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.
Whether Kirk is a good person or not isn’t really based on how good a job he does at carving out weekly family time. You gloss over his views on gay marriage but presumably he is opposed to it. I admit I didn’t pay very much attention to him while he was alive. Wishing harm upon a significant chunk of the population because of your religious beliefs lands someone squarely in bad person territory, for me at least. And that’s without getting into the significant accusations of racism.
>Wishing harm upon a significant chunk of the population because of your religious beliefs lands someone squarely in bad person territory
Significant chunks of the population wish harm against conservatives for their political beliefs. Are they bad people?
Significant chunks of the population wish harm against white people for their race. Many of these people spent years on the NYT bestsellers list. Are they bad people?
More broadly: Every political policy that matters will harm sympathetic people. If you want affirmative action in college admissions, you want to make it harder for my kids to get into a good school. If you want to eliminate farm subsidies, you want to put some of my relatives out of business. If you want to deport people here illegally, there are literally millions of basically sympathetic people who came to the US to get jobs that paid better than they could make at home whom you're planning to kick out. If you want to move to single-payer healthcare, you will put a ton of people working in private insurance out of work, and you will make some peoples' actual healthcare worse in order to make the whole thing cheaper or to make the average person better off.
Table stakes for talking about politics in any serious way is that you will be proposing stuff that will hurt real people, whose pain hurts as much as yours does, whose lives will be made harder by your proposals. So if you define someone as bad if their proposed policies would impose harm on lots of people, you will just always define everyone having a real political discussion as a bad person.
Whether someone is morally good or bad depends on their intent, not their beliefs*. Kirk did not wish harm upon homosexuals, he believed that homosexuality was bad (for the homosexuals themselves most of all). You can believe that his belief was wrong, of course, and that the actions he took under those false beliefs caused harm, or could cause harm. But I see no evidence that Kirk wished to do harm to others.
*For example, lets say I was told by a legitimate authority that I must press a red button when signaled in order to save the life of a man in the next room, and I believed him. With that belief in mind it would be wrong for me to decide not to press the button, and right for me to decide to press the button, since I believe that pressing it will save a life and that if I don't press it someone will die. The fact that it would be good to press it and bad not to remains that case even if my belief is wrong, and in reality pressing the button does nothing at all, or even causes harm to someone.
<Whether someone is morally good or bad depends on their intent, not their beliefs*.
Not entirely. I think part of being morally good is trying to have accurate beliefs, it least when it comes to beliefs that determine your impact on the world. Kirk was in a position where he was able to have far more impact on the world than most of us., and so had a much greater moral obligation to be accurate. Of course there is no way to test the accuracy of religious beliefs, but Kirk also talked about subjects where fact checks are possible and knowing the facts influences what opinions make sense. Kirk recommended a ban on all hormonal and surgical treatments for trans people, and jailing doctors who carried out those treatments. Had he spoken with any trans people or people with gender dysphoria? Had he spoken with the doctors? Did he know the impact a felony conviction would have on a doctor? Had he read a summary of the research on gender transition outcomes? He said continuing to have relatively few gun control laws in the US was worth a few deaths. agree that lots of policies that harm a few people are nevertheless a net good. Raising the speed limit frm 55 to 65 probably leads to more highway death, but may benefit more people overall. But was he familiar with the gun death stats -- for instance the number of accidental deaths, suicides and child deaths that would not have occurred if we had stricter gun laws? Maybe he was, but still believed having this many guns in this many hands is worth the price. But the gun numbers, in particular, are pretty daunting. I don't think many people could read the stats and not at least have some second thoughts -- not become willing to consider at least a few more constraints on gun-buying.
Well, I think he'd say that. but what values, really? I don't think it's the product of some big thought-out philosophy of life, where there are first priniciples, etc. For instance I don't think it's based on anything in the bible. You can find endorsement of all kinds of stuff in the bible, but I don't think I've heard anyone quoting the bible in gun arguments. Is it a deep love of the Constitution and its amendments, with all that stuff taken literall? If so, he'd be quoting lots of the constitution, right, not just talking about the second amendment. To me it seems like where he's coming from is not a worked-out set of values, but a cluster of attitudes that a lot of people have, attitudes about guns, sexual roles, etc. It's vibes, basically. The stuff he's for feels right and true to him. Um, I mean felt.
I can't really speak to Kirk's beliefs (before his assassination, I vaguely knew he was some kind of Republican activist, but I don't think I could have picked him out of a police lineup and don't know his writings or anything). But I think many of the most contentious issues come down to values conflicts, and so aren't really subject to change because of factual claims or statistics.
Like, if someone demonstrated the old Freakonomics idea that widespread abortion had caused the crime rate to massively fall, this would be a convincing reason to suppport legal abortion for many people, but a whole bunch of anti-abortion people would just say "yeah, we don't care that your baby murder policy preferentially murders babies that would have grown up to commit crimes, it's still bad." The disagreement isn't about the factual question, but about an unproveable values/morality question.
