lost orders were, since they were already several days old and partially obsolete when they were lost, and McClellan took most of an additional day after receiving them before setting his own army in motion. My own inclination is that the lost orders moved McClellan to action sooner than he would otherwise have moved, and probably gave him a moderate but not necessarily critical advantage; I think it's reasonable to imagine Lee having a more successful campaign without the lost orders, but it's also reasonable to imagine McClellan still sort-of winning.
Turtledove's outcome, where Lee routes the Army of the Potomac in a position where they can't retreat and are forced to surrender en masse, is not realistic in my opinion. For one thing, I think McClellan was a bad general, but I do credit him with the ability to read a map, and his flaws were sloth and irresolution rather than foolhardiness: I have a fair amount of difficulty imagining him putting his army in a position like that. For another, one army destroying another in a field battle wasn't much of a thing in the American Civil War. There were at least three times (Island #10, Fort Donelson, and Vicksburg) where a large force allowed itself to be besieged and eventually had to surrender, plus at least a couple of battles late in the war (Nashville and Cedar Creek) where the losing army technically survived but lacked the manpower and cohesion to be an effective offensive force afterwards, but Appomattox was the only battle in the war where one army really "checkmated" another one and forced it to surrender in the field. McClellan outnumbered Lee by a large margin during the Antietam Campaign, so it would have been spectacularly unlikely for Lee to have been able to do to him what Grant historically did to Lee while outnumbering the latter by about a 5 to 2 margin. I think Turtledove is aware of this difficulty and takes pains to explain that Lee was able to set up his dream engagement and moreover to have Burnside's and Hooker's mishaps also befall the Union during the same battle in order to try to stack the deck sufficiently against the Army of the Potomac.
- The United States Government in HFR seems to suffer from a severe case of plot-induced stupidity, which I think was done deliberately by Turtledove in order to set up the rest of the series. I'm dubious of James Blaine being nominated and winning in 1880, since so much of his political career was a product of the Reconstruction Era and the tail end of the Civil War. I probably would have chosen either Charles Francis Adams or John Sherman for that role, but Adams would have been too diplomatically savvy for what Turtledove had in mind, and Sherman likely to be too competent a wartime commander in chief.
Similarly, the choice of General Rosecrans as head of the US Army was historically dubious and likely influenced by Turtledove's need for plot-induced stupidity from that quarter. The in-world justification was that Rosecrans was the most prominent Union general who hadn't been disgraced during the alternate Civil War the way McClellan and Pope had been. Presumably, General Halleck (whom had just been appointed General-in-Chief a month or two before Antietam) also caught his share of the blame. Come to think of it, this was probably another reason Turtledove made sure to mention Burnside and Hooker having key roles in the alt-Antietam defeat). The problem with this is that Rosecrans was a subordinate of Grant's at the time of the Antietam Campaign. Grant's pretty clearly the best candidate on those grounds, and William T. Sherman has at least as good a claim on the runner-up slot as Rosecrans, plus Sherman's brother (the same John Sherman whom I mentioned in the previous paragraph) was a powerful Senator, which would have been unlikely to have hurt his political career. Instead, Turtledove gives both Grant and Sherman cameos, with Grant having returned to struggling civilian life while Sherman stayed in the army and wound up in a dead-end position as the garrison commander in San Francisco (presumably an allusion to Sherman's stint as a staff officer to the US military governor of California during and after the Mexican War, plus an additional stint in the 1850s as a bank manager in SF). But Turtledove clearly needed inept military leadership for the US Army in HFR, and Rosecrans is a better source for that than Grant or Sherman.
- Turtledove has Abraham Lincoln become a socialist labor organizer after the war, in order to set up a US counterpart of Germany's Social Democratic Party for use later in the series. I am very, very dubious of this, since my impression is that Lincoln had pretty standard Whig views on economic issues. Lincoln might have sided with moderate progressive reformers during the Gilded Era, but I very much doubt he'd have gone full socialist.
Just a note for people who aren't familiar with the series: it gets unbelievably dark as it goes on. Basically think of all the worst crap that happened in the 20th century, but transplanted to North America.
They were freed in name only, more or less. No longer legally chattel, but permanent noncitizens, lacking most civil rights, and subject to a "passbook" system that severely limited internal mobility and ability to leave a bad situation and seek better employment elsewhere. I think Turtledove modelled it on the "Black Code" laws that several ex-Confederate states tried to implement in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War until it was preempted first by federal reconstruction legislation and then by the 14th Amendment.
At least that's the solution for the 1880s through the 1930s. After that, a regime that Turtledove modeled very overtly on Nazi Germany takes over in the Confederacy and does the sort of thing that Nazis do with minority groups that they particularly hate.
> The Confederacy's decision to abolish slavery in order to maintain their alliances with Britain and France, so soon after the Civil War, was absurd
Is it? Even absent foreign pressure, slavery is rapidly becoming economically untenable by the late 19th century. The price of cotton is dropping, farming is becoming more efficient meaning that less agricultural labour is required, all the money is in industrialisation. And while you could theoretically staff your factory with slaves, at some point it's cheaper to just pay hire labourers than to own them and be responsible for their entire life cycle as well as stopping them from running away.
I've heard that line of argument, and I partially agree and partially disagree with it. In some ways, industrialization would have made slavery more economically viable rather than less: industrialization and real economic growth bid up real wages, which means free labor is more expensive and slaves more valuable to the extent they could substitute for free labor. Even if factor work is inhospitable for slave labor (which is commonly argued, but I have heard arguments against it based on examples from the the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and the Stalin-era Soviet Union), the US as a whole still had something like 20-25% of the workforce doing agriculture labor as late as the 1930s, and many/most southern states had considerably larger agricultural sectors than the country as a whole.
I expect a victorious Confederacy would eventually have abolished slavery, but I think 1881 is far too soon. That's too soon for economic changes to decentralize slavery from the Confederate economy, and I expect culture would lag economics significantly there. In addition, Civil War veterans would make up a large part of the electorate and most of the political class at that point in history.
Historically, Brazil was the last state in the Americas to abolish slavery and did so gradually starting in 1871 and ending in full abolition in 1888. At the time the process started, about 25% of the population of Brazil was slaves. From what I've seen, countries and states that abolish slavery through the political process tend to do so only when the enslaved fraction of the population is relatively low, since the percent of population enslaves is a pretty good proxy for how entrenched slavery is in the country's economy, culture, and institutions. Most of the northern states that had slavery during colonial times and abolished it during or after the Revolution did so at a time when less than 10% of their populations were enslaved, and the Unionist slave states that passed emancipation laws during the Civil War and prior to the 13th amendment (Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia) had 9.7%, 12.7%, and about 7% respectively enslaved in the 1860 census. Kentucky (19.5%) and Delaware (1.6%) kept slavery until the 13th Amendment went into effect.
The least-enslaved Confederate state (not counting Kentucky, which Turtledove has joining the Confederacy in both TL-191 and Guns of the South) is Tennessee, which was 24.8% enslaved in 1860. For the Confederacy as a whole, about 38% of the population were slaves. So even besides the hardening effect the Civil War itself would likely have had on the politics of slavery in any Confederate victory scenario, slavery was much more deeply rooted in the Confederacy than it in Brazil. My guess would be that a victorious Confederacy probably would not have abolished slavery until some time in the early 20th century, perhaps as late as the 1930s or 1940s.
I haven’t read the series so I don’t exactly when ”soon after the Civil War“ is. I don’t think the efficiency of farming cotton increased all that significantly until the invention of mechanical harvesters in the 1950’s. Before that, cotton had to be picked by hand, making it a labor intensive crop.
Furthermore, economics doesn’t drive everything; ideology is also important, even if that ideology was initially constructed to support economic interests. You don’t fight a war to preserve slavery and then turn around and abolish it. Once the Confederate leadership realized were probably going to lose unless they could raise additional troops, they discussed the possibility of using slaves as soldiers. Jefferson Davis was in favor, because he cared more his place in history as the George Washington of the Confederacy than about the fate of slavery. The Confederate Congress gave its approval as essentially the last thing it did before evacuating Richmond, at which point it was to late to actually train and field any slaves as soldiers.
The point is that it took an existential crisis for the Confederacy to do something (using slaves as soldiers) that might endanger the institution of slavery. It’s incredible to imagine these same people completely abolishing slavery entirely for nothing more than better relations with France and England.
You also have to consider religious motivations, which sometimes trump economic ones. There were theological arguments for and against slavery, but the actual mentions of slavery in the Bible seem to support the pro-slavery side. At the time, many people believed that God played a role in historical events. If the Confederacy had won, that would have been taken as evidence that slavery was morally right. (We saw the flip side of this in the actual timeline, where the Confederate loss was seen by former Confederates as establishing that slavery was wrong.)
A hypothetical Confederacy might eventually abolish slavery, but I think any realistic scenario would involve the generation who fought the war dying off and being replaced by future generations with different values.
"I don't think Turtledove is a bad writer by any means (or I would not have read and re-read so many of his books), but he set himself an exceptionally hard task with those three and falls far enough short to be jarring." (etc.)
This is a fairly common problem among genre writers tackling historical personages, I find. I had exactly the same problem with To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which on paper is an interesting speculative fiction novel with an excellent choice of protagonist but which is sunk in practice by Farmer's emulated R.F. Burton being two orders of magnitude less striking and individual than the real one.
Yeah. His Sam Clemens was if anything even worse, and there are plenty of other examples. I still read and enjoyed the whole series on the strength of the concept (as a teenager, not sure if I could now), but it's a shame the dialogue wasn't better.
"I endorse the common complaint that the sex scenes, particularly those featuring Mark Twain and George Custer (not the same scene, at least), constitute fan disservice."
Thank you for that image, now pass the brain bleach.
And you know now that you said it, someone is going to write it.
In _The Guns of the South_, also by Turtledove, but an unrelated Civil War AH, time travelers from a future South Africa give machine guns to the Confederacy.
Lee eventually finds out that the time travelers are far from the future consensus, which opposes slavery. He assumes the majority has more wisdom and becomes an abolitionist. Is this at all plausible?
Lee was philosophically opposed to slavery and tried to structure his own life to avoid having anything to do with it while still being a Proper Virginia Gentleman. It is an amusing quirk of history that of the two premier generals of the American Civil War, only Ulysses Grant actually owned slaves(*). But Lee was first and foremost a patriotic citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I strongly suspect that if he were privately given a magic button that would cause the South to institute gradual compensated emancipation in a broadly non-disruptive manner, he'd have pressed that button at any time in his adult life even without knowing the judgement of the future. But he would also have known how unpopular and divisive an act that would have been at the time, and would not have sought emancipation in a way that would have torn apart the civil society of Virginia.
Turtledove did what he could to make that scenario even remotely plausible, including having the Rivington Men almost cartoonishly setting the *worst* possible example for the future of slavery. And that was enough for me, while reading the story at least. But it only gets me to "remotely plausible".
* Only two, and he freed them prior to the war. Lee, as executor of his father-in-law's estate, had temporary control over a larger group of slaves he did not own, and eventually freed them in accordance with the terms of the will.
"t is an amusing quirk of history that of the two premier generals of the American Civil War, only Ulysses Grant actually owned slaves(*). But Lee was first and foremost a patriotic citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia."
This, like so many nice things said about Lee is not true. Lee inherited an unspecified number of slaves from his mother when she died. In his will before the Mexican American war Lee lists several slaves as his property, and declares that they should be freed after his death.
While Lee did free his father in law's slaves, he did so under protest. He repeatedly petitioned the state to allow him to extend their bondage and only freed them after the courts had turned him down twice.
"I strongly suspect that if he were privately given a magic button that would cause the South to institute gradual compensated emancipation in a broadly non-disruptive manner, he'd have pressed that button at any time in his adult life even without knowing the judgement of the future."
Gradual being the key word here. Lee believed that slavery (and it's attendant tortures, rapes and murders) were necessary for the instruction of black people and although he does not talk about how long it will be "necessary" the letter makes it clear that he is thinking on the order of centuries if not millennia.
I don't know all the details of the various cases but it's worth noticing that there were several Virginian officers in the US Army who *did* stay loyal to the Union, notably including George Thomas who became one of the best Union generals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Henry_Thomas
When Virginia seceded, there were nine colonels, one brigadier general, and one major general from Virginia on active duty in the US Army. Of these, the only ones to join the Confederate army were Colonel Robert Lee and Brigadier General Joe Johnston. Colonel Thomas Fauntleroy resigned from the Federal army and went home to Virginia where he sat out the war as a civilian. The other seven colonels (including George Thomas) served in the Union army during the war, as did Major General Winfield Scott.
Lee may have been motivated by loyalty to his home state, but compared at least to the small sample size of his Virginian peers among senior officers in the Old Army, his decision was the exception rather than the rule.
Yeah I think it's safe to say that fighting for the Confederacy was a choice Lee made rather than something he was forced into. If nothing else for all I don't think highly of the Confederate leadership, I don't think they'd be dumb enough to give command of their army to a man who was only on their side because they threatened his family.
I also reread GotS relatively recently. The turn to abolition there is also very historically dubious, but I think Turtledove does a somewhat better job of justifying it there. He set up several factors to reverse the pressure of the very deeply-ingrained and fundamental support for slavery among the Confederate political class:
1. The time travelers arrive late in the war, after Union armies have had the opportunity to put the Emancipation Proclamation into effect in a big chunk of the Confederacy, particularly in Tennessee, northern Georgia, and the Mississippi Valley. The Confederacy did try to re-enslave freedmen who stayed behind, but an awful lot of former slaves presumably went north when the war turned against the Union and are beyond the reach of Confederate slave catchers. Turtledove shows a severe shortage of slaves in the postwar Confederacy, with slave auctions yielding prices that are two or three times as high as those typical just before the war.
2. There is a large guerrilla movement of former slaves who had served in Union armies and chose to stay behind and continue fighting when the war ended. They have no real prospect of taking and holding territory, but it would definitely be plausible for them to make slavery uneconomical in areas within their reach by facilitating the escape of runaways. One of the things I learned reading Frederick Douglass's memoirs (I did so just after rereading GotS and just before rereading HFR) is that John Brown's original plan for what eventually became the Harper's Ferry raid was to set up a network of guerrilla bands in the Shenandoah Valley with exactly that purpose, rather than inciting a general slave revolt. Douglass considered the guerrilla plan to be potentially workable, albeit extremely risky. The idea being that if the guerrillas can increase the rate of successful runaways enough, replacing runaway slaves (or buying insurance that pays off when a slave escapes) would become too expensive for big plantations to be profitable relative to free labor. Turtledove has the guerrilla movement militarily defeated whenever and wherever the Confederate army managed to come to grips with them, which I agree is the realistic outcome (especially if the Confederates are armed with modern assault rifles while the guerrillas have muzzle-loading Springfields), but there was enough of a simmer relatively late in the book to cause problems for planters.
3. Having Lee as the leader of the emancipation movement would have been an enormous asset to the effort. How realistic this is is debatable: Lee was relatively moderate on slavery as southern aristocrats went, and definitely wasn't of the Calhoun/Stevens school of believing slavery to be a positive moral good, but the prevailing interpretation I've heard is that Lee favored continuing slavery for the foreseeable future and only freed some of his own slaves before the war because he was forced to by the terms of his late father-in-law's will. I consider Turtledove's decision to have Lee turn abolitionist to be unlikely but acceptable artistic license, and given that Turtledove's Lee came to oppose slavery soon after the war, I could see Lee's stature getting him far more leeway (so to speak) to advocate abolition than just about anyone else. I don't think it would necessarily be enough to get him elected on an abolitionist platform, but he's just about the only person who might possibly be elected on that platform.
4. The time travelers did an excellent job of casting themselves as the villains and inspiring a backlash against the policies they had set out to support, culminating in a group of them shooting up Lee's inauguration ceremony and killing the Vice President, Mrs. Lee, and several other notable people and narrowly failing to assassinate Lee. Turtledove depicts several pro-slavery characters at various levels from grassroots to high military and political leadership reluctantly coming to support Lee politically because the time travelers inspire them to an "Are we the baddies?" realization. I found Turtledove's depiction of this to be well-executed and believable.
5. After the Confederate army captures the time travelers' Richmond offices, Lee has the additional asset of a well-stocked library of primary and secondary sources about the historical Civil War and its aftermath. Lee was then able to lobby the Confederate congress by literally showing them the judgement of history on slavery in tangible form and showing them what a bunch of losers the white supremacy movement was by the late 20th and early 21st century. And since the library's included a number of post-war Lost Cause memoirs by ex-Confederate politicians and generals, Lee was in several cases able to lobby his opponents with their own words retrospectively distancing themselves from support of slavery. The prevailing 21st century interpretation of these memoirs is that most of them were disingenuous in this and several other important respects, but it's still bound to have an effect.
6. Lee's emancipation proposals were relatively moderate, a delayed "free birth" law combined with a very gradual program of compensated emancipation. Turtledove modeled this on the way Brazil historically abolished slavery in the same timeframe, which in turn followed a similar template to the late 18th century abolition laws in the northern US and a narrowly-unsuccessful proposal to abolish slavery in Virginia in the 1830s.
It's been a long time since I read any good Civil War history books, but from what I recall, Lee wasn't a strong slavery supporter, he just very strongly believed his first loyalty was to his state, rather than the nation. So it's not that he felt the need to defend slavery, but rather that if his state went to war, he had no choice but to go with it.
I think that sort of makes it somewhat plausible, in the sense that it doesn't require overcoming a strongly held belief, but also it does require starting to care greatly about something that he didn't seem to care much about.
And of course, this is all dependent on me correctly remembering (and the source being correct in the first place) something I read some 20 years ago.
Turtledove modeled his interpretation of Lee on the Lost Cause depiction of him, which is very much as you describe. Historiography in the last two or three decades has reinterpreted Lee in a substantially less sympathetic light, but Turtledove was writing in 1992 when a lot of Lost Cause-influenced historiography was still mainstream.
Turtledove has also said in other contexts (talking about his depiction of Stonewall Jackson in How Few Remain) that he deliberately played into Lost Cause narratives early in the book in order to encourage people who sympathize with the Confederacy to keep reading so he can deliver anti-racist messages later on to some of the people who most need to hear it. I'm pretty sure Turtledove did the same thing with the Clean Wehrmacht myth in the Worldwar series, and wouldn't be surprised it that was a factor in how he depicted Lee in GotS.
I am not a historian, but believe that if Virginia has remained in the Union then Lee would have been part of the US Army during the war. Do the historiographers think that Lee would *still* have joined the Confederacy (and they waged war on his home state)?
I haven't heard that question addressed directly by historians, but for my part I agree that Lee almost certainly stays loyal to the Union if Virginia does. The part of the narrative that historians have largely reconsidered are:
1. The idea that Lee's decision to join the Confederacy with Virginia was necessitated by cultural norms rather than Lee's own personal politics. Many other Virginians from similar backgrounds to Lee, most notably Winfield Scott and George Thomas, stayed loyal to the Union and served important roles on the Union side during the Civil War.
2. Lee is now generally viewed by historians as less anti-slavery than he was viewed 30+ years ago when GotS was written. Although I think there's a range of views within mainstream scholarship here. Note that John Schilling (whom I respect enormously as a fellow armchair historian and acknowledge as better-informed than myself in several areas of history) has also chimed in on this thread and seems to have landed on a viewpoint that has Lee much less supportive of slavery than my own interpretation of Lee.
There's no question that Lee was conspicuously pro-Confederacy once Virginia was part of it, and the examples of the other Virginia colonels illustrates that. The question is why, and "Virginia Patriot, much more so than those other guys" IMO fits the observed facts better than "Yay Slavery, must preserve slavery".
And I agree with Turtledove that if you want to imagine Lee actively pushing for abolitionism, you need a perfect storm of unlikely circumstances to set it up. Mostly, a President Lee of the CSA is going to privately contemplate the issue, notice how massively divisive and disruptive it would be for his homeland, and hope his children or grandchildren are going to come up with a better solution.
Lee seemed like he had a depressive personality, and the problem of what to do about slavery was one of his preoccupations even if it was equivocal and prompted him to no action.
He had not been a successful man when in middle age he left his post in the Texas Hill Country. It is not hard for me to imagine that on the frontier he had had the distance to see and brood over the fact that the importation of slaves was something that only weakened and corrupted and doomed the South.
I'd be interested in learning more about that analysis and its parameters and assumptions.
If the claim is specifically that the Confederacy didn't have the capacity to invade and occupy the North or otherwise comprehensively materially defeat the Union by destroying enough armies to exhaust the Union's war-making capability, then I am entirely inclined to agree with that conclusion.
If your friend is also claiming that the Confederacy had no chance of winning by exhausting the political will to continue the war, that's a much stronger and more surprising claim and I'm curious how your friend modeled it.
I posted this in the hidden thread several days ago, but will post it again here, regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
I worked for Charlie and was about ten feet to his left when he was shot.
Charlie hid nothing about his beliefs. He wasn't a centrist, he was a conservative Christian who wanted to shape the country accordingly and obviously plenty of people disagreed with him on all kinds of issues. Charlie himself was under no illusions about that; he would routinely acknowledge he was in a minority with his views on gay marriage and a tiny minority with his views on abortion.
But everybody who cares about the well-being of America should be horrified by this. From knowing Charlie personally for the past three years I can attest that he was a genuinely good person in a way very few other political figures are. The nature of modern celebrity-driven politics means that Washington is full of narcissists, attention-seekers, con artists, and other bad actors. Charlie was not one of them. Everything Charlie did, he did it because he thought it was best for the country.
Young, online conservatives are routinely getting seduced by dark personalities who promote conspiratorial thinking or hateful ideologies. Charlie rejected that. For example, the Israel issue is tearing the right apart, and Charlie, in my opinion, distinguished himself by taking the issue seriously and refusing to give into hatefulness.
Over the past two days I've had to endure obnoxious people finding some random statement of Charlie's they don't like that supposedly justifies his murder. I could say many nasty things at that, but to respect Scott's preferred tone I will just say that most people are not on camera for two, three, even five hours a day, having their every statement recorded for all time. Charlie didn't always speak perfectly; he wasn't Regis Philbin. But those who knew him can testify to his fundamental good nature.
This blog and others have recently revived interest in the Cyropaedia, Xenophon's work that basically tries to answer the question "What makes someone a great leader?" Of all the people I've worked for, Charlie easily came the closest to the vision of that book. Like Xenophon's Cyrus, he saw setbacks as a chance to learn and try again. He had excellent personal self-discipline: He ate basically 4 different foods, carefully maintained his sleep, and set aside every Saturday as strictly family time (he'd literally shut off his phone and I couldn't text him). He was happy to let his allies reap the rewards of his victories and was routinely generous to the people under him. He was not a flatterer, and more than once when donors tried to strong-arm him on something I saw him say he was happy to stop taking their money and move on, with no hard feelings. He was a fantastically hard worker -- I think this is the part most people outside of movement conservatism don't realize. He didn't just host a show or do debates on campus, he also ran a massive youth outreach organization (which meant constant fundraising too), did GOTV, involved himself in appointments/policy, and so on. One of his favorite sayings was "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" -- and it was very clear which of those he thought was his duty.
Charlie believed in himself to an incredible degree. He always said that Turning Point USA was the most important organization in America, and he believed it. But unlike a lot of people who believe in themselves, Charlie didn't let that decay into megalomania. He was always guided by Christian humility and was always happy to hear counterarguments. More than once I was able to change his mind on a topic, and he was happy to admit it whe I did.
Thank you for sharing this. Something I’ve really appreciated hearing, from you and Greer (https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of), is the extent to which Charlie was doing so much more than Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan. The extent to which he was a connector and leader and movement peacemaker and convener among powerful conservatives was not something I knew when he was assassinated, and it left me viewing some of the more hagiographic retrospectives with much more skepticism than was deserved. He was your friend, and it’s a tragedy that he was killed, and I hope his killer is punished accordingly.
I don't think *anything* you can say ever justifies murder and am appalled by the recent rise of political violence.
That being said, it is notable that Kirk apparently supported the guy who attempted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi. How would you feel if someone said the same thing about Robinson now?
The Pelosi thing (a homeless guy who attacked her husband in their SF home with a hammer) gets brought up a lot, but it's a nonfatal attack that wasn't captured on video and had a slight zany element to it. So, I think a good comparator is the 2017 attack on Rand Paul that left him hospitalized, which Democrats and comedians made light of. Unsavory behavior in both cases, but not on par with groundswell gloating malicious glee over a hideous murder. And it's true that Charlie didn't "support" the homeless hammer attacker; he joked that the circumstances seemed murky, so they guy should be bailed out so we can ask him what he was doing in the Pelosis' house.
Kirk did not "support" him or support trying to murder Democrats. Anybody telling you as much is a liar. There were a bunch of wild conspiracies about that attack (namely that it was a lovers' quarrel) and, if I recall right, he suggested bailing him out of prison so that he could tell his side of the story. I thought it was dumb and told him as much, and as a result he embarrassed himself less than many other RW figures did in that episode.
I think Lapras's question stands - would you find it outrageous if someone called to bail out Tyler Robinson (if he was eligible for bail)? I mean, there's a lot of conspiracy theories circulating about why he did it, I've seen people calling him a groyper, maybe he should be allowed to tell his side of the story and clear things up.
Like, you get how that's offensive, right? You can say it was meant as a joke, but the joke is basically "maybe the guy who tried to kill you had a good reason."
Edit: I tracked down the actual clip of Kirk talking about the attack, and it comes off as "just asking questions" to me. As in, not openly endorsing the lover's quarrel conspiracy theory, but trying to put it on equal ground to the mainstream explanation in order to muddy the waters. You're correct that he didn't endorse the attack, but I'm still pretty unimpressed.
Your comment "[Kirk] didn't want (at this time) to force his views on other people", if from an actual associate of his, is the scariest thing I've ever read about him.
I expect you will not elaborate on what you meant, but it'd be appreciated.
We all have wrong beliefs, but I don't think any of my beliefs are fundamentally or obviously harmful? I mean I could bring up all the times Kirk said hateful things about minorities, but if that's too subjective we can also look at his blatant lying about covid in ways that are easy to disprove. I just don't do that sort of thing, so my ideology must be fundamentally less harmful than Kirk's.
I also don't broadcast those beliefs to millions of impressionable youth.
See this is hard for me to believe, because Kirk had a public platform where he debated people every day, so thousands of people would have told him directly to his face if he was doing something wrong, and he would have had to ignore every single one of them.
It's much more likely that Kirk was corrected multiple times, but because he was a bad person he chose money over intellectual honesty.
This argument only works if all or most of the people who debated Kirk were right. If they weren't, and Kirk knew that, then Kirk could and would rightfully reject their feedback.
We haven't established that the people who debated Kirk were mostly right.
Hey man, I'm not really interested in doing this game where I give you an example and then you nitpick things about it until it fits your personal parameters of wrongness or rightness. According to this source, he claimed hydroxycloroquine was 100% effective against covid.[1] That is just a lie. Not a subjectively offensive opinion, it's just not credible, and clearly harmful if anyone believes him. This is one example, his wikipedia page has plenty more and I know you're capable of reading it if you're acting in good faith and actually want to know what this guy said.
Of course, if you already agree with all of it, there's no conversation to be had.
I know you've already gotten a lot of responses but I'd like to ask you something slightly different.
I'll premise this by saying I'm sorry this happened. I'm sorry it happened at all because it was murder and it was wrong, I'm sorry it happened it to someone you knew personally, and I'm sorry you were in the immediate vicinity and experienced it as it happened. I'll also say that the people (some in this very thread) that are celebrating or gloating about Kirk's death, or trying to justify it and saying (implicitly or explicitly) that he deserved it are behaving despicably. The proper response to speech one disagrees with is more speech. I know next to nothing about Kirk but from what I've heard in the wake of his death, he lived that approach by trying to counter ideas he disagreed with speech and his own ideas. Even if one disagrees with his views and finds them offensive and wrong (and from what I've seen recently, I mostly do), he was at least taking the right approach, and it never should have cost him his life.
Having said all that, I was wondering how you, as someone who knew him personally, reconciles your view that he was a fundamentally good person with some of his public statements that are now being circulated? I don't have an exhaustive list (as I said, I was almost entirely unfamiliar with him before his death), but some that come to mind are his comments that Biden should be executed and that doctors that provide gender transformation care should face Nuremberg-style prosecution?
I can see three possibilities.
1) These quotes are made up or being taken wildly out of context, in which case Kirk is basically being defamed.
2) He had a public persona that was more incendiary and extreme and a private persona that was more compassionate. But if this is the case then it seems like one of those personas was disingenuous. Which one? And either way, is that how a genuinely good person would act?
3) There was no difference between what he believed and said in public and in private. In this case, he may very well have been friendly, funny, and pleasant to be around (at least if you weren't in one of the groups he disparaged), but that alone doesn't seem to me to make him a good person.
Or maybe there's a fourth possibility you can speak to?
Your answer is not going to influence my opinion on his murder -- as I said above, it was wrong, full stop, and the perpetrator should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and should be called out as a murderer who did something evil. Whether Kirk was a genuinely good person or not is irrelevant to those points.
I'm just just trying to figure out more true things about him, because I want me views of the world and the people in it to be as well informed and accurate as possible. Thanks in advance.
Hey Ryan, sorry for the delayed response; I didn't know Substack threads could have notifications auto-disabled. I suppose I'll cut to the chase on this:
"but some that come to mind are his comments that Biden should be executed and that doctors that provide gender transformation care should face Nuremberg-style prosecution?"
re: the Biden one, all I can say is a lot of people viewed various Biden actions as basically treasonous. Allowing absolutely insane unchecked migration over the southern border, letting his son cash in by trafficking access and influence to foreigners, etc. He's reacting in an amped up radio-host way to that. I don't remotely expect most people here to agree with that or like it or consider it responsible advocacy, but that's the context it happened in -- amped up radio host. Statements that strong didn't happen often; they took place because we considered it important to really drive home how harmful, insane, and historically unprecedented the Biden border policies were in particular.
Re: the Nuremberg thing, he meant that doctors who did sex changes on kids should be treated like criminals and prosecuted. I agree with that so I make no apologies for it.
Re: your bigger question, I feel like you are allowing people to reduce a public figure (specifically one who talked literally every day in all kinds of contents) to some sound bites. Charlie was a whole bunch of things because he was a dynamo of energy. He was the boss of a large organization, he was an on-the-ground activist, he worked with the staffing of the Admin, and so on. To some extent, this increased the risk that he'd say things people could complain about later, because he was speaking constantly and with little preparation; he wasn't a blogger who could carefully curate his every comment. Personally, I think individual word choices and sentences carry small weight in deciding how good or bad a person is. You are free to disagree.
>Re: the Nuremberg thing, he meant that doctors who did sex changes _on kids_ should be treated like criminals and prosecuted. I agree with that so I make no apologies for it.
[emphasis added]
I think that this is actually a majority view in the US. I just did a quick Gemini check [usual warning on AI summaries apply]
prompt:
>what fraction of the population wants to ban sex change operations on minors
AI summary:
>A new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of U.S. adults favor or strongly favor laws and policies that: Require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth (66%) Ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors (56%)
I personally, think the question is somewhat more nuanced, in that, if e.g. a 16 year old has severe gender dysphoria, none of the options are good, and some of the changes from puberty are irreversible. But banning such medical interventions before 18 is hardly a fringe position, in fact a majority one.
Kirk wasn’t talking about prosecuting doctors under a hypothetical scenario in which sex change operations for minors are banned and some doctors continue to perform them after they are banned. If Wargamer is, he doesn’t say so unambiguously.
The United States Constitution prohibits ex post facto law, which is a way of saying that you cannot Constitutionally prosecute doctors for having performed sex change surgeries prior to April 1, 2024 (which is when Kirk made his comments) even if a law making such surgeries illegal is passed at some future date. That is presumably why Kirk references the Nuremberg trials.
I find the Nuremberg analogy unconvincing for two reasons. First, it is debatable whether the Nuremberg trials involved ex post facto law or simply applied existing international law. The Nazi’s were convicted of doing things that were generally recognized as wrong. In contrast, there’s no consensus for or against transgender surgery for minors. Gemini mentions an undated Pew poll in which 58% support a ban, while a May 2024 Gallup poll shows 36% support.
Second, Germany had just lost a war and unconditionally surrendered. That gave us the power, and arguably the right, to run Germany as we saw fit. The United States has not been conquered by a foreign adversary, so the only ways I can see for Kirk’s wish to come true would be for vigilante groups to kidnap people and conduct the trials (along the lines of the plot against Governor Witmer), or to have the government itself violate the Constitution. Supporting either of these is, I hope, a fringe position.
>The United States Constitution prohibits ex post facto law
Agreed, and I support that prohibition.
>Kirk wasn’t talking about prosecuting doctors under a hypothetical scenario in which sex change operations for minors are banned and some doctors continue to perform them after they are banned.
I'm not sure whether his exact position actually goes beyond this to support an ex post facto prosecution. I agree that citing Nuremberg was not a good sign. He _might_ have been citing Nuremberg to express the vehemence of his view rather than his support for ex post facto prosecutions - or I may be ignorantly whitewashing his position. I wish he were still alive and that I could ask him clarifying questions about what his actual position was.
> Gemini mentions an undated Pew poll in which 58% support a ban, while a May 2024 Gallup poll shows 36% support.
Yes, polls can both shift, and exact phrasing can matter. ( I'm hoping and guessing that, since Pew is a well-known polling enterprise, that they had a large enough sample size, corrected for the expected confounders, and generally did the polling in a competent way. )
Would you agree that even 36% support (for a forward looking ban, not an ex post facto one) is sufficient to say that this is not a fringe position, even if not a majority one? I'm not arguing for the wisdom of a forward looking ban. I, personally, think that it is too blunt an instrument and precludes edge cases like 16 year olds with severe gender dysphoria - but honorable citizens can honestly disagree about this.
I appreciate that he responded after being in close proximity to his friend when he was murdered. If I was in his shoes, I don't think I'd be on the internet.
I didn't respond in more detail because it didn't seem like it would add anything new to the thread, and I didn't want to pile on. But FWIW, his responses seem to mostly align with my options 2) and 3) above, and I trust that you can figure out how that influences my opinion of Kirk from my original post.
I'm not accusing you of ulterior motives here. However, I do find the attempt to litigate whether he was good (in the case of OP) or wasn't good (in the case of others' posts) to be missing the mark. We don't frame living people as simply good or not good and I fail to see why we would treat the dead the same way.
Isn’t the fourth option that all of those statements are either correct or, that when taken in the context of the totality of what he said over his very public life where he said things for a living, not sufficiently bad to balance out the good things in his life?
I suppose so, if one judges someone by sort of tallying up the good and bad things they've done and seeing which side comes out ahead. But I don't think someone who views their own righteousness in this way is a genuinely good person.
My own view is that a genuinely good person always tries to do the right thing. I don't expect perfection -- Lord God Almighty, we all make mistakes. But I think a good person recognizes them as mistakes, shows an appropriate degree of remorse, and tries to do better in the future. I guess that's a fifth possibility.
And he believes he is doing the right thing. As far he sees it, executing these people would have improved this country. Why would he have to think that was a mistake? We haven't even tried it yet.
If he truly believed that treating doctors that provide transgender care like the Nazis that perpetrated the Holocaust would be th right thing to do and would improve the country, then I don't think he was a genuinely good person. A good person shouldn't have to "try it" to realize that it's wrong.
>to respect Scott's preferred tone I will just say that most people are not on camera for two, three, even five hours a day, having their every statement recorded for all time.
I find it hard to square these two statements. Holding mass events on campuses, being on camera for hours at a time. Did he not follow the attention gradient the public laid out for him, whether they agree or disagree? Why didn't he start an anonymous substack or something?
That's a rather sharp distinction to draw. What would you say is the limit, if any, to what you can say about real, identifiable people as long as they're not in the same room?
Nah, fuck that. Your boss/coworker/lover is dead, and that's a cause for huge celebration.
You, or anyone, are not entitled to my (or anybody's) feelings. I will feel whatever and however I want, up to and including and beyond celebrating the death of a piece of shit who celebrated the death of others and gave it legitimacy.
I repeat, there is only one obligation you or the ilk of Charlie can demand from me, and that is not to be beheaded by me. Box checked. Kirk was not beheaded by me. Someone else beheaded him, but that's not my problem, I can be perfectly happy that this happened and not violate a single law. You and Kirk's harem can go pound sand.
One thing that makes the "Right", whatever fake and gay that pure aesthetic is now about, appear hilariously weak and effeminate is demanding things it never gives.
What I mean by this is: Poor little beheaded Charlie can gloat about school shooting victim and the murdered kids in the ongoing Gaza genocide till the cows come home, nobody of you around him fishing for sympathy now ever thought to correct him or mildly call him out, but his homies will still find it in themselves to cry and whine about respect, empathy, decorum, all the things that poor little beheaded Kirky never displayed an ounce of to someone who does not give him the hard-on by being the "White Christian" fetish he had such a thing. He seems to have developed a thing for Jews too in his final days, well, I'm glad I'm not the target audience.
Hell, the fucking irony of marrying a former beauty pageant, while sucking on a sexual predator's balls whose favorite pastime is groping beauty pageants. This literally means that poor little beheaded Charlie is a cuck, or at least an aspiring cuck. He literally praises and fawns over a geriatric man that would have demolished his wife by groping and pumping if he ever came across her (and who knows, ....). And I thought his hard on for Evangelicals and Jews was his weirdest fetish.
So anyway, fuck Kirk, thank Yahweh and Jesus and Allah and the Buddha that he's beheaded now, May The Rest Like Him Follow Promptly, Ameen.
PS: perhaps the only thing that can move my heart strings for the piece of human excrement is the 2 daughters he inflicted his fatherhood upon, this is mainly why I wish the video of him being beheaded would disappear from the internet before the oldest is 5, I fear for her little heart the sight of her piece of shit father getting what he deserves. So if you want to drum up sympathy for poor old beheaded Kirky, focus on this angle. Never lead with "he was a good guy" he wasn't, and we know, you're bullshitting or brainwashed, and we're interested in your brainwashed bullshit. Cry about someone who didn't say that Empathy is made up and new age. We're being Kirk's most loyal disciples by denying him any mercy or empathy. He's looking up at us from hell smiling every time I insult him, he's probably disappointed I expressed sympathy for his little cuties.
There have been at least two sock accounts by a notorious user Scott permanently banned, and "Charlie's dead, I'm happy" might be another one of them. The tone of unhinged masturbatory delight in indulging their ungoverned excessively emotional partisanship is certainly familiar, and CDIH replied to you:
> "I'm not an ACX stranger and have been a reader for 7 years + Unsong,"
And while the comments on this thread aren't the banned user's exact voice, AI makes it trivially easy to tweak one's writing voice a bit, so who can even know anymore?
Regardless, even if Scott was much more on top of policing - which he generally isn't, he apparently only goes through his "report comment" notifications 2 or 3 times a year to hand out bans - there's nothing he can do about cowards making sock accounts to escape the consequences of violating the content rules. They can always just come back under another username.
Ideally, Scott would publicly encourage the entire readership to silently report and then mute attention-seeking rules-violating comments like the above, so that they receive no engagement whatsoever.
Ideally, that would hurt the cowards and sock puppets and cowardly sock puppets much worse than a ban and would encourage them to take their content to Facebook, where it belongs.
The usual problem with this otherwise wise council is that it doesn't work well with newcomers, who visit the site out of curiosity and immediately flee from what looks like mostly witches. Or stick around because it's their kind of witches.
There's probably a short story to be told of a forum regular who loves the quality of the forum she visits daily, but wonders why she hasn't met any new quality posters in months, but instead keeps having to add a few more to the ignore list. One day, similarly curious, she visits the site using a guest account, and discovers it's 95% horrible content her ignore list had been blocking, while the software silently still permitted her crowd of ~50 to continue their quality discussions in the nooks and crannies.
And if culture war topics are being discussed, sometimes there will be a pinned comment by the blog author saying something like, "Please help me by not engaging trolls in the comments. Please report and ignore."
While sometimes there are robust debates in the comments, bad behavior is far more rare there than it is here.
Now, if Scott no longer cares about his content rules and/or that some people he's banned frequently return as sock puppets, that's fine. He's not obligated to care, and he can certainly change his commenting rules at any point.
I can see how an "Intro to the Forum" would at least mitigate the newcomer problem, but hasn't that ship largely sailed in general? I think most newcomers don't make a point of reading any intro signs in front of the entrance (or sticky posts, etc. I think you know what I mean).
I could certainly support teaching something like that in school, esp. as part of a general curriculum on critical thinking.
Even if people at least lean a little more into reading intro posts, I think that still leaves the problem where people read "don't feed the trolls" and think "a troll is anyone disagreeing with my object level views on culture war topics". So if there are Purple and Green camps, the Purples are reporting all the Greens and engaging their fellow Purples, the Greens are doing the exact opposite, the blog somehow has two echo chambers side by side, and the blog author is getting reports for every single post.
Every once in a while a Purple will agree with a Green on something without realizing she's a Green, read more of her posts, find out, get horrified, and... block? What about the previous agreement?
Isn't part of the goal of a rationalist blog to try to understand mental models that aren't one's own? Otherwise, how does one grow?
You may hate the cruelty, but this, in fact, is MAGA's single most leading fetish, the only thing they derive pleasure -sexual and other - from.
So again, I'm perhaps the single most loyal and authentic Charlie mourner here, by treating him exactly and precisely how he loved to treat people.. By shunning empathy, by being tribal, by being entirely and completely a near perfect embodiment of my lizard brain.
I'm perfectly aware that's a bit out of the ordinary on ACX, as I'm not an ACX stranger and have been a reader for 7 years + Unsong, but take that up with the guy who made the discussion about Poor Old Beheaded Kirk to begin with, who wasn't me.
If you've been reading for 7 years, then I assume you're capable of updating your beliefs. Then please absorb this: you've been brainwashed with online tribalist content and need to reconsider your "us vs them" framing of the world. Also your tone is atrocious.
I don't agree with most of this, but the boundary about emotions is solid.
I don't care about Charlie Kirk, and for reasons I don't understand, I don't think his assassination will make matters much worse. I could be wrong about the latter.
It may be that there's been so much killing that I don't feel like one more is important.
I'm willing to be more or less polite, but I feel what I feel, or this case, don't feel what I don't feel.
If Kirk was a plausible successor for Trump, it's good that he's gone, though assassination is probably disruptive.
Every single thing I claimed about POBK is either a trivial fact about him (he sucked Trump's balls) or a statement that can be traced back to him with any amount of moderate research skills, like the fact he said school shooting victims are a good deal in return for the right to carry weapons or that he gloated over Gazan deaths.
I view my comment as not much more than stating those facts and expressing that he deserved death for them, which he does.
It's not a crime to say that someone deserves death, after all, it's Charlie Kirk's defenders who are lightening quick to point out that "Speech" deserves nothing but more speech, what I'm writing now **is** more speech, namely the speech that express celebration and comfort that POBK is dead. I struggle to see what's wrong. Speech met with speech. No physical harm done.
This reminds me of people who call Snowden a coward for not returning to the US to face trial. Being brave doesn't mean you go looking for trouble. Getting baited into doing retarded things by being accused of cowardice by those who want to see you punished isn't bravery.
This **is** my ordinary handle Christina, I decided that making fun of Kirk's extremely funny death and gloating over it would my forever internet personality now, unless I can calculate a risk his daughter would see what I post, which I currently don't.
I did nothing wrong, as per Poor Old Beheaded Kirk's (POBK) own defense, it's not immoral to gloat over death, as evidenced by his endless gloating over the death of Gazans, the death of black Americans, the death of school shooting victims, etc... etc... etc....
Why treat him with a standard higher than the one he treated people with?
Let's set aside the topic of Charlie Kirk, who, like all famous Christian conservatives, was a very tedious and boring figure. Let's not mention him again.
What's interesting is that *you* unambiguously and ostentatiously violated Scott's content rules, and did so using a pseudonym in order to escape his censure.
Thank you for sharing. This was a terrible thing and you have my sympathy.
While there has been political violence throughout the history of the U.S., incidents seem to be accelerating, which is scary[1].
I'm going to mention something only because, in recent days, Trump/MAGAs have been specifically emphasizing violence by "the left": ~84% of "Ideologically motivated extremist homicides" are apparently done by right-wingers (hmm, I wonder how to get the raw data on this).[2]
It's incredibly easy to warp the categories toward ideological ends. To me, it is fundamentally deranged to treat every crime by a white prison gang as "right-wing" but then downplay something like "riots ripping apart dozens of American cities in summer 2020" as not left-wing. Yet that happens all the time! When was the last time an American mob committed mass arson or looting during riots over a right-wing cause?
It's all in the definitions, and the left has more institutional control able to launder their preferred ones.
I'm wondering if their perception of violence on the left encompasses scenes of violent protest, looting, maybe violent speech online, etc not just murders. In that case (with Jan 6 being a notable exception) I could see how one would get there mentally.
I remember a few years ago, somebody did a (difficult-seeming) dive into this business of “trans people getting murdered”. It got no attention, obviously, but nonetheless it was good to know, no, you’re not going crazy, there is no such epidemic. Those killed tended to be sex workers killed by their fellow sex workers, or others from their street milieu; and they fit the usual pattern as regards murder victims, in other ways. Their “transness” or transvestitism was the least salient characteristic about them, and it was unlikely any of them were murdered by anyone political enough even to vote.
Yet, I expect such murders get assigned as “right wing” for no particular reason.
That may in fact be the reason for the assassination, the indulgence of this nonsense.
I think you may be referring to one of my posts, and it wasn't especially difficult. I was trying to establish an upper bound, so I made a lot of simplifying assumptions like "the murder rate is constant throughout the year."
I don’t know? - this was well before substack. But presumably during the first Trump administration since there was no such threat category during the Obama administration lol.
This person actually attempted to examine the individual circumstances of each homicide where the word trans was in media reporting. It was not statistical that I remember though the statistical implications were elementary and obvious.
I’m not imaginative, so I couldn’t have made this up. Nor did I know about the, uh, demimonde that it sort of invoked. However, perhaps it was not well done (in whatever sense you like) as it was quickly memory holed, after a few people on what was then called “the alt-right” read it.
I recall seeing a study citing the heightened threat to trans black people, which I now wish I'd bookmarked. It claimed some number of black trans people had been murdered in the last N days. I don't remember the number of murders cited, but I do remember looking up the total number of black people murdered over that time span, and finding it was a greater proportion of the population than the trans person murder figure. In other words, knowing nothing else, if you were black, you were safer if you were trans than if you weren't.
This isn't to convince anyone that trans people are in fact safer, but rather that the overall violence rate will be something worth checking.
> Trump/MAGAs have been specifically emphasizing violence by "the left":
In my experience, "the left" draws a self-serving violence vs destruction difference, and on top of that murder vs violence difference, that "the right" does not. It's word games all the way down for some people, and less than a handful of mass murders that ~nobody defends makes it quite easy to gerrymander the numbers for a particular narrative.
>hmm, I wonder how to get the raw data on this
You can start with The Persecution Project (https://theprosecutionproject.org/) which is one of few sources that compiles and offers raw data, but some of it is tagged poorly and you're still working with whatever is being reported downstream of other biases.
>Trump/MAGAs have been specifically emphasizing violence by "the left": ~84% of "Ideologically motivated extremist homicides"
You were the one that conflated "violence" and "murder" first, though I can see how you get there in context. Not all violence is murder.
It's pretty easy to draw a line that "the right" (defined very loosely) has committed more political *murder*- El Paso, Tree of Life, Emanuel AME make up most of that toll for the last 20 years.
Once you expand past murder into violence (assault, etc), it gets muddier and much more prone to selective reporting/charging.
I'm having a really hard time squaring "he was a good guy" with the consistent pattern of promoting falsehood, lies and hate speech documented on his Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk
I think the most likely true explanation is that he was just crazy. Delusional.
I often assume bad faith but his claims are so ... paranoid and weired and easy to doubt when one first encounters them, that I just can't imagine someone having the guts to speak them out while knowing they aren't true.
You respond to the bad things Kirk said (e.g. that Democrats are maggots, vermin, and swine) by saying in effect "he was a nice guy in private, he's said a lot of stuff and the Internet keeps a record of it forever".
I just hope you'll realize that the same could be said about many people right now saying things you don't like about Kirk, and the government is openly bragging about persecuting them.
With all due respect to your personal relationship, and I do sincerely not wish this on my worst enemy -- the flip side is that, at least in the minds of some, he, used his considerable talents and charisma in ways that were not for the most part positive. his dismissal of lbgt and trans people's rights to even existentially exist less be treated equally, was not a good thing at all. It was really bad in my opinion, and I don't feel I should be censored or canceled for saying that about somebody who I think was a net negative influence on our society.
>his dismissal of lbgt and trans people's rights to even existentially exist
I literally don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Please show me where Charlie Kirk demanded that LGBT people be rounded up and placed in concentration camps.
If you approvingly quote the Bible verse about how gay people should be stoned to death, I don't think you actually want gay people in your movement.
(There's enough wiggle room in Kirk's statements to argue that he didn't *literally* want gay people to be murdered, but if you want gay people to feel welcome in your movement then you shouldn't even be gesturing in the direction of murder.)
I never said Charlie Kirk literally said "we should stone gay people." In fact, in my parenthetical I said exactly the opposite.
What he did say was that the verse in question "affirms God's perfect law in sexual matters." So as I said, he quoted it approvingly. He did not say "you shouldn't be resting your arguments on single verses because there are lots of single verses that command bad things, like stoning gay people," he thinks it should be relevant to Christian practice in some way.
Since you apparently didn't read it, I'll say it again: There is enough wiggle room to say that he wasn't literally saying to kill gay people. But there is no plausible interpretation where that statement is *friendly* to gay people.
Apparently you have access to this full quote and the context, would you like to post it here rather than drip-feeding extra bits of context when challenged?
I don't know why I'm asking. I barely knew a thing about Charlie Kirk before he was murdered, I don't claim to be an expert on everything he ever said, and I don't want to wind up in a rhetorical corner where I have to defend everything he ever said or else admit that it's okay to murder him.
I don't even agree with everything *I've* ever said.
If someone murdered my boss, in order to prevent him from continuing to practice our joint profession, I'd probably be a bit reluctant to put my name out in public in the immediate aftermath. Not that it matters in my case, obviously.
Do we know anything specific about the shooter's intentions or goals? I haven't looked into it deeply but most of what I'm seen makes him sound more nihilistic, for the luls or for the notoriety than specifically to shut Kirk up.
I don't want to start drama by naming a bunch of specific people right now in case this gets highlighted, but Nick Fuentes had a pretty well-known feud with my late boss.
Oh, for the love of god! Kirk was on a genuine kill list, along with Elon Musk and Donald Trump (if these words don't ring a bell, it's not Israel) -- Donald Trump subsequently (after being removed from said kill list) sent materiel to this country.
You don't have to poke at Israel to find foreign influence. Some Countries have Publically Available Kill Lists (and it comes up in congressional testimony, when Republicans take exception at funding countries that put American politicians on their "kill list"). Charlie was on one of them.
Remember when Gavin Newsom said his son is a fan of Charlie Kirk? It made me wonder if actually the boy was really a fan of Tate, Fuentes, or maybe even Spencer or Hanania.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gavin-newsom-gives-props-conservatives-183151983.html
I hate to be the one to nitpick about Jeroboam, but no, I actually don't hate it. Jeroboam is described as a punishment for Solomon personally, not for the Israelites. Did you maybe mean Jehu? He is sort of described that way at one point
Well, I think all the commentary on here about the Charlie Kirk assassination has proven Chesterton's statement:
"Thus was accidentally discovered (like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim—that if an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing."
Depending on what numbers the Substack counter is showing at any second, there are between 1,400 and 1,600 comments here and we seem to be still going strong.
"If an editor can only make people angry enough, half the newspaper will be the editor's obituary."
Ezra Klein has an odd suggestion for the Democrats:
"And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now. And I do think a lot of what is happening in terms of the structure of the system itself is dangerous. I think that the hour is late in many ways. My view is that a lot of people who embrace alarm don’t embrace what I think obviously follows from that alarm, which is the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win."
"Taking political positions that’ll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn’t want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/opinion/interesting-times-ross-douthat-ezra-klein.html
Of all the issues they could moderate on, why would he pick what polling and election results is the Democrats' best issue? Kansas, Ohio, and Missouri all voted to legalize abortion. Sometimes Democratic talking heads realize that the average trucker isn't a fan of the pronoun stuff, overcorrect and wind up thinking he's a Ned Flanders-type fundamentalist Christian, which is not the case. There's also the pro-life movement, which wants Republican politicians to believe that there's this vast mass of people who vote Republican because of abortion but would otherwise be Democrats, who are always alluded to but never heard from since they barely exist IRL.
If the Democrats want to hire me as their expert on Middle America I'll do it for $600,000 and a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
> Of all the issues they could moderate on, why would he pick what polling and election results is the Democrats' best issue?
Well they don't have to change the policy of the party, just to run a few candidates with opposing views to signal that opposing views are welcome within the party. The Republican has some "pro-choice" voices, but the Democrats have no "pro-life" voices.
Really though it's just an example.
"Pro-life Democrat" means going back to the disowned party line about "safe, legal and rare" instead of "abortions for everyone! free! at any stage of pregnancy! yes we hate babies!" extreme fringe position.
Why Klein picked Kansas, Ohio and Missouri? Possibly because, as mentioned in passing in a post about Susan Collins in Maine on "Silver Bulletin", the Republican seat in Ohio is vulnerable:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/is-susan-collins-toast
"She’s the only Republican incumbent up for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024, which automatically puts her in the “most vulnerable Republican seats” category — a lonely group that also includes North Carolina’s open seat and Senator Jon Husted’s seat in Ohio."
So I think Klein may be advising "Instead of going full-bore and doubling down on the things that didn't win the last time, cool your jets a little and you can take these seats easy".
Don't talk about abortion, talk about what you will do for the local economy. I don't think Klein means "run pro-life Democrats in Ohio, Kansas and Missouri", but being more open to running candidates that are not 200% progressive-aligned might be a better bet for the hicks in the sticks states.
A post from way back in May from "Silver Bulletin":
https://www.natesilver.net/p/can-democrats-really-win-the-senate?utm_source=publication-search
"Friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Yglesias wrote recently that “Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority in 2026 is nearly zero unless they do something dramatically different.” Yglesias was making a point I largely agree with about candidate quality — that Democrats ought to nominate moderates who are good fits for red states — so I’m not going to rag on him too much. But the early forecasts put together by groups like the Cook Political Report also paint a difficult picture for Team Blue. Cook rates all but three GOP-held seats (Maine, North Carolina and Ohio) as “solid Republican”, implying that there’s really no pathway for Democrats for a Senate majority at all.
By contrast, the odds at the prediction market Kalshi give Democrats a 32 percent chance of winning the Senate next year. While you’d certainly rather be Republicans than Democrats, I happen to know a thing or two about how those one-in-three chances sometimes come through. That implies a competitive race, not the foregone conclusion that Cook assumes."
So Nate thinks (or at least thought in May) that the Democrats have a good chance, if they turn their support into actual votes and if they convince the right candidates to run.
>"Pro-life Democrat" means going back to the disowned party line about "safe, legal and rare"
Abortion being legal is not a "pro-life" position. Words have meanings.
"Some limits on abortion" *is* a pro-life stance so far as the Democrats are concerned.
Democrats should do research, not just rely on someone's opinion. Even the research is unreliable, but you could ask random 10000 people in each state which party they would vote for if Democrats changed this or that. It would be a great mistake to abandon some traditional value and then find out it didn't help at all. (Actually, there is a risk of a change in the opposite direction -- what if some people vote Dems only because they want abortion, but otherwise disagree? After the proposed change, Dems would lose even more voters.)
And now I am going to disagree with my first paragraph (which takes priority: you should do research instead of listening to even my opinion) and say that I think that Democrats should instead tone down the wokeness. It's not like the woke people will switch to vote Republicans, because even a moderate D position is closer to them than R position. So they would lose no one, and gain moderate voters who are generally pro-D, but tired of hearing that they suck because of the original sin of being born white or male or something like that.
The Dems don't need to change their core views, they just need to be more tolerant of those who agree with them 80-90%.
It's the normal political cycle. When you're losing, you tone down the fundamentalism and make your tent bigger. Then when you have power, you realise you don't need all those goddamn centrist heretics after all and you cast them out of your tent. The Democrats have spent years in cultural ascendancy, making war on the unbelievers in their own ranks, now it's the Republicans' turn to alienate everybody and the Democrats turn to play big tent politics.
I agree. I wonder how this look like in practice, telling the fanatics in your own ranks that they are going to be thrown under the bus in favor of big tent politics. I am sure they are not going to like it.
I am not familiar with Ezra Klein's politics, so maybe what I write here doesn't make sense, but I kinda suspect that he might be one of those in the risk of being thrown under the bus, and this article is a plead to sacrifice something else instead, even if doing so probably wouldn't actually help the Dems.
I think the idea is to run candidates who could win in those red states, instead of enforcing ideological conformity on all Dem politicians. I’m not sure pro-life is one of these issues but guns and immigration seem to be.
You know who thinks this is good advice? David French!
https://x.com/DavidAFrench/status/1969195892449087562
Few conservatives think of French as one of them, understandable since he's works for a liberal publication where he tells liberals they're right about anything, but maybe him giving the Dems such terrible advice proves he's been a deep-cover conservative all along!
I am not in touch with his current state, but David French 2 years ago was definitely more anti-abortion than partisan Republican. Democrats running anti-abortion candidates would be a pure win for him and, I suspect, he would completely switch parties and vote straight D if the two parties swapped abortion positions.
In other words, I see this more as advocating for his preferred policy position, rather than sincere or poisoned-chalice strategic advice.
"Pro-life" in this context does not mean "no abortion at all ever" but more in line with the majority position of the American population, which seems to be "yes abortion, but with definite limits".
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
"Views on abortion, 1995-2024
While public support for legal abortion has fluctuated somewhat in two decades of polling, it has remained relatively stable over the past several years. Currently, 63% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% say it should be illegal in all or most cases."
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/13/broad-public-support-for-legal-abortion-persists-2-years-after-dobbs/
"As in the past, relatively few Americans (25%) say abortion should be legal in all cases, while even fewer (8%) say it should be illegal in all cases. About two-thirds of Americans do not take an absolutist view: 38% say it should be legal in most cases, and 28% say it should be illegal in most cases."
So broadly, popular support for the rape/incest/life of the mother trifecta, popular support for medication abortion (upper limit there seems to be 12 weeks' gestation), after that limits on surgical abortion depending on gestational age and reason for abortion.
"Partisanship and ideology
Democrats (85%) are about twice as likely as Republicans (41%) to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
But while more conservative Republicans say abortion should be illegal (76%) than legal (27%), the reverse is true for moderate and liberal Republicans (67% say legal, 31% say illegal).
By comparison, a clear majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (76%) say abortion should be legal, with liberal Democrats (96%) overwhelmingly saying this."
So if the Democrats ran candidates with the "safe, legal and rare" position (emphasis on the "rare") they could peel off some of the moderate Republicans.
With the increasingly aggressive Russia violating NATO airspace, now not just with drones but also with warplanes, why don't we (as in NATO) just shoot them down (not just the drones, but the planes)? It seems that would stop these provocations. Maybe a warning shot first and if the plane doesn't turn around immediately then just send everything after it to down it. If they come again in a few months then just shoot without warning.
I don't think there is any risk of esalation, actually shooting a couple of Russian airplanes over NATO airspace down would probably de-escalate the situation quickly. Russia has nothing to gain by pushing further if met with firm resistance.
Am I missing something?
How long are these planes violating NATO airspace, and how long does it take to launch a response?
I wouldn't be surprised if they're just skimming the border, entering NATO airspace for long enough to be provocative but not long enough that even if you launched a SAM then you could be confident the SAM wouldn't hit them in Russia.
That's a good point. Hard to say. But Estonia is tiny and a supersonic plane can probably cross the entire country in less than 30 minutes. It is hard to keep close to the border when the country is this small.
Would it be a problem if the rocket actually hit the plane back in Russia? If it is launched when the target is in NATO airspace it seems fair game.
Until Russia claims that the jet was in their airspace all along, and uses it as a pretext to... do whatever.
> Russia is not trying to start world war III. Ukraine is, in that if they don't get World War III, the leadership will die.
I agree with the first part -- Russia would prefer a sequence of small wars against smaller countries, gaining one piece of territory at a time. It was a mistake to expect that "the rest of Ukraine" is a sufficiently small territory they could swallow at once, and they probably regret making that mistake now. (I guess that's what you get when you trust the numerologists that 22-02-2022 has magical properties.)
The second part is just silly; there are many ways for the Ukrainian leadership to survive, such as winning the war, accepting the loss of some territories, or even losing the war and moving to another country.
.
By the way, I noticed that you have over 100 comments in this Open Thread, could your perhaps trade some quantity for quality? You still haven't answered on the conspiracy theory that you shared in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-399/comment/157182333 so maybe please don't start new conspiracy theories before resolving the older ones?
Please don't respond with whataboutism. Fact is Russia keeps violating NATO airspace. It is a hostile power we are in a new cold war with, so such a (repeated!) violation should be met with lethal force. This is signalling and setting boundaries and it has to be clear - those planes should have been destroyed. I am not sure why you bring Ukraine into this.
As for the drones, I don't believe the story about any GPS (or whatever the Russian version is called) malfunction, especially when we see manned aircraft do the same. But even if it is true it doesn't matter. Fact is, those were military aircraft owned by a hostile power which entered NATO airspace and said power made no attempt to warn NATO or de-escalate the situation, only came up with excuses later.
Of course the drones were Russia's fault. They launched them, just like they invaded Ukraine.
>Ukraine is trying to start ww3
Please.
Citation very much needed on all of this. Russian hardware can malfunction perfectly well due to shoddy Russian manufacturing or careless Russian operation, all of which would be caused by Russia. Your certainty that it was an unspecified Not Russia that is responsible for all of this, seems unwarranted.
Thought Experiment: The Year is 2031, and God-Emperor Trump has just taken his last breaths in a hospital. Having never named a successor, he was pressed on his deathbed to whom should go his U.S. empire, to which he replied "to the strongest..."
After several years of realignment and intermittent fighting, we now have five post-U.S. Diodachi, each made up of some continuous chunk of territory in the lower 48 (we'll ignore Hawaii, Alaska and the various islands).
Which former U.S. States belong to which of the successors, and what are there names? (Borders don't have to fall exactly along state lines, as long as they make some sort of sense.)
What happens to the South in this scenario? Absorbed into Greater Texas? I don't see it.
I can imagine Texas going it alone, they might expand to the north and west but not to the east, since capturing New Orleans or Atlanta would be a cultural threat to their essential Texasness.
That lineup also fits noneconomic factors reasonably well at broad landscape scale.
There are inherent headaches. "West Coast" would fight pretty strongly to retain the Central Valley of CA and central parts of OR and WA; some others would have similar things to try to cling to for various cultural and/or economic reasons. Various clusters of one cultural color that are fully surrounded by the opposite -- Austin TX, Asheville NC, southwestern WA, etc. -- would be problems.
And that's not even considering the _massive_ headache of US federal military installations/assets to divvy up. So it would all get messy for sure -- a civil national divorce for the US is very hard to picture in real life. This ain't, at all, gonna be as clean as Slovakia and the Czech Republic splitting up.
With all those familiar objections noted, your short list is probably about as practical as is imaginable. Possible adjustments would include New England and the Atlantic-coast SE [Florida/Georgia/SC/NC] each splitting off as their own new polity, maybe even relatively cordially regarding their new neighbors. And subsequently both the NE and Great Lakes polities would at least kick the tires on becoming part of Canada.
I understand the reasons West Coast would want those areas; didn't suggest that would be cultural. Those reasons will be strong enough for them to fight hard over it, is the point.
I'm not sure I had properly distinguished Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon in my head as separate people until today.
You're not the only one.
The simulation only has a limited number of unique character concepts, it has to reuse them here and there.
> Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer's, corrupt, tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.
- Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk sure doesn't speak well. After you say "dementia-filled," "Alzheimer's" is redundant. But on the other hand, "dementia-filled" is an adjective, so can be meaningfully paired with the word "tyrant." To call someone an "Alzheimer's tyrant" is kind of like calling them a "diarrhea athlete." OK, hon, we get what you mean but . . . Moving on, how does being "honestly" put in prison differ from suffering the same fate, but *dishonestly*? And if so is there an intermediate zone where people suffer fibby imprisonment?
Kirk doesn't sound like he has Alzheimer's, though. He sounds dumb.
Grammar-nazis are still nazis. You should be deplatformed!! 😤😤
Of course it sounds dumb when parsed as serious discourse. But in its context, which was a talk show, it was a performative, aggressively-delivered rant. And that's what Charlie specialized in. That's the "style of discourse" he mainstreamed on college campuses.
He was doing good with the first part of that statement.
"dementia-filled Alzheimer's" (not to mention the other adjectives) would better apply to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Trump and Biden have fast a double-standard for a decade, given that both Trump's supporters and detractors *expect* him to talk in a tangential pattern with spontaneously-created "facts" and numerous slurred-or-incorrect words
>both Trump's supporters and detractors *expect* him to talk in a tangential pattern with spontaneously-created "facts" and numerous slurred-or-incorrect words
I guess Biden's supporters saw it happening for years but never came to expect it until that debate. Odd.
Yes, as a former Biden supporter, I was fooled as well.
But there's at least a giant-gaping reason: he had a life-long stutter. *I also* had a stutter for years. And sometimes it comes back and ruins an interaction. People think I'm struggling to "think". That can't be further from the truth.
So yes, in my opinion, Biden's stutter made him appear stupid back when he was smart... and (for those who actually like him)... made him appear "merely stressed" when he was declining.
But caveat, I still don't think his symptoms/deterioration are anything close to Trump's, even during the debate. At that "debate", Trump and Biden faced orders of magnitude different levels of difficulty. Biden had to state clear facts, as best he could remember, about his positions, while also addressing every falsehood coming from Trump's mouth. All Trump had to do was say things, true or not. (which is literally all that a dementia-addled person *needs* to do)
Mentally, it was the equivalent of Biden juggling balls and bowling-pins while all Trump had to do was throw more ridiculous bowling pins.
Factually, Biden still won.
Is it true?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?
1) and 3) are obviously yes and no respectively.
Unfortunately, right now 2) is a pretty clear and unambiguous "yes" too, because we're in the midst of a massive and unprecedented wave of illegal abuse of state power to silence critics of Kirk and of the administration more broadly, and we need to push back against it.
Up until Kirk, I've been a pretty firm believer in "de mortuis nil nisi bonum"; the reason I've reluctantly had to compromise on that in this particular case is the extent to which his murder is being weaponised for evil.
Statements about people who are neither Charlie Kirk nor conspicuous supporters or opponents of Charlie Kirk, are not necessary to the discussion about Charlie Kirk or the meta-discussion about discussion of Charlie Kirk.
Whataboutism is rarely necessary, and this particular case seems extremely strained.
The better libertarian appeal, I think, is to remind everyone that there are things that are both worth avoiding, and worth opposing making into a government ban.
I have seen the argument for opposing a government ban by consciously doing the thing banned, and it often strikes me as cutting one's own nose off to spite one's face. It often doesn't even get the desired message across.
The thing I am questioning is posting this at top level with no context whatsoever. I do agree that as a reply to someone claiming Kirk was a saint, it would be quite appropriate; but as it is, we have perhaps more heat than light. This isn't Xitter.
true? yes https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-tanehisi-coates
https://x.com/legionmint/status/1968097283809193990?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1968097283809193990%7Ctwgr%5E19b73c73fc752a60f744b421ab9626a1e7a2cbda%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snopes.com%2Ffact-check%2Fcharlie-kirk-biden-death-penalty%2F
necessary? in the service of transparency about the late Charlie Kirk's record and rhetoric? yes
kind? it was very unkind (and hateful) (and potentially violence-encouraging) for Charlie Kirk to say that
Yes, it’s true. The the quote is from The Charlie Kirk Show, Salem Radio Network, July 24, 2023.
I was able to find a clip from the show that provides a bit of context. It starts with an excerpt from a speech Harris gave on July 21 where she advocates that children should be taught to engage in critical thinking and make up their own minds. Kirk says this shows that “Kammy” would be easy to beat, even easier than Biden. The statement about Biden is basically an aside indicating that he doesn’t like Biden either.
Bottom line: the quote is accurate and more context doesn’t help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mxqQb1XzNM
My God, he actually said "and/or" in a spoken address. What the hell was wrong with him.
The problem with pretending to be stupid that the "kind" part of the true-necessary-kind triad was applying to Kirk's speech, not yours, was that you already answered the other two as applying your speech, not Kirk's.
You have to stay in character.
thanks for pointing out my deliberate turn and re-turn-ing it as a mistake. very clever.
> "People are voting for someone who is sundowning and clearly demented"
I take it you don't mean Trump; but here we all sadly are.
You have to add "in Minecraft" to the end of the threat.
For a moment away from all the doom and gloom - if you need a lawyer, hire this guy's representative? 😁
https://www.independent.ie/regionals/kerry/news/courts/judge-dismisses-drink-driving-charge-against-kerry-driver-asleep-in-a-car-stuck-in-a-hedge/a876927494.html
"Judge dismisses drink driving charge against Kerry driver asleep in a car stuck in a hedge
Gardaí allege mid Kerry defendant first tried to get into a car that was not his own
An intoxicated man found asleep in a car that had crashed in a hedge in rural Kerry had his drink driving charge dismissed as gardaí could not prove he had driven the car.
...Gardaí testified that when they arrived at the scene, they found Mr O’Connor asleep in the car, which was ‘in the hedge at more or less a 45 degree angle’.
The court heard that Mr O’Connor was unsteady on his feet, his eyes glazed and his speech slurred. Garda Dennehy said she could smell alcohol on his breath.
...Mr Ahern further made his case.
“The State can’t prove he got there in his own car, judge. It could have been there for hours and he could have returned to the car. We can’t join those dots, judge. It could have been in the ditch all along.”