>Had he spoken with any trans people or people with gender dysphoria?
Yes? He spoke with a lot of them on video, and I assume he spoke with them when not being recorded as well.
>Had he spoken with the doctors?
Seems like he probably has, though I don't have direct evidence on that. He was pretty involved in the topic though, certainly did a lot of research on it, so I would assume he spoke to doctors about trans issues at some point.
> Had he read a summary of the research on gender transition outcomes?
He and his organization Turning Point have cited research on this multiple times, such as the Cass report. Given that the government of England is not sure if these treatments are helping, is it unreasonable for someone like Kirk to believe they don't? This is pretty far from settled science.
>But was he familiar with the gun death stats -- for instance the number of accidental deaths, suicides and child deaths that would not have occurred if we had stricter gun laws?
Yeah, of course he was, his career was literally debating topics like gun control. This is what he did for a living, he was very familiar with the research.
>>But was he familiar with the gun death stats -- for instance the number of accidental deaths, suicides and child deaths that would not have occurred if we had stricter gun laws?
>Yeah, of course he was, his career was literally debating topics like gun control. This is what he did for a living, he was very familiar with the research.
I asked GPT5 to search for any direct quotes from Kirk in which he cites gun statistics. I asked for statistics that supported the beneficial effects of guns, and statistics that undercut the idea that guns cause much pointless harm. Here is its response:
"Across the sources above and broader searches (including coverage aggregating “Kirk in his own words”), I didn’t find any verified, direct quotes where Kirk himself cites numerical statistics (e.g., FBI homicide breakdowns, rates of defensive gun use, percentages of shootings in gun-free zones, etc.) to argue that guns are beneficial or to counter claims of harm. The material I can verify on the record is value-based (tradeoff framing) rather than numeric. " . . . " I can’t find any direct Charlie Kirk quotes that cite statistics to argue guns “don’t do much harm” (e.g., knives kill more than guns, or similar minimization claims). The on-record, verifiable remarks I can find are value-judgment framings (a “trade-off”), not numerical comparisons."
It then offered to search deeper, looking at the video/transcripts of The Charlie Kirk Show, TPUSA event videos, or archived posts on his X/Facebook. I asked it to do that. Here is its response:
"VERIFIED QUOTE WITH STATISTIC
“Fact: 98% of all mass shootings occur in gun free zones.” — Charlie Kirk on X/Twitter, May 19, 2018.
WHAT I SEARCHED FOR AND DIDN'T FIND
I checked Kirk’s X/Twitter history and recent compilations of his quotes, plus event clips and coverage pointing back to primary sources. Beyond the 2018 “98%” tweet above, I did not find other direct quotes from Kirk where he himself recites statistics"
The man died while he was literally in the act of discussing gun violence statistics. His last words, in response to the question "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?" were "Counting or not counting gang violence?"
The organization he founded and ran, Turning Point USA, put out a 23 page booklet called "The Case Against Gun Control" (https://cdn.tpusa.com/assets/books/TheCaseAgainstGunControl.pdf) in 2016. It features such statistics as "between 1950 and 2016, 98.8% of mass public shootings occurred in gun-free zones" and "60% of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they knew the victim was armed. 40% of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they thought the victim might be armed" and "the year after Texas passed their concealed carry law, murder rates fell 50% faster than the national average. The rate of murder wasn’t the only the only crime affected. Rape rates fell 93% faster in the first year after enactment and 500% faster in the second! Additionally, assaults fell 250% faster in the second year." It also features line graphs depicting crime rates and firearm crime rates in the U.K. and Australia, a bar graph about statistics on self defense measures, and statistics about changes in firearm crime rates over time, the effectiveness of gun control measures, and firearm suicides.
I don’t really care about your hypothetical button. Everyone realizes that opposing gay marriage makes you a bad person unless you are a Christian fanatic.
"Everyone" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Many voters in the US don't realize that, most people in the world don't realize that, almost nobody 20 years ago even in the liberal parts of the US realized that, etc.
I certainly don't think that opposing gay marriage makes you a bad person. Nor that supporting gay marriage makes you a bad person.
But I do think that thinking that having the opposite opinion to you on gay marriage makes someone a bad person makes you a bad person.
There are questions on which reasonable people cannot disagree, but gay marriage (which is fundamentally a semantic and administrative question) is not one of them.
> Everyone realizes that opposing gay marriage makes you a bad person unless you are a Christian fanatic.
Isn’t opposition to gay marriage most of the world (it’s a world minority position) and all of the world a few years ago. Hillary wasn’t a supporter until 2013. Obama until 2012.
In fact marriage wasn’t even a major concern of homosexual activists until recently - even opposed by some.
I also didn't follow him during life, and it sounds like I disagree with him on most things.....but your "Everyone realizes" is carrying an entire elephants worth of weight there. Put me in the camp of "people can believe and even advocate for harmful things without being bad people" camp.
If you ignore intentionality when making moral judgments then everyone who disagrees with you is a "bad person". It's an internally consistent way to judge morality, but not one I would want to adopt.
I'm sorry that this happened to someone you cared about and that you're going through this. As I alluded to elsewhere in this thread, I think people celebrating his death or saying he deserved it are a relatively vocal subset of too-online people who are not really representative of anything, other than perhaps the fact that people are too whipped up over stuff.
Candidly I did not care very much for what Charlie Kirk had to say and if you wanted to discuss this at some more appropriate point in the future I would be happy to tell you why, but at the moment I think the best thing you can do is not engage with that sort of thing. Some people will want to scream about his faults. Some people will want to increase the visibility of the first group so they can lump in everybody who disagreed with him with his killer. Very few people on either side are going to engage very well with his essential humanity right now.
+1. The "was he good or not" inquiry really seems to be people trying to determine how they feel about the murder. This is misguided and pointless; this is a tragedy on multiple levels, most of all for free speech and civil society.
I don't know of any data to support or reject claims about how most people are thinking. However, this is not how I feel about the "was he good or not" inquiry.
The reason is because how I feel about the murder is straightforward: the murder was bad, it a crime that should be prosecuted, and it is unfortunate that it happened.
I think that is also the take from almost all "official" voices (political party leaders, senior elected officials, corporate spokespeople, etc.)
For me, the inquiry into "was he good or not" is a response to a lot of loud claims that he was good and should be venerated in an unusual way.
My feelings on this topic are still quite muddled and I'm unsure how to exactly express these feelings. I was personally more shocked about this event than any other in recent memory.
When I went to work (in an office in DC) after Charlie died, two of my coworkers who I would describe as "normie libs" suggested in no uncertain terms, during casual conversation, that he deserved to be killed. Charlie was definitely to the right of me but most of his views were not *that* different than mine. Which of his views were so awful that they mean that his death is justified? Would my coworkers speak the same about me? To be blunt, this sort of toxicity is far more normalized than I realized. Maybe it's something unique to the left, maybe it's both sides and I'm just waiting for a good unambiguous example to show that the right is just as vicious or something. But it still rattled me.
Honestly this was the most shocking aspect to me, moreso even than Kirk's death, which to be honest I only felt a token amount of badness about (I had filed it away initially in the "mass shooting" category in my head, which is to say that I guess crazy people sometimes do crazy stuff like this and and obviously nearly everybody condemns it). To see ~20% of my peers try to justify it was about as shocking as if I heard someone try to justify or a mass shooting.
You mentioned wondering about an example on the right and just because you seem to be legitimately curious I would say the natural retort from a more left-wing perspective would probably be one of:
- People celebrating putting Kilmar Abrego Garcia in CECOT
- People regularly trashing victims of police killings, no matter what the circumstances
- The weird retcon of January 6th, complete with mass pardons for people who attacked DC police
- Making a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse
- Making a hero out of Daniel Penny
I don't say these to be like "Aha the right is trash and we, the good liberals, are superior", just to note there's plenty of sh** to go around. Most people don't build their politics out of a careful consideration of the issues. Most people are just on a team with their friends and family, and everybody is increasingly more and more rabid these days, even as the US remains quite prosperous and safe and so forth by historical standards.
I think when you're talking about broad political movements, you will always be able to find a lot of dumb, evil, or ill-considered things being said or valorized. That's just life in a world where the bell curve (of intelligence, involvement, or decency) has a left half.
It's only when you get to individuals or small groups that you can really expect anything like consistency.
So was OJ Simpson, but that doesn't make him heroic.
"Was not 99% certain to be legally liable for those people they killed" is not a good basis for praise. I've never even killed anybody in the first place and this has earned me no praise by either political party.
What do you think Daniel Penny did wrong? From the Right's point of view he stopped a madman who was threatening to immanently kill people. The court agreed. What was Charlie Kirk threatening to do such that his killer could be considered a hero?
I think all of those have some complicating factor or nuance that makes it harder to fully compare them to Kirk's assassination. It's why I mentioned wanting an unambiguous example, like where someone innocent gets killed soley for their beliefs or nonviolent advocacy. The only ones I can think of are like, synagogue attacks by neo-nazis? The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. maybe (a comparison that certainly won't ruffle any feathers)?
I think probably not that many people on the left would agree with you that those are definitely so complicated as to justify how (some) people responded to them. Although we can throw in "that time people mocked the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband" if you want something closer to the same shape.
(Also I don't think January 6th is very nuanced. People shouldn't be lauding it. It, much more directly than some of the others, normalizes political violence.)