Judge King considered this evidence.
“I could say on the balance of probabilities, he drove the car from A to B. But could I say it beyond a reasonable doubt? We’ve no eyewitnesses who saw him driving.”
“But you do have to prove that he was driving,” Mr Ahern replied. “You have no evidence of him driving, all you have is him asleep at the wheel of the car.”
The charge for drunk driving was subsequently dismissed."
So to recap: drunk guy was found trying to get into a car not his own at quarter to five in the morning. Later, the guards were called out at six o'clock to a car stuck in a hedge. They found the car crashed into the hedge, and my man asleep inside the car. He was visibly drunk and a breathalyser test showed him to be three times the legal limit for blood alcohol.
But his lawyer, who plainly was worth every penny of his fee (if the defendant was even paying him and not getting free legal aid), managed to talk the judge into "but you can't *prove* he drove the car there". Brilliant! Though I don't know about letting a guy go free to (possibly) get drunk and crash cars again.
An Irishman leaves the pub one evening and climbs aboard his cart and horse. There is an ordinance in the village prohibiting operating a Horse and cart if you've been drinking. As the horse and cart make its way down the lane the Irishman sees a Guard up ahead. He climbs down from the cart and grabs hold of the tail end of it, and walks along with it. The horse knows perfectly well how to get home and continues as if nothing has changed. As the horse and cart reaches him,, the Guard shouts out, "You had a few there Seamus?"
Seamus jerks his thumb toward the horse and says "You better ask him. He's driving."
Worthy of Hugh Mussingbird-Mussingbird. I believe UK law is "drunk in charge of a car" so you don't have to be driving as such. That's puritanism for you.
Now that I think of it, when the guards found him, he *wasn't* drunk-driving. He was sound asleep in a car that was safely off the road! 😁
You can’t prove that even if he was driving, the hedge didn’t reach out and grab him like the Whomping Willow. You didn’t see it.
Or that the fairies didn't whisk him up and put him into the driver's seat after the car had crashed. No eyewitnesses at all to say what did happen!
Could anyone here recommend a great writing coach for bloggers who are trying to get better at the craft? And could use human coaching and supervision to get their writing to be cleaner and more compelling and engaging? Punchier. To the point I really love Scott's writing and I have read his articles on the subject before, but it feels like there's only so much I can do without him going DIY myself without a little external help.
You might be interested in: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7axYBeo7ai4YozbGa/halfhaven-virtual-blogger-camp
That's a great pointer, thanks so much. Hanging at Lighthaven for a month with Scott & co sound fantastic, but I can't make that a priority right now, but something that gets close without that type of time commitment is right up my alley. Appreciate you looping back to this weeks later.
There is https://www.inkhaven.blog/ -- a blogging training/marathon in November, and Scott is one of the coaches. I hope that some people who get there will publish the advice they got -- they have to write one article each day during November, and going meta seems like a natural choice if you run out of ideas.
I think someone will probably organize an online equivalent of the same, a group of people who commit to writing one blog each day during November. If that happens, I will try to mention it in an Open Thread, unless I forget.
There is some writing advice online, including from Scott:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/21/the-art-of-writing-randian-monologues/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not-sounding-like-an-evil-robot/
https://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
After having read that, I suspect the most important part is: write a lot. Your first 100 articles will probably suck anyway, each one slightly less than the previous ones, so get them out of the way as soon as possible.
Maybe some psychological advice, but that would depend on what your problem is; different people have different problems. For example, some people worry about writing a bad article, so they might benefit from advice: "you don't have to publish everything you write; write it regardless, sleep on it, then decide the next day whether you click the publish button". Or maybe: "don't worry about the article size; if it is short, maybe you will get some more ideas as you write it, so at the end it will be long enough; and if it remains very short, maybe just archive it, and later post a collection of such short articles as one article; on the other hand, if it gets too long, find a subset that makes sense separately, and publish that, and later maybe publish the rest".
But really, the greatest mistake is not writing enough. Check my blog: six articles in four years, that is pathetic. One mistake I made was choosing a topic in advance, instead of just writing whatever comes to my mind.
I suspect that many good articles start as a reaction to something. If you just sit in an empty room and try to come up with an idea, often nothing happens. But if you read other people's texts, often you get provoked to write a response. Maybe take that response later, and expand it to a standalone article.
A moderate proposal:
Could we please change the rules so that in even-numbered Open Threads people can only talk about topics other than Charlie Kirk? In odd-numbered Open Threads it would be still okay to talk about anything.
(If this seems unfair, then let's also ban talking about Melissa Hortman in the even-numbered Open Threads to keep it fair and balanced, but it probably won't make much of a difference.)
If it weren't such an unacceptable assault on the already much put-upon and beleaguered 1st Amendment, I wish there could just be a 3-4 week ban on talking about Charlie Kirk nationwide, in any form of social or print media, excepting short, terse sentences explaining the bare-bones agreed upon facts of the events and highly important subsequent developments.
Not just because of the feeling that half of the nation next door is arming up to kill the other half, a conflict whose blast radius might well include two or three continents. Not even because some conservative influencer literally called it "The American Reichstag Fire" and literally nobody anywhere seemed to consider that a wake-up call or even a particularly surprising phrasing. All of that is distressing, alarming and many other similar gerunds. But that's not even my main beef.
My main beef is that literally everywhere you see discussions about the shooter, everybody, from both sides clearly have NO interest in anything like actually learning the facts, or understanding the context, or considering that maybe an isolated, dramatic event caused by a nutjob with a rifle need not actually be a weather-vane moment in and of itself[1]. Instead they are just interested in shouting at each other while each and every one of them talking. Out. Their. Asses. And if this *is* the moment that starts the fire that burns down the world, it will be really, really embarrassing to die to something this bloody stupid.
[1] History has contained many nutjobs with rifles, and some with pistols. They are more common in political and media environments like this one. But it's still correct to treat them as rare background events, black swans that show up out of nowhere. They're really, really not worth starting an insurgency or a riot or a World War over.
>My main beef is that literally everywhere you see discussions about the shooter, everybody, from both sides clearly have NO interest in anything like actually learning the facts, or understanding the context, or considering . . .
Your post is itself an example of the kind of bad take on the sitution you are complaining about. First you say everybody else's thoughts are crap, then you post your own views.
And you're not right that everybody but you is spewing crap. Many people posting on the last open thread showed interest in learning the facts, or posted info about things such as sites the shooter had spent a lot of time on, or updates about some detail. There were also thoughtful posts about how one reacts, how to stay sane and fairminded, etc. I myself spent several hours online researching first what the statistics Kirk had quoted over the years regarding gun use, then the accuracy of them. And in my exchanges outside of this group I have been able to set a few people straight about various facts such as the engravings on the bullet shells.
As for your second point, I have been wondering myself how seriously to take the idea that we are now halfway down the slippery slope to shooters, shooters everywhere. I don't have any idea for how frequently assassinations and similar happen, and the different ways things play out afterwards and how likely each is. I'm sure somebody has studied it. Anybody here know anything about that?
" First you say everybody else's thoughts are crap, then you post your own views."
My own views that...what? I'm not making any factual claims about the situation itself. I'm happy to wait for the story to develop. Mostly I'm quite frustrated that people are using every twist and wrinkle of this story to finger-point, and only engage with it on that level. Probably that's what I get for spending too much time on Facebook after a major political event though.
"Trudeau decided to employ martial law and thieve money from citizens without due recourse (by leaning on the banking system)."
And lo and behold, that was his last term as PM. I was not sorry to see him go. I particularly disliked that incident.
I also thought it was bad, despite being otherwise completely unsympathetic to the truck "protestors".
Hard same. Their cause was bad, their protest was bad, and I wasn't sorry to see them gone. But none of that was worth the government getting to test out and normalize that shiny new tool in its toolbox of ways to repress its citizens.
The main problem is that moderation only kicks in like once every three months, so for practical purposes there will never be rules.
I feel like that rule is going to become irrelevant really quickly. It won't be that long until the news cycle moves onto the next inevitable incident. Not that anything productive will come of discussing that either.
Instead of Charlie Kirk specifically, you could make it "any active shooter incident less than two weeks old", or some other small number of weeks.
Also gives the police a bit of time to do their work so we have more hard facts and less people just making things up.
If you do have access to privileged information via personal contacts, you probably shouldn't spread it to randoms on the internet.
> "security clearance"
I suspect "I didn't think anyone would /believe/ me" won't hold much water at the court martial.
Anyway, the traditional place for that sort of thing is the War Thunder forums, not here.
I would be fine with that, also with returning to having some no culture war topics threads.
> no culture war topics threads
I say, steady on there. What would we even talk about?
Updates from the insanity that is the federal bureaucracy.
So there was this community that was getting a ton of federal money for a problem the federal government caused.
Think a couple billion. Out of a different pile of federal money they were also getting a few million for the same problem.
So:
A) Which one do you think the community cares about and is acted on quickly?
B) The federal government is mad that they aren't acting quickly enough on the smaller pile of money.
C) I am hired to help them.
The paperwork required for accessing the smaller pile of money is nearly as large as the bigger pile of money. And in particular has two very long "forms" X and Y (think hundred page long reports requiring a bunch of research/meetings etc.) that need to be submitted.
I help the community complete X and submit it. There is some fighting with their federal minder over the content of the submission, and then the government minder says "you know why don't they do shorter form Q instead of X". Keep in mind X is a hundred of pages of forms/meetings/etc. they have already completed at this point.
I talk to the higher ups because I don't think the minder is right this is an acceptable substitute. Minder's bosses in DC say minder knows what she is doing, just help the community get Q and Y in and everything will be fine.
So we complete Q and Y and submit them...
and the minder rejects Y because they never completed X! A form this same person have for months been explicitly telling them they don't have to do...
Depending on how much research and who needs to be in how many meetings, it seems like they could easily wind up spending five or six figures just generating the reports.
Oh for sure it is deep into 5 figures, probably near 6.
And this is why I'm very not impressed when government bureaucrats complain that if any money is cut they won't be able to do their jobs. Those forms and the idiocy aren't directly required by Congress -- that's their job-preserving implementation at fault. They made their bed, and they can change it.
Forms exist for a reason.
From an implementation point of view, the ideal way to do these things would be to hand some employee a cheque for a billion dollars and tell them to spend it in whatever way seems appropriate. In practice, that's a recipe for massive waste and corruption. There needs to be some kind of paper trail, justification, diffusion of responsibility to ensure that money is being spent somewhat responsibly, because otherwise it tends to disappear into the pockets of whoever is in charge of spending it.
That's not to argue that any specific implementation is optimal,but we should at least be aware of the problem we are trying to solve.
Forms and record-keeping are very necessary, and it does help to have a paper trail when someone is trying to game the system.
But a lot of stupid changes come from the top-down and then get rolled back because enough people yell about how stupid they are. Recently where I work, and not going into too much detail because I'm not allowed, we use personal identifying information about people and *immediately* that is entered on the online system, the paper is supposed to go into the shredder. No letting it sit on the desk, enter the data and then shred.
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago another body issued an instruction that all this information was to be kept on file (physical paper file) and left out in the office so it could be accessed as needed (e.g. during an inspection). "But this breaches about six directives on not doing this", we pointed out. "Nah, yeah, it's okay, do it", was the response.
Come forward a couple of weeks and *now* the new directive is "Okay, you don't have to have a physical file lying about" which is in line with all the directives we operate under about NO PERSONAL DATA ACCESSBLE BY UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL and so forth. Presumably, and this is my cynical take on it, because every body and organisation in the country in the same field contacted the directive-issuing body to yell about YOU DO REALISE THIS VIOLATES ABOUT SIX REGULATIONS and WILL YOU TAKE THE LEGAL RESPONSIBILTY OF INSTRUCTING US TO DO THIS, SO WHEN THE INEVITABLE LAWSUITS HAPPEN, THE BUCK STOPS ON YOUR DESK?
That must have been somebody trying to justify their salary by coming up with a new idea as to what paperwork has to be on hand, and plainly not reading the instructions beforehand.
Now we've got another "I have to do something to prove I'm earning my pay" innovation by a new page being added into the usual forms that applicants have to fill out which just makes more bumf.
Sure...but that's not what current forms do at all. In fact, they do just the opposite--they *obfuscate* massive waste and corruption and allow the people involved to shrug off all complaints with exactly what you (and other defenders of bureaucracy run wild) are doing. "Process was followed. You can't blame us, we did what process required."
Process exists to serve people, not the reverse. And too often, process (of which forms are one example) is an excuse to do anything but your job. Because shuffling paper around and denying things for trivial/assinine reasons is much easier and less risky (for the individual) than actually doing their job.
Personally, I believe two things about federal bureaucracy:
1. It's trying to do *way* too much in general. This means that you inevitably end up with huge stacks of things accreted over time, each with jealous defenders (who generally happen to be receiving the benefits of those things OR have specialized in greasing the right palms/following the right process). So nothing can ever get cut outside of a wholesale "burn it all down" crisis.
2. If you can't (a) hire the right people, (b) trust them to act correctly with minimal process, and (c) easily fire them if they *didn't* act correctly...then you have a broken system that no amount of process can fix or even partially ameliorate. No amount of forms can keep people honest, because it's just paper. Only *people* can help keep others honest. The bureaucracy would be a lot better if it were small enough to be run with more discretion AND more accountability. Yes, that means no civil service protections beyond the simplest--civil service jobs (yes, including cops and politicians) should be held to stringent standards. One whiff of corruption, self-dealing, or other malfeasance (including non-feasance) and you're out on your ear and/or prosecuted.
> If you can't (a) hire the right people, (b) trust them to act correctly with minimal process, and (c) easily fire them if they *didn't* act correctly...
Pick two.
> then you have a broken system
Debatable, but whatever your view on that, you /also/ have an ordinary unexceptional system built and populated by human mortals just like all the others.
Things that are obvious to one person are not at all obvious to another, you cannot predict ahead of time what will or will not be obvious, and knowing more about a subject makes it harder, not easier, to communicate with people lacking the exact same hyperspecialisation.
"Common sense" isn't common, and large numbers of people would lack it even if, to any significant extent, it was. I've posted the link before, but I like https://novehiclesinthepark.com/ as a practical example perhaps a little too much: every time I post it and people discuss, inevitably people strongly feel the correct answers are obvious common sense, while equally strongly disagreeing about what the correct answers actually are.
This is why we have have laws, rules, warning signs, safety rails on industrial equipment etc etc. Writing down what you think of as obvious common sense in ways that other humans won't misinterpret / misunderstand is, in fact, such a hard problem that we literally have entire multiple professions dedicated to such tasks.
Forms exist for a reason, but some of those reasons are bad.
Less glibly: the cost of filing a proper form is sometimes a significant fraction of the cost of the project the form is attached to. If the form is for a project containing multiple sub-projects, each of which requiring forms of their own, then the total cost of forms may very well exceed the cost of the non-form component of the project.
Back to more glib: the federal government will easily spend $10000 making a $5000 decision.
I'm reminded of an exchange between Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart about the relation between doing a thing and justifying doing it. You might have run across it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo It is not the only incident I've seen, but it's certainly the most popularly known, to date.
Incidents like this make me seriously consider whether some government initiatives might be served better by just trusting the implementors and skipping all the forms, and running the real risk that said implementors will take the money for the non-form project, pocket it, and disappear. (Then again, my libertarian side says "just let whoever wants this thing done, pay for it themselves, pooling with whomever agrees, and they get the profit therefrom, and don't involve the government at all beyond providing courts for fraud suits if they arise".)
Why do you think that requiring forms helps preserve jobs? It’s only because Congress writes legislation in such a risk averse way that tries to deny any sort of agency to the offices doing these things, so the offices require applicants to fill out huge amounts of paperwork to prove that they’re doing what Congress asked.
I don't think that forms preserve jobs or are required by congress. They're a feature of public bodies fairly generally. Government agencies are risk averse, and asking applicants to fill endless forms is the default way of covering ass. It has low risk of blowback, and at worst imposes costs on the applicants (who the agency workers very likely view in an adversarial way).
I've recently started working in a state agency in my country and have heard a few times that 'no one knows what the purpose of this form is, or when it's required so the default is we always fill it and file it away'. Part of my job is to rationalise some of these processes, if possible.
Yes, that is my impression.
Or to put it more simply, it's as Oscar Wilde quipped a long time ago:
> The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Not really. In fact, it's exactly the other way around -- Congress has basically given *most* agency to the agencies.
Very little of the paperwork is actually required, except by the agencies own interpretation of legislative requirements. Let's take 42 U.S. Code §1436a Restriction on use of assisted housing by non-resident aliens (chosen fairly arbitrarily).
Subsection a lays out a few fairly simple criteria by which the Secretary (meaning HHS itself) can make financial assistance available to aliens:
1. They must be a resident of the US
2. lawfully present (as defined by a set of criteria)
Total paperwork required: *at most* a set of checkboxes and a document check.
Subsection b defines financial aid. No paperwork here.
Subsection c defines policies around preservation of families (ie restricting termination of aid once given under certain circumstances). This requires work by the agency...but not volumes of paperwork. It also denies students and non-residents.
Subsection d lays out the (very simple) verification requirements--a declaration by the applicant and one piece of documentation (defined by the Secretary!)
Total...maybe 1 page of stuff and a document (passport, birth certificate, or immigration paperwork, things that everyone should already have).
In reality, the Section 8 paperwork (of which this is the salient regulation) is...voluminous. Why? Because bureaucrats have been busy-beavering for decades. Every "fault" or "mistake" means a new set of regulations (not legislation), so now we have patches layered on patches on patches, most of which just don't mean anything anymore.
And this preserves the jobs of the bureaucrats because they get to make ever-expanding rules, which have to be interpreted and managed (badly) by...the bureaucracy.
"Every "fault" or "mistake" means a new set of regulations (not legislation), so now we have patches layered on patches on patches, most of which just don't mean anything anymore."
That's precisely it. Everyone is scared to do anything that might trigger a lawsuit, so they follow precedent. It's up to the legislature to scrap old regulations and just bring in a new bill or act to cover the current situation, but good luck with that.
Apart from "someone would have qualified under the old system but not under the new system, so an ambulance chaser lawyer is going to represent them in a court case about discrimination", there probably are legacy programmes and schemes running, and if the new regulations affect them, then there will be blue murder and the political opposition is going to take this gift you handed them on a platter and run with it ("heartless bureaucrats deprive poor helpless people in need of their basic rights!")
So you end up with, as you say, patches on patches on patches, often contradicting one another.
Does anyone know of an open source or established framework/standard for agent to agent AI communication? Looking for any materials anyone might suggest in that space. Thanks!
GibberLink - https://www.gbrl.ai/
There's the A2A Protocol: a2a-protocol.org. It's fairly new, but has enough backing to plausibly become the standard.
Thank you! My tin foil hat says Google shan’t be trusted in this space but a great place for me to start, appreciate the link. No idea how I didn’t fall upon it before…
Yeah, that is a little surprising since you had all the right terms in your comment. My comment before I edited it originally assumed you'd seen this one and were asking about alternatives because you found it unsatisfactory in some way.
I'm not an economist, and have no policy sway. But I think the Fed ought to hold rates, rather than cut them today.
Inflation is still above target, not dropping very fast (slight rise in September), and tariffs will without doubt cause inflationary pressure. We need some lead time on cutting rates to head off an economic downturn, but it seems premature so far.
Everyone expects the Fed to lower rates .25%. Perhaps they will lower rates .5%. I hope not, for if they do, I believe it would be a signal that the executive office has sway over the Fed's decisions, which would be an awful precedent.
I suspect we will be having an economic downturn over the next couple months whether or not we have a rates cut, for though rates will have some impact on it, it wouldn't be the only, or even largest, thing determining the economic state.
The case for lowering rates is that tariff-induced inflation is likely to be transitory. (Ironically, the administration has been arguing AGAINST this).
No, an economic downturn isn't a good idea. Why would anyone think it is?
The only people I can think of who would want it is those with bearish positions in the capital markets, and usually those people are using such positions as hedges rather than placing bets.
If a company allows itself to become a zombie, then it has fundamental management problems that temporarily alleviating the debt burden slightly won't fix. There are good reasons to take on debt, but no good reasons to take on crippling debt.
EDIT: I thought of an additional class who might want an economic downturn: the opposing political party of whoever is in the White House. It would purely be for selfish reasons, and may help their people get elected, but is still bad for the country as a whole.
I think an economic downturn would be precisely the thing the current administration would enjoy because it would increase their powers of emergency, etc. Nothing like a few good riots about economic issues to give them justification. Yes I am a cynic sometimes. But I wouldn’t put it past them because anyone with a brain and some knowledge of economics knows that what is going on is going to end badly.
I have to say that both administrations used emergency powers, both probably not strictly properly. It is possible who was worse is a matter of opinion.
https://xkcd.com/2112/
It was actually Trump who declared an emergency at the beginning of Covid and it carried over into Biden‘s term. Trump has since declared more than one emergency and they are all still active.
I think Greenspan followed logic like this and it lead to the GFC
If I understand you, you are saying Greenspan prevented economic downturns, and thus caused the 2008 downturn?
Has everyone forgotten the "irrational exuberance" of 1996 that everyone ignored until the dot com bubble inevitably burst?
This is the guy who was asked in 1995 concerning whether he would raise interest rates, "if I may be bold enough to ask, will you or won't you and if not, why not, and if so, why." His answer was: "Yes and no. (Laughter) Let me put it this way, I spend a substantial amount of my time in endeavoring to fend off questions and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear. (Laughter and applause) What I have learned at the Federal Reserve is a new language which is called Fed Speak. Here we learn to mumble with great incoherence and when confronted with a question like that Martin, that I get my little lexicon out very quickly, and read how to answer your question, so I hope I didn’t answer it. (Laughter) I am sure you will ask an equivalent again."
From https://www.econclubny.org/documents/10184/109144/1995GreenspanTranscript.pdf
I think Greenspan is the best Fed Chairman I have witnessed in action, with perhaps Yellen a pretty distant second. Recall he retired in 2006, so another Fed Chairman, specifically Bernanke.
When he was appointed, I knew almost nothing about him, and that didn't increase much. I vaguely recall he was Greenspan's protege, as it were, but he certainly was no Greenspan.
Besides, what I, or anyone else in the general public, thought of him was irrelevant, as it was an appointed position, and public opinion has no sway over appointing the Fed Chairman, nor in keeping the chairman in his position.
One other category that think a downturn is "good" is those who think some form of excess/imbalance has developed in the economy which (1) will get squeezed out with minimal/moderate pain during a contraction but (2) would result in a more severe problem (crisis) if allowed to continue. This is one school of interpretation linking the dotcom bubble to the global financial crisis, with soft Fed policy (among other policy errors) connecting the two and exacerbating the latter. Japan's lost decades are another case study in this theme.
This is sometimes described as a preference for harsh medicine. An obvious criticism is that it is hard to know what dose medicine is too harsh and causes more suffering than it avoids.
With respect to a political party gunning for a downturn, I actually think the timing for a near-term contraction would likely favor the incumbents because there's enough time ahead of 2026 (let alone 2028) to get a recovery at that point. To be clear, I am not claiming that this is an intentional strategy currently being implemented.
I agree; my list of examples was not exhaustive.
In general, strong price performance from assets that do not generate positive cash flows is a signal of excessively easy policy. In this case, seems pretty clear.
""real companies doing Real Business." (aka creating new things)"
If you only mean new products, I think Real Business should also include reliably making useful old things.
I think there are good reasons for Wall Street to be pro-growth, provided it remembers why that's good and doesn't grow in ways that defeat the purpose. But that's probably worth an entire thread of its own.
"frees up money to be allocated"
I'm sorry, but that's not how money works. If your company owes $1B and can barely service the annual $100M in interest, and then goes bankrupt, the bank gets perhaps $300M back of what it lent. The $700M disappears. We operate on fiat currency, and the banking system can simply allow that bank to lend another $1B to others, but there's no reason they couldn't do that before the bankruptcy, and a good reason not to allow it now that the company went bankrupt (they didn't lend it wisely the first time).
Let the free market determine whether a company will succeed. A zombie company likely thought it was not going to be a zombie, but underestimated sales and/or expenses in some way. If they can survive through their missteps, perhaps they will become a normal company. But possibly not, if their interest rates are ridiculously high, based on starry-eyed visions of future revenue streams or something.
Don't forget the relatively blameless employees you have working at the company, who will now increase the unemployment rate, deepening the economic downturn. And the company's suppliers, who will now have less revenue. And the customers they had, who must now either do without, or find another supplier of the product/service.
If a company goes bankrupt, any money in common stock likely simply disappears. Common stock isn't money, but is exchanged for, say, dollars. The money "freed up" is in the assets of the company, which must get sold to pay debts. That money is provided by people who want the discounted assets, and already had it available, whether by borrowing it or having cash on hand.
> "a certain level of destruction and disruption" leads to "enhanced growth" in the future.
This is true for some things, such as industries going obsolete no matter how good they are at their jobs. Berkshire Hathaway was a textile company. They shut down all textile operations long ago as capital-intensive and money-losing. We certainly don't need artificial calamities to "help" companies go out of business; they will do it naturally.
>Now it is our turn to nominate someone with no positive qualities.
Didn't you try this with Kamala already?
She has a new book out and apparently (only going by the excerpts here) it wasn't her fault, it was the fault of the White House/Biden administration/Biden staffers/the Bidens. Presumably because they couldn't cope with a Strong Independent Woman of Colour, the sexist racist bigots! Um, er, wait...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/kamala-harris-107-days-excerpt/684150/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/10/kamala-harris-book-excerpt-joe-biden-2024-election-00555057
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/11/biden-harris-new-book-uproar
Great potential for hair-pulling between the different factions in the Democratic party, as some of the Biden/White House ex-staffers seem more sympathetic to her than others, except it came out just before the Kirk assassination so of course that has cleared it out of anyone's notice.
My *GOD*, is that excerpt in the Atlantic boring!
The editor's note...
> "The biggest surprise in Kamala Harris’s forthcoming account of her rough-and-ready, intense, and absurdly condensed campaign for president, 107 Days, may be that it is filled with surprises."
...made me literally LOL. Not a single word of the excerpt is a "surprise." Every sentence is what you'd expect Harris (and/or her writing partner, or a ghostwriter) to carefully construct in order to continue campaigning while very, very, very carefully punching the rest of the Biden Administration now that everyone agrees the Biden Administration definitely deserves to be retroactively punched.
Who is this book even *for*? Who can read lines lines like this and not roll with laughter:
> "The biggest applause [at a sorority event] came when I started to say what I would do to restore the rights of Roe v. Wade.
> “When I am president—”
> A roar erupted that drowned out the rest of that sentence.
> That roar told me they could see it. Clearly, for the first time. This could be, and it should be. It was not because of gender or because of race, but despite those things.
> I thought, as I often did, of Shirley Chisholm, and I know they did, too. The first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress and the first woman to run for our party’s nomination. She had blazed the path, and now I was standing on it.
No, Ms. Harris, you did not think of Shirley Chisholm at that moment, and neither did anyone else in the crowd.
Nice try, though.
Ehh, I'm inclined to cut the author(s) some slack. Book excerpts published as though they were essays are uniformly awful. The pacing and structure are all wrong for the new format, and they tend to conclude with a thudding anticlimax (to be picked up in the now-missing next chapter).
It's completely possible to write compelling, self-contained anecdotes within a book, and then pop them out for promotional excerpts. For a book she supposedly received $20 million to "write," there should be much, much better excerpt fodder here.
That's some pretty tortured writing. "Despite or perhaps because" has become fully meaningless - is she really implying that the sorority girls would have hated her for her gender and race were it not for Roe v Wade being on the ballot?
I do wonder how the ghostwriter is 😁 There's definitely recycled material from the campaign even in that excerpt ("this could be, and it should be" - were there accompanying hand gestures like the 'past down there, future up there' speech she used to do?)
She's said she isn't running for governor of California, but I have to think she's tempted for a second bite at the cherry with 2028. I think she'll fail like Hillary did, and for some of the same reasons. Hillary was too much Nanny Knows Best, Kamala is too loosey-goosey (to quote Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.")
I would say the difference between picking Newsom, and picking Kamala, is the difference between plucking a daisy from a field, or ripping out a patch of grass as you're falling off a cliff.
Kamala's "unburdened by what has been" always sounded to me like she was treating "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" as a how-to guide instead of as a warning.
Huh this seems exactly backwards to me. Harris is someone who has often talked about policy. In his 20 year career I have never seen Newsom do anything other than angle for spotlight.
Joy and coconuts. Do not forget the coconuts. And Brat Summer Green.
I will never let this lot live down the coconuts:
https://x.com/NYMag/status/1817878014396350802?lang=en
I have to give this much credit to Newsom, he has not (yet) been photographed with or referenced any fruits or vegetables.
That seems implausible. It was a hilariously bad strategy, but I think it's better explained by them deciding to ride a wave of relatively organic interest driven by a Tamil expression that didn't translate well than by sabotage.
Allegedly it came from something her mother used to say ("You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?")
I don't think the right/GOP had any moles in her campaign, I think that lot came up with the coconut theme all on their little ownsomes (if you're listened to the campaign staff crying about how none of the loss was their fault, you'll recognise the genius at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZOpWp02WVs)
She lost, so clearly she wasn't chosen by God. Keep up!
TL;DR Everyone's probably had enough of talking about Charlie Kirk, but hear me out: I grew up in a left-wing family in the 90s. When the men got together, there was a lot of conspiracy talk - the CIA rigged this election, assassinated that president. I'm not sure if they believed it to be strictly true or not, but it served two purposes - it maintained group identity (it's us against the bad guys) whilst also allowing some horn-locking (if you didn't believe in the speaker's conspiracy, you were naive - God forbid!). All good clean fun, but then a family member developed paranoid schizophrenia. They came to believe all that stuff and more besides - the CIA didn't just rig a Jamaican election in the 70s, they were recruiting family members to do psy-ops, which included winking and asking people to repeat things. It would have been farcical if it wasn't so devastating.
Do I hold those involved in conspiracy talk responsible for contributing to the illness? You bet - I sometimes fantasize about going full Hercule Poirot at the eventual funeral - “you killed him!”. But, I don't think that instinct would stand up to strict scrutiny. For one thing, some of the delusions had little to do with politics, including an obsession with the card game Mao, a deliberately annoying game with no mystery except an elaborate maze of rules taught through gameplay. Should we avoid playing Mao, in case young schizophrenics develop an obsession? I think that would be more acceptable to those in question than giving up loose conspiracy talk. After all, Special Branch really DID have policemen infiltrate the green movement, fathering children with the women they were spying on. Should left wingers never talk about this stuff? That seems unrealistic. The people at the top of political tribes care about policies and coalition building, but for the rank and file it's a matter of life and death, and if they can't look for reds or blues under the bed, ze whole point is….lost.
Since then I've moved on, I became a Catholic at 22 and I hold the view expressed by Fr John Zuhlsdorf that while a lot of politics can be disagreed on by people of good will, life issues are non-negotiable. So I voted tory for the first time to try and stop assisted dying (just as everyone else is leaving it seems!). But I don't like it, I love my family and I feel like a traitor. That's my problem but it is frustrating to see the right apparently going all in on questions which according to Fr Z should be negotiable. But I digress. I have two children now and we had a decision to make about the MMR vaccine a few years back. Apparently foetal tissue was used in the original development of the vaccine. We disagreed on the moral implications of this, so we looked into it and the published Vatican advice was it's okay to have the vaccine, because the degree of participation would be “remote” and “material” (as opposed to “proximate” and “formal”). However we still have a general responsibility to make known to law-makers our views on how to conduct medical research.
Jesuitry? Maybe. But it strikes me as a distinction useful in these debates. It's okay to feel that on some level people are responsible for a tragedy if they have indulged in hateful speech. Actually demonstrating how that happens is a very different matter, and if we're trying to be rational here, for me that means leaving room for a remote and material co-operation in the “toxoplasma of rage”. We all have a duty to lower the temperature, but these are matters of life, death and dreams. Cut everyone some slack including yourselves.
Are we doomed then? Yes. And yet somehow we survive. We can better explain what is going wrong than how to make things right, but that doesn't mean we are clueless about how to make things right, just that it is intuitive, you learn it by doing and taking an interest in a variety of things, and it won't just plop out the end of a formula.
How is it leftist to believe the federal government has gotten up to some shady things? Distrust of overweening government power is a conservative virtue, I think.
I'm UK based, but suspicion of the military industrial complex was left coded until Trump
Yes, you just have to make some minor tweaks.
"The government is terrible" -- right wing
"The government military-industrial complex is terrible" -- left wing
"The US/UK does terrible things" -- left wing
"The US/UK Government does terrible things" -- right wing
And then when it comes time to vote, the sides unite to increase the government's budget, allow broader surveillance, and allow it scarier police powers.
What does it mean to "try" to pocket veto a bill? Failing to pocket veto a bill = signing it.
These things undulate. Republicans were happy enough with the CIA to nominate Bush Snr for president.
>Since then I've moved on, I became a Catholic at 22 and I hold the view expressed by Fr John Zuhlsdorf that while a lot of politics can be disagreed on by people of good will, life issues are non-negotiable. So I voted tory for the first time to try and stop assisted dying
It's a good thing that in America those people support the second amendment.
Fr Z not only supports gun ownership but owns a gun himself, but that would be a matter of prudence, not an absolute.
Does he intend to use it as for the protection of life only, or property as well?
As the saying goes, the fact that he's trying to steal *my* property demonstrates that he also values his life less than my property.
This whole train of thought is so wrong-headed that I thought at first the people spouting "values his life more than" stuff were bantering. Consider someone who decides to ski down their first black diamond trail without being quite sure they are up to it. Do they value the thrill of that trail more than they value their life? When you're late for an appointment, and you take a few more small risks on the road to get to your destination faster, is that evidence you value being on time for dentistry more than your life?
It's obvious that in most situations of this kind people are gambling. They're not willing to give their life to get something, they're willing to *risk* their life. And the amount of risk varies across situations.. If on the way to the dentist you zoom through a late yellow light that turns red as you go under it, you're increasing your risk of a serious accident on the way to the dentist by quite a small amount, let's say 1%.. If you head down that black diamond trail you are taking a larger risk of serious injury or death. But very rarely does taking a risk to achieve a goal involve taking a 99.9999% chance of dying. I see no reason to think tsomeone breaking into a house to steal something thinks the risk is that high. His life experience certainly wouldn't lead him to.think it isl. Probably a lot of homeowners never even hear them a thief break in in the night, and of those who do not all confront the thief..
It's a snarky comment more than a philosophical statement, but it's maybe worth thinking through a bit.
If you ski down a double-black-diamond slope, you value the experience of doing so more than you fear the possibility of dying or being injured in the attempt. You have consented to the risks in order to get the rewards. If you do that voluntarily and fall on the way down and break your leg, it wouldn't make sense for you to be able to sue the owner of the ski slope--a fast, risky run down the mountain is what you signed up for.
If you voluntarily step into a boxing ring, you value the experience of having a boxing match + whatever pay you expect more than you fear the possibility of injury. Again, you've walked into that with open eyes. If you go in there and the other guy breaks your jaw, you don't have any real grounds for complaint--that's what you signed up for.