Honestly I think even assassinations of politicians aren't the same shape or without nuance. What I mean is that in some sense, in some limit case the assassination of particularly bad politicians, especially in non-democratic situations, could possibly be justified. There is a steelman for the assassination of a politician based on how evil they are; while there are still some pacifists who are staunchly against killing even the worst of tyrants, for most people it's a question of magnitude (how bad of a politician do they have to be to justify an assassination).
But I struggle to find a good steelman for the assassination of a political commentator/activist/podcaster/writer even in the worst cases. "This person advocated for X, therefore it is good that they are assassinated" is unjustifiable for pretty much any value of X.
The attack on paul pelosi is a closer comparison (a non-politician attacked purely for his association) but even there I think it matter what the actual critiques are! For example, I'm much more forgiving of critiques in the realm of fog of war, not knowing what the facts are, being skeptical of reported narratives, and careless speculation about motive; it seems like a different category of error than "justifying the attack itself" which I think is uniquely bad.
> (Also I don't think January 6th is very nuanced. People shouldn't be lauding it. It, much more directly than some of the others, normalizes political violence.)
That would be a perfectly reasonable reaction if the left hadn't spent the last seventy years normalising disruptive, destructive and even sometimes violent protests as a reasonable reaction to not getting what you want.
> To be blunt, this sort of toxicity is far more normalized within the mainstream left than most people on the left would like to admit or acknowledge.
I feel pretty comfortable agreeing with this in particular; I think people in general have this sense that their team is civil and the other team is a bunch of psychos and we should probably just admit that the national discourse is terrible all around, equal parts stupid and awful regardless of the actual point being made.
I would never claim that all of Charlie's critics are celebrating his demise, or most of them, but I will be frank: It is clear to me that it's a LOT of people, a lot more than a small cabal of the incredibly online. I was DM'd by a person I last spoke with 10+ years ago to gloat about his demise. There is an apartment complex across the street from our HQ, and somebody was playing Bella Ciao from their balcony to disrupt the ongoing prayer vigil at our front entrance. I screenshotted the front page of Reddit the day of the killing and the #2 thread on r/all was "Obituary of a hateful douche." I saw endless "he deserved it" takes all over the comments that were well-upvoted.
Several of my friends have told me about losing friends over this because they were celebrating or justifying the murder -- these were not "too-online" people, but rather people they knew in real life. Several fall into the box of "normal liberal women."
It is a very large number of people treating this as either good or at minimum justified and I will not be convinced otherwise.
Okay. I'm not trying to fight with you about this. I'm just trying to put forth a more hopeful perspective, for what it's worth. I think a lot of people say and do shitty stuff when something is the hot-button political issue of the day. I think they get a bit whipped up and don't really think very clearly. I'm sorry that you're in the middle of that. I hope it doesn't shake your faith in humanity too much.
Moreover, I think sh**'s just kinda crazy right now and I think there's a real chance of a vicious cycle of escalation if we spend too much time focusing on the worst things people do in politics, or in response to politics. Obviously I can appreciate how empty that must sound to you in this context. I don't think there's any justification for somebody killing your friend. I don't think there's any justification for people celebrating it. People can be pretty trash sometimes. That's not all they are, though. Please do your best to take care of yourself and those around you right now. I think it's possible you might feel very tempted to come to a forum like this one and engage with people and that might not necessarily end up being very helpful.
I apologize if that sounded hostile to you personally, I did not intend it that way. But I did want to reply because I do feel like I'm going through a big push by a lot of people to obscure/deny what I saw play out with my own eyes. I want it to be clear that a LOT of people did celebrate this. It angers me and it frightens me.
No, I think that's totally fair. And that's super gross and I don't begrudge you feeling any way about it; I've never had to deal with something like that and I'm sure it's a nightmare.
Personally I think that kind of the root problem facing the world in general and the US in particular is that we've gotten to the point where this stuff is all so predictably bad, that people react this way without really thinking, and that that behavior is aided and amplified by our communication platforms, and it gets normalized, and it spirals. It really plays to people's worst instincts.
My partner has been reading Stanley Milgram's "Obedience To Authority", about his famous electric shock experiment, and one thing I've always taken from that is that it's trivial to get people to commit horrible acts (in that case, pretty much literal murder).
One way to look at that is that everybody is basically scum. Another way to look at that is that sometimes people do awful stuff even if they're basically normal, decent human beings at heart. I can't tell you which one of those is true.
I think a lot of people say horrible things in an ill-considered moment. But before, they said it at the bar and their buddies all winced and said "Jesus, Fred, dial it back a notch!" Now, they say it on social media, they get upregulated by the algorithm because their outrage-inducing content is sticky, and there's a permanent record for their future cancellation.
"Miller did not specify any specific groups. He vowed to “use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”
And that's a good thing because disrupting leftist terrorist networks and patronage networks who want to bring about anti-white race-communism increases human flourishing and reduces human harm. Thank goodness we have people like JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk.
Are they going to disrupt any actual terrorist networks? Do we have evidence of some sort of shadowy leftist conspiracy arming and training the shooter? Or are they just going to harass a bunch of random journalists for the crime of truthfully reporting what Charlie Kirk said?
(I never thought I'd see conservatives cheering on a government crackdown on "hate speech," but that's exactly what Pam Bondi just promised.)
Yes they are going to disrupt actual terrorist networks. There is evidence of leftist terrorist ideology radicalising the shooter and causing him to carry out the attack, in the same way that in many cases there is evidence of Islamic terrorist ideology radicalising islamic terrorists and causing them to carry out attacks. Whether journalists will be harrassed depends on whether there is evidence of them inciting murder and suporting terrorism.
Pam Bondi's comments about hate speech are a mistake and she'll likely be forced to retract them. The problem is terrorism.
There is some evidence to that effect, yes. There was much more evidence for a Communist conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert key American institutions in the 1950s, And indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that one was true. Yet the populist demagogue of a politician who rose to lead the great crusade to rid America of Communist influence, failed to disrupt any actual Communist networks except by dumb luck because he really, really sucked at figuring out who the bad guys actually were. We had to wait for his successors to actually get anything useful done, far later than we should have.
Why do you imagine that Donald Trump and his crack team of yes-men will do any better than Joseph McCarthy? The recent Hyundai arrests, for example, look like the same sort of pathology at work. So I'm not expecting much good to come of this.
>Why do you imagine that Donald Trump and his crack team of yes-mien will do any better than Joseph McCarthy? The recent Hyundai arrests, for example, look like the same sort of pathology at work. So I'm not expecting much good to come of this.
Ouch! Thanks for the heads-up. Aargh. In November 2024 I viewed Trump as the marginally lesser evil, but I really wish his administration wasn't so frequently _sloppy_ .
Obviously, the winning strategy is to have a buffoonish yet popular demagogue lead the great crusade against foreign infiltration, with a quiet followup team to get the actual useful work done!
Time to fire up my Kalshi and Manifold. Soon as I find out who those followup teams are.
(Oh, and I'm assuming there's enough market demand for a Joseph Welch that the problem of finding one will solve itself.)
Suppose McCarthy had a 20% chance of being successful at purging communism. Suppose the Trump admin is less competent and in a worse position than McCarthy so only have a 10% chance of being successful at purging leftist anti-white race communism. That's still an order of magnitude better position than America has been prior to Trump winning in 2024.
Hilarious, the admin busy sobataging USA's trade and weakening the Dollar is going crazy full autoimmune disorder on itself to try to "avenge" the rightful neutralization of a weak specimen who talked shit one time too many and got hit.
I keep telling left wing friends of mine that opposition to free speech will rebound on them eventually. And well here we are (and the Palestine arrests here in the U.K.).
Besides Miller, many people are *trying* to start the pogroms:
Jesse Watters:
"They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us. What are we gonna do about it?... . Everybody’s accountable … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now. … This is a turning point and we know which direction we’re going.”
Steve Bannon:
“We have to have steely resolve ... Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
Even Trump offered to go after George Soros (??) for RICO (????).
He's handsome (obviously), rich (~$50 million seems to be the estimate), and powerful (he's governor of California). To say these are not positive qualities strikes me as deranged. Is this the "slave morality" thing again?
Most people distinguish qualities that are admirable from ones that are merely enviable. While both could be considered "positive" in the broad sense, in context Scott pretty clearly meant admirable ones.
(If the distinction isn't clear to you, it roughly maps to "beneficial to others" vs "only beneficial to you.")
Scott clearly considers wealth to be a material condition rather than an inherent quality, see "[Positive qualities] can get you a billion dollars". It follows that holding political office is disqualified on the same grounds, and he is eliding Newsom's looks in the same spirit of hyperbole as saying Trump has 100% support.
"Master–slave morality" was a classification Nietzsche came up with. Anytime someone refers to slave morality, they're contrasting it with master morality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality
An acquaintance claims to be interested in being the “Pro” adversary in an experiment to show the legitimacy of astrology to anyone who lacks a Religious commitment to the absence of the supernatural. She claims that a lot of skill is involved in chart-reading, and that she has this skill (I'll grant the implied claim to set aside every Unqualified Fool that may have been taken in by experimentors prior), and was not offended by my pointing out that the sheer power of the Barnum Effect makes anything but the most rigorous and powerful tool (RCTs with blinded graders) a must.