If you live in an environment in which you can expect property to be protected with deadly force (robbing an armored car driver, robbing a drug dealer), then when you try to steal it, you're accepting that as part of the cost of doing business. If you try and end up getting shot, you don't really have any grounds for complaint. That's what you signed up for.
In all three cases, you could have avoided the danger of being injured or killed by the expedient of staying home. The fact that you stepped into the boxing ring means you did accept the possibility of having your jaw broken or getting a concussion or whatever. In the same way, once it's known that trying to steal my property is liable to get you shot, you trying to steal it means accepting the possibility of getting shot--not that this is something you want, but that this is a danger you've knowingly signed up for in order to get the expected reward of stealing my stuff.
So? Maybe he's wrong. Maybe you're not entitled to shoot suicidal people, even if they are suicidal.
I believe in applying "no means no" here. If he doesn't *say* that he values his life less than your property, he doesn't. You're only phrasing it that way because you think killing him is okay anyway. But you've actually made a fully general argument for killing someone for anything whatsoever. Just state that whatever he did, the fact that he did it when he knew you wanted to kill him shows that he values his life less. "Kissing his gay partner in front of me shows that he values his life less than his sexuality".
The proper reasoning is that *you* don't value his life more than the property. Maybe you can justify that, but not by blaming it on the target.
I think the part where someone has broken into your house while you’re there is an important consideration. You don’t know what someone who’s broken your into your house is going to do for sure. If they turn tail and run, I don’t think you are justified in shooting them in the back. It’s certainly not the same as kissing your gay lover in front of someone else in terms of provocation. Shooting someone for that is still considered murder and should be.
>"Kissing his gay partner in front of me shows that he values his life less than his sexuality"
The person who actually does this would agree, like any other martyr willing to give their life for their ideals.
>I believe in applying "no means no" here. If he doesn't *say* that he values his life less than your property, he doesn't.
Revealed preference.
It was intended to be snarky, not a serious philosophical statement.
I don't know what his views are on that. That might turn out to be a grey area. You see a man breaking into your house, carrying a gun. Is he there to steal jewelery or to kill you? He might have a gun for protection or to freak you out. Are you feeling lucky? But I think I see where you're going and personally I'd be happy with a "consistent ethic of life" on gun control and other issues but there are too many contrary opinions from the Church Fathers for it to be anything more than a good idea.
The inevitable point is .. how can there be a consistent ethic on medically assisted dying , etc?
I used scare quotes because I actually agree. The phrase is something you hear a lot from liberal Catholics, although JPII was also moving in that direction - since we oppose abortion we should also oppose the death penalty, be pacifists, etc. When I converted my heart was with this instinct, but it doesn't quite work, however I think lots of people believe it and e.g abolishing the death penalty might soften the blow of a pro-life turn, maybe. But that's a bit academic at this point.
The Church Fathers and various Catholic figures over the past 2,000 years have been pretty consistent that suicide is a sin.
I hope you're arguing that both assisted suicide and shooting burglars should be legal.
This is a very nice comment, except for the part where your new moral reasoning led you to vote for increasing human suffering. (Somehow reminds me of the nice Hitler meme.)
TIL "let's not kill babies!" makes you Nice Hitler.
Well, if that makes me Nice Hitler, then just call me Adolf, baby!
If you're Nice Hitler, should it rather be Adolph? Or perhaps Adolphie?
I think Adolphine is the feminine form, though there do seem to be some variants.
It's fine, I didn't expect an easy response, and it kind of proves my point. Appreciate this though. "How dare you call me nice?!!"
I am no more nice than a toothache 😁
>nice Hitler meme
What's that?
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/578682-adolf-hitler, probably.
yes, thank you
I'm not asking you to agree with me, I included it to show that even if someone is very pro-life, they can distinguish between degrees of co-operation, and I think this is something everyone can benefit from.
I've always thought that the history of Russia disproves this meme. Plenty of hard men and hard times, many weak men, but they don't ever seem to get to the good times.
Some of them have a very different definition of "good times" than do you or I.
From that perspective (which I don't share) it would make more sense to torture the young and healthy (so that they become hardened warriors) rather than the old and dying...
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
We've all got links from Scott that we like best.
Did you read Zanzibar Buck-buck McFate's comment?
He's talking about opposing assisted suicide, which has nothing to do with any of the examples you give. Rightists are always twisting themselves into pretzels in apologetics for Christian slave morality positions they wouldn't naturally support.
Slave no, servant yes.
For my part I'm okay with people optimising for QALYs and I support many measures for doing so. But there is no One Weird Trick for optimising QALYs and there are bound to be profound disagreements about what quality means. I'm not even sure if I've had a QALY as an adult. But life is a package.
Looking for a product recommendation. I have a 6-year-old, who wants a watch, and I want him to have one too. The problem is that kids' digital watches have an alarm in them, which mysteriously gets turned on (because the kid ends up randomly mashing the buttons, possibly as fidgeting), and then the watch goes off every 5 minutes in English class and gets taken away (I'm truly sorry for the 1st grade teacher). Are there any kids' watches, preferably digital, that simply don't have any speakers in them?
I fixed that once by pushing a pin through the tiny speaker. Of course I knew I was risking the thing not working at all after that, but it worked fine, didn't even click.
Get an analog watch, then?
For example, I searched for "Kids watch", scrolled down past all the ads etc., and clicked on the first actual search link, which seems to meet your criteria? https://www.flikflak.com/
Thank you! Good call that analog watches come without alarm features. I do wonder why digital models without a beeper aren't a more common offering; clearly the kids prefer digital, and I can't have the only kid who gets it into random-beeping mode and can't shut it off.
If not you could just superglue the alarm button to its housing. Or superglue the volume buttom to 0
Supergluing the alarm button might work; sadly, cheap digital watches don't come with a volume button. (Or a power button, which would offer a less nuclear option than permanently taking the watch away.)
Anyone have a mathematically based counter argument to this article claiming utilitarians would be forced to choose ruin if they followed EV maximization? https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2018/04/a-paradoxical-puzzle-for-ethical-utilitarians/
The main point is the argument maximizing the wrong thing. You should, at the start, pick a strategy that maximizes the outcome you care about (total expected utility = total expected payoff at the end of the game). What the argument does instead is try to maximize the expected payoff after each round.
The simplest way to mathematically model this is to note that, at every round, there is tremendous value is being able to keep playing. The payoff after each round is not just what was included in the calculation, but additionally a term for “how much you expect to gain until the end of game, given the amount of credits you have.” That’s complicated to compute, but we know it is zero if you lose everything. For a rigorous treatment of this matter, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellman_equation
(thanks for the pointer to the Bellman equation!)
The whole 'paradox' is a little naive. A rational player would realise that there's no time pressure in this game; so there's no reason to risk total failure - this is the only source of 'paradox'. You escape from the 'paradox' by using log-utility which will correctly assign infinite negative weight to losing all your tokens; the comments already mention the Kelly criterion. The game is iterated, and has a stopping condition, so it's not enough to look at expectation (which is linear) - this seems a common error mode in these sorts of puzzles, but it's very well studied in game theory.
A strategy of betting half of all tokens at each time step has an expected return of just under 5% (compounding). The doubling time of this strategy is 15 rounds; after each loss you're back to where your previous position with 15 successes. The expected arrival time of a failure is 100 rounds of the game, so on average every hundred rounds you would expect growth by a factor of around 65.
In fact, betting a greater proportion of your accumulated tokens increases the expectation (but also the variance) all the way to 1. If there's an underlying paradox, it's one that's familiar to anyone who's studied calculus: the properties of a converging sequence need not be shared by the limit. In this case, in the space of strategies, betting a fixed proportion p of tokens has positive and increasing log-utility as p tends to 1; but at 1 the log-utility is undefined (or infinite and negative depending on your level of pedantry).
You use the Kelly Criterion to select your bet size. Effectively you bet edge/odds.
KC works out to be bet 89% of your capital when you win 99% but are paid like you win 90.9%.
This reduces the chance of ruin to zero and so maximises growth to infinity. If you are sure of the numbers - bet this size. If you are in anyway unsure (like of all of the reality we live in- bet a fraction of Kelly, it has the advantage of reducing the volatility of your strategy if the ratio of the edge to odds was as good as you thought at the cost of slowing down the growth but if the ratio is worse than you thought then it increases your growth and keeps you alive.)
In our example - assuming you cannot bet a fraction of 1 unit, I would reduce my size. Especially if you are sure you'll be allowed to play the game as much as you like. Betting 1 unit when you have 100 gives you a low but non zero chance of ruin. That's pretty sad compared to a fortune. You want to keep that low. If you set the rule - bet only 1 anytime you have fewer than 910 units but Kelly above it (89%) then you might face that situation again. Makes more sense to have that as a sliding scale. 1 below 910. Some fraction less than 89% at 910 - trending up towards 89% as you get to 8,272. (Assuming pressing the button c12k times to get to 910 is trivial - if its a significant portion of your patience start trending up to 89% sooner).
Really the question is - how long can you be bothered playing? You've found a system that tends your units towards infinity but it will take infinite time to get there. Surely hanging around playing the game for infinity is not infinitely good. You need an exit strategy.
NB - if you want to play with this concept on a spreadsheet - make the probabilities a bit less extreme. If you have the odds of losing higher than 1%, you'll see more runs where the bet size is above the kelly criterion bust themselves without needing infinite processing power and memory.
Give yourself an edge but a high chance of losing for the quickest examples.
I think running side by side a payoff of 4 to 1 (implied 20%) when your odds are 25% of winning with strategies betting 10% of your bankroll, 5% of your bankroll and 50% of your bankroll is quite illustrative. In most runs you'll see the 50% bust out, the 10% usually stays alive (infinity is long) but underperforms the 5%.... Kelly is 6.25%.
I think this is a version of the gambler's ruin idea:
> The concept was initially stated: A persistent gambler who raises his bet to a fixed fraction of the gambler's bankroll after a win, but does not reduce it after a loss, will eventually and inevitably go broke, even if each bet has a positive expected value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin
I assume the EV calcs are correct for each round, but you can do an EV calc for the whole strategy.
For example the strategy of "bet everything N times" gives you a 100*(1.1^n) payout with a probability of 0.99^n, and a 0 payout with a probability of (1 - 0.99^n).
For n = 1000, that is about a 36.6% chance of 1,378,000 and a 63.4% chance of 0. That's positive EV but is also risky.
As n goes towards infinity, you get an ever higher chance of going broke and an ever higher payout if you don't. It makes sense that when you go to infinity that this converges to a 100% chance of going broke.
The EV of the strategy is 100*(1.1*0.99)^n, which is increasing with n, so there's a sort of discontinuity at infinity with the EV where it's monotonically increasing as n goes up, but the EV where you go to infinity is 0.
I bet you could produce a reasonable looking utility function that takes into account variance and is "continuous" in this sense.
Here's one that should work: you can choose a strategy at the start of the game about how to bet each round. The strategy of "keep betting until you lose" gets you zero credits at the end. The strategy of "bet either until you lose, or until you get to round N, whichever comes first" beats it for every finite N.
What is that "plus 1 times 0" part of the equation? That should be a minus, and times 100, or whatever 100% looks like when 10% looks like 1.10. You're supposed to be subtracting the losses, not adding them.
...or do you multiply them? You probably multiply that zero instead of adding, which means you get zero everywhere. Either way, that's the part where the math is wrong.
The equation is saying something like
A) suppose I bet $10
B) if i win, then omega give me $11 in revenue.
C) if i lose, then omega gives me $0 in revenue.
Whereas you're assuming it's saying
A) suppose I bet $10
B) if I win, then the net profit is $1.
C) if I lose, then the net profit is -$10.
The left-hand side of the equation represents the revenue, not the delta of your bankroll.
I'm going to post the equation here so I can stop reopening the link.
0.99 * 1.10 * C + 0.01 * 0 * C = 1.089 C ≈ C + 0.09 C
The direct addition of the probabilities means this equation has no mechanism for losing in the first round. It's only showing expected value across multiple bets, which assumes you have the resources to make those multiple bets.
The mechanism for losing is the fact that the variable is 0, instead of 1. If the variable is 1, it means you give Omega $10, you lose, and then Omega gives you 100% of your bet back, which means there's no change to your bankroll.
But since the variable is 0, it means you give Omega $10, you lose, and then omega keeps your money and you get nothing, which means your bankroll is $10 less than it was before.
The equation says "+0". Nothing in it allows for forcing C to zero.
I'm getting the impression that people didn't actually look at this equation, and instead go off of vibes.
Let's make this a little more concrete.
Are you familiar with poker? When you win a round, you receive the entire pot. The pot is the sum of ALL the players' bets, including your own bet. So when you win a pot, the *revenue* you receive is just the pot. But to calculate *net-earnings*, you have to subtract your own bet from the pot. If you lose a round, your revenue is $0 but your net-earnings is -x, where x is whatever you wagered for that round.
The equation in the blogpost is calculating the *revenue* you receive from omega when you lose, which is $0. What you're doing is you're calculating the *net-earnings* in your head (viz. -$10), noticing that your "-10" figure doesn't match the "0" figure, and assuming the equation is setup incorrectly.
----
> It's only showing expected value across multiple bets, which assumes you have the resources to make those multiple bets.
No, it's showing the EV for a *single* bet. That's how EV works (in the arithmetic case) [0]. It sums the outcomes and weights them by probability. E.g. consider a fair coin-toss. Heads, you win $100. Tails, you get nothing. (It's not a gambling situation. The wager is free, effectively.) The equation looks like
let
EV = expected value
x = cointoss event
P = probability
R = reward
w = winning outcome
l = losing outcome
EV[x] = P(w) R(w) + P(l) R(l)
EV[x] = 50% $100 + 50% $0
EV[x] = $50
Which means, on average, you'll receive $50 for each cointoss. R(l) is zero because you're not getting any money in that outcome. It has no relationship to the betsize because you didn't bet anything to begin with. P(w) and P(l) are both 50%, and they sum to 100%, which is the total sample-space for a single event (viz, the cointoss).
If, hypothetically, we were calculating the expected value of the *final* outcome across multiple cointosses, then yes, we'd generally connect those events with a multiplication symbol instead of an addition symbol, like this:
EV[x]^n = EV[x_1] * EV[x_2] * EV[x_3] * ...
It's hard to follow in the blogpost because he skips the variable setup and goes straight to substitution.
----
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#Random_variables_with_finitely_many_outcomes
No, the math is fine. That expression is calculating expected value of the bet.
Expected value assumes infinite resources. Using expected value with finite resources is not fine. A 20% chance with 10x payout is only expected value if you can survive losing your wager at least four times straight. You can't instead make a single bet five times the size that leaves you unable to afford to lose once. If the math tells you otherwise the math is wrong. Incomplete at best.
> Expected value assumes infinite resources.
Okay, this helps clarify your level of mathematical ability.
At first glance it seems like it's just a flipped St. Petersburg Paradox. The resolution there is decreasing marginal utility and the fact that infinity can't exist in the real world.
TIL that "murder with a modified firearm" is a federal offense in the US, which is why Luigi Mangione is facing the death penalty.
Current Supreme Court precedent is that the death penalty for plain old first degree murder is unconstitutional as "cruel and unusual punish", but the death penalty can be constitutional for murder of the sentence is based on aggravating circumstances for the crime. The federal government and states that still have the death penalty generally have long lists of circumstances that qualify in that jurisdiction.
This is California's list, for example:
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-190-2/
Not that any of that would matter in a New York courtroom, of course.
Ah, you were saying that the key bit is that he's facing federal charges rather state ones, right? I'd forgotten the murder was committed in a non-death-penalty state.
>Current Supreme Court precedent is that the death penalty for plain old first degree murder is unconstitutional
I don't think that's true? The Supreme Court did rule in 1972 (Furman v. Georgia) that the death penalty violated the constitution when imposed arbitrarily, or in a discriminatory manner. But then in the 80s and 90s Congress passed laws creating uniform methods of sentencing for the death penalty, and that's been used ever since. And it is still the case that federally first degree murder alone is sufficient for the death penalty: "whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for life" is still part of the US Code.
I think we're mostly talking about the same thing in different terms. The statutory list of special circumstances that make a murderer eligible for the death penalty are a key part of the "uniform methods of sentencing". My understanding is that the logic of Furman assumes that the death penalty is only appropriate for the worst of the worst, not for first-degree murderers in general.
The main controlling precedent besides Furman is Gregg v. Georgia (1976) which upheld the death penalty under laws with a two-stage procedure where the death penalty requires consideration by the jury on the basis of the murder involving statutory special circumstances.
Traveling across state lines would probably have been enough.
My Constitutional scholarship is a bit rusty, but I think you can get the federal death penalty for using a phone/the internet in the commission of a crime. Commerce clause and all that.
Seems to me there is a sort of second wave of objections now to people who expressed negative views about Kirk in the first couple days after his shooting. In the first wave people objected to individual posts. In this present thread there have been several posts that have the character of a call for “higher standards,” and suggestions that we have “better moderation” here. The idea is in the air that we should have a way to *prevent people* from criticizing the acts and opinions of someone who was just assassinated. This reaction seems to me to have quite a lot in common with the Trump administration’s crackdown on various groups, done under the guise of preventing further shootings. WTF?
Caveat: I might not be reading the same material you are. I assume you referring only to here on ACX?
I can understand wanting to crack down on posts that dogpile on an assassination victim out of a desire for decorum, in the same way I can understand wanting to crack down on guns in the wake of a shooting. Namely, I oppose either one, but I can still understand the sentiment.
I think most people have some sense of decorum, it aligned with everyone in their neighborhood, and its value was recognizable, so they believe it's worth enforcing on others. The catch is decorum is a set of customs, and it can vary; while everyone in your neighborhood might share them, everyone online probably won't, past a very spare baseline. To some extent, this is obvious; your online church group is not Reddit. (Probably.) But Scott cultivated a certain custom via SSC, carried some of it over to Substack, and there's probably some friction with Substack regulars who weren't SSC regulars. Plus, SSC regulars were a heterodox lot to begin with.
You're probably just seeing a confluence of SSC regs, Substack regulars, and other newcomers looking for a train wreck to watch, possibly even infiltrated by a few shit-stirrers from SneerClub and elsewhere. So while there may have been a barely critical mass of SSC regulars who wanted to break out of echo chambers (or at least build a new one around "Thou Shalt Be Rational") and set down new rules with that in mind, there probably aren't enough of anything to create that critical mass on ACX.
There are probably enough people on ACX to have a meta-discussion on how best to moderation discussions, but it's also going to be understandably hard to have that right now, just like it's hard to have a sober discussion about violence management just after someone shot up a mall.
So, the options I see: (1) batten down, weather the current thing, hope that not to much crackdown occurs, and try to have that meta-discussion later; (2) go in with pushback right now and hope you can stave off the worst crackdowns without coming off looking so much like a bad guy that it sours anyone's appetite for long-term norms; (3) come up with norms in the moment that look so compelling and glib that they work in a crisis, and will also work long term; (4) something I haven't thought of yet.
See anything else?
Well, as for your mention in (1) of hoping for not too much crackdown, I actually am not worried about that. I don't think Scott would do anything like a crackdown. He might get more energetic about quickly banning people who are posting grotesque zero-value stuff, like that guy "Charlie's dead, I'm happy" crowing about beheadings, but I don't mind that at all. He might go back to designating certain threads as no-culture-war topic threads, but I wouldn't mind that either. Is there any other way a you think a crackdown could occur? Should I be more worried?
So the stuff I'm posting is not tactical, an effort to come at the pro-policing forces situation in an effective way, I'm just stirred up, like everyone else. I am probably more stirred up about tone-policing and post content policing than about Kirk himself or an assassination, and that's a result of my temperament and my values, not allegiance to some philosophy about free speech. I think being very honest, but civilized in how one expresses it, works better than anything else over the long run to help groups work. But of course I am influenced by the fact that I've found that's what works best for me.
There might be a sort of 4th option here: Just keep being honest about thoughts and feelings and reactions, even the ones some say should go unexpressed, while saying the stuff in a way that that's civil -- and hope some people kind of like the impact of that and move in that direction themselves. I disclosed early on that I have 2 gay and slightly trans family members, and that my first reaction to hearing of Kirk's assassination was a big jolt of joy. But I added that I certainly did not approve of assassination. Seems like that bit of honesty might have been helpful to some people. Nobody can help how they *feel,* and the pressure here to immediately feel a certain way about the assassination seems fucked up to me, and to run counter to people forming a healthy "we." So I hope I did a bit of good there. I mean, a lot of the appeal of Scott is that he has is willing to broach topics and say things others do not, and to have a kind of frankness others do not. There was an essay of his about not being able to get a date, while treating an abusive psychopath who had been married 5 times. In it he mentioned rageful feminists who call the kind of thing he was saying "whining," and he used a string of words, stuff like "harpies," to describe them, and people were OK with that. It was clear he was describing how angry the feminist's words made him *feel,* not writing off feminism or women.
By "crackdown", I'm thinking more of a subset of ACX posters who manage, by social pressure, to enforce their shared norms on everyone else. I think Scott does not prolifically enforce norms on OTs (possibly for good reasons I'm not aware of), and if so, it's possible for a subset to enforce such norms without his intervention or possibly even his notice.
Whether you should worry about this is probably going to be a function of who your worst case subset is, and how likely you think they are to cowbird everyone else out. Speaking only personally, two subsets fit my central example of worry. One is Reddit-style lefties as one finds in /r/politics. Another is redpilled bros, the type who would use the word "soyboys" in unironic contempt. The common feature I put to both stereotypes is their irrational approach to discussion - for instance, assuming that merely having the object level views of the other is a form of bad faith. I've seen enough bad arguments for object views I might agree with to know that bad arguments repel me more than disagreement at the object level, at least some of the time, and possibly most of the time.
(CDIH's comments struck me as so bad that I went beyond forum reports and handwrote a letter to Scott's private email. I felt bad doing that, and hope I don't regret it later.)
As for wanting to express yourself honestly: I think you're equipped to know how hard that can be. You say you felt a "bolt of joy" at the news of Kirk's death, but you also say you don't approve of assassination. Consider what would happen if someone read one of those, but missed the other. Maybe someone quoted you out of context; maybe their eyes read your comment, were drawn to the provocative part, and didn't notice the bit that would temper it. Neither would even be your fault!
Meanwhile, one of the reasons I was drawn to Scott's writing was not just that he could write about the rage of getting no action while terrible people get plenty, but also turn around and write about the rage of, say, having marital problems and not understanding why, and also not understanding why someone can be so bad at hooking up. Well, maybe not that specific case (I don't remember the essay you're referring to), but anyone who can put on, say, an "anti-libertarian" hat, and then later put on a "pro-libertarian" hat in the same essay, and switch between them, is someone with that rare ability to actually move one of today's tough issues beyond the Superbowl of Talking Past the Other Side. And possibly an example to others. If those others are able to receive that signal.
My point here is that expressing one's political views is inherently risky. You could certainly make mistakes; but even if you don't, it's still up to everyone reading whatever you wrote to interpret it in the spirit you wrote it. If they don't want to, then you're doomed, no saving throw. For that reason, I regard people who try to avoid that type of malicious interpretation as especially precious, and forums that encourage more people like that as precious in aggregate, and breathlessly fragile as newcomers wash over it.
Kirk's assassination will be only one of many fraught events to bring eyeballs here, so I think it's worth thinking about long term norms like this.
> Is there any other way you think a crackdown could occur?
The most obvious way is for him to make comments (and possibly all posts) subscribers only and get a couple volunteer moderators. He might do that regardless of his opinion on the comments, given the concerns over the government crackdown and escalating tensions.
I think way too many people are blurring between:
a. Politically motivated murder is bad
b. Cheering for politically motivated murder is bad
c. Expressing hatred/dislike/anger for the recently murdered guy is bad
d. Speaking ill of the murdered guy is bad.
Approximately everyone can agree to (a), but there's a lot of motivated blurring toward (d), in ways that remind me a great deal of the previous round of this kind of thing, where we started with "Being a literal Nazi is bad" and ended up cancelling people for liking a Facebook post that could be called racist with a strained reading.
The reality is that this shooting would never have happened if such leftist rhetoric wasn't tolerated in this society. Can you blame them for wanting to achieve peace of mind by eliminating such possibilty? You can't truly say you're free as long as you fear consequences for speech.
Well, yes. Giving up freedom for a little temporary safety and all that. Also, if nobody says anything that could ever conceivably lead a disturbed individual to commit crimes, this substack will get really boring.
>this shooting would never have happened if such leftist rhetoric wasn't tolerated
Which leftist rhetoric is your "such" pointing to, Jim? Rhetoric in the post you are responding to? Rhetoric in posts of mine in the earlier thread, posts made in the first 36 hrs or so after the shooting? Other rhetoric on here?
The rhetoric that criticized Kirk's opinions as wrong and evil. What motive would anyone have to kill him if he was not antagonized by anyone? Is it not fully within people's right to pursue a world where people such as Kirk do not have to worry about the consequences of their speech? Isn't that what the push-back against cancel culture is all about?
People do political assassinations of their political enemies. There's no need for rhetoric that calls them wrong and evil. There was no widespread campaign declaring Melissa Hortman evil, or Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church evil. Even Charlie Kirk, frankly, was mostly made fun of as a dork on the left prior to his death.
Tyler Robinson reached the conclusion that he wanted to kill Charlie Kirk, not because of "leftists", but because of his own beliefs and decisions. He was an adult, with free agency, and he exercised it. I believe he exercised it wrongly, but acting like a 22 year old is incapable of moral agency, merely buffeted around by rhetoric, strikes me as a truly insane level of agency denial. Do you apply the same level of denial of individual agency when a 22 year old kills his parents, or his neighbor, or his lover?
"Agency" is irrelevant. The crime happens regardless. The only way to save those lives is to prevent it from happening the first place. That requires eliminating either the motive or the perpetrator before it happens. A modern state has the means to do both.
If criticizing other people's beliefs as wrong and evil had been banned, Kirk would not have been permitted to speak.
There's no harm in criticizing beliefs outside of the consensus. Of course his speech would have been allowed.
You claim to believe that people with minority views should be silent; this is a minority view, and yet here you still somehow are, inexplicably talking. How?
Rules also apply to you, not only to the other guy. Please don't propose rules you are not prepared to follow.
How would you have a speech regime that allowed Kirk to express his opinions (some mainstream, some pretty far outside the mainstream), but that didn't allow people to criticize his opinions as wrong or evil?
I mean, "the authorities forbid all speech to the left of me" is a possible policy, but I don't think it sounds like a very good one for the country.
If the alternative is inevitable polarization, resentment, and war, is there any other choice? The cultivation of a unified consensus has been the status quo for most of human history. It is liberalism that's the anomaly. If and when liberalism fails, it will eventually be replaced by a more stable and efficient system. Nothing of value is lost.
I don't think the alternatives are either rigid policing of allowed speech or civil war. Indeed, I think trying to impose rigid policing of speech is one of the ways you could end up triggering a civil war.
So if being critical of Kirk created antagonism, and antagonism upped the chance that someone would get so angry that they shot Kirk, and if we should not tolerate such rhetoric because it it makes sociey unsafe -- then, Jim, why is it OK for you to be critical of. those who posted their objections to Kirk's ideas? You are also being critical. You are definitely creating antagonism -- you are, for instance, IRRITATING THE SHIT outta me. And, by your model, you are upping the chance that somebody reading your critique will become so incensed that they shoot me. Jim! What if you are wrong and evil!?!?!?!?
Because I understand which side is winning, and by extension, which side is best for my continued survival. That's really all there is to it. The victors will be the heroes of this story, and the vanquished, its villains. I'd rather be alive and good, thank you very much.
>Because I understand which side is winning
I agree that it is always sensible to pick the winning side. It is also difficult. I follow Carl Benjamin in the UK a fair amount, and I (mostly) wish him and his allies well (Keir Starmer makes Joe Biden look benign), but Carl has a tendency to announce that the battle is surely won. Political winds can shift quickly and with little warning.
If that's what you believe, you are not in fact upholding any sort of principle like "freedom of speech" or "do not retaliate against speech with violence." Your principle is "I have a gun, so do what I tell you."
And I don't think someone who believes that has any ground to call other people wrong and evil.
So look, Jim, seems to me you are not thinking clearly about this stuff. The stuff I mean is what a person should do when they think somebody else's ideas are wrong and also just *awful*? From your point of view people on the left are dead wrong about Kirk's ideas, and their public criticism of him was wrong and evil. It led to increased antagonism, and finally someone who was full of the antagonism melted down and shot him.
OK, I see the logic of what you are saying. But I’ve pointed out a problem with it: *You* are being quite critical of "the left." You are saying their complaining about Kirk was wrong and evil. Their complaints led to antagonism, and the antagonism led to somebody killing Kirk. His death is their fault. Now, imagine being someone who has written some criticism of Kirk on here — not the kind where they call him a Nazi, but the kind where they say his ideas are wrong, his facts are false, etc. You are saying to them that what they said was wrong and evil, and it's people like them who are responsible for Kirk's death. They are going to be angry, right, to be told that? Wouldn't you be, if you expressed your ideas and somebody said that to you? OK, so you have just created antagonism. You are doing the thing you called wrong and evil, the thing you said lefties do, the thing you said creates antagonism and leads to shootings.
I don't think it's wrong and evil to criticize people, so long as you are explaining your objections and not just slinging insults. I think some antagonism is inevitable, and the challenge is to get past the illusion that the other person is an evil piece of shit so you can talk over the disagreement. BUT: If you really think criticizing people and creating antagonism is wrong and evil, then you gotta the face fact that you are doing it too. Seems to me the point of your most recent post is that you get to criticize “the left” because you are right and they are wrong and anyhow your side is going to win. So it’s not wrong and evil for you to antagonize the left by criticizing their ideas. But obviously, Jim, people who disagree with your ideas think they are right and you are wrong and their side at least deserves to win, and it’s not evil for them to criticize you or Kirk because their complaints are all true and correct.. So nothing whatever has been accomplished by your posts here. You have not convinced anyone of anything. You have not stuck with your priiciples, and refrained from creating antagonism, in fact you have boosted the antagonism level. And you are not noticing the big picture here, which is that when it comes to creating antagonism, both sides are equally bad.
And yet if one of us stopped to help the other with a flat tire, and neither of us knew they were with the person they had had this exchange with online, we might like each other fine. So it should not be hopeless for us to talk about these issues and get somewhere. Why aren’t we getting anywhere?
I’m going to recommend an article to you by Scott Alexander. It’s called *I Can Stand Anything but the Outgroup.” It is not political, and leans neither right nor left. I’d say it’s more about psychology — how our minds work when there’s a group we think is infuriating and wrong as fuck. It’s here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
-Kirk expressed normal, mainstream political opinions.
-A huge number of people called him, and anyone expressing similar opinions, things ranging from "extremist" to "literal Nazi" for years. I mean you'd really get the impression of a society-wide consensus from some pretty major, mainstream platforms, like Reddit.
-He was killed in this environment.
-People are saying the online commenters bear some responsibility for the murder due to having created that environment - it's the idea of stochastic terrorism.
Jim is not upping the chance that someone will want to shoot you, because he's making dry points about rhetorical style, not calling you a Nazi with zero hyperbole intended.
Not arguing against anything else or justifying anything, but I don't know if I would describe Kirk's pretty well-documented political opinions as "normal" or "mainstream".
>Jim is not upping the chance that someone will want to shoot you,
Sure he is. I criticized Kirk's views quite a lot on the thread before this one. I did not go screamo, claim that he was a Nazi, or say anything along those lines. I said I thought he was wrong about various things, and explained why, said that some of his proposals were cruel and harmful, and quoted his proposals, etc. However, I'm sure that my criticisms, if anyone believed them, would have made the person reading them quite angry. I personally feel great anger at Kirk. If someone read my views who was right on the edge of melting down and shooting someone, my views might have pushed him over, and led himi to shoot Kirk. Maybe they are less likely to than my calling Kirk a nazi would have been. On the other hand, maybe they more likely, because calling Kirk a nazi is sort of silly. He didn't look like one, or share many views in common with nazis. It's basically an insult, like saying someone is an asshole. So my statements about Kirk, which do not contain insults like asshole or nazi, might actually be more angering for someone because they are backed up by details about what I see as wrong with Kirk's thoughts and actions.
On here you will mostly find reasoned arguments about what was wrong with Kirk's ideas. And my posts about Kirk are as civil as Jim's about the left. But you are silly to think that reasoned arguments could not make someone who's loosely wrapped go out and shoot somebody. Consequently, I think Jim, expressing the view that those who criticized Kirk are bad and evil and responsible for the shooting is in the exact same category as my polite by harsh criticisms of Kirk. It creates antagonism. (I can tell you from personal experience it does that. I feel quite irritated by him.). And, as Jim says, the more antagonism you create, the greater the chance that some nut will blow his top and shoot.
If it’s normal and acceptable to fight words with words, then that’s what fights will be fought with, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do you want there to be no other way to win over an audience than silencing the opponent forever?
> Do you want there to be no other way to win over an audience than silencing the opponent forever?
Seems that's the world we already live in. Let's not pretend the current status quo liberalism was enshrined through honest debate. The left, over the last century, has aggressively pushed their morality through media and academia. And yet, even that wasn't enough to align the population. Absolute consensus requires active measures to be taken to eliminate all that would threaten it. And through the true unity that would be achieved, nobody will be oppressed, because those that remain will share the same will.
This is delusional. Yes, a bunch of mostly-left-wing wannabe volunteer commissars managed to get people fired for insufficient zeal for the Latest Thing, and that was bad. But there is a lot of right wing media available, the ideas those idiots were trying to suppress remained visible to anyone looking on podcasts and substacks and such, etc.
We are not remotely in a civil war situation where the only remaining way to win arguments is to kill people. Some people get a kick out of cosplaying like that's our world, and of course like 99.9% of them would be dead in a ditch or hiding under their beds in an actual civil war. And then some subset of the cosplayers spin off into their delusions like that tragic f--kup who murdered Kirk (or the one who murdered Brian Thompson), and they die or get arrested and never see one second of freedom in the remainder of their lives.
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence,” remind me who said that?
I think it's mostly due that one guy saying out loud the things people on the Right believe most people on the Left agree with but have the prudence to be silent about.
You mean the guy on here crowing joyfully about the beheading?
Yes, him. Going by "Charlie's dead, I'm happy",
I thought he showed up later than the sentitious Emily Post types, but maybe not. I'm too tired to check.
I just learned the word "sentitious." Thanks!
This is called “we condemn censorship and cancel culture”.
"Where I live, someone's mom called the police on her son for building bombs in her house during 2020, so some places are "just not keen" on the whole terrorist ideology, even if it is your own flesh and blood".
Just when I thought I could not be more depressed about the state of discourse, along comes something I saw on Tumblr (yeah, okay, it's Tumblr) about Tyler Robinson and his father turning him in. Tagged "bad parenting" not for "raising a murderer" but "informing on him to the cops".
Because your parents should always help you cover up a crime, no questions asked.
Lovely, but I'm betting the person who posted that doesn't think your parents should help cover up rape, or beating up trans people, or killing non-evil politicians, for instance.
If you scroll down, you should see "ProfGerm" and "Tergiverse".
Girls!!!1!
What an awesome, big, really crafty parody of an AI music video with real actors:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V7qEG56zxdo
On the Titanic women and children went to the lifeboats and the men went to the grave.
No discussion, no vote, no rebellion. Some of the men had family in the lifeboats but even those who did not made the sacrifice. Poor men and oligarchs, men of many nations and faiths, or none, young and old, saving the women and children was more important than saving them.
For millions of years communities which sacrificed men to protect women and children recovered. Those who sacrificed women and children to save men did not. It is rare to pass on genes without also passing on culture, these two face natural selection hand in hand. The "protect and sacrifice" genes that gave rise to the culture of valuing women and children above men dominated the gene pool reinforcing that culture.
The men on the Titanic did not need to know any of this, none of them had faced such a situation before but the culture of protect and sacrifice was stronger than their survival instinct. Like the boys who marched against the machine guns in 1916 their culture would allow them to do no other. It was easier to die than throw the women and kids out of the lifeboats.
What, I wonder, would happen on board the Titanic today?
Plenty of communities exist, even flourish, even out-compete West (in darwinian terms) without having sentimental "women and children first".
Your women and children do not survive for long without men protecting them.
As a matter of fact, small girls get selected, say 3-4 years. If food is short, primitive people are apt to let the small girl go. They will not let the father go.
Boys get selected at early youth, when they are drafted to fight.
And selection means cull.
So this "women and children" first I believe was specific to specific countries at a specific period. By no means universal--or applicable to even those countries now.
Gian, "Plenty of communities exist, even flourish, even out-compete West(in Darwinian terms) without having sentimental " women and children first"."
If you name some of those communities I would be grateful.
I don't know what their views on "women and children first" are, but, in purely Darwinian terms, nations listed by fertility rates are in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Any Moslem or Hindu to begin with.
Sources? You only need to live in such a society. There is no nonsense about women first.
In fact there is a travelogue by Evelyn Waugh about Africa -- there he was traveling in a boat with a
Moslem man who was travelling first class with his four wives in the second class.
It's worth remembering that the logic of "women and children first" is not necessarily that the men are less valuable or should sacrifice themselves, but that men have the best chance of surviving on their own without a lifeboat.
Of course we've all seen the movie and know that floating in the North Atlantic in sub-freezing conditions for five hours will almost certainly be non-survivable, but it probably seemed worth a shot at the time.
If the ship had sank in friendlier conditions then many men would have survived, floating in their lifejackets or clinging onto flotsam.
Melvin, I do think men (myself included) are less valuable, women's brains, less energy and size required for the same output and self replicating = more valuable.
Wimbli, worldwide there are more female graduates coming out of universities than male.
I'm not a historian or anything but the two quotes often attributed to Benjamin Guggenheim are:
> We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen
and
> Tell my wife, if it should happen that my secretary and I both go down, tell her I played the game out straight to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward
Sounds like he knew that the likely outcome was him dying, not that he thought he might have a better shot at making it without a boat.
Jack, good reply.
The men on the Titanic were explicitly _ordered_ (by the ship's captain) to let women and children on to the lifeboats, with armed crew members stationed to enforce that order.
This research paper is on point:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1207156109
"We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers...."
Paul Botts, of course trained seamen are going to have a higher chance of surviving a sea disaster than untrained civilians, male of female. Thank you for the very interesting link.
You are making a mistake by treating Titanic as representative.
There was a lot of shipwrecks before and all sorts of evil behavior happened among the survivors, including involuntary cannibalism (as opposed to "the custom of the sea"). Often, the victims were precisely the weakest people, including the women, because they didn't put up that much fight.
Not even the Titanic situation was that clear-cut, but others have already commented on the class differences.
Marian Kechlibar, agreed, the example of the Titanic was over simplified.
I don’t think a shipwreck situation is comparable with the titanic. If it’s a test of endurance to see who can survive, it’s no surprise that the strongest people with the largest store of calories did much better than anyone else. That means children and women would be at a significant disadvantage.
Wasn’t income, as measured by what part of the ship people were housed in, also a big predictor of who got a seat in a lifeboat?
Eremolalos, I came here to have my ideas challenged, you have done so, thank you.
Correct, 33% of men in first class survived, along with 34% of children in third class.
That’s still a lot of dead first class male passengers. Yes, class mattered too (I think it was 95% of first class women survived) but the thought experiment still holds - would it happen today. Would 70% of an elite, first class on the titanic was at least millionaire level by today’s standards, be prepared to die today. Answers on a very small postcard to Peter, UK.
Peter Defeel, Perhaps now it would be easier for all males who do not have kin in the lifeboats to think that their families would be better off if they survived and feel no shame in doing so.
As Jack pointed out above Guggenheim and others on the Titanic would have considered themselves cowards had they taken to the lifeboats while women and children drowned.
What really bothers me is whenever I see video of people evacuating a burning plane, there's always doofuses with their luggage. That means that they've disobeyed the "don't take anything with you" request and have held everyone up while they retrieve their luggage.
Example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY9tjlAsSqc
I read a larger analysis that claimed that while the men/women division held true there, that looking at a much larger share of shipwrecks found that women often didn't fare nearly so well.
I read something like that but it also seems to me like the Titanic was unusual in that "who survived" is basically the same as "who got on a lifeboat". A few things had to be true for that to happen:
* shipwreck happens after the wireless telegraph is invented, allowing another ship to respond in real time (otherwise the lifeboat people might eventually die from exposure with nobody ever knowing about the situation), but before technology is good enough to avoid icebergs entirely
* ship sinks in enough time that people can get in the lifeboats, but not so much time that the lifeboats could act as ferries to a nearby ship
* weather is good enough that the lifeboats don't get wrecked, but also cold enough that people can't survive in the water even for short periods.
In other shipwrecks I bet that the women/men thing didn't hold up mostly because "who people decided to let on the lifeboats first" wasn't a huge factor.
I don't find that chain of reasoning very plausible. It seems to ignore lots of things that could be important (e.g. sharks).
But let's see what the research says! From https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1207156109:
>>>
Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers. We also find that: the captain has the power to enforce normative behavior; there seems to be no association between duration of a disaster and the impact of social norms; women fare no better when they constitute a small share of the ship’s complement; the length of the voyage before the disaster appears to have no impact on women’s relative survival rate; the sex gap in survival rates has declined since World War I; and women have a larger disadvantage in British shipwrecks. Taken together, our findings show that human behavior in life-and-death situations is best captured by the expression “every man for himself.”
<<<
I don't think that the possibility of shark attacks changes what I wrote. Most of the alternative scenarios where the factors I listed aren't present, wouldn't involve people surviving for a long time in the open water.
Even where that is the idea - the most infamous example of sharks attacking survivors of a sinking ship was the USS Indianapolis. According to Wikipedia the high end of the estimated range for number of people killed by sharks was 150 out of 890, in 4 days (with a larger number dying from other causes, basically all the various issues that could arise from floating in the ocean with no food or water for 4 days). Compare to the Titanic where (again according to Wikipedia) basically everyone in the water died within 15-30 minutes.
Possibly I misunderstood your initial point? I took the claim as "P(survival) ~= P(lifeboat)", with the implication that P(lifeboat) strongly depended on gender... was that correct?
My further understanding of your claim is that normally, either P(survive) isn't well-correlated with P(lifeboat), and/or P(lifeboat) doesn't depend strongly on gender... was that correct?
I'd agree except that I'd phrase it not as "P(survival) ~= P(lifeboat)", more like "{people who survived} ~ {people who got in lifeboat}". And that in other situations they aren't ~.
I recently learned about the SS La Bourgogne: “Only 13 percent of her passengers survived, compared with 48 percent of her crew. 200 of her passengers were women, but only one survived. Passengers included numerous children, none of whom survived.”
I read about it in a typically wonderful Roger Angell piece, about his odd father, odder even than his odd stepfather - which had a terrific ending.
I'll go ahead and post the link to the Roger Angell piece then, only partway through but it is indeed excellent: https://web.archive.org/web/20231118183633/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/02/21/the-king-of-the-forest-roger-angell
"Where this élan came from is a mystery, for he was not a trivial sort of person, not an entertainer. He didn’t get it from his father, a slight, almost frail man, who had been crippled by childhood polio. My father didn’t know him for long, in any case. Elgin Adelbert Angell was aboard the French liner La Bourgogne—one of the last North Atlantic blue-ribbon ships with masts as well as steam—which sank, en route to France on July 4, 1898, off Sable Island, southeast of Nova Scotia, after a dawn collision with a British merchant vessel, Cromartyshire, with the loss of five hundred and forty-nine lives. It was a famous marine disaster of its day. My grandfather, a Cleveland lawyer, had embarked the day before, and was looking forward to a reunion with his wife and daughter—my father’s younger sister, Hildegarde—who had been in Europe for six months. The story behind this is that my grandmother had exhausted herself nursing my father through a long bout of typhoid, and had been sent abroad, on doctor’s advice, to recover her health. My father, who had just turned nine, had been booked aboard La Bourgogne as well, but he came down with chicken pox and had to be left behind. Fortuitously, my grandmother’s brother, Frederick Curtis, was the head of a small school for boys in Brookfield, Connecticut; my father had been enrolled there during his mother’s absence, and there the disappointed patient had to remain, while his father went on alone. My father never said much about this episode in his life, but he did once tell me that his Uncle Fred, who had a long beard, used to make the rounds in his nightshirt, carrying a candle, to kiss each of the boys good night. I don’t know when my father got word about La Bourgogne or how many weeks or months went by before he was reunited with his mother and sister, but this Dickensian scene is what comes to mind when I try to imagine the moment: the wavering candle held by his approaching, sadly murmuring uncle, who wakes him up for the bad news."
Thanks!
It is hard to imagine such a self-effacing, and generous-to-parent, memoir in the New Yorker nowadays.
And Paul just posted a link to the paper I'd been thinking of; I'm copying the link here for convenience
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1207156109
33% of men in first class survived; 34% of children in third class survived.
Disproportionate Devastation | Titanic https://share.google/NBH9cWZWeHVSjVYCr
>What, I wonder, would happen on board the Titanic today?
They'd have enough lifeboats for everyone.
Lyomante, shame has no bearing on the matter.
If you pass on a successful gene/culture combination to your grandchildren then you have passed the survival of the fittest test.
If you do not then natural selection will erase both genes and culture.
Lyomante, with respect it is you who reduces the matter to conception rather than a lifetime commitment to raising your children then helping with your grandchildren.
Individualism is mostly a Western concept, there are far more arranged marriages than love matches. Both male and female have to submit to the will of their elders, the alternative is to lose their support, plus they are better at matchmaking than teenagers.
We face challenges as a species that we can only solve as a species, teamwork rather than individual choices is required. I am not a team player and would hate it.
If we are not biological machines driven by forces then what are we?
I genuinely thought Astral Codex Ten was a place for "sophisticated" liberals. High IQ nuanced takes. With some sense of morality. I was curious to see what the takes on Charlie Kirk's assassination would be here. And thank God there were a few good civilized souls remaining. But so many evil comments as well. This assassination has shaken me to the core. And (some of) the left's response has been absolutely shocking. I never thought we had reached such a low point. Celebrating, or excusing the assassination of someone for his ideas. Throwing a bunch of "what about this what about that". My God. Is this what happened when MLK was assassinated? Did people dance on his grave and openly claimed he got what he deserved? I guess *some* probably did. I doubt it was as many as now though. What a black pill.
1. Most of the people I've seen have not been celebrating his assassination, they've been saying "political assassination is bad but I do not want to make a big show of mourning for someone who made a career of saying how much they hate me." I think this is a reasonable stance - liberalism can demand certain actions for the sake of peacekeeping, like "don't call for violence," but it cannot demand that you feel sad.
2. A lot of Republicans immediately responded to the assassination by saying "the left needs to stop saying such inflammatory things," and the government responded by promising to crack down on leftists saying inflammatory things. So it's pretty important to that discussion to point out that Kirk made a career out of saying inflammatory things.
Where have you seen this celebration? I’ve just seen government officials announcing that they want to declare civil organizations, possibly even the Democratic Party as a whole, to be illegal.
A part of your impression is caused by the nature of online communication. Offline, when 5 people debate some topic and 95 stay silent, you see a mostly silent crowd. Online, when 5 people debate some topic and 95 stay silent, you see a debate.
People are not obligated to be angels.
The Golden Rule of ethics, the one you say when a child or a disbeliever in ethics asks you to explain the entirety of ethics while standing on 1 foot, is "Treat People Exactly As You Want To Be Treated, [Unsaid but implied] For Good People Will Treat You Exactly As You Did Them".
All Else Is Commentary.
So no, Tergiverse, aka Mr. good leftist "appalled" by us dirty naughty mockers of Kirk's death. We're, I will reiterate again and again and again, to the end of time, never obligated to be good to a bad actor. Talk shit? nobody cares about you and law-abiding people will celebrate your death longer than your family will mourn it, and in greater numbers and more zealous enthusiasm. Talk good, and people will mourn you and remember your good deeds and suppress the memory of your bad deeds.
There is nothing illegal about being happy and jubulent and celebratory when someone is dead. There is something **distasteful** and **immoral** about it, but only if the counter party recognizes the authority of those words, when they recognize what it means to behave for others and constrain your actions without the necessity of the use of lethal force associated with law enforcement. There isn't any such notion in the counter party's mind, the counter party literally holds a big sign over their chest and back saying in bigly font ""I will imprison and sue and kill and detain and mock each and every one I hate, with or without a good reason, including neutrals and former allies, without provocation, all the time"", and Kirk is part, an integral high-profile part!, of this counter party.
He doesn't get any of the benefits of civil behaviour he decried as "made up".
Being mourned honorably is not a god given right, it's a privilege that the living and only the living decide to bestow on you, and many people have decided Kirkie doesn't deserve any.
Get over it, he's dead, we're happy, you have no power over the neural structure that allows us to be happy over his death, you have no power over the neural structure and the internet machinery that allows us to express this happiness. It has already happened, it will never be reversed, cut the losing fight and continue living your day unaffected, as indeed you're by the death of this low quality human specimen, of no particular importance or virtue.
Please do not speak for anyone else but yourself.
The Golden Rule of ethics, the one you say when a child or a disbeliever in ethics asks you to explain the entirety of ethics while standing on 1 foot, is "Treat People Exactly As You Want To Be Treated, [Unsaid but implied] For Good People Will Treat You Exactly As You Did Them".
What the "yay I'm happy he's dead/he deserved it" comments indicate is that, should some disgruntled person blow *your* (general you) head off, then it's fine for everyone to cheer that and say you deserved it.
Even if it's the Bad Guy shooting the Good Guy. Okay for the Bad Guys to cheer about getting One Of Them!
Except that the people currently cheering on the death of Kirk would never accept people on the other side cheering on a trans activist or Democratic politician or Insert Your Favourite Here getting their head blown off.
Do you think it's easy not to cheer for the death of the hated? Or the ones on the other side from me? I've had to learn it with difficulty to be charitable, not to rejoice. Because it's easy to rejoice. And that leads to evil, because ill-wishing is a habit that will make you hardened of heart and darkened of thought, and then you will *want* bad things to happen to those you hate, and it will become easier and easier to *hate* and not just disagree. And convince yourself that your hatred is justified because that person is evil, not just mistaken or even simply does not share your values, but evil and worthy of death.
And as we are seeing now with all the shootings everywhere over the past year or so, hating leads to active violence.
I didn't cheer, but I did put up a post saying that I was not able to be sad about Kirk's death, and that I had felt a burst of fierce joy when I learned about it. Added that I was not in favor of assassination, and that I was talking about my feelings, not my inner guidelines for how to behave. I don't know whether you saw the post. In it I talked about having 2 beloved family members who were gay and mildly trans. It was actually very helpful to me to be able to tell this group my actual feelings and not get pushback. It made me calmer and more able to think about the incident in a balanced way. And the next day I happened to see a young dad carrying a little boy on his shoulders and felt a spontaneous pang of grief for Kirk and his family. Also on the next day, as part of some data gathering I was doing, I googled for organizations dedicated to helping imprisoned trans people, and there were a huge number of them. And I thought, I see why people are irritated by be-good-to-trans people stuff. It does seem like the group gets help and sympathy way out of proportion to how many of them there are. And, jeez, the proportion of this small group who end up going to prison must be small too, & so total imprisoned trans population *quite* small compared to, for example, little underfed children. So there's something silly about there being all those organizations, and I can see how that stuff irritates the hell out of people who have not been trained into the vehemently-pro-trans response. Anyhow, my point is that being allowed to say I hated what Kirk said about trans people so much that I briefly felt glad he'd been shot actually helped me move away from that point of view. So I don't agree with these governess-sounding people who insist you cannot speak ill of the dead, and especially that you should feel only empathy, grief etc. People can't help how they feel, and often calm down if others show some tolerance for those who feel something they do not.
Oh, I exempt feelings. We have little control over immediate emotion. What we *do* have control over is, are we going to make this a means of expressing hatred, or do we establish a habit of "murder is always bad, no matter who the victim"?
There are those I'd be quite happy, in theory, to see dead in a ditch, but that does not mean I want some Hero to go blow their brains out, and if that happened, I would try very hard not to be "good, they deserved it, that's a start on the bad people in the world".
That's wrong no matter who does it for whatever reason, and yes I think they're wrong, and yes I'd say they're wrong.
At the moment, we're stuck in a loop of "our side *never* did that and would *never* do that" "yes they did" "no we didn't, it was *your* side did that".
I don't care who did it, even if I recognise and understand the impulse to do it, especially in response to "but for years you guys rejoiced and cancelled".
Celebrating the murder of anyone, even an evildoer, does harm to your soul. Avoid it.
"I'm still better than them because I still draw a line at their children."
How long will that line hold? Because there are people who plume themselves, as you do, that "I'm still better than them" who made threats and jokes about raping and stalking and murdering people's children online, on the grounds that "A is famous and a right-winger and so it's okay to do it".
God damn it, I'm starting to agree with Shoe0nHead, or she's starting to agree with me. This is cats and dogs living in harmony territory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJENP0Rr8p0
> Get over it, he's dead, we're happy, you have no power over the neural structure that allows us to be happy over his death, you have no power over the neural structure and the internet machinery that allows us to express this happiness.
*He* doesn't. The administration, on the other hand...
There are other countries in the planet known as Earth, some of them - most of them I would even wager - are not the backward fundamentalist shit hole that recently became the once good USA, from such remote bases of operations, and even from a great many strongholds still inside the USA, one can still verbally strike at stupid low IQ servile cucks and mock their humiliating deaths, and nothing bad of mention will happen.
As one should.
*sigh* Where does this overconfidence even come from? America's reach does not stop at its borders. Regardless of what happens, the US military and its various industries and services will likely remain intact. Just look at China: "Even though a thousand miles away, anyone who affronts China will pay."
They would probably use AI for that, but sure, have fun with that.
The Thing of the Day is assassination. Assassinations are touchy, but they're also rare, so don't let one drive your whole experience. Most of the time, I think ACX is better.
Now, when the Thing of the Day is something other than an assassination, ACX is still not quite as good as I'd like; it's not quite as good as SSC was. Part of that is just the Substack UI; it drives off long form discussion. DataSecretsLox has a better UI, IMO, but I notice one problem it has in common with ACX: part of the original SSC crowd went there, instead of the whole thing.
Another problem they both have are that the high IQ takes are necessarily lengthy to make, and it's hard to say something that wasn't already said in SSC's Top Posts or in a list of effortposts that only ever gets longer and longer. (I suppose we could spend our days doing little more than posting their titles in response to current events and everyone just re-reads them and delights in the memory refresh.) By contrast, low-IQ takes are cheap and easy to make, even high-IQ people can make them, and anyone can get bored, so on they go. Bad takes crowd out good ones.
If you want to try to dilute low-IQ takes, post more high ones. "Be the change you want to see in the universe." I doubt anyone will mind.
This post is so over the top and so homogeneous in striking the exact same notes in every sentence that I suspect it was produced by AI.
I think not. There are typos. Moreover I do agree with it on the whole, AI or not. Perhaps you object to something specific in this post? A call to avoid being sucked below the froth is something I hope we can all support.
I had the same thought.
Apologies if this seems like a non-sequitur, but I think the only thing you can do is take action to protect your own emotional/mental health by disengaging from the online discourse.
I understand also that this is like the "eat less and exercise more" advice that (nearly) everyone already knows/believes but (nearly) no one follows.
Shorter version: "these people I dislike are bad".
TIL Charlie Kirk and George Floyd both share the same birthday.(Oct 14) In the spirit of bipartisan unity, I propose that hereafter Oct 14 shall be known as Discount Martyrs Day.
This is offensive to everyone, including me. It's a great idea.
When bad things have happened to you, and will happen to you in life, know that you deserved them.
Which critique of those two martyrs offends you?
Absolutely. Anyone who offends you deserves inoperable cancer.
The federal appeals court panel last evening ruled against the administration in the Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook situation. The panel declined to grant an emergency stay of the district court's preliminary injunction. (So none of these court actions yet actually resolve the core legal question, which has to do with what does/doesn't count as a legit "for cause" firing of a Fed governor as required in the relevant federal law.)
News reports say that the White House is right now begging the Supreme Court to intervene and overrule the appellate panel's refusal to issue a stay. They want to keep Cook [a Biden appointee] from participating in the Fed's two-day meeting starting today at which the Board of Governors will consider the president's demands for a cut in interest rates.
The appeals court's decline of a stay did not reference Reuters' debunking over the weekend, with receipts, of the accusation that Cook had misrepresented to a mortgage lender her purpose/use of the home that she was seeking a loan to purchase. (Nor have Cook or her Trump administration accusers yet commented on Reuters' revelations.) So far the federal courts have been dealing just with the "likelihood to succeed" of different perspectives on what "cause" does/doesn't mean for federal appointments for which that standard of dismissal is required in law.
The SCOTUS nerds in the relevant subReddit [which is rather high quality and informative because firmly moderated] think that Reuters' published findings will reduce the chances of the Court wanting to involve itself now. Idea being that even the most eager unitary-executive/whatever-the-POTUS-wants-goes justices (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch) will sigh and take a pass on a "for cause" instance in which the allegation behind the attempted dismissal has been publicly disproven. Any hour now we may learn whether or not that prediction holds up.
Trying to figure out Trump's motives here, I don't think he particularly cares whether it succeeds, he just wants to be seen to be putting pressure on the Fed.
That way, when the Fed drops interest rates, as it certainly will, he can take credit.
I’m not sure the Supreme Court worries so much about optics anymore. I think they’re just letting it rip.
I would say "increase" or "maintain" rather than "generate", but, yea.
The modern American left puts itself on tilt way more than our parents or grandparents did, a change that this core Trumpian strategy takes ruthless advantage of.
https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/the-kong-edition an interesting and brief history of a dog's chew toy, heard about this via an automotive parts consultant
Fabulous
Kongs are amazing dog toys, literally the one I'd choose if about to be stranded on an island with our family mutt.
In addition to the chewability they are mesmerizing for dogs that love to chase thrown things, because they can be thrown like a ball but then bounce both strongly and chaotically.
Much of this thread seems to suggest Scott, or Substack, could use more moderation tools. A nice muting system wouldn't be such a bad thing, either.
It took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about, since I thought the thread was pretty chill, especially about the Charlie Kirk stuff. Then I copied the url into incognito mode on my browser and apparently I've blocked...like 40% of the ACX commentariat. The comment count on this thread when I'm logged in is 356 comments, in incognito mode it's 620.
So, uh, yeah, just block people. It's very chill. Like, there's a guy below who's named "Charlie's dead, I'm happy". Do you really want to intellectually engage with someone like that? Do you really think you'll have a valuable discussion? If not, just click on the user name, it brings up a little profile, there's a little 3 dot thing by "Message", and you can just block him.
It's sad that discourse has gotten here but, like...discourse is hard. Especially since the stakes are getting raised because now instead of right-wingers getting cancelled, everyone's getting canceled. Yay!?
Like, I really enjoyed open threads under the old Reign of Terror but that's a much harder thing for Scott to do now with everything going crazy and also post NYT doxxing. Plus, ya know, the opportunity cost of playing with toddlers. So the second best option for us is just to block people who be dumb and angy.
I appreciate wanting to curate, but if you're doing it to the point of cutting out over a third of one of the best comment sections the internet has to offer, maybe what you *really* want is to just not engage with the internet anymore?
As someone else who also extensively curates their online experience (I get enough stress offline anyhow!) and now finds it a lot more pleasant than it used to be, I'm not sure why you think your "throw the baby out with the bathwater" suggestion is better than just throwing out the bathwater?
Good question. I think there are two good possible reasons.
First, IMO the internet kind of just sucks to be socially involved in at all. Even though I find this comment section extremely interesting, informative, collegial, etc... I feel like engaging with it is not the best use of my time, and generally try to make myself do less of it. Some people might have a much more positive experience, but I think it's good to suggest "be less online" anytime it seems even potentially applicable!
Second, as with ~80% of things in life, I think the Pareto principle applies here. There are a scattering cranks and weirdos here, and blocking them would make perfect sense... but there aren't *that* many. I would think like 5%, 10% tops. If you're blocking well over a third of all ACX comments, I think you're at significant risk of shading over from "curation" to "filter bubble", even with the best intentions.
I notice that ACX comments, while still noticeably better than, say, Reddit or X or Reason.com, don't seem as good to me as SSC comments were.
If it turns out WoolyAI agrees, and had maintained his ignore list with that in mind, then the argument here might be that, to WoolyAI, he isn't really filtering "one of the best comment sections the internet has to offer" so much as he's filtering that precise slice that dragged its quality down to the neighborhood of the worse ones.
If, moreover, he and I aren't alone in feeling this way, then it starts to make more sense for someone to do this curation for all of us.
Oh that's a really good point, especially considering how important relative improvement/worsening is to our experience of things.
I'd be remiss if I didn't rejoin your earlier point in turn - generally, I often think I could do better with at least a bit less online time.
Blocking is a good idea but what a pity it has to happen here.
Yeah, that guy was what prompted me to make the post. Thank you as well for the instructions! I thought it used to be under the three dots by comments as well, but maybe that's only in the app. Substack is so disjointed.
For anyone who doesn't already know... offered b/c it took me a long time to stumble on this myself.
Muting:
(1) click on the poster's name. this will open a substack page of the form "https://substack.com/@username"
(2) click the three dots button to the right of the "Subscribe" and "Message" buttons. This will give you a pop-up menu that includes options "Mute" and "Block."
I do not have an opinion on the claim "this is a nice muting system."
It also hides all responses to their comments, so they're, like, completely gone from your end. It's the best way to deal with the propagandist screamboys.
Sometimes there are valuable replies downstream from stupid comments. I would like an option that shows someone's comments using small gray font. So that I can read it when I am curious, but I can also easily skip it.
If someone keeps posting genuinely bad comments, I think banning is better than blocking, because everyone needs to ban individually, and the bad comments still remain on Scott's public page. Banning is useful for situations where you think that something is bad but others disagree.
+1
I should've asked more directly because I could've sworn it used to be under the three dots dropdown menu on comments too, but that has disappeared. Thank you!
>I do not have an opinion on the claim "this is a nice muting system."
Hey, better than nothing, that's for sure.
What's the difference between muting and blocking?
Muting stops you from seeing their posts. Blocking stops them from seeing yours.
I just had the random thought that the Ani AI from Twitter reminds me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, with Elon Musk as Gendo Ikari, Grimes as Yui Ikari, and Ani as either Rei Ayanami, the EVA, or both.
Rei was both...
A question for the mathematicians in the audience.
Are there purely mathematical facts which seem weirdly complicated for no particular reason?
Wandering away into astronomy for an example, the year is not an even number of days long. It would be convenient if it were, but its not. It's not even a simple fraction of number of days long. It's an uneven awkward not-quite 365.25 number of days, like God just eyeballed it rather than measuring before cutting.
I'm looking for something like that, but with pure numbers.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/710:_Collatz_Conjecture
The fact of precisely which numbers are prime.
This fact undoubtedly exists, since primality is clearly specified and binary over the integers - every integer greater than 1 either is prime, or is not. However, that fact is not cleanly stateable; the best we can do is list them. There is no simple pattern, no simple formula for determining primality that is simpler than the condition itself*; to know for sure, we have to divide by at least every prime up to the integer's square root, more if we don't know -those- primes, and for the integers we'd typically like to test (cryptographic keys), the list is never known, and would be unmanageably large if it were. (Or we use the AKS primality test, but that's still polynomial in the number of bits.)
*There is a primality test that is 50% likely to fail for a non-prime, and can be tried with multiple inputs to get the total likelihood as high as you like, but that's a statistical method, not a discrete one.
No, there is a deterministic method for determining whether a number is prime that scales polynomially with the number of bits needed to represent the number (AKS algorithm). So there is a deterministic prime test capable of evaluating the primality of very large numbers. It's just not used in practice since the statistical method is far superior in almost every way.
Good catch; I edited my post.
I'm noticing it was published in 2002, which explains why I didn't know about it - I stopped following prime number theory closely somewhere in the 1990s.
I'm also reading that it's O(n^12) in the number of bits (possibly O(n^6), depending on how one conjecture resolves). This is certainly better in the long run than O(n^0.5) in the size of n itself, but still pretty bad for practical purposes, like, say, finding out which two primes were multiplied to create a 128-bit integer.
Determining which two primes were multiplied to form a 128 bit integer requires prime factorization, which is known to be NP. That's a separate problem from whether determining a given number is prime or not.
Also, the Miller Rabin algorithm runs in O(n^3) time where n is the number of bits, so it is also polynomial in the number of bits, just with a smaller exponent.
Every once in a while someone comes up with a formula that enumerates the prime numbers, and acts as though they’ve discovered something deep. But ever since Gödel’s work, we’ve known that it’s not too difficult to write down a formula to enumerate any computable sequence, including the primes. The problem is that these formulas just aren’t any simpler than the definition itself (and in most cases are a lot more complicated).
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say with "that fact is not cleanly stateable; the best we can do is list them". In other words, the best formula is still "Prime(N) <-> N=2 || N=3 || N=5 || N=7 || ..." which may as well not be a formula.
I don’t think anything in the real world behaves precisely according to the math describing it. The circumference of a circle is a real fixed quantity of something that math can’t quite get at.
The circle is the mathematical thing - the circumference of a round physical object is the real fixed quantity that math doesn’t get at.
Quite right. I was using the term loosely.
Drawing a circle on a piece of paper could be considered a physical object at that point
The three great unsolved problems of classical geometry are to find ruler-and-compass constructions for squaring the circle, doubling the cube and trisecting the angle; these all turn out to be impossible, for reasons that require mathematics incomparably more complicated than stating and understanding the problems does.
Similarly, in modern mathematics we have Fermat's last theorem, the twin primes conjecture and the Goldbach conjecture (every even number is the sum of two primes), which even a child can easily understand, but only the first of which has been solved, and that required incredibly complicated mathematics.
One of my favorite Geometry problems was thus:
It can be proven that it is impossible to trisect an angle using the methods of geometric construction.
Use geometric construction to construct a tool that can be used to trisect an angle, necessarily a tool that violates the rules of geometric construction. Include a proof that it works correctly.
My favorite example of "impossible for incomparably more complicated reasons" is this:
You have a square (or a rectangle) made of paper. Can you cut it to an *odd* number of triangles that have the same *area* (regardless of their shape)?
.
Cutting to an even number of triangles is trivial. Like, cut along the diagonal, and then cut each half into N triangles of same area. Or, first cut the rectangle into N slices of the same width, then cut each of them along a diagonal.
For the odd numbers, you can easily prove it is impossible for 3 or 5 by evaluating all possibilities, but then they are too many. It feels like there either should be a simple general proof, or a nice trick to do it for a reasonably small odd number (less than twenty).
I finally found a proof of impossibility in some mathematical journal, but it was so complicated that I didn't understand it. I remember that the idea was to consider the coordinates of the corners of the triangles, and color them differently based on whether the coordinate was a rational number with some power of 2 in the denominator (maybe even depending on whether it was an odd or even power of 2), and then... some complicated reasoning about the total number of each color.
Sticking to the topic of "uneven awkward numbers", my favorite has to be Ramanujan's constant, e^(pi*sqrt(163)) = 262537412640768743.99999999999925...
The explanation of why this is *almost, but not quite* an integer involves some serious number theory that I never really got around to learning, but there's some explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heegner_number
The Busy Beaver numbers:
The first four are 1, 6, 21, 107. OK, whatever.
The fifth is about 47 million, which is a pretty big escalation from the last one but is still a perfectly reasonable sort of number that shouldn't cause any mental distress.
The sixth one is unfathomably large, far too large to be representable within the physical universe. In decimal notation it would have far more digits than there are atoms in the observable universe.
And after that they just keep getting bigger.
optimal packing of 17 squares https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/17-squares-in-a-larger-square
As it says it's only the best known, not proven to be optimal, though it's hard to imagine that a packing any closer could look much better.
Anything to do with Diophantine equations. Seemingly simple questions about integer solutions to equations (Fermat's Last Theorem, congruent number problem) can have extremely difficult proofs touching on many areas of mathematics (algebra, geometry, analysis).
In this case, though, there is a reason: provably, there is no (computable) upper bound on how long of a proof you need to argue that a particular Diophantine equation has no solutions - this is the answer to Hilbert's Tenth Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_tenth_problem). In fact, any mathematical question can be encoded as a Diophantine equation, though usually these equations are much more complicated than the simple-seeming-but-still-hard equations like a^n + b^n = c^n.
Not "complicated" per se, but 355/113 is a bizarrely precise approximation of pi.
Irrational number can be written in continued fractions which are an infinite sequence of fractions nested into each other, each which numerator one and denominator an integer, plus* another continued fraction smaller than 1. Stopping after one of those integers produces a fraction which is a maximally precise approximation of your irrational number given the size of its numerator and denominator.
*or minus, in a non-standard variant where as a result, all the denominator integers are at least 2. I like it better that way. Fight me.
For example, the "golden ratio" 1.618033989... is 2 - 1/(3 - 1/(3 - 1/(3 - ... ) ) ). Stop after one of the 3s, and you get a ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers: 5/3, 13/8, 34/21, etc.
In this example the integers form a periodic pattern (in fact, constant at 3, which is a case of periodic) because the golden ratio is a root of a quadratic equation. e has another (non-periodic) pattern. In general, you get seemingly random small integers, for example:
log(2) = 1 - 1/(3 + 1/(4 - 1/(7 + 1/(4 - 1/(2 + ...) ) ) ) )
And then there is pi:
pi = 3 + 1/(7 + 1/(16 - 1/(294 - 1/(3 - 1/(4 - ... ) ) ) )
It is already rare to get a 16, but on top of that you run into a huge 294, then the normal small numbers. Stop the fraction after the 16, neglecting the tiny 1/(294 - ...), and you get the very strong approximation pi ~ 355/113. The error is about 0.00000027.
It is just improbable and not part of any pattern, unlike the roots of quadratic equations or e.