I suggested that if we end up deciding the juice isn't worth the squeeze doing that without institutional support (I am not “in academia”, nor do I have a degree in statistics or sociology or anything remotely related to this topic), an easier yet maybe <em>more</em> powerful alternative for “at least turning heads” in the rationalist and academic communities would be to set up a Polymarket account, place 100+ bets over the course of the next 2 years, and make a profit.
What measures should be taken to make the latter experiment more “head-turning”? The only measure I could think of <em>so far</em> was to have her legal name on the account, with a minimal-entropy handle, to (should the experiment yield a positive result) avoid the appearance of impropriety and defray accusations that she Cheated by simply creating many accounts, placing random or anticorrelaed trades, and only revealing the best-performing account.
Eastern or Western astrology? Which system of houses? Going to use the asteroids in the 'new' astrology systems or not? Indian astrology takes account of the precession of the equinoxes which might make it a better system for Scientific Testing, Western astrology is a little more symbolic.
Personally I think these kinds of tests are like "we wanted to see if holy water does anything so we used it to water plant seeds versus a control group watered with tap water; result was no significant difference" tests. Well duh no, that's not what holy water is for.
I don't think astrology works in the sense of doing what it claims to do (foretell future events) but rather it's one way of using symbolism to think about interior work.
That seems like a completely inapplicable criticism to the kind of tests I've described, though. The astrologer/interpretor is going to have full freedom in what kind of predictions to make about peoples' lives (in the RCT option) or what questions to wager on (in the Polymarket option), *and* she has already stated that either of these would be reasonable things to attempt.
This is no "[abusing] holy water [by] pouring it on plants" case, unless you would like to claim as an astrologer that the astrologer I've met would Blaspheme by _daring_ to make testable predictions?
Frankly, if any system (east, west, Native American, asteroids, or even magma-flow or galaxy based) works, that would be a reality-shattering revelation. I predict the experiment to “fail”; I seriously expect no outcome besides the Astrologer in question being converted to a Rationalist, or to One Who Copes. Obviously, every other astrologer under the sun will remain unconvinced by this one; but that's just the cost of playing.
Worst case scenario is rather *I* fuck up an experiment's design or execution and render the results moot with no interesting outcome at all.
This is what I mean that "prediction" markets do not really "predict" anything. Most of them are not liquid enough to prevent market manipulation. You would be better off just making very public yet falsifiable (ie specific) claims and posting them here
I thought (and told the astrologer) that RCTs would actually allow detecting signal in even the “vaguest” of claims, with a high enough sample size. Am I wrong here?
It would, after all, be prima facie unfair to exclude an *actual divination* method that happens to have outputs that must be subjectively judged. But—crucially—unlike Christian prayer, where we can't give placebo rosaries or whatever (and even if we found some sect that claims the sanctity of accessories matter, they would have no problem coping a negative result afterwards about how God works in mysterious ways and accepted/blessed the placebo accessories as real anyway due to the faith of the prayors), randomized charts are indisputably fair for statistical analysis.
If I take 100 strangers (or friends of mine who do not know the interpretor), and I give the interpretor 50 real charts and 50 fake charts assigned to these strangers, ask for an interpretation, then have someone (who was blinded to the randomization) work with the interpretor to produce a fair and reasonable itemized summary of each of the interpretations and agree on a reasonable delay (if any) to wait before giving each of these itemized interpretations to the subject, then have the subjects themselves *grade* the items for accuracy with likert scale, wouldn't that be the scientific foot in the door to show the presence/absence of a separation between the ratings by people whose charts were actually read, and the ratings by people who were given interpretations from fake charts (provided the Barnum Effect wasn't so strong that all items were clamped to max)?
Broadly, pre-registered RCT are the gold standard for a good reason. Of course, failure to pre-register just sends you right back to the garden of forking paths (a more charitable phrase than "p-hacking"). But how large does the sample need to be? That depends on the measurement error, and the effect size.
You can use a Likert-style rating and have N independent reviewers decide "how accurate" a statement was. But you should definitely have her go through several rounds of post-dictions and having them get rated, to see just how precise she needs to be to avoid everything getting Barnumed right off the bat. You could use those pre-tests to practice getting specific enough that the statements are actually meaningful. If they're too bland, then your measurement tool is so crappy that your "power" will be garbage anyway. For more, see here:
But if she gets good **AHEAD** of time at writing statements that are actually Likert-divisive, then you could use the variation in the scores to estimate the sample size needed. But off-the-cuff, you're going to need MANY HUNDREDS.
As a rule of thumb, "large" effect sizes are "so obvious we didn't need to do the experiment"; things like
- "men are heavier than women"; you can get away with only ~20 samples per condition for things like that.
- A "medium" effect size is things like "people who like eggs eat egg salad more tan those who don't"... going to need 50+ per condition for these
- A "small" effect size is things like "smokers believe smoking is less harmful than non-smokers"... for this you need many hundreds; this is where your astrology results will be, AT BEST.