I've always wondered about this - I feel like their ought to be some sort of power series involving pi whose truncation yields this, or something similar (a la e^pi sqrt163 ), but I've never heard of one.
Neither do I.
You can use the fact that the integral of 1/(1 + x^2) over x in [0,1] is pi/4, approximate that function by polynomials and integrate them. The denominator of the result will tend to be a highly composite number. For example it is possible with a close enough polynomial to land on 377/120 = 3 + 1/(7 + 1/17). But 113, a prime denominator, is hard to reach by summing fractions.
In case you haven't seen it, one of Euler's methods for relating a power series with a continued fraction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_continued_fraction_formula#:~:text=The%20exponential%20function%20ex,power%20series%20for%20ex.
Also, taking both second terms of the arctan expansion in of Euler's famous method of approximation (based on pi = 20 arctan(1/7) + 8 arctan(3/79) ) is about to 354.97/113.
The it's about 289/92 = 3 + 1/(7 + 1/7). You don't reach 355/113 specifically.
What I meant was, expand arctan(x) to two terms of the power series, then substitute in 20 arctan(1/7) + 8 arctan(3/79) and we get an approximation that is close to 355/113:
20*(1/7 - 1/1029) + 8 *(3/79 - 9/493039) is approximately 354.97/113
Of course, this isn't a special relationship between the power series and the continued fraction, it is just the expected coincidence from two good approximations.
You're probably thinking of "continued fractions".
Pi. Always seemed odd to me that a number that shows up in so many places is so messy.
This is another great example (that I should have included) of "typical case is a monster, but students almost only see simple cases."
why does the quadratic formula have to be so ugly
To prepare you for the much uglier cubic and quartic cases. They are ugly enough that they are written down as "methods" rather than explicit formulas which would be monstruous.
The monstruosity is there in turn to console you for the fact that in degree 5 and above, there is no formula at all.
They just stop at four? Math is weird.
I recommend notallwrong's video about why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSHv9Elk1MU.
I think the answer depends heavily on how you understand the phrase "weirdly complicated for no particular reason." As an exercise for the reader, classify the examples given by other posters (and here) based on how they interpret "weirdly complicated" and "no particular reason."
Some examples that particularly resonate with me:
(1) Historically, the role of complex numbers in the solution to cubic polynomials is an interesting case. Specifically, a question entirely about real numbers that has an answer in the real numbers requires making use of complex numbers to find the answer.
(2) formal definitions or proofs of things that seem simple:
- convex set (probably this is just me, but I have a strong memory of my reaction when first seeing the definition)
- the real numbers either through Dedekind cuts or convergent Cauchy sequences
- Jordan curve theorem
(3) things where the typical case is a monster, but students almost only see simple cases:
- integrals of combinations of elementary functions
- continuous maps
In your example, if you assume the planets formed out of a disk of dust and rubble, there's really no reason to expect that the orbital period of a planet around its sun and the period of rotation around its own axis should be in any particular relationship to one another. While I understand where you're coming from, a universe where the number of days in a year was always integer would have to have radically different physics than ours: it wouldn't be governed just by the laws of Kepler and Newton that we have. There's a nice passage in 'Foucault's Pendulum' which discusses our tendency to see patterns where there are none (the first link I found was here: https://x.com/mcnees/status/1715802475607851187)
Other people have given maths results along the lines you're looking for, I think. You might like to look at the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences (here: https://oeis.org). Entering a few numbers it'll show lots of ways they can be continued - what's a surprising sequence depends on your taste, but it might help reorient your thoughts on what's complicated and what isn't.
Tidal lock does tend to produce an integer number of days in a year, but that integer is zero. As I understand it, each body's gravity continuously hits the other at different angles as they revolve and rotate, and that causes solids to deform and fluids to slosh around. This has a friction-like effect that turns some of the rotational kinetic energy into entropy and gradually rearranges the rotational energy so the orbital system produces less tidal friction. For the Earth-Moon system in particular, tidal forces are gradually slowing down the Earth's rotation (increasing our day length) and pushing the Moon further away from the Earth. The Moon is already tidally locked to the Earth, so tidal forces don't slow it down any further.
There's also tidal resonance, where the planet gets locked into a small integer ratio through some effect that I'm not really clear on. Mercury is the main example I know of, with three days every two years.
But yeah, if the ratio isn't 0:1 or something like 3:2, there's no mechanism to keep the ratio close to an integer ratio. To the contrary, the same mechanism that produces tidal lock means that the ratio is going to be constantly changing unless it's in one of the stable configurations, so if a planet coincidentally had a 500.00-day year, for example, it wouldn't stay 500.00 days for very long on a cosmic time scale.
One of Poincaré's discoveries is that three (or more) body systems are chaotic (in a technical sense). Such configurations are unstable: a slight nudge from the gravitation effects of a distant planet cascades and causes differences which grow with time. Everything is still rather well behaved over a few millions of years, but not over billions.
Apparently, people have worked out in some detail which planets are most likely to be perturbed to the extent that they collide or are ejected from the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System
Don't hold your breath - nothing exciting is coming up in the next ten million years or so.
Here are some examples that come to mind. I interpret your question as "mathematical examples where you might reasonably hope for a clean result, but things turn out to be messier" (I think "complicated for no particular reason" is debatable, given how mathematical facts are intertwined. If days divided years perfectly without any error whatsoever, or even gave a nice fraction, that would seem a lot more complicated given existing knowledge. Consider e.g. that the earth's mass is not perfectly constant, its orbit not perfectly clean of randomly changing debris, etc. - the laws of physics would have to "conspire" across the universe to get this one arbitrary measurement continuously right).
(1) Some natural numbers can be expressed as a sum of two squares (like 13 = 9 + 4 or 1 = 1 + 0), and some cannot (like 7). What characterizes the numbers that have this property? You might initially hope for a quick answer like "every even number and every other odd number" (this happens to hold for 0,1,2,3,4,5 but breaks at 6), or something at that level.
In fact, it is "every number whose prime factorization does not contain an odd power of a prime that leaves remainder 3 when divided by 4" [1]. One may wonder whether it's even a proper answer, given how much more complicated it sounds, but it is indeed considered an answer. It goes along the same lines if you instead ask which numbers are sums of three squares [2]. You might think this pattern continues, but math has another surprise in store: there are no more complicated conditions beyond three. Every natural number is a sum of four squares [3].
(2) Real numbers are usually associated with their decimal representations, like a quarter 0.25, a third 0.333..., and so on. One may reasonably expect that every real number corresponds to a unique such representation, but famously 0.999.... is exactly 1. This less-than-elegant edge case comes naturally from fully clarifying what exactly is meant by the "..." part [4].
(3) To the extent that disappointing messiness comes from "nice patterns that just break" (arguably the above examples can be seen as such instances), you may be interested in lists like [5] or [6], and in this 3B1B video [7] on a sequence that starts 2,4,8,16,31.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum_of_two_squares_theorem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendre%27s_three-square_theorem
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange%27s_four-square_theorem
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
[5] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/15444/examples-of-eventual-counterexamples
[6] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/514/conjectures-that-have-been-disproved-with-extremely-large-counterexamples
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtkIWDE36qU
Packing 11 unit squares in a larger square.
I really like the so called "sausage catastrophe" in packing theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_sphere_packing#Sausage_catastrophe
If the Kepler conjecture can be thought of as the limit of this sort of sphere-packing as the number of spheres approaches infinity, then I think you could say that, in one sense, infinitely many spheres can be packed more efficiently than four spheres, which is kind of funny. Because for four spheres arranged in a sausage-shape (line), which has been proven to be optimal according to the wiki page, the density is ~73%, but the densest space-filling sphere packing according to the Kepler conjecture (which has been proven) has density ~74%.
Edit: On second thought this just seems obvious and might be an intuitive explanation for why the sausage catastrophe happens, at least in a fuzzy big picture way. Because
1. The density for the sausage shape gradually decreases from 100% for one sphere down to 66.6...% in the limit as more spheres keep being added (because 66.6...% is the ratio of sphere volume to total volume being added with each extra sphere appended).
2. The optimal density for infinitely many spheres filling space (so under the condition where you can ignore whatever inefficiencies would have existed along the outer boundary for that way of arranging spheres) is ~74%, which is greater than the limit density of the sausage shape.
3. As a shape gets larger, its volume increases much faster than its surface area, which I think means that for sphere packings, we should expect that, as more spheres are added, a point should be reached where the internal density of the structure begins to matter arbitrarily more than the density along its boundary.
4. So as more spheres are added, since the ideal internal density of ~74% remains steady above the declining density for the sausage shape, you eventually reach a point where you can have enough space taken up by spheres arranged according to the 74% ideal internally to outweigh the inefficienicies along the boundary and change the trajectory of the efficiency away from falling down toward 66.6...% and instead toward rising up to 74%.
On the other hand, maybe for higher dimensions the ideal space-filling sphere density is below the lower limit of the declining sausage shape density, in which case the sausage shape never stops being the most efficient.
"He can run on a platform of punishing illegal immigrants, and the illegal immigrants themselves will rally to his banner."
Source? I'm aware of LEGAL immigrants supporting Trump, because they're not happy about people skipping the line while they follow the rules, but I've never seen or heard anybody say "I'm here illegally and I support Trump!"
I read about a case of an anti-immigration Trump supporter who died in ICE custody (he was from Canada). So that was one at least.
Of course, illegals can't vote, so it doesn't matter much, but their friends and family can. And Trump seemingly did very well with them in 2024, given his strong numbers with latinos more generally.
Getting good data about the opinions of illegal immigrants is very difficult for obvious reasons. However, there is an abundance of anecdotes about illegal immigrants supporting Trump:
https://houston.eater.com/chain-restaurants/83924/trump-burger-ice-deportation-sham-marriage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGq3yEM7iLM&t=3s
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-supporter-detained-ice-thought-only-criminals-would-deported-2091501
And I have a family member who was an illegal immigrant who is as MAGA as they come.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vd1vn9n06o
> "He's doing the right thing because lots of these people don't deserve to be here," Arpineh told the BBC over the phone from the Adelanto immigrant detention centre in California's Mojave Desert.
> "I will support him until the day I die. He's making America great again."
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/11/08/trump-red-shift-voter-turnout-queens-bronx-southern-brooklyn/
>Javier Flores, a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, who’s lived in Castle Hill for four years while working as a butcher, said that “I couldn’t vote but if I could, I would choose him.”
>
>“They should remove everyone who isn’t supposed to be here — the bad people,” Flores told THE CITY in Spanish. “The people who have a bad record, you know, who have a criminal history.”
That may imply that if he was a citizen (and thus could vote) then he would vote for Trump, since he doesn’t support illegal immigrants with criminal records being allowed to live in the US.
Organizer for Saint Louis Effective Altruists here, thanks for the mention!
When asked by Jake Tapper about whether they did any data analysis of how many new cases of these diseases there will be with no vaccine mandates before lifting them, Florida's surgeon general said "Absolutely not," and "There’s this conflation of the science, and what is the right and wrong thing to do." This seems a clear indication of their position on deontology vs. utilitarianism, and I think different from most governments', at least in the modern age.
I can see the philosophical argument here, but I definitely do not think of De Santis as a libertarian in other areas.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/tapper-shocked-florida-surgeon-generals-plan-end-vaccine-mandates-schools :
"You’re trying to lift the vaccine mandate in Florida, and your department, and you did not even do a projection as to how this could impact public health? So you have not prepared hospitals in the Florida counties, most at risk, with the best treatments for any outbreaks of measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio. And you have not looked into how many kids might now get these preventable diseases? That’s what you’re saying?"
"No, that’s what you said. What I’m saying is that it’s an issue of right and wrong in terms of whether parents should be able to control, have ultimate authority over what happens to their kids’ bodies."
So weird.
Aren't all issues of right and wrong a weighting of the whole situation? If Susan's child will die when Tina doesn't vaccinate hers, should Tina have the right to not vaccinate hers?
And the trickery:
"It will always be true that parents should be able to decide what goes on, what goes into their kids’ bodies. I mean, it’s not complex at all."
What about cyanide, malnutritional food, and penises?
Obviously we don't think that any individual has per se the right to anything. That's what having a state is all about.
I wonder how many people fall for such an argument, or if that's not even the plan. If the plan is only to appear to believe in this argument so one doesn't have to consider the downside for other people.
I've always understood the main framing of the argument for vaccine mandates to fit this criteria though. The potential negative impact of many sick children outweighs the positive impact of one child's (parent's) choice. Predicated on the assumption that vaccines are extremely unlikely to cause harm themselves (and the loss of faith in this is the current driver behind the backlash).
Wouldn't that imply that you're not obligated to feed your children? Since that would require the existence of a positive right to food?
I generally don't think the positive/negative rights framing is very useful, since every right implies an obligation on someone else to enforce that right. But it seems especially unhelpful when discussing the rights of children, who are inherently dependent on others for food, shelter, and health care. If you accept a positive right for children to have food from their parents until they're old enough to take care of themselves, why not also a positive right to basic medical care?
Florida has a separate but equal decision-making system. You go down to the Piggly-Wiggly and buy you some beer, then you wrestle an alligator and fuck a teen. Then you drink the 6-pack and write down your druthers.
I grew up in Florida.
People often bring that up, but it's at best just part of the explanation. All states have some kind of sunshine laws and at least a dozen proactively publish police reports. And the most famous Florida stories are the type of thing that would make the news in any state, like that guy that ate another guy's face.
The claim I heard is that the details of the sunshine laws differ by state, and Florida's sunshine laws release an unusually large amount of information as a matter of course.
Let's say you're a local news reporter looking for stories to write up. If you're in California, for example, you can trivially obtain a brief description of each incident the police responded to and its disposition. For example, you might get something like "John Smith, 53, was arrested 3:17 p.m. Sunday, at 797 First St. on warrants for four counts of trespassing, four counts of public intoxication, urinating in public and obstructing a teacher from entering a school."
Which is intriguing, but if you want to write your story, you need to do some actual legwork by calling up the police department, tracking down Mr. Smith, or knocking on doors near where the incident occurred and hoping someone is willing to talk to you about what happened. Or you can file a freedom-of-information request and get a copy of the police report up to 30 days later when the story is old news. The legwork might be worthwhile, depending on the story, but there's a good chance you're not going to bother unless the police blotter entry is really intriguing or you're really hard-up for something to write about.
If you're in Florida, however, you can get the whole police report immediately under the sunshine laws. This makes local crime stories a lot easier to write, which in turn gives local reporters more incentive to look for particularly interesting local crime stories to report on.
----
After writing that up, I did some quick poking around to try to confirm or contradict that explanation and found conflicting accounts. I found a few local news stories from Florida which agree with the explanation, at least in broad strokes. For example:
https://www.wctv.tv/content/news/Florida-public-records-laws-help-Florida-man-stories-trend--507536371.html
On the other hand, I found this law review article from 2021 which (as I understand from quickly skimming it) seems to conclude that Florida does have unusually strong sunshine laws both as-written and as-implemented, but the difference from the norm isn't as strong as the picture I painted above and probably isn't the sole or primary reason for the Florida Man trend:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2117
Seems more of an endorsement of Hume ("can't deduce an ought from an is") rather than of deontology specifically.
Even utilitarians are going to side with Hume on this one, and will happily supply the extra moral plumbing needed to connect oughts to ises.
I've never been able to get the student discount option to work. Part of the problem is that clicking the link itself takes you to a form that doesn't have a student discount option, and I can't see the entire link to copy it and paste it into another browser tab (half of the "m" in "com" is cut off, and I can't see anything that comes after that).
In rapidly accelerating AI news, it has been three months since there has been a new top score in SWE bench Verified, the longest gap (I think) since the metric was invented
https://www.swebench.com/
"The Bible describes the specific way that divine election works . . ."
Is there a list of Scott's writing that contain these entertaining "ancient myth explains everything"-things?
There was one about how the Bush family became powerful because of a magical weapon: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/16/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate/
I don't have a full list, but I assume you're familiar with *Unsong*? What about https://www.tumblr.com/aaronsmithtumbler ?
Where are all the techno-optimistic takes on AI? I feel like everyone is so negative about it; if they're not predicting it will actually end the world they're inevitably predicting it will make life worse.
Is there anyone who has set out an optimistic take on AI? Like, one where it enhances human capability instead of replacing us? One where my brain and will are enhanced by having an assistant ride along with me at all times? One where we're all able to summon a modestly-sized legion of angels to do our bidding at a modest cost, and put them away again once we're done?
I feel like becoming an AI optimist, just because the whole field seems undersaturated.
> One where my brain and will are enhanced by having an assistant ride along with me at all times?
I write about and argue this in this post:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/the-spastic-yuppie-zombie-hoods-in
An excerpt:
"But people generally know what’s good and bad for them. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak - they knew they shouldn’t eat that whole pizza / half gallon of ice cream, and they did it anyways! They knew they should get to work on their thesis, but would rather have stabbed themselves in the eyeballs than do it, and you know what’s better than eyeball stabbing? Getting a drink with your friends! That’s just self care, really!
But a lot of the lift here is persuasion. These AI minds will know everything about you, they’ll know your thinking style, they’ll know what rhetorical techniques you prefer, they’ll be talking to you in the ways that most resonate with you and making connections, arguments, and analogies accordingly. Super persuasion, but at the personal level, and for your benefit - a super-ego that works, in other words.
And another thing - I’m not pretending the AI is going to win all the time here, either. Your super-ego doesn’t win all the time today, does it? All it really needs to do is win more often on the margin. Think of it winning only 10% more - 10% better decisions compounded over days, weeks, years, and decades is a CRAZY big effect size. It’s like getting a 10% financial return that compounds weekly!
If you’d made 10% better decisions all through high school, do you think you might have gotten into a better college? If you’d been 10% more motivated and making 10% better decisions throughout your career, would you have driven more impact and had a better career overall? Wouldn’t you be in a noticeably better place right now? How about relationships? If you’d been 10% more thoughtful and connected and better, continuously, every day, maybe you’d still be in a relationship you still regret losing. See how big an effect “10%” can be?"
There's a fellow on X: @perrymetzger. He's generally AI-focused and optimistic, and will also often repost similar views.
(Interestingly, he thinks Yud and other rationalists are way off on AI, and generally cultish and aren't rational. My view is that they have a blind spot where AI is concerned, but otherwise started out pretty good.)
I thought the optimistic take was that before the AI kills us, it will make us rich...
Sometimes learning new things closes some paths to imagination. We no longer write sci-fi about people flying to the Moon by being shot out of a giant cannon. Similarly, now that we know that alignment is an actual problem, any realistic positive vision would have to start with something like "in 2040 humanity figured out how to solve alignment, and then the superhuman machines brought us utopia" but that's just reminding us that we actually have no clue where to start and the clock is ticking.
My most optimistic take on AI is that it'd be better than a Yudkovskyian Jihad, if only because it might be a more interesting way to end civilization. Global thermonuclear war is so 1950s.
I'm okay with it, the upside is tacitly assumed by the tech companies putting billions into AI research. How to communicate risk without appearing negative is a work in progress.
I expect most top thinkers in the ACX/EA/LW space think that the chance that AGI makes (almost) all our lives better is over 50%. But if you've got a new system that makes the airport security line go 2000% faster (by deleting the security), planes board 500% faster, and ticket prices drop by 30%, but also 0.1% of flights crash, not even passengers want to take that deal (and flight crews even less).
Some facts to consider:
- A cryptographer looking at the human immune system sees no security at all. None. Your body is like a mall with doors open 24/7, even when you're sleeping. Your immune system is like mall cops with machine guns and RPGs, but their aim is only as good as mall cops. And each robber becomes two robbers whenever it steals something. This system usually works well enough for *natural* pathogens, except when it doesn't and the mall collapses. I propose one should be concerned about the potential of artificial pathogens. Which ASI could create. And in my thinking, "real" AGI leads very easily and directly to ASI.*
- Once AGI is invented, there will either be completely autonomous AGIs with their own goals, or not. If yes, the small ones should be able to shape themselves into worms (viruses) and engage in various power-seeking behaviors, while the big ones should be smart enough to trick any human or markedly smaller AGI, which might not end well. And if AGI is highly obedient and completely controlled by people? The risk of totalitarian control is the most obvious thing, especially in this age where democracy is already in decline, but omnicidal people, while very rare, also exist.
- Open-source AGI inherently cannot have reliable safety, period. Alignment is ineffective because you can't prevent someone with the weights from "finetuning for evil" (accidentally or on purpose). You can't require an auxiliary AGI as killswitch that checks an AGI's output. You can't make serious efforts against "jailbreaking" (assuming that's still a thing in AGI). And.... it seems like some well-funded people are working toward open-source AGI. 🤦♂️
So an AGI-generated utopia sounds nice and all**... but I care much more about my toddlers reaching adulthood.
* our tech tree seems to lead to transformer-based quasi-AGI instead, but a single company or paper could probably change the game. Quasi-AGI might help create pathogens too, but their safety level seems a lot higher to me.
** though if AGIs solve all our problems for us, then what is the point of having human thinkers like me who are devoted to solving the world's problems? What is the point of human intelligence in this new world? 2025 LLMs augment intelligence, which is very useful, but eliminating the need for human intelligence is something else entirely.
> A cryptographer looking at the human immune system sees no security at all. None. Your body is like a mall with doors open 24/7, even when you're sleeping. Your immune system is like mall cops with machine guns and RPGs, but their aim is only as good as mall cops. And each robber becomes two robbers whenever it steals something. This system usually works well enough for *natural* pathogens, except when it doesn't and the mall collapses.
I feel like this cryptographer needs to consult a biologist. Your immune system does a pretty solid job considering that, unlike a mall, you're constantly saturated with gobs of attackers. Your immune system is so good that even when a novel and dangerous pathogen emerges, our best course is almost always to give your immune system a heads-up, and this mostly solves the problem. Your body can constantly manufacture its own "mall cops" in massive numbers.
Pathogens that float around today have had millions of years to evolve and have tried I-can't-even-calculate-how-many different instances of attack vectors and they still mostly can't do very much unless you're too much of a literal baby to have much practice figuring out how to kill diseases, or you're old enough to be breaking down at a decent rate.
If you watch Kurzgesagt's hour-long video about the 4-billion-year history of life on Earth, you'll notice something: the first 45 minutes are extremely boring. This is because the life in the first 3 billion years is prokaryotic life (and archaea), which is not capable of evolving as complexly as eukaryotic life. Viruses, in turn, are generally simpler and more limited than prokaryotic life. Meanwhile, humans can design and build objects in a one year or less that might never have evolved even once in the entire history of life on Earth, let alone in the 200,000-year history of humanity (e.g. AM or FM radios; digital computers; and maybe even novel medical molecules).
So I feel like you have a misunderstanding of biology here. The design skill hierarchy is ASI > humans >> eukyrotes > prokyrotes > virii. To say virii haven't evolved an ability in the last 200,000 years is saying little about the difficulty of the task to humans on up. (Also, to say that no virus has *ever* made *any* species go extinct is an unprovable hypothesis, and the question may be moot because there is some selection pressure *against* a virus causing extinction of its host).
> Your body can constantly manufacture its own "mall cops" in massive numbers.
Yes, but the cops' weapons and skills do not improve concordantly. When I used the analogy of "mall collapse" I had cytokine storms in mind; the more common cause of death I could analogize as "the mall is picked clean and the cops starve to death".
I feel like these metaphors fail to be super useful in some way. Biological systems aren't designed at all, they're just guided by selection pressure, but often explore way more of the possibility space than evolved systems. AGI is a weird mix of design and evolved.
You could use other lenses, e.g.:
- humans mostly design and manufacture things at very different levels of details than biological systems (although not entirely so these days as we've finally started making some things with truly harrowing levels of fine details)
- many biological systems are way more adaptive than human-designed ones (like how software can critically fail from one wrong input, or in the cryptography case the slightest issue can badically leak everything)
It's not just a metaphor. I certainly believe, for example, that a biological radio tranceiver could be constructed via instructions encoded in DNA, but that natural selection would create that DNA about as often as it creates intelligent beings or extinction-level viruses: almost never.
Well, yeah, no argument here. But also it would take an incredible amount of effort for a human to design the immune system.
An analogy from evolutionary biology and ecology may be helpful. If a new species comes along that outcompetes your species in all aspects of your niche, then you are going extinct. If a new species comes along that outcompetes you in only *some* parts of your niche, then your species survives, but things get weird as you are forced to specialize in the new smaller and less diverse niche. If a new species comes along that is a symbiote, then your species survives, but things also become weird as you are forced to specialize in the symbiosis. If a new thing comes along, but it is not a species, then you are probably ok. What makes a new thing a species? Not totally clear, but reproduction and (natural) selection are probably necessary features.
I think it’s pretty easy to find? https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
Pretty much any Greg Egan, if you’re looking for fiction that explores the longer-horizon what-ifs?
One important true thing that most people will never understand is that new tech taking people's jobs is how we all get richer and better off.
It's been going on for 250 years, and still most people don't understand how it happens.
So I *hope* AI kills tons of jobs. The more the better. That's my techno-optimism!
I mostly agree, with the caveat that we historically haven't been very good at compensating people who get displaced in this way. Just because we get rich does not mean that we'll do a good job of distributing the wealth (although I hope that the wealthier we get the easier it'll be to convince people to share.)
That’s to misunderstand the nature of this particular transformation, if it happens. At a simplistic approximation Factory jobs replaced farming, office jobs replaced factory jobs but, from the Industrial Revolution on there were factories at the same time as farming and offices at the same time as factories. So the transition was obvious. More office workers, fewer factory workers.
But when we get rid of the offices what’s left? What’s the next thing. Our cities will be the new rust belts.
Workers can be totally replaced by technology, it’s happened before although admittedly to horses, not humans.
The transitions were not obvious before they happened. People had the same worries as now, and the new jobs that appeared were surprising and weird at first.
I keep seeing that horse argument, and I think it's completely wrong. Working horses disappeared, sure. But they were *tools*, not workers, and they got replaced by better tools, like cars.
Humans used horses to get work done. They were not employees on a labor market!
This can go great (except for possible instabilities with too many jobs being replaced) until AI instantly replaces all the new jobs created as soon as they are created. Then there are no humans in the loop (if it's under competition) and we end up with gradual disempowerement https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/.
If you think there are jobs AIs won't be able to do you can make your prediction now.
If AI somehow replaces all jobs, we have a society where as much goods and services are produced as today, but no one has to work.
That's actually a utopian society, right?
As much goods and services are produced as today, but 95% of them are luxury goods and services for the 1% who own the AIs and have lots of money and can afford to buy lots of luxury goods and services. The remaining 5% is just enough to produce a working-class standard of living for the 10% who get paid a small amount of money to provide the 1% with the specialized services that can't or won't be done by AI. The remaining 89% are unemployed, dead broke, and rummaging through the garbage hoping to find enough food to stay alive.
Fortunately, the 1% throw away a lot of food. Unfortunately, "luxury goods and services for the 1%" includes killbots to keep the riff-raff from stinking up the place or doing any damage.
Does this sound utopian?
It sounds terrible. I just don't see a reason things would end up that way, nor have you offered one.
It's very different from how new tech eliminating jobs have played out for 250 years.
If society fractures into a group of people benefiting from AI, who are lifted into unimaginable splendor, and everybody else who becomes a proletariat only doing those things too cheap and unprofitable to be done by AI/robots, that seems like a bad thing. Unless you’re one of the Cyber elite or maybe a bodyguard, masseuse, personal chef, etc. you’ll be impoverished and disempowered.
I agree that if bad things happen, that would be bad!
If you are interested in discussing things, don’t reply like this.
I would recommend reading the gradual disempowerement site/paper (https://gradual-disempowerment.ai / https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16946 ).
My intuition for it is that right now economy, politics, culture rely on human flourishing to some degree. If your workers are dying too fast they won't produce efficiently, if your population is dying they might rebel, right now they elect governments, select information, form culture all at least somewhat pointed towards human flourishing.
If the requirement of human flourishing/humans falls away the new equilibrium will probably be one without human flourishing/humans. Any block you put in the way e.g. AIs can't do X, laws, ... will get eroded away by the system if there is optimization pressure (moloch).
If there is competition humans will lose control because they make things more inefficient. So one solution might be to have a singleton (humanity/AI) be in control.
I'll just note that you didn't have an answer to the argument that to me completely refutes this line of thinking.
Sorry, I missed it could you repeat the argument :)?
What I don't understand is how it works. There are a lot of people in jobs an AI could do who don't have skills for jobs that are not replacable by AI: People taking tickets at the cineplex, person who registers callers for Community Ed courses, cashiers . . . What happens to them when AI takes their jobs? Do they end up unemployed and broke, but it's legit to write that off as collateral damage because in 15 years unskilled people will be on balance better off too?
This is the sort of problem I suspect might be answered at least partially by a (non-trivial) dig into Russ Roberts, David Henderson, and the rest of the folks over at EconLib.
If I had to sketch one possible solution, I'd start by pointing out that no technology, no matter how disruptive, transforms an economy overnight; instead, it is adopted gradually, first by the bravest (or most foolhardy) heatseekers, then businessowners right behind them who watch how well they do, then more businessowners behind them, and so on. They further subdivide by sector and geography and nationality - a robot-maker for a plastic-molding plant in Jiangsu is going to have a different adoption timeline than a retailer for farm equipment in Cedar Rapids or a derivatives trader in Abu Dhabi.
When the AI bug first hits, then, we'll see a bloc of Chinese cupholder factory workers suddenly looking for work, or American corn harvester sales staff, or Arabian oil futures brokers. They'll do the same thing other suddenly-unemployed labor do, getting jobs making some other plastic consumer item or selling a different piece of farm machinery or brokering a different commodity. This sort of thing happens often enough that the economy will absorb them with little more than an alarming blurb in Forbes. Making somewhat less news will be their support staff in the building they worked in, also handed pink slips - random clerks, assistants, first-level supervisors, janitors, recruiters, guards, cafeteria workers, etc. They will likely get jobs doing roughly the same thing, in another building, at another company, maybe another city.
As the AI bug sweeps through, there might be a rise in the rate of such layoffs, but it's still going to be limited by the rate at which a business can retool; no business is going to freeze its supply and revenue streams while it does a 100% conversion.
Anyone laid off has a high chance of seeking a job doing something somewhat different, in a different market. They'll compete with whoever's already there, on price (assuming the state hasn't done something asinine like freeze salaries). This will unemploy different people in turn, who move further still, and so on. This will happen at the speed of rehiring and retraining, which will limit the spread of AI.
Many such people will see this coming, and resign before it hits; the AI wave will be the trigger for them finally looking at that relocation idea they've been batting around for months or something. Again, this is all pretty normal job churn; it's just that the cause is different.
The key to this sketch I've made is that people are employed on a spectrum of jobs, many of which are adjacent in skillset required, and a disruption to one of those jobs will often lead to everyone shifting over by one in the relevant direction.
You're asking the question people have been asking all through the Industrial Revolution. When we automate away jobs, how are the fired workers going to make a living?
It's a tough question, because you genuinely can't know beforehand. In 2025 we know that new jobs like gig worker, influencers, solar/wind technician etc have emerged, but 1-2 decades ago no one could predict that.
And that's how it's been for 250 years. I expect the trend to continue. One way to think about it is that a large number of unemployed people is a big unused resource. And capitalism is *very* good at exploiting those!
All three of those jobs you mention are perfectly capable of automation right now. I haven't used a human-operated supermarket checkout since long before COVID, for instance.
So to the extent that they haven't already been automated away, I'd suggest that it's not just a purely financial reason that they haven't been done away with, and I don't see a reason to believe AI will dramatically change that.
Wait, what? You mean a supermarket checkout that /a store employee/ doesn't operate, surely? There is definitely a human still in the loop with the DIY kiosks, and for that matter a fraction of a human tending the kiosk cluster.
I really want there to be a fully automated method out there, especially by now with all our newly mighty multi-domain LLM tech, but from what I understand the robotics to do a search for a bar code just aren't there yet. Much less robust recognition of produce or error handling for a torn tag or all the other long-tail problems.
I just want to put items in my trolley, and have the system know what items are in my trolley without the need to scan each one individually. I understand that Amazon was testing a system like this but they gave up.
Related; I used a self-checkout today, and was stopped three times, because the presumably-new automated theft prevention system presumably didn't like my coat and kept shutting down the kiosk. An automated system that screws up theft detection is unusable on its own.
Yeah I was thinking more of human factors, but that kind of problem in interaction with the real world - vision, manipulation, etc - is also a lot tougher than the AI will take our jerbs people allow for.
Right now, it's arguably blown up the market for LLM trainers and people who maintain the systems on which LLMs run.
Of course, you're probably hunting for people who use LLMs to create wealth. I think it's too early to tell either way how much wealth is possible that way, but if we assume your claim about replacing expensive human effort with cheap AI effort, then the natural outcome of that will be businesses using cheap AI to lower their costs, and enable them to compete on price. Their customers will consequently see their own costs drop, allowing them to compete on price as well, and so on.
Eventually, businesses that use LLMs or are downstream of businesses that do, will operate less expensively, in rough proportion to the portion of their costs that were driven by answering business questions that LLMs can now answer (correctly). Or, they'll get more done at the same cost.
For example, programmers trying to get a piece of tech working might spend an hour tracking down the problem on StackOverflow and scattered tech articles, blogs, and manuals, or spend a few minutes asking ChatGPT and checking the responses. Eight problems might take a day last year, and only half an hour now. Programmers might spend that half hour and then go home, but more likely, they'll just get about 10x work done. Programs are finished 10x as fast, or 3x as fast with fewer bugs, leading to 3-10x improvement in the production of their customers. Given how pervasive programming is, the costs could be seen dropping across nearly every industry (to varying degrees).
And that's just programming; I'm hearing of LLMs being used in investment, and it doesn't seem implausible for them to be used in manufacturing and logistics, where the problems are more boring and less visible.
That leaves industries where LLMs aren't as applicable, such as services, resource extraction, and tourism. These will probably end up swelling in number, and people will move to those jobs. The result is a rough sketch of how LLMs would make everyone better off.
> Given how pervasive programming is, the costs could be seen dropping across nearly every industry (to varying degrees).
Software as a product is understood badly in economics. It adds value to GDP not when produced but when sold. The marginal costs of digital reproduction of code is already close to zero. An app that isn’t selling but that suddenly takes off will increase the wealth of its creator and thus the aggregate GDP of his country by being sold, not when it was written. This is why successful software companies have huge margins - in reality these companies will see greater margins, there’s no certainty any savings are passed onto consumers or workers.
Software as a cost or service (the obligatory website) might become cheaper, the most likely outcome is more money for Bezos as he fires his staff.
There is plenty of demand for new programs, and my arguably limited experience is that reasonably experienced programmers working together with AI can deliver them: a) quite a bit faster, b) with fewer bugs and general technical debt.
Medical advances are the thing I feel most optimistic about. Researchers can use AI to speed up what they do, by using it for tasks that AI can do much faster and more accurately than people can. I'm sure anyone here who is in the field can give some good examples.
AI can find promising molecules but they still have to go through trials which are real bottleneck. Blog of Derek Low at Science has been good in reporting,
Yeah, the actual path from "this looks promising for problem X" to "I'm prescribing this to you for problem X" is like a billion dollars and twenty years long.
Hi it me! As someone who's brain is hard coded to go build ai-optimizer like things, but who is skeptical that language models or reinforcement learning agents will lead to human thriving, even if they are aligned, I've been having a grand old time doing a PhD building huge neural networks that find dense correspondence between MRI or CT scans. Cancer researchers seem to appreciate it, although I do little direct cancer research myself
https://github.com/uncbiag/uniGradICON
David Deutsch is one, AFAIK.
EMDR therapy is getting unrealistically good reviews, including from at least one person whom I know personally. Like, "one session and my PTSD is completely gone" level. I don't generally believe in magic pills, but the reports are piling up. What's its deal, is it really that good?
I know some people who've been through it, and I'm going through it myself. My results are so far inconclusive, but seemingly positive, to the extent you can figure how your life is going through the usual ups and downs over weeks.
A guy I know swears by it, says it took him from constant, low-level shame to not having that, and his experience got me in the door.
My wife took one session, back when it was new in the 1990's, and reports she went from screaming nightmares to being able to sleep through the night.
I’m a clinical psychologist who never learned to do EMDR because I thought it was the dumbest idea ever, and the research I read did not change that view. Recently revisited research, and the updated result is that it works as well for recovering from trauma as talking over the trauma with a therapist (at least talking it over with the therapists who were the control group in the EMDR research.) However EMDR done with the wrong kinds of movements during the procedure works as well as EMDR done using the prescribed movements. I can see how doing some supposedly helpful physical movements while talking with the EMDR practitioner would be facilitator. It gives you a placebo effect, and also give a rationale for the unpleasant process of recounting and reliving the trauma, which most trauma victims greatly dislike doing and avoid. (Actually, just simply recounting it over an over, with a calm supportive professional, reduces symptoms, probably by simple desensitization.)
So upshot is that trauma victims benefit from EMDR sessions, but from the interpersonal component not the EMDR itself. I think it’s likely that a therapist with training in psychosocial treatments of trauma could be more effective than a generic supportive therapist who believes the eye movement part is the active ingredient.
You just reminded me of another thing that will limit AI adoption: a lot of people plain distrust it, including highly trained people who would be making the business decisions.
If you're some True Expert in your field whose Pointy-Haired Boss fired because he's convinced himself that AI can do your job, and it turns out you're absolutely right that it can't, there's even a good chance that some of your customers will also suspect you're right. This means you can start your own business with a handful of fellow True Experts, offering less AI-automated services with higher quality, delighting the customers that defected along with you, attracting more, and eating PHB's market share.
Depending on how flat PHB falls on his face, you might even score a story in the trade rags about how AIs are mostly hype, and tip True Experts from other fields into doing the same thing.
> It gives you a placebo effect
If that’s your mind fixing stuff isn’t that effectively working.
Yes. The disadvantage of treating trauma this way are that (1) it wastes the time of the mental health professionals who go to trainings in EMDR; (2) training professionals to use it = giving them misinformation about what the actual change agent is; (3) treatment gives patients misinformation about nature of PTSD (EMDR treatment comes with a whole theory about brain re-wiring via something related to eye movements , and there is no support for that theory at all). (4) Time training therapists in EMDR could have been used in training in some effective targeted treatments that are empirically supported. Result would have prob been therapists actually becoming more effective than EMDR therapists, because they would know treatments that not only give a placebo effect, but work better than placebo.
I'm in no position to judge if EMDR is bullshit or not, but I have to admit this was an incredibly satisfying fucking read!
Sort of a tangent:
Has anyone done any serious research on if EMDR receptivity correlates with hypnotic suggestibility?
I know that EMDR isn't hypnosis... per se.
But to this random layperson, it sure looks a little hypnosis-y.
I am not at all hypnotically suggestible (not even when I desperately want to be hypnotized, not even paying a professional hypnotherapist), but have always found it pretty easy to put other people in hypnotic trances with bullshit I completely make-up on the fly. So I have a lot of respect for the idea that techniques are probably not as important as a person's inherent suggestibility to receive the technique.
I had never thought of that, but once you suggested it I thought it was plausible too. But just asked GPT to summarize the research on it, and it turns out no correlation has been found between hypnotizability measures and response to EMDR. There isn’t even a correlation between hypnotizability and response to placebo effects, considered as a group. My guess re: why hypnotizability does not predict EMDR response is that EMDR is actually not that much like hypnosis. As in hypnosis, there is this simple repetitive stimulus going on, the eye movements. *But* the subject is not urged to play close attention to them. Instead they are doing the movements mechanically to take the edge off something else that’s guaranteed to grab their attention: remembering and recounting a trauma. And there is no patter of the kind hypnotists use, suggesting to the subject that they are getting more and more drowsy and relaxed, and that is very pleasant, etc. Maybe the traits that predict placebo response are more things like optimism and tendency to be swayed in the direction of what's socially desirable?
About your being impossible to hypnotize: I thought I was too, and a lot of people tried when I took a course on doing hypnosis where students practiced on each other. A couple people with professional chops also tried, too. In my case, the thing that was interfering with my becoming hypnotized was social awkwardness: It felt like lying to, for example, deliberately close my eyes when the hypnotist said “your eyes will close on their own.” But it felt very awkward to just keep them open — what was the hypnotist supposed to do then? And I yearned to just say “I’m sorry, but this is not working,” but that just was not done.
Then one day I was in a setting where I listened to an induction in a large group, and did not have to be worried about embarrassing the hypnotist not by being having the responses they were counting on me to have. I become quite hypnotized. It was extremely pleasant, and a genuinely altered state. I’m pretty sure that suggestions like “your arm is full of helium and floating upward by itself” would have worked on me. You’ve probably already tried getting hypnotized by a video hypnotic induction, but I think that’s less powerful than induction via a real person. Maybe try it when you’re an inconspicuous member of a group, with a real hypnotist doing the induction?
Thanks for expanding on hypnotism!
For my experiences, I followed along with some of the initial suggestions / orders about closing my eyes and whatnot, but like you, it was an act of carefully considered compliance, rather than actually feeling the sensation being suggested.
It sounds like we differed in that I would eventually confess when it felt like the session was getting "real" (rather than the beginning part where I felt like I should cooperate because the process was still supposed to be kicking off). I'd use language like, "I'm sorry, but I don't think this is happening right for me. What should this feel like?" I always felt compelled to say something relatively early because I didn't want the hypnotist to feel stupid later for not realizing that I was merely acting / humoring them.
I'm intrigued by the idea of attempting to be induced in a large, in-person group but can't imagine how the opportunity may arise. Professional stage hypnotists tend to put safe guards in place to avoid inadvertently inducing non-participants members (having their neighbors jostle them, etc), and I'm a little dubious *that's* the setting I'd want to attempt induction under, anyway.
And it's also possible I'm simply a much bigger pain in the ass than you are. My instinctive reaction to hypnotic suggestions ala, "Your eyes are growing heavier" is:
"Wait, are they?" *checks body* "No, they factually are not."
And like...that's really the full of it, it feels like? As far as I can tell, it's not anxiety about losing control or whatever, or defying the hypnotist for the sake of defiance, or worrying about what they might think.
It's just that if I hear a suggestion that doesn't align with my understanding of perceived reality, I just immediately reject the suggestion as being fundamentally inaccurate, full stop. I can't buy in, even when I want to - even when I'm *paying* to! - because, well, no, my eyes aren't actually growing heavier. They just *aren't.*
It looks like there's not a good way for a layperson to perform the Stanford / Harvard scales of suggestibility on oneself, but I did take this probably bullshit online quiz (https://hypnosis.edu/sq/intro) and had a pretty dramatic imbalance of "Emotional" and "Physical" suggestibility (18%/82% - with a note, "People who score at or close to the 50/50 range respond to both Literal and Inferred Suggestions are described as “Somnambulistic” personalities. This is the most suggestible person and is the best subject for a Stage Hypnosis show because they respond to physical challenges, emotional suggestions, positive and negative hallucinations, amnesia, and time distortion"). But like I said, probably bullshit!
And in a semi-related digression, I was completely fascinated to hear the illusionist (and arguably most famous stage hypnotist) Derren Brown mention during a podcast with Sam Harris that he isn't at *all* suggestible, unlike Harris, who had apparently had the formal testing done in graduate school and discovered he is extremely suggestible.
If memory serves, Brown may have even said that he's *never* experienced hypnosis, himself.
Now, anything a professional illusionist claims should always be taken with a salt mine of salt, but I think it's plausible. Despite having no training whatsoever, I once more or less accidentally put a friend into a deep hypnotic trance to keep her still while having clogs in her infected milk-ducts semi-violently flushed out. I was initially just trying to get her to not hold her breath and make the pain worse, but her face went blank-ish and she went from clenching on my hand with every syringe of water jetting into her breast to me holding her hand loosely relaxed in mine. It was remarkable...and a little creepy.
And at the end of the appointment, her doctor wanted to know about how professional training for hypnotic pain management works, and seemed genuinely startled when I said I was just making it up as I went along.
So at least I feel like I'm certainly not unique in being able to hypnotize others while not being suggestible.
But I also defer to your formal training/expertise in hypnosis; if it's very unlikely that an absolute lack of susceptibility is a thing, I'll keep an eye out for opportunities.
Could someone please explain, using simple language, how it works in practice?
You are directed to do specific side-to-side eye movements (e.g., sit in front of a screen and move your eyes to follow an indicator), and you do talk therapy at the same time.
The mechanism of action is not well-understood. All of the following have been proposed as possibilities:
- Something to do with side-to-side eye movements being part of the instinctive "threat detection package," and therefore doing them, detecting no threat, and talking about your trauma helps break the traumatic memories > threat response association.
- The specific eye movements don't actually matter, but talking about your trauma while doing a distractor task that requires focused concentration makes it harder to obsess about the trauma, helping to break the traumatic memories > negative emotional response association.
- Something something inter-hemispheric connections.
- It's effective mostly because it's talk therapy, and talk therapy is effective, but the specific and complex instructions make it feel more "science-y" and act as a placebo enhancer/patient buy-in enhancer, resulting in basically Talk Therapy ++.
- It's literally just talk therapy, and works as well as any other talk therapy; the claimed better outcomes are just allegiance bias (i.e., studies by people who do EMDR reporting that EMDR works, like every other therapy style).
More Research Is Needed (tm).
Ah, I assumed that eye movement was a solution looking for a problem.
I remember people believing that doing "eye exercises" will help cure myopia. It wasn't confirmed by research.
I remember people believing that observing other people's eye movements will help you figure out whether they are a visual / auditive / kinesthetic type, and also when they are telling you the truth and when they are lying, and this knowledge will give you almost hypnotic power over them. This also wasn't confirmed by research.
Now people believe that doing eye exercises cures trauma. More research is needed. But if the results are negative, I expect them to come back a few years later claiming that eye movements can be used to predict IQ or cure cancer...
Why are we consulting and quoting Claude so extensively on a forum where humans gather for conversation?
Personally, I'm not getting *any* value out of comments where people are quoting various gen AI programs. I wish you and others would knock it off.
Wait, y'all are humans?
It's not magical but it's a substantial improvement over alternatives. It feels goofy as hell and the results aren't instant but six months of EMDR therapy easily feels...5x better than standard therapy. It might even be more than that. After 6 months of normal therapy, it's very hard to detect significant personal changes or improvements. After 6 months of EMDR, I'd be surprised if you didn't see significant personal changes.
I should note, since you are a princess, that I'd bet substantial money that EMDR works better for men than women. Mostly because I'm a man and emotions are icky and gross and have cooties and I suspect a major part of EMDR is just distracting myself so I talk about emotions without being self-aware. Like, being forced to jingle keys in front of my own face so I talk about my emotions without thinking about talking about my emotions, if that makes sense.
Acc/to Wiki, here's the source of the original idea:
>EMDR was invented by Francine Shapiro in 1987. In a workshop, Shapiro related how the idea of the therapy came to her while she was taking a walk in the woods, and discerned she had been able to cope better with disturbing thoughts when also experiencing saccadic eye movements.
I read Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 (or "Southern Victory") series when it first came out and am rereading it for the first time now. I am about 3/4 of the way through the second book (American Front) and haven't decided if I will keep going after that.
The concept of the series is dealing with the long-term consequences of a Confederate victory in the American Civil War. The first book takes place about twenty years later and concerns a second war between the Union and the Confederacy, with Britain and France intervening on the Confederate side. The rest of the series deals with the two World Wars and the interwar years in a world where the Confederacy is part of the Entente and the Union part of the Central Powers from day one. As I recall, it starts out as fairly hard alternate history but gets more contrived as the series goes on, since Turtledove seems to be subordinating realism to his high concept of transplanting the historical events to North America.
Thoughts on the first book (How Few Remain) in particular:
- I endorse the common complaint that the sex scenes, particularly those featuring Mark Twain and George Custer (not the same scene, at least), constitute fan disservice.
- I understand Turtledove's desire to use interesting historical characters as viewpoint characters, and he makes good use of many of them. It does backfire somewhat because three of the characters he chose (Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass) were among the best and wittiest writers and orators of their time. I don't think Turtledove is a bad writer by any means (or I would not have read and re-read so many of his books), but he set himself an exceptionally hard task with those three and falls far enough short to be jarring. Especially since I had recently read Douglass's 1881 autobiography and had it fresh in my mind when reading HFR.
- The Confederacy's decision to abolish slavery in order to maintain their alliances with Britain and France, so soon after the Civil War, was absurd. I understand Turtledove's probable reasons for putting that in, though, and I do give him some credit for understanding how unlikely it is and going through some work in the story to try to justify it. Having General Longstreet be the Confederate President who pushed it through was a nice touch, since in our timeline Longstreet supported Reconstruction and joined the Republican Part after the war.
- Turtledove skipped over some interesting implications of the Confederacy having a full military alliance with Britain and France. For one thing, having the Confederacy in common as a major ally would make Britain and France see one another as parters rather than rivals much earlier than historically. For another, it should have had implications for the Franco-Prussian war. Did the Confederacy declare war on Prussia, or at least encourage the recruitment of their citizens to serve as foreign volunteers in the French army? If so, did that change the outcome of the war? And if not, why not, and how does France feel about that?
- The point of departure (POD) is a popular one for armchair analysis: during the Antietam Campaign, General Lee issued orders to the scattered parts of his army telling them where they were to go and where they could expect to find the rest of the army. Historically, one copy of this order got used to wrap up a packet of three cigars, which promptly got dropped and shortly afterwards was picked up by Union scouts who were examining the abandoned Confederate campsite. The scouts smoked the cigars and passed the orders up the chain of command, where they helped inform General McClellan's campaign plans against Lee. The historical result was a very bloody battle that was a tactical stalemate but a strategic defeat for the Confederacy. Turtledove has the lost orders being immediately recovered (and the cigars smoked) by Confederate soldiers. Without McClellan having the benefit of knowing Lee's campaign plans, Lee is able to set up his dream engagement against the Army of the Potomac. Turtledove throws in at least two more bits of bad luck that happened to Union generals who were corps commanders at Antietam and would later command the Army of the Potomac: Ambrose Burnside is unexpectedly deprived of his ability to cross a river, and Joe Hooker is concussed at a critical point in the battle by a near-miss from an artillery shell. Historically, these happened at Fredricksburg and Chancellorsville, respectively, but Turtledove has both happen at the alt-Antietam battle.
As I said, this is a popular POD for Confederate victory scenarios. I'm dubious of how Turtledove has it play out, although again Turtledove does seem aware of the difficulties. Many historians question how significant the lost orders were, since they were already several days old and partially obsolete when they were lost, and McClellan took most of an additional day after receiving them before setting his own army in motion. My own inclination is that the lost orders moved McClellan to action sooner than he would otherwise have moved, and probably gave him a moderate but not necessarily critical advantage; I think it's reasonable to imagine Lee having a more successful campaign without the lost orders, but it's also reasonable to imagine McClellan still sort-of winning.
Turtledove's outcome, where Lee routes the Army of the Potomac in a position where they can't retreat and are forced to surrender en masse, is not realistic in my opinion. For one thing, I think McClellan was a bad general, but I do credit him with the ability to read a map, and his flaws were sloth and irresolution rather than foolhardiness: I have a fair amount of difficulty imagining him putting his army in a position like that. For another, one army destroying another in a field battle wasn't much of a thing in the American Civil War. There were at least three times (Island #10, Fort Donelson, and Vicksburg) where a large force allowed itself to be besieged and eventually had to surrender, plus at least a couple of battles late in the war (Nashville and Cedar Creek) where the losing army technically survived but lacked the manpower and cohesion to be an effective offensive force afterwards, but Appomattox was the only battle in the war where one army really "checkmated" another one and forced it to surrender in the field. McClellan outnumbered Lee by a large margin during the Antietam Campaign, so it would have been spectacularly unlikely for Lee to have been able to do to him what Grant historically did to Lee while outnumbering the latter by about a 5 to 2 margin. I think Turtledove is aware of this difficulty and takes pains to explain that Lee was able to set up his dream engagement and moreover to have Burnside's and Hooker's mishaps also befall the Union during the same battle in order to try to stack the deck sufficiently against the Army of the Potomac.
- The United States Government in HFR seems to suffer from a severe case of plot-induced stupidity, which I think was done deliberately by Turtledove in order to set up the rest of the series. I'm dubious of James Blaine being nominated and winning in 1880, since so much of his political career was a product of the Reconstruction Era and the tail end of the Civil War. I probably would have chosen either Charles Francis Adams or John Sherman for that role, but Adams would have been too diplomatically savvy for what Turtledove had in mind, and Sherman likely to be too competent a wartime commander in chief.
Similarly, the choice of General Rosecrans as head of the US Army was historically dubious and likely influenced by Turtledove's need for plot-induced stupidity from that quarter. The in-world justification was that Rosecrans was the most prominent Union general who hadn't been disgraced during the alternate Civil War the way McClellan and Pope had been. Presumably, General Halleck (whom had just been appointed General-in-Chief a month or two before Antietam) also caught his share of the blame. Come to think of it, this was probably another reason Turtledove made sure to mention Burnside and Hooker having key roles in the alt-Antietam defeat). The problem with this is that Rosecrans was a subordinate of Grant's at the time of the Antietam Campaign. Grant's pretty clearly the best candidate on those grounds, and William T. Sherman has at least as good a claim on the runner-up slot as Rosecrans, plus Sherman's brother (the same John Sherman whom I mentioned in the previous paragraph) was a powerful Senator, which would have been unlikely to have hurt his political career. Instead, Turtledove gives both Grant and Sherman cameos, with Grant having returned to struggling civilian life while Sherman stayed in the army and wound up in a dead-end position as the garrison commander in San Francisco (presumably an allusion to Sherman's stint as a staff officer to the US military governor of California during and after the Mexican War, plus an additional stint in the 1850s as a bank manager in SF). But Turtledove clearly needed inept military leadership for the US Army in HFR, and Rosecrans is a better source for that than Grant or Sherman.
- Turtledove has Abraham Lincoln become a socialist labor organizer after the war, in order to set up a US counterpart of Germany's Social Democratic Party for use later in the series. I am very, very dubious of this, since my impression is that Lincoln had pretty standard Whig views on economic issues. Lincoln might have sided with moderate progressive reformers during the Gilded Era, but I very much doubt he'd have gone full socialist.
Just a note for people who aren't familiar with the series: it gets unbelievably dark as it goes on. Basically think of all the worst crap that happened in the 20th century, but transplanted to North America.
And what did the Confederates do with the freed slaves? Sent them West or sent them Africa?
They were freed in name only, more or less. No longer legally chattel, but permanent noncitizens, lacking most civil rights, and subject to a "passbook" system that severely limited internal mobility and ability to leave a bad situation and seek better employment elsewhere. I think Turtledove modelled it on the "Black Code" laws that several ex-Confederate states tried to implement in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War until it was preempted first by federal reconstruction legislation and then by the 14th Amendment.
At least that's the solution for the 1880s through the 1930s. After that, a regime that Turtledove modeled very overtly on Nazi Germany takes over in the Confederacy and does the sort of thing that Nazis do with minority groups that they particularly hate.
Yeah, something halfway between slavery by another name and apartheid on steroids.
> The Confederacy's decision to abolish slavery in order to maintain their alliances with Britain and France, so soon after the Civil War, was absurd
Is it? Even absent foreign pressure, slavery is rapidly becoming economically untenable by the late 19th century. The price of cotton is dropping, farming is becoming more efficient meaning that less agricultural labour is required, all the money is in industrialisation. And while you could theoretically staff your factory with slaves, at some point it's cheaper to just pay hire labourers than to own them and be responsible for their entire life cycle as well as stopping them from running away.
I've heard that line of argument, and I partially agree and partially disagree with it. In some ways, industrialization would have made slavery more economically viable rather than less: industrialization and real economic growth bid up real wages, which means free labor is more expensive and slaves more valuable to the extent they could substitute for free labor. Even if factor work is inhospitable for slave labor (which is commonly argued, but I have heard arguments against it based on examples from the the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and the Stalin-era Soviet Union), the US as a whole still had something like 20-25% of the workforce doing agriculture labor as late as the 1930s, and many/most southern states had considerably larger agricultural sectors than the country as a whole.
I expect a victorious Confederacy would eventually have abolished slavery, but I think 1881 is far too soon. That's too soon for economic changes to decentralize slavery from the Confederate economy, and I expect culture would lag economics significantly there. In addition, Civil War veterans would make up a large part of the electorate and most of the political class at that point in history.
Historically, Brazil was the last state in the Americas to abolish slavery and did so gradually starting in 1871 and ending in full abolition in 1888. At the time the process started, about 25% of the population of Brazil was slaves. From what I've seen, countries and states that abolish slavery through the political process tend to do so only when the enslaved fraction of the population is relatively low, since the percent of population enslaves is a pretty good proxy for how entrenched slavery is in the country's economy, culture, and institutions. Most of the northern states that had slavery during colonial times and abolished it during or after the Revolution did so at a time when less than 10% of their populations were enslaved, and the Unionist slave states that passed emancipation laws during the Civil War and prior to the 13th amendment (Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia) had 9.7%, 12.7%, and about 7% respectively enslaved in the 1860 census. Kentucky (19.5%) and Delaware (1.6%) kept slavery until the 13th Amendment went into effect.
The least-enslaved Confederate state (not counting Kentucky, which Turtledove has joining the Confederacy in both TL-191 and Guns of the South) is Tennessee, which was 24.8% enslaved in 1860. For the Confederacy as a whole, about 38% of the population were slaves. So even besides the hardening effect the Civil War itself would likely have had on the politics of slavery in any Confederate victory scenario, slavery was much more deeply rooted in the Confederacy than it in Brazil. My guess would be that a victorious Confederacy probably would not have abolished slavery until some time in the early 20th century, perhaps as late as the 1930s or 1940s.
I haven’t read the series so I don’t exactly when ”soon after the Civil War“ is. I don’t think the efficiency of farming cotton increased all that significantly until the invention of mechanical harvesters in the 1950’s. Before that, cotton had to be picked by hand, making it a labor intensive crop.
Furthermore, economics doesn’t drive everything; ideology is also important, even if that ideology was initially constructed to support economic interests. You don’t fight a war to preserve slavery and then turn around and abolish it. Once the Confederate leadership realized were probably going to lose unless they could raise additional troops, they discussed the possibility of using slaves as soldiers. Jefferson Davis was in favor, because he cared more his place in history as the George Washington of the Confederacy than about the fate of slavery. The Confederate Congress gave its approval as essentially the last thing it did before evacuating Richmond, at which point it was to late to actually train and field any slaves as soldiers.
The point is that it took an existential crisis for the Confederacy to do something (using slaves as soldiers) that might endanger the institution of slavery. It’s incredible to imagine these same people completely abolishing slavery entirely for nothing more than better relations with France and England.
You also have to consider religious motivations, which sometimes trump economic ones. There were theological arguments for and against slavery, but the actual mentions of slavery in the Bible seem to support the pro-slavery side. At the time, many people believed that God played a role in historical events. If the Confederacy had won, that would have been taken as evidence that slavery was morally right. (We saw the flip side of this in the actual timeline, where the Confederate loss was seen by former Confederates as establishing that slavery was wrong.)
A hypothetical Confederacy might eventually abolish slavery, but I think any realistic scenario would involve the generation who fought the war dying off and being replaced by future generations with different values.
"I don't think Turtledove is a bad writer by any means (or I would not have read and re-read so many of his books), but he set himself an exceptionally hard task with those three and falls far enough short to be jarring." (etc.)
This is a fairly common problem among genre writers tackling historical personages, I find. I had exactly the same problem with To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which on paper is an interesting speculative fiction novel with an excellent choice of protagonist but which is sunk in practice by Farmer's emulated R.F. Burton being two orders of magnitude less striking and individual than the real one.
Also, I assume Farmer started with a really cool premise, but had no idea how to make it make sense. Unfortunately, he wrote sequels.
Yeah. His Sam Clemens was if anything even worse, and there are plenty of other examples. I still read and enjoyed the whole series on the strength of the concept (as a teenager, not sure if I could now), but it's a shame the dialogue wasn't better.
"I endorse the common complaint that the sex scenes, particularly those featuring Mark Twain and George Custer (not the same scene, at least), constitute fan disservice."
Thank you for that image, now pass the brain bleach.
And you know now that you said it, someone is going to write it.
Fanfic being what it is, it's probably already written.
Or just one LLM prompt away...
AND. Not or. AND.
LOL! Many Thanks! So all fanfic is LLM-generated now :-)
"George Custer sex scenes" instantly brings the Custer's Revenge Atari game to mind.
Or its greatly improved 2008 remake.
In _The Guns of the South_, also by Turtledove, but an unrelated Civil War AH, time travelers from a future South Africa give machine guns to the Confederacy.
Lee eventually finds out that the time travelers are far from the future consensus, which opposes slavery. He assumes the majority has more wisdom and becomes an abolitionist. Is this at all plausible?
Lee was philosophically opposed to slavery and tried to structure his own life to avoid having anything to do with it while still being a Proper Virginia Gentleman. It is an amusing quirk of history that of the two premier generals of the American Civil War, only Ulysses Grant actually owned slaves(*). But Lee was first and foremost a patriotic citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I strongly suspect that if he were privately given a magic button that would cause the South to institute gradual compensated emancipation in a broadly non-disruptive manner, he'd have pressed that button at any time in his adult life even without knowing the judgement of the future. But he would also have known how unpopular and divisive an act that would have been at the time, and would not have sought emancipation in a way that would have torn apart the civil society of Virginia.
Turtledove did what he could to make that scenario even remotely plausible, including having the Rivington Men almost cartoonishly setting the *worst* possible example for the future of slavery. And that was enough for me, while reading the story at least. But it only gets me to "remotely plausible".
* Only two, and he freed them prior to the war. Lee, as executor of his father-in-law's estate, had temporary control over a larger group of slaves he did not own, and eventually freed them in accordance with the terms of the will.
"t is an amusing quirk of history that of the two premier generals of the American Civil War, only Ulysses Grant actually owned slaves(*). But Lee was first and foremost a patriotic citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia."
This, like so many nice things said about Lee is not true. Lee inherited an unspecified number of slaves from his mother when she died. In his will before the Mexican American war Lee lists several slaves as his property, and declares that they should be freed after his death.
While Lee did free his father in law's slaves, he did so under protest. He repeatedly petitioned the state to allow him to extend their bondage and only freed them after the courts had turned him down twice.
"I strongly suspect that if he were privately given a magic button that would cause the South to institute gradual compensated emancipation in a broadly non-disruptive manner, he'd have pressed that button at any time in his adult life even without knowing the judgement of the future."
Gradual being the key word here. Lee believed that slavery (and it's attendant tortures, rapes and murders) were necessary for the instruction of black people and although he does not talk about how long it will be "necessary" the letter makes it clear that he is thinking on the order of centuries if not millennia.
I don't know all the details of the various cases but it's worth noticing that there were several Virginian officers in the US Army who *did* stay loyal to the Union, notably including George Thomas who became one of the best Union generals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Henry_Thomas
When Virginia seceded, there were nine colonels, one brigadier general, and one major general from Virginia on active duty in the US Army. Of these, the only ones to join the Confederate army were Colonel Robert Lee and Brigadier General Joe Johnston. Colonel Thomas Fauntleroy resigned from the Federal army and went home to Virginia where he sat out the war as a civilian. The other seven colonels (including George Thomas) served in the Union army during the war, as did Major General Winfield Scott.
Lee may have been motivated by loyalty to his home state, but compared at least to the small sample size of his Virginian peers among senior officers in the Old Army, his decision was the exception rather than the rule.
Yeah I think it's safe to say that fighting for the Confederacy was a choice Lee made rather than something he was forced into. If nothing else for all I don't think highly of the Confederate leadership, I don't think they'd be dumb enough to give command of their army to a man who was only on their side because they threatened his family.
I also reread GotS relatively recently. The turn to abolition there is also very historically dubious, but I think Turtledove does a somewhat better job of justifying it there. He set up several factors to reverse the pressure of the very deeply-ingrained and fundamental support for slavery among the Confederate political class:
1. The time travelers arrive late in the war, after Union armies have had the opportunity to put the Emancipation Proclamation into effect in a big chunk of the Confederacy, particularly in Tennessee, northern Georgia, and the Mississippi Valley. The Confederacy did try to re-enslave freedmen who stayed behind, but an awful lot of former slaves presumably went north when the war turned against the Union and are beyond the reach of Confederate slave catchers. Turtledove shows a severe shortage of slaves in the postwar Confederacy, with slave auctions yielding prices that are two or three times as high as those typical just before the war.
2. There is a large guerrilla movement of former slaves who had served in Union armies and chose to stay behind and continue fighting when the war ended. They have no real prospect of taking and holding territory, but it would definitely be plausible for them to make slavery uneconomical in areas within their reach by facilitating the escape of runaways. One of the things I learned reading Frederick Douglass's memoirs (I did so just after rereading GotS and just before rereading HFR) is that John Brown's original plan for what eventually became the Harper's Ferry raid was to set up a network of guerrilla bands in the Shenandoah Valley with exactly that purpose, rather than inciting a general slave revolt. Douglass considered the guerrilla plan to be potentially workable, albeit extremely risky. The idea being that if the guerrillas can increase the rate of successful runaways enough, replacing runaway slaves (or buying insurance that pays off when a slave escapes) would become too expensive for big plantations to be profitable relative to free labor. Turtledove has the guerrilla movement militarily defeated whenever and wherever the Confederate army managed to come to grips with them, which I agree is the realistic outcome (especially if the Confederates are armed with modern assault rifles while the guerrillas have muzzle-loading Springfields), but there was enough of a simmer relatively late in the book to cause problems for planters.
3. Having Lee as the leader of the emancipation movement would have been an enormous asset to the effort. How realistic this is is debatable: Lee was relatively moderate on slavery as southern aristocrats went, and definitely wasn't of the Calhoun/Stevens school of believing slavery to be a positive moral good, but the prevailing interpretation I've heard is that Lee favored continuing slavery for the foreseeable future and only freed some of his own slaves before the war because he was forced to by the terms of his late father-in-law's will. I consider Turtledove's decision to have Lee turn abolitionist to be unlikely but acceptable artistic license, and given that Turtledove's Lee came to oppose slavery soon after the war, I could see Lee's stature getting him far more leeway (so to speak) to advocate abolition than just about anyone else. I don't think it would necessarily be enough to get him elected on an abolitionist platform, but he's just about the only person who might possibly be elected on that platform.
4. The time travelers did an excellent job of casting themselves as the villains and inspiring a backlash against the policies they had set out to support, culminating in a group of them shooting up Lee's inauguration ceremony and killing the Vice President, Mrs. Lee, and several other notable people and narrowly failing to assassinate Lee. Turtledove depicts several pro-slavery characters at various levels from grassroots to high military and political leadership reluctantly coming to support Lee politically because the time travelers inspire them to an "Are we the baddies?" realization. I found Turtledove's depiction of this to be well-executed and believable.
5. After the Confederate army captures the time travelers' Richmond offices, Lee has the additional asset of a well-stocked library of primary and secondary sources about the historical Civil War and its aftermath. Lee was then able to lobby the Confederate congress by literally showing them the judgement of history on slavery in tangible form and showing them what a bunch of losers the white supremacy movement was by the late 20th and early 21st century. And since the library's included a number of post-war Lost Cause memoirs by ex-Confederate politicians and generals, Lee was in several cases able to lobby his opponents with their own words retrospectively distancing themselves from support of slavery. The prevailing 21st century interpretation of these memoirs is that most of them were disingenuous in this and several other important respects, but it's still bound to have an effect.
6. Lee's emancipation proposals were relatively moderate, a delayed "free birth" law combined with a very gradual program of compensated emancipation. Turtledove modeled this on the way Brazil historically abolished slavery in the same timeframe, which in turn followed a similar template to the late 18th century abolition laws in the northern US and a narrowly-unsuccessful proposal to abolish slavery in Virginia in the 1830s.
It's been a long time since I read any good Civil War history books, but from what I recall, Lee wasn't a strong slavery supporter, he just very strongly believed his first loyalty was to his state, rather than the nation. So it's not that he felt the need to defend slavery, but rather that if his state went to war, he had no choice but to go with it.
I think that sort of makes it somewhat plausible, in the sense that it doesn't require overcoming a strongly held belief, but also it does require starting to care greatly about something that he didn't seem to care much about.
And of course, this is all dependent on me correctly remembering (and the source being correct in the first place) something I read some 20 years ago.
Turtledove modeled his interpretation of Lee on the Lost Cause depiction of him, which is very much as you describe. Historiography in the last two or three decades has reinterpreted Lee in a substantially less sympathetic light, but Turtledove was writing in 1992 when a lot of Lost Cause-influenced historiography was still mainstream.
Turtledove has also said in other contexts (talking about his depiction of Stonewall Jackson in How Few Remain) that he deliberately played into Lost Cause narratives early in the book in order to encourage people who sympathize with the Confederacy to keep reading so he can deliver anti-racist messages later on to some of the people who most need to hear it. I'm pretty sure Turtledove did the same thing with the Clean Wehrmacht myth in the Worldwar series, and wouldn't be surprised it that was a factor in how he depicted Lee in GotS.
I am not a historian, but believe that if Virginia has remained in the Union then Lee would have been part of the US Army during the war. Do the historiographers think that Lee would *still* have joined the Confederacy (and they waged war on his home state)?
I haven't heard that question addressed directly by historians, but for my part I agree that Lee almost certainly stays loyal to the Union if Virginia does. The part of the narrative that historians have largely reconsidered are:
1. The idea that Lee's decision to join the Confederacy with Virginia was necessitated by cultural norms rather than Lee's own personal politics. Many other Virginians from similar backgrounds to Lee, most notably Winfield Scott and George Thomas, stayed loyal to the Union and served important roles on the Union side during the Civil War.
2. Lee is now generally viewed by historians as less anti-slavery than he was viewed 30+ years ago when GotS was written. Although I think there's a range of views within mainstream scholarship here. Note that John Schilling (whom I respect enormously as a fellow armchair historian and acknowledge as better-informed than myself in several areas of history) has also chimed in on this thread and seems to have landed on a viewpoint that has Lee much less supportive of slavery than my own interpretation of Lee.