(notice that most psych studies are run with only handfuls of students... most psych studies are absolute garbage)
for a true RCT, it would be arbitrary claims about the lives of the sample subjects I would select; for the Polymarket quasi-experiment it would just be (allegedly) anything “The Charts” say “The Market” is wrong about
This proposed Polymarket test doesn’t seem to be a test of astrology. It’s a test of whether the astrologer can identify Polymarket markets where the market predictions are wrong, which doesn’t establish anything about astrology in the absence of evidence that the astrologer couldn’t have accomplished the same result without using astrology.
Most people can't just go on Polymarket and make a bunch of money by identifying places where the market predictions are wrong. If this person can, and she claims to be using astrology to do it, it's definitely non-zero evidence that the astrology is actually working.
Maybe she just happens to be a really good forecaster who also wants to pretend astrology works for some reason. But that's somewhat unlikely in its own right.
There’s no way that astrology can predict markets even by its own logic. All human traits that are “influenced” by the stars are influenced individually not in aggregate. It’s like trying to use Myers Briggs to predict an election
What’s the current status of The Bay Area in the rationalist and AI safety communities? Is it still the main hub for rationalists and AI safety research? Do people expect it to stay that way as AI development accelerates? How does the rationalist community relate to the broader Bay Area tech scene? There’s overlap, but tech workers often move for jobs or lifestyle, while rationalists seem more likely to stay put because that’s where the community is, right?
For context: I’ve never been to The Bay and don’t work in tech, but the rationalist/EA community are central to my social life in the town current live in. I’m wondering I should move to The Bay to be closer to the community I identify with.
Rather than attempting to answer your questions directly, I will tell you about my own experience. I won't attempt to describe a causal mechanism by which one event led to the next, but maybe you can infer one. And perhaps my description of how I "eased into" the Bay is also one that can serve as an example that you or others might pilot test a move to the Bay Area.
I have been a SSC/ACX reader since 2017, and regularly attended SSC/ACX meetups in the western Pennsylvania from 2017 - 2025 (becoming the lead organizer in 2021 in the "post-covid" era that also coincided with the transition from "SSC meetups" to "ACX meetups." We got decent turnout (~10 people at normal meetups, 20+ people at the big meetups announced on Scott's blog), with ~half of our regular attendees being SWEs who were in Pittsburgh to work for companies like Google, Duolingo, and Uber ATG (the "self-driving car" unit that was later sold to Aurora).
In June 2024, I attended LessOnline and Manifest in Berkeley, and spent ~2 weeks living in the Bay Area, attending both the big weekend conferences, and smaller weekly Bay Area meetups; I quickly learned that it is not hard to fill up consecutive weekday nights with events like "AI paper book club" or "weekly LessWrong dinner" or "public weekly dinner hosted by the cofounder of Manifund," and I also quickly learned that the East Bay is full of friendly people who are pleasant to talk to even when discussing random personal topics.
In June 2025, I returned to Berkeley for LessOnline/Berkeley and gave several talks about my experience working on educational YouTube videos. The subtext of any talk like this (sometimes elevated to the text when I remember to add a slide at the end to say it) is that "I know a lot about this topic because it's literally my job to care about it, and if you'd like to be my client, you should talk to me afterward," and that led to a series of conversations that led to me working on videos about AI safety for the AI Species YouTube channel. This was a remote working relationship for June/July, and things went well enough during that time that in August I moved to the Bay so that I could continue working on AI safety videos (and be closer to important conversations) happening in that environment.
One of the things I realized during my first forays into "the scene" is that I can overhear and join a conversation about a topic I'm interested, tentatively express my own understanding of the topic with a soft invitation for correction, and someone present who knows more about the subject than I do will say something to either confirm or counter my intuition. (Sometimes that person will be an employee at a frontier AI lab, or someone who is working on AI research, or just someone who has spent more time reading papers than I have.) And then this will repeat maybe half a dozen more times over the course of a night, and theoretically I probably could have gotten most of that signal from being sufficiently curious online, but the communication is much higher fidelity (I'll get random asides that I wouldn't have gotten from just reading the papers), and much higher bandwidth (there's a real sense in which 1 hour of conversation can replace a full day of reading). And then there are some nights when I don't particularly learn much of anything about any of my professional interests and I "just" spend several hours enjoying tacos and pleasant conversation with people who share my values, or (because I have spent a decade working) sometimes I find myself in the position of being the subject matter expert in an area where someone else expresses curiosity.
I will also remark that several of my friends from Pittsburgh are currently working in the Bay Area, falling into the camps of "in SF working for an AI company" or "in Berkeley working on AI research." Some of these are people who were part of the Pittsburgh "rationality community," but the majority of them were just CMU students who moved to the Bay after finishing their PhDs (or bachelor's programs).