There's no question that Lee was conspicuously pro-Confederacy once Virginia was part of it, and the examples of the other Virginia colonels illustrates that. The question is why, and "Virginia Patriot, much more so than those other guys" IMO fits the observed facts better than "Yay Slavery, must preserve slavery".
And I agree with Turtledove that if you want to imagine Lee actively pushing for abolitionism, you need a perfect storm of unlikely circumstances to set it up. Mostly, a President Lee of the CSA is going to privately contemplate the issue, notice how massively divisive and disruptive it would be for his homeland, and hope his children or grandchildren are going to come up with a better solution.
Lee seemed like he had a depressive personality, and the problem of what to do about slavery was one of his preoccupations even if it was equivocal and prompted him to no action.
He had not been a successful man when in middle age he left his post in the Texas Hill Country. It is not hard for me to imagine that on the frontier he had had the distance to see and brood over the fact that the importation of slaves was something that only weakened and corrupted and doomed the South.
I'd be interested in learning more about that analysis and its parameters and assumptions.
If the claim is specifically that the Confederacy didn't have the capacity to invade and occupy the North or otherwise comprehensively materially defeat the Union by destroying enough armies to exhaust the Union's war-making capability, then I am entirely inclined to agree with that conclusion.
If your friend is also claiming that the Confederacy had no chance of winning by exhausting the political will to continue the war, that's a much stronger and more surprising claim and I'm curious how your friend modeled it.
I posted this in the hidden thread several days ago, but will post it again here, regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
I worked for Charlie and was about ten feet to his left when he was shot.
Charlie hid nothing about his beliefs. He wasn't a centrist, he was a conservative Christian who wanted to shape the country accordingly and obviously plenty of people disagreed with him on all kinds of issues. Charlie himself was under no illusions about that; he would routinely acknowledge he was in a minority with his views on gay marriage and a tiny minority with his views on abortion.
But everybody who cares about the well-being of America should be horrified by this. From knowing Charlie personally for the past three years I can attest that he was a genuinely good person in a way very few other political figures are. The nature of modern celebrity-driven politics means that Washington is full of narcissists, attention-seekers, con artists, and other bad actors. Charlie was not one of them. Everything Charlie did, he did it because he thought it was best for the country.
Young, online conservatives are routinely getting seduced by dark personalities who promote conspiratorial thinking or hateful ideologies. Charlie rejected that. For example, the Israel issue is tearing the right apart, and Charlie, in my opinion, distinguished himself by taking the issue seriously and refusing to give into hatefulness.
Over the past two days I've had to endure obnoxious people finding some random statement of Charlie's they don't like that supposedly justifies his murder. I could say many nasty things at that, but to respect Scott's preferred tone I will just say that most people are not on camera for two, three, even five hours a day, having their every statement recorded for all time. Charlie didn't always speak perfectly; he wasn't Regis Philbin. But those who knew him can testify to his fundamental good nature.
This blog and others have recently revived interest in the Cyropaedia, Xenophon's work that basically tries to answer the question "What makes someone a great leader?" Of all the people I've worked for, Charlie easily came the closest to the vision of that book. Like Xenophon's Cyrus, he saw setbacks as a chance to learn and try again. He had excellent personal self-discipline: He ate basically 4 different foods, carefully maintained his sleep, and set aside every Saturday as strictly family time (he'd literally shut off his phone and I couldn't text him). He was happy to let his allies reap the rewards of his victories and was routinely generous to the people under him. He was not a flatterer, and more than once when donors tried to strong-arm him on something I saw him say he was happy to stop taking their money and move on, with no hard feelings. He was a fantastically hard worker -- I think this is the part most people outside of movement conservatism don't realize. He didn't just host a show or do debates on campus, he also ran a massive youth outreach organization (which meant constant fundraising too), did GOTV, involved himself in appointments/policy, and so on. One of his favorite sayings was "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" -- and it was very clear which of those he thought was his duty.
Charlie believed in himself to an incredible degree. He always said that Turning Point USA was the most important organization in America, and he believed it. But unlike a lot of people who believe in themselves, Charlie didn't let that decay into megalomania. He was always guided by Christian humility and was always happy to hear counterarguments. More than once I was able to change his mind on a topic, and he was happy to admit it whe I did.
He was a great man, and I will miss him terribly.
Thank you for sharing this. Something I’ve really appreciated hearing, from you and Greer (https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of), is the extent to which Charlie was doing so much more than Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan. The extent to which he was a connector and leader and movement peacemaker and convener among powerful conservatives was not something I knew when he was assassinated, and it left me viewing some of the more hagiographic retrospectives with much more skepticism than was deserved. He was your friend, and it’s a tragedy that he was killed, and I hope his killer is punished accordingly.
I don't think *anything* you can say ever justifies murder and am appalled by the recent rise of political violence.
That being said, it is notable that Kirk apparently supported the guy who attempted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi. How would you feel if someone said the same thing about Robinson now?
The Pelosi thing (a homeless guy who attacked her husband in their SF home with a hammer) gets brought up a lot, but it's a nonfatal attack that wasn't captured on video and had a slight zany element to it. So, I think a good comparator is the 2017 attack on Rand Paul that left him hospitalized, which Democrats and comedians made light of. Unsavory behavior in both cases, but not on par with groundswell gloating malicious glee over a hideous murder. And it's true that Charlie didn't "support" the homeless hammer attacker; he joked that the circumstances seemed murky, so they guy should be bailed out so we can ask him what he was doing in the Pelosis' house.
Kirk did not "support" him or support trying to murder Democrats. Anybody telling you as much is a liar. There were a bunch of wild conspiracies about that attack (namely that it was a lovers' quarrel) and, if I recall right, he suggested bailing him out of prison so that he could tell his side of the story. I thought it was dumb and told him as much, and as a result he embarrassed himself less than many other RW figures did in that episode.
I think Lapras's question stands - would you find it outrageous if someone called to bail out Tyler Robinson (if he was eligible for bail)? I mean, there's a lot of conspiracy theories circulating about why he did it, I've seen people calling him a groyper, maybe he should be allowed to tell his side of the story and clear things up.
Like, you get how that's offensive, right? You can say it was meant as a joke, but the joke is basically "maybe the guy who tried to kill you had a good reason."
Edit: I tracked down the actual clip of Kirk talking about the attack, and it comes off as "just asking questions" to me. As in, not openly endorsing the lover's quarrel conspiracy theory, but trying to put it on equal ground to the mainstream explanation in order to muddy the waters. You're correct that he didn't endorse the attack, but I'm still pretty unimpressed.
At the end of the day though, his beliefs were fundamentally wrong and harmful.
Your comment "[Kirk] didn't want (at this time) to force his views on other people", if from an actual associate of his, is the scariest thing I've ever read about him.
I expect you will not elaborate on what you meant, but it'd be appreciated.
My bad. Thanks for clarifying.
We all have wrong beliefs, but I don't think any of my beliefs are fundamentally or obviously harmful? I mean I could bring up all the times Kirk said hateful things about minorities, but if that's too subjective we can also look at his blatant lying about covid in ways that are easy to disprove. I just don't do that sort of thing, so my ideology must be fundamentally less harmful than Kirk's.
I also don't broadcast those beliefs to millions of impressionable youth.
Kirk likewise presumably believed that none of his beliefs were fundamentally or obviously harmful.
See this is hard for me to believe, because Kirk had a public platform where he debated people every day, so thousands of people would have told him directly to his face if he was doing something wrong, and he would have had to ignore every single one of them.
It's much more likely that Kirk was corrected multiple times, but because he was a bad person he chose money over intellectual honesty.
This argument only works if all or most of the people who debated Kirk were right. If they weren't, and Kirk knew that, then Kirk could and would rightfully reject their feedback.
We haven't established that the people who debated Kirk were mostly right.
Hey man, I'm not really interested in doing this game where I give you an example and then you nitpick things about it until it fits your personal parameters of wrongness or rightness. According to this source, he claimed hydroxycloroquine was 100% effective against covid.[1] That is just a lie. Not a subjectively offensive opinion, it's just not credible, and clearly harmful if anyone believes him. This is one example, his wikipedia page has plenty more and I know you're capable of reading it if you're acting in good faith and actually want to know what this guy said.
Of course, if you already agree with all of it, there's no conversation to be had.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/politics/charlie-kirk-conservatives-coronavirus.html
I know you've already gotten a lot of responses but I'd like to ask you something slightly different.
I'll premise this by saying I'm sorry this happened. I'm sorry it happened at all because it was murder and it was wrong, I'm sorry it happened it to someone you knew personally, and I'm sorry you were in the immediate vicinity and experienced it as it happened. I'll also say that the people (some in this very thread) that are celebrating or gloating about Kirk's death, or trying to justify it and saying (implicitly or explicitly) that he deserved it are behaving despicably. The proper response to speech one disagrees with is more speech. I know next to nothing about Kirk but from what I've heard in the wake of his death, he lived that approach by trying to counter ideas he disagreed with speech and his own ideas. Even if one disagrees with his views and finds them offensive and wrong (and from what I've seen recently, I mostly do), he was at least taking the right approach, and it never should have cost him his life.
Having said all that, I was wondering how you, as someone who knew him personally, reconciles your view that he was a fundamentally good person with some of his public statements that are now being circulated? I don't have an exhaustive list (as I said, I was almost entirely unfamiliar with him before his death), but some that come to mind are his comments that Biden should be executed and that doctors that provide gender transformation care should face Nuremberg-style prosecution?
I can see three possibilities.
1) These quotes are made up or being taken wildly out of context, in which case Kirk is basically being defamed.
2) He had a public persona that was more incendiary and extreme and a private persona that was more compassionate. But if this is the case then it seems like one of those personas was disingenuous. Which one? And either way, is that how a genuinely good person would act?
3) There was no difference between what he believed and said in public and in private. In this case, he may very well have been friendly, funny, and pleasant to be around (at least if you weren't in one of the groups he disparaged), but that alone doesn't seem to me to make him a good person.
Or maybe there's a fourth possibility you can speak to?
Your answer is not going to influence my opinion on his murder -- as I said above, it was wrong, full stop, and the perpetrator should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and should be called out as a murderer who did something evil. Whether Kirk was a genuinely good person or not is irrelevant to those points.
I'm just just trying to figure out more true things about him, because I want me views of the world and the people in it to be as well informed and accurate as possible. Thanks in advance.
Hey Ryan, sorry for the delayed response; I didn't know Substack threads could have notifications auto-disabled. I suppose I'll cut to the chase on this:
"but some that come to mind are his comments that Biden should be executed and that doctors that provide gender transformation care should face Nuremberg-style prosecution?"
re: the Biden one, all I can say is a lot of people viewed various Biden actions as basically treasonous. Allowing absolutely insane unchecked migration over the southern border, letting his son cash in by trafficking access and influence to foreigners, etc. He's reacting in an amped up radio-host way to that. I don't remotely expect most people here to agree with that or like it or consider it responsible advocacy, but that's the context it happened in -- amped up radio host. Statements that strong didn't happen often; they took place because we considered it important to really drive home how harmful, insane, and historically unprecedented the Biden border policies were in particular.
Re: the Nuremberg thing, he meant that doctors who did sex changes on kids should be treated like criminals and prosecuted. I agree with that so I make no apologies for it.
Re: your bigger question, I feel like you are allowing people to reduce a public figure (specifically one who talked literally every day in all kinds of contents) to some sound bites. Charlie was a whole bunch of things because he was a dynamo of energy. He was the boss of a large organization, he was an on-the-ground activist, he worked with the staffing of the Admin, and so on. To some extent, this increased the risk that he'd say things people could complain about later, because he was speaking constantly and with little preparation; he wasn't a blogger who could carefully curate his every comment. Personally, I think individual word choices and sentences carry small weight in deciding how good or bad a person is. You are free to disagree.
I also appreciate your response.
Also, thank you for the clarification on
>Re: the Nuremberg thing, he meant that doctors who did sex changes _on kids_ should be treated like criminals and prosecuted. I agree with that so I make no apologies for it.
[emphasis added]
I think that this is actually a majority view in the US. I just did a quick Gemini check [usual warning on AI summaries apply]
prompt:
>what fraction of the population wants to ban sex change operations on minors
AI summary:
>A new Pew Research Center survey finds that majorities of U.S. adults favor or strongly favor laws and policies that: Require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth (66%) Ban health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors (56%)
I personally, think the question is somewhat more nuanced, in that, if e.g. a 16 year old has severe gender dysphoria, none of the options are good, and some of the changes from puberty are irreversible. But banning such medical interventions before 18 is hardly a fringe position, in fact a majority one.
Kirk wasn’t talking about prosecuting doctors under a hypothetical scenario in which sex change operations for minors are banned and some doctors continue to perform them after they are banned. If Wargamer is, he doesn’t say so unambiguously.
The United States Constitution prohibits ex post facto law, which is a way of saying that you cannot Constitutionally prosecute doctors for having performed sex change surgeries prior to April 1, 2024 (which is when Kirk made his comments) even if a law making such surgeries illegal is passed at some future date. That is presumably why Kirk references the Nuremberg trials.
I find the Nuremberg analogy unconvincing for two reasons. First, it is debatable whether the Nuremberg trials involved ex post facto law or simply applied existing international law. The Nazi’s were convicted of doing things that were generally recognized as wrong. In contrast, there’s no consensus for or against transgender surgery for minors. Gemini mentions an undated Pew poll in which 58% support a ban, while a May 2024 Gallup poll shows 36% support.
Second, Germany had just lost a war and unconditionally surrendered. That gave us the power, and arguably the right, to run Germany as we saw fit. The United States has not been conquered by a foreign adversary, so the only ways I can see for Kirk’s wish to come true would be for vigilante groups to kidnap people and conduct the trials (along the lines of the plot against Governor Witmer), or to have the government itself violate the Constitution. Supporting either of these is, I hope, a fringe position.
Many Thanks!
>The United States Constitution prohibits ex post facto law
Agreed, and I support that prohibition.
>Kirk wasn’t talking about prosecuting doctors under a hypothetical scenario in which sex change operations for minors are banned and some doctors continue to perform them after they are banned.
I'm not sure whether his exact position actually goes beyond this to support an ex post facto prosecution. I agree that citing Nuremberg was not a good sign. He _might_ have been citing Nuremberg to express the vehemence of his view rather than his support for ex post facto prosecutions - or I may be ignorantly whitewashing his position. I wish he were still alive and that I could ask him clarifying questions about what his actual position was.
> Gemini mentions an undated Pew poll in which 58% support a ban, while a May 2024 Gallup poll shows 36% support.
Yes, polls can both shift, and exact phrasing can matter. ( I'm hoping and guessing that, since Pew is a well-known polling enterprise, that they had a large enough sample size, corrected for the expected confounders, and generally did the polling in a competent way. )
Would you agree that even 36% support (for a forward looking ban, not an ex post facto one) is sufficient to say that this is not a fringe position, even if not a majority one? I'm not arguing for the wisdom of a forward looking ban. I, personally, think that it is too blunt an instrument and precludes edge cases like 16 year olds with severe gender dysphoria - but honorable citizens can honestly disagree about this.
I appreciate your response, and no need to apologize for the delay.
I appreciate that he responded after being in close proximity to his friend when he was murdered. If I was in his shoes, I don't think I'd be on the internet.
I didn't respond in more detail because it didn't seem like it would add anything new to the thread, and I didn't want to pile on. But FWIW, his responses seem to mostly align with my options 2) and 3) above, and I trust that you can figure out how that influences my opinion of Kirk from my original post.
I'm not accusing you of ulterior motives here. However, I do find the attempt to litigate whether he was good (in the case of OP) or wasn't good (in the case of others' posts) to be missing the mark. We don't frame living people as simply good or not good and I fail to see why we would treat the dead the same way.
I'm honestly just trying to better understand who this guy was, but I take your point. Maybe it's not worth it.
Isn’t the fourth option that all of those statements are either correct or, that when taken in the context of the totality of what he said over his very public life where he said things for a living, not sufficiently bad to balance out the good things in his life?
I suppose so, if one judges someone by sort of tallying up the good and bad things they've done and seeing which side comes out ahead. But I don't think someone who views their own righteousness in this way is a genuinely good person.
My own view is that a genuinely good person always tries to do the right thing. I don't expect perfection -- Lord God Almighty, we all make mistakes. But I think a good person recognizes them as mistakes, shows an appropriate degree of remorse, and tries to do better in the future. I guess that's a fifth possibility.
And he believes he is doing the right thing. As far he sees it, executing these people would have improved this country. Why would he have to think that was a mistake? We haven't even tried it yet.
If he truly believed that treating doctors that provide transgender care like the Nazis that perpetrated the Holocaust would be th right thing to do and would improve the country, then I don't think he was a genuinely good person. A good person shouldn't have to "try it" to realize that it's wrong.
>Charlie was not one of [the attention seekers].
>to respect Scott's preferred tone I will just say that most people are not on camera for two, three, even five hours a day, having their every statement recorded for all time.
I find it hard to square these two statements. Holding mass events on campuses, being on camera for hours at a time. Did he not follow the attention gradient the public laid out for him, whether they agree or disagree? Why didn't he start an anonymous substack or something?
>"you're a person too, even if we disagree."
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-refers-democrats-maggots-vermin-and-swine
Thoughts?
>He's not saying that to people he's talking to.
That's a rather sharp distinction to draw. What would you say is the limit, if any, to what you can say about real, identifiable people as long as they're not in the same room?
Nah, fuck that. Your boss/coworker/lover is dead, and that's a cause for huge celebration.
You, or anyone, are not entitled to my (or anybody's) feelings. I will feel whatever and however I want, up to and including and beyond celebrating the death of a piece of shit who celebrated the death of others and gave it legitimacy.
I repeat, there is only one obligation you or the ilk of Charlie can demand from me, and that is not to be beheaded by me. Box checked. Kirk was not beheaded by me. Someone else beheaded him, but that's not my problem, I can be perfectly happy that this happened and not violate a single law. You and Kirk's harem can go pound sand.
One thing that makes the "Right", whatever fake and gay that pure aesthetic is now about, appear hilariously weak and effeminate is demanding things it never gives.
What I mean by this is: Poor little beheaded Charlie can gloat about school shooting victim and the murdered kids in the ongoing Gaza genocide till the cows come home, nobody of you around him fishing for sympathy now ever thought to correct him or mildly call him out, but his homies will still find it in themselves to cry and whine about respect, empathy, decorum, all the things that poor little beheaded Kirky never displayed an ounce of to someone who does not give him the hard-on by being the "White Christian" fetish he had such a thing. He seems to have developed a thing for Jews too in his final days, well, I'm glad I'm not the target audience.
Hell, the fucking irony of marrying a former beauty pageant, while sucking on a sexual predator's balls whose favorite pastime is groping beauty pageants. This literally means that poor little beheaded Charlie is a cuck, or at least an aspiring cuck. He literally praises and fawns over a geriatric man that would have demolished his wife by groping and pumping if he ever came across her (and who knows, ....). And I thought his hard on for Evangelicals and Jews was his weirdest fetish.
So anyway, fuck Kirk, thank Yahweh and Jesus and Allah and the Buddha that he's beheaded now, May The Rest Like Him Follow Promptly, Ameen.
PS: perhaps the only thing that can move my heart strings for the piece of human excrement is the 2 daughters he inflicted his fatherhood upon, this is mainly why I wish the video of him being beheaded would disappear from the internet before the oldest is 5, I fear for her little heart the sight of her piece of shit father getting what he deserves. So if you want to drum up sympathy for poor old beheaded Kirky, focus on this angle. Never lead with "he was a good guy" he wasn't, and we know, you're bullshitting or brainwashed, and we're interested in your brainwashed bullshit. Cry about someone who didn't say that Empathy is made up and new age. We're being Kirk's most loyal disciples by denying him any mercy or empathy. He's looking up at us from hell smiling every time I insult him, he's probably disappointed I expressed sympathy for his little cuties.
You are working against democracy by creating social status to extralegal killers.
If this doesn't meet the grounds for deleting a comment and banning a user, I'm not really sure what the standards are.
There have been at least two sock accounts by a notorious user Scott permanently banned, and "Charlie's dead, I'm happy" might be another one of them. The tone of unhinged masturbatory delight in indulging their ungoverned excessively emotional partisanship is certainly familiar, and CDIH replied to you:
> "I'm not an ACX stranger and have been a reader for 7 years + Unsong,"
And while the comments on this thread aren't the banned user's exact voice, AI makes it trivially easy to tweak one's writing voice a bit, so who can even know anymore?
Regardless, even if Scott was much more on top of policing - which he generally isn't, he apparently only goes through his "report comment" notifications 2 or 3 times a year to hand out bans - there's nothing he can do about cowards making sock accounts to escape the consequences of violating the content rules. They can always just come back under another username.
Ideally, Scott would publicly encourage the entire readership to silently report and then mute attention-seeking rules-violating comments like the above, so that they receive no engagement whatsoever.
Ideally, that would hurt the cowards and sock puppets and cowardly sock puppets much worse than a ban and would encourage them to take their content to Facebook, where it belongs.
The usual problem with this otherwise wise council is that it doesn't work well with newcomers, who visit the site out of curiosity and immediately flee from what looks like mostly witches. Or stick around because it's their kind of witches.
There's probably a short story to be told of a forum regular who loves the quality of the forum she visits daily, but wonders why she hasn't met any new quality posters in months, but instead keeps having to add a few more to the ignore list. One day, similarly curious, she visits the site using a guest account, and discovers it's 95% horrible content her ignore list had been blocking, while the software silently still permitted her crowd of ~50 to continue their quality discussions in the nooks and crannies.
No, requesting readers not to engage with rules-violating trolls is actually quite easy?
For example, the Ask A Manager blog routinely requests commenters to not do things like fixate on issues which aren't germane to the letter writer (example here: https://www.askamanager.org/2025/05/an-opinionated-volunteer-is-demanding-too-much-of-our-small-organization.html).
And if culture war topics are being discussed, sometimes there will be a pinned comment by the blog author saying something like, "Please help me by not engaging trolls in the comments. Please report and ignore."
While sometimes there are robust debates in the comments, bad behavior is far more rare there than it is here.
Now, if Scott no longer cares about his content rules and/or that some people he's banned frequently return as sock puppets, that's fine. He's not obligated to care, and he can certainly change his commenting rules at any point.
But I wish he would announce that.
I can see how an "Intro to the Forum" would at least mitigate the newcomer problem, but hasn't that ship largely sailed in general? I think most newcomers don't make a point of reading any intro signs in front of the entrance (or sticky posts, etc. I think you know what I mean).
I could certainly support teaching something like that in school, esp. as part of a general curriculum on critical thinking.
Even if people at least lean a little more into reading intro posts, I think that still leaves the problem where people read "don't feed the trolls" and think "a troll is anyone disagreeing with my object level views on culture war topics". So if there are Purple and Green camps, the Purples are reporting all the Greens and engaging their fellow Purples, the Greens are doing the exact opposite, the blog somehow has two echo chambers side by side, and the blog author is getting reports for every single post.
Every once in a while a Purple will agree with a Green on something without realizing she's a Green, read more of her posts, find out, get horrified, and... block? What about the previous agreement?
Isn't part of the goal of a rationalist blog to try to understand mental models that aren't one's own? Otherwise, how does one grow?
You may hate the cruelty, but this, in fact, is MAGA's single most leading fetish, the only thing they derive pleasure -sexual and other - from.
So again, I'm perhaps the single most loyal and authentic Charlie mourner here, by treating him exactly and precisely how he loved to treat people.. By shunning empathy, by being tribal, by being entirely and completely a near perfect embodiment of my lizard brain.
I'm perfectly aware that's a bit out of the ordinary on ACX, as I'm not an ACX stranger and have been a reader for 7 years + Unsong, but take that up with the guy who made the discussion about Poor Old Beheaded Kirk to begin with, who wasn't me.
If you've been reading for 7 years, then I assume you're capable of updating your beliefs. Then please absorb this: you've been brainwashed with online tribalist content and need to reconsider your "us vs them" framing of the world. Also your tone is atrocious.
The things you assert are facts, are not facts.
I'm inclined to agree with Ryan L here.
I don't agree with most of this, but the boundary about emotions is solid.
I don't care about Charlie Kirk, and for reasons I don't understand, I don't think his assassination will make matters much worse. I could be wrong about the latter.
It may be that there's been so much killing that I don't feel like one more is important.
I'm willing to be more or less polite, but I feel what I feel, or this case, don't feel what I don't feel.
If Kirk was a plausible successor for Trump, it's good that he's gone, though assassination is probably disruptive.
You are being worse than a fictional character you made in your head, which in turn is worse than the person they are based on.
Every single thing I claimed about POBK is either a trivial fact about him (he sucked Trump's balls) or a statement that can be traced back to him with any amount of moderate research skills, like the fact he said school shooting victims are a good deal in return for the right to carry weapons or that he gloated over Gazan deaths.
I view my comment as not much more than stating those facts and expressing that he deserved death for them, which he does.
It's not a crime to say that someone deserves death, after all, it's Charlie Kirk's defenders who are lightening quick to point out that "Speech" deserves nothing but more speech, what I'm writing now **is** more speech, namely the speech that express celebration and comfort that POBK is dead. I struggle to see what's wrong. Speech met with speech. No physical harm done.
Post this under your regular username, coward.
This reminds me of people who call Snowden a coward for not returning to the US to face trial. Being brave doesn't mean you go looking for trouble. Getting baited into doing retarded things by being accused of cowardice by those who want to see you punished isn't bravery.
+1
In an environment where people are getting fired for saying that stuff, any prudent person would hide their identity to say it.
What a strange place for your mind to go!
This **is** my ordinary handle Christina, I decided that making fun of Kirk's extremely funny death and gloating over it would my forever internet personality now, unless I can calculate a risk his daughter would see what I post, which I currently don't.
I did nothing wrong, as per Poor Old Beheaded Kirk's (POBK) own defense, it's not immoral to gloat over death, as evidenced by his endless gloating over the death of Gazans, the death of black Americans, the death of school shooting victims, etc... etc... etc....
Why treat him with a standard higher than the one he treated people with?
Let's set aside the topic of Charlie Kirk, who, like all famous Christian conservatives, was a very tedious and boring figure. Let's not mention him again.
What's interesting is that *you* unambiguously and ostentatiously violated Scott's content rules, and did so using a pseudonym in order to escape his censure.
Post under your regular username, coward.
Thank you for sharing. This was a terrible thing and you have my sympathy.
While there has been political violence throughout the history of the U.S., incidents seem to be accelerating, which is scary[1].
I'm going to mention something only because, in recent days, Trump/MAGAs have been specifically emphasizing violence by "the left": ~84% of "Ideologically motivated extremist homicides" are apparently done by right-wingers (hmm, I wonder how to get the raw data on this).[2]
[1] Note: this list is not exhaustive but I don't know where to get a better one: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/charlie-kirk-shooting-timeline-recent-political-violence-america/story?id=125473910
[2] 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
This response from eugyppius basically encapsulates the argument you'd get from me or others: https://x.com/eugyppius1/status/1968177728232083855
It's incredibly easy to warp the categories toward ideological ends. To me, it is fundamentally deranged to treat every crime by a white prison gang as "right-wing" but then downplay something like "riots ripping apart dozens of American cities in summer 2020" as not left-wing. Yet that happens all the time! When was the last time an American mob committed mass arson or looting during riots over a right-wing cause?
It's all in the definitions, and the left has more institutional control able to launder their preferred ones.
I'm wondering if their perception of violence on the left encompasses scenes of violent protest, looting, maybe violent speech online, etc not just murders. In that case (with Jan 6 being a notable exception) I could see how one would get there mentally.
I remember a few years ago, somebody did a (difficult-seeming) dive into this business of “trans people getting murdered”. It got no attention, obviously, but nonetheless it was good to know, no, you’re not going crazy, there is no such epidemic. Those killed tended to be sex workers killed by their fellow sex workers, or others from their street milieu; and they fit the usual pattern as regards murder victims, in other ways. Their “transness” or transvestitism was the least salient characteristic about them, and it was unlikely any of them were murdered by anyone political enough even to vote.
Yet, I expect such murders get assigned as “right wing” for no particular reason.
That may in fact be the reason for the assassination, the indulgence of this nonsense.
I think you may be referring to one of my posts, and it wasn't especially difficult. I was trying to establish an upper bound, so I made a lot of simplifying assumptions like "the murder rate is constant throughout the year."
I don’t know? - this was well before substack. But presumably during the first Trump administration since there was no such threat category during the Obama administration lol.
This person actually attempted to examine the individual circumstances of each homicide where the word trans was in media reporting. It was not statistical that I remember though the statistical implications were elementary and obvious.
I’m not imaginative, so I couldn’t have made this up. Nor did I know about the, uh, demimonde that it sort of invoked. However, perhaps it was not well done (in whatever sense you like) as it was quickly memory holed, after a few people on what was then called “the alt-right” read it.
I recall seeing a study citing the heightened threat to trans black people, which I now wish I'd bookmarked. It claimed some number of black trans people had been murdered in the last N days. I don't remember the number of murders cited, but I do remember looking up the total number of black people murdered over that time span, and finding it was a greater proportion of the population than the trans person murder figure. In other words, knowing nothing else, if you were black, you were safer if you were trans than if you weren't.
This isn't to convince anyone that trans people are in fact safer, but rather that the overall violence rate will be something worth checking.
> Trump/MAGAs have been specifically emphasizing violence by "the left":
In my experience, "the left" draws a self-serving violence vs destruction difference, and on top of that murder vs violence difference, that "the right" does not. It's word games all the way down for some people, and less than a handful of mass murders that ~nobody defends makes it quite easy to gerrymander the numbers for a particular narrative.
>hmm, I wonder how to get the raw data on this
You can start with The Persecution Project (https://theprosecutionproject.org/) which is one of few sources that compiles and offers raw data, but some of it is tagged poorly and you're still working with whatever is being reported downstream of other biases.
When the right blames "The Left" for a murder, it's inappropriate to bring up murder statistics? Okay bub. That looks like a good source, though.
>Trump/MAGAs have been specifically emphasizing violence by "the left": ~84% of "Ideologically motivated extremist homicides"
You were the one that conflated "violence" and "murder" first, though I can see how you get there in context. Not all violence is murder.
It's pretty easy to draw a line that "the right" (defined very loosely) has committed more political *murder*- El Paso, Tree of Life, Emanuel AME make up most of that toll for the last 20 years.
Once you expand past murder into violence (assault, etc), it gets muddier and much more prone to selective reporting/charging.
I'm having a really hard time squaring "he was a good guy" with the consistent pattern of promoting falsehood, lies and hate speech documented on his Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk
How do you define hate speech?
Is saying whiteness is a contract with the devil hate speech?
Wow. This is extreme.
I think the most likely true explanation is that he was just crazy. Delusional.
I often assume bad faith but his claims are so ... paranoid and weired and easy to doubt when one first encounters them, that I just can't imagine someone having the guts to speak them out while knowing they aren't true.
You respond to the bad things Kirk said (e.g. that Democrats are maggots, vermin, and swine) by saying in effect "he was a nice guy in private, he's said a lot of stuff and the Internet keeps a record of it forever".
I just hope you'll realize that the same could be said about many people right now saying things you don't like about Kirk, and the government is openly bragging about persecuting them.
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-refers-democrats-maggots-vermin-and-swine
https://bsky.app/profile/kimmasters.bsky.social/post/3lyvgug4mzs2h
With all due respect to your personal relationship, and I do sincerely not wish this on my worst enemy -- the flip side is that, at least in the minds of some, he, used his considerable talents and charisma in ways that were not for the most part positive. his dismissal of lbgt and trans people's rights to even existentially exist less be treated equally, was not a good thing at all. It was really bad in my opinion, and I don't feel I should be censored or canceled for saying that about somebody who I think was a net negative influence on our society.
>his dismissal of lbgt and trans people's rights to even existentially exist
I literally don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Please show me where Charlie Kirk demanded that LGBT people be rounded up and placed in concentration camps.
Please show me the exact quote where Hitler demanded all Jews should be rounded up and placed in concentration camp.
No wordplay or implications arr allowed, Hitler must say, using the exact verbiage, "We Will Round The Jews and Place them In Concentration Camps".
This is sophistry, not addressing FionnM's point.
>lbgt and trans people's rights to even existentially exist
Pretty sure he never tried to kick gay people out of existentialist philosophy.
If you approvingly quote the Bible verse about how gay people should be stoned to death, I don't think you actually want gay people in your movement.
(There's enough wiggle room in Kirk's statements to argue that he didn't *literally* want gay people to be murdered, but if you want gay people to feel welcome in your movement then you shouldn't even be gesturing in the direction of murder.)
I never said Charlie Kirk literally said "we should stone gay people." In fact, in my parenthetical I said exactly the opposite.
What he did say was that the verse in question "affirms God's perfect law in sexual matters." So as I said, he quoted it approvingly. He did not say "you shouldn't be resting your arguments on single verses because there are lots of single verses that command bad things, like stoning gay people," he thinks it should be relevant to Christian practice in some way.
Since you apparently didn't read it, I'll say it again: There is enough wiggle room to say that he wasn't literally saying to kill gay people. But there is no plausible interpretation where that statement is *friendly* to gay people.
Apparently you have access to this full quote and the context, would you like to post it here rather than drip-feeding extra bits of context when challenged?
I don't know why I'm asking. I barely knew a thing about Charlie Kirk before he was murdered, I don't claim to be an expert on everything he ever said, and I don't want to wind up in a rhetorical corner where I have to defend everything he ever said or else admit that it's okay to murder him.
I don't even agree with everything *I've* ever said.
>I worked for Charlie and was about ten feet to his left when he was shot.
Why are you not saying this under your real identity?
If someone murdered my boss, in order to prevent him from continuing to practice our joint profession, I'd probably be a bit reluctant to put my name out in public in the immediate aftermath. Not that it matters in my case, obviously.
Do we know anything specific about the shooter's intentions or goals? I haven't looked into it deeply but most of what I'm seen makes him sound more nihilistic, for the luls or for the notoriety than specifically to shut Kirk up.
No, not at this time.
“Young, online conservatives are routinely getting seduced by dark personalities who promote conspiratorial thinking or hateful ideologies”
Can you put a name to these dark personalities?
I don't want to start drama by naming a bunch of specific people right now in case this gets highlighted, but Nick Fuentes had a pretty well-known feud with my late boss.
I didn’t ask the left. I did ask the guy who says he worked for Kirk and made the claim.
There’s a non- leftist person live-streaming to 250,000 people on YouTube at this very moment and blaming Israel for Kirk’s murder, so I’m curious.
Oh, for the love of god! Kirk was on a genuine kill list, along with Elon Musk and Donald Trump (if these words don't ring a bell, it's not Israel) -- Donald Trump subsequently (after being removed from said kill list) sent materiel to this country.
You don't have to poke at Israel to find foreign influence. Some Countries have Publically Available Kill Lists (and it comes up in congressional testimony, when Republicans take exception at funding countries that put American politicians on their "kill list"). Charlie was on one of them.
Can you cut the suspense and name the Countries with Genuine "Publiclly Available Kill Lists", FFS.