I specifically mentioned LessOnline and Manifest which happens May/June, which are the biggest and most public events that draw people to Lighthaven in Berkeley, but you might be able to replicate a smaller version of this experience by attending a smaller event at Lighthaven. Alternatively, if you wish to spend the entirety of November at Lighthaven writing a large volume of blog posts, the Inkhaven Residency is currently accepting applications.
That all sounds sooo awesome. (But the Bay Area is so expensive. Can there not be a cheaper Schelling point? There should be a third-world Schelling point too. Surely not more than a small fraction of Earthlings is allowed to visit, let alone live, in the U.S.)
Not if you want to hang out with the Cool People who are building the Tech Abundance Future. If it somehow transpires that all those people are in say Nairobi, then Nairobi will be about as expensive as San Francisco is now.
The urban Bay Area is a pair of thin, tall corridors along the coastline with the large San Francisco Bay running through the middle of them, boxed in from the north. This is exacerbated by rigid height limits, zoning restrictions, wildlife preserves and other veto points. In my city, you can always tell when the economy is booming because there are construction cranes everywhere. I was in SF when the economy was booming, and saw none.
So yes, much cheaper Schelling points are possible.
The height limits, zoning restrictions, wildlife preserves, and other veto points are there because the Cool People collectively want them there, So they'll be there in any new Cool-People Mecca you manage to set up. If these things do not exist in your city, then the Cool People are not going to move to your city en masse. Which may be a good thing from your perspective, but it's a real limitation for what we're talking about here.
If you can find a flat non-coastal city that isn't bisected by a major river, that would be at least somewhat helpful, but then there's the question of water and transportation access.
> the Cool People who are building the Tech Abundance Future
This seems to be an attempt to conflate (a) the creepy businesspeople pushing AI, always-online telemetry, and other questionable features into products to make them more anti-consumer; and (b) the cool members of the neo-Enlightenment movement who read and write LessWrong essays.
The only connection I can see is if some of the latter decided to hold their nose and join the former in order to afford the high cost of living of the Berkley area. (No, wait...)
I’m a college student in a rural red state where it’s almost impossible to find people to talk about this kind of stuff with. I’ve never been to the Bay Area. It’d be very interesting to me to go to a meetup or something sometime and see what a whole community of these people is actually like
I want to find people who are interesting without being weird and low-status.
I know these people exist. I know that having the ability to discuss interesting ideas doesn't necessarily mean you need to forget how to bathe or form a polyamorous group house.
But somehow it seems to be a weird divot in personality space, so many people set out to start thinking about interesting ideas and somehow always wind up in a polyamorous group house in Berkeley.
If a conversation progresses to deeper things, that inevitably raises the question of what the deepest thing is - the pearl of great price, which men sell all they have to purchase: love, of some sort.
I would point out that in attempting to meet people, explicitly trying to filter for non-weirdness and/or intelligence is a pretty good indicator somebody is weird.
I still think the definitive piece on this was written...god bless it, 8 years ago by Sarah Constantine and the Zvi. Links below. I'll quote the Zvi, because his experience and opinions mirror my own:
"Many of our best and brightest leave, hollowing out and devastating their local communities, to move to Berkeley, to join what they think of as The Rationalist Community. They feel comfortable ripping apart those other communities because they think the point of those communities was to feed their best people to the ‘real’ community in Berkeley; when not being careful they use the term ‘rationalist community’ interchangeably with ‘rationalists living in Berkeley’. Once there, they have an increasingly good time and develop new ways to have an increasingly good time, forming a real community. But that ‘rationalist community’ is ‘increasingly ill-named.’ Its central cultural theme is not rationality, or becoming stronger, or saving the world; it is, Sarah reports, an unconditional tolerance for weirdos, a paradise for Bohemians, a place built on warm connections of mutual support for those who don’t fit into broader society.
The rationalists took on Berkeley, and Berkeley won.
Berkeley doesn’t work for us. We work for Berkeley.
Huge, if true.
…And That’s Terrible?
Yes.
This is bad.
This is really bad.
This is unbelievably, world-doomingly bad. It means we’ve lost the mission.
This is taking many of the people most capable of saving the world, and putting them in a culture focused instead on better living. A culture that, rather than enforcing the mission, is encouraging them to lose the mission. A culture that is such a failure in its outward-facing goals that one of its best and brightest is now suggesting that anyone who wants to impact the outside world should do so without the community’s help."
I think it is important to keep separate mental buckets for your values. Yes, I want to live in a nice environment. Yes, I want to be rational. Both are things that I want, but they are not the same thing; "living in a nice environment" is not the same as "being rational". At best scenario, both happen at the same time; but they are still not the same thing.
Similarly, I want to have good friends. I also want to have a rationalist community. At best scenario, the good friends happen to be rationalists, and the rationalists happen to be good friends. Still, a "good friend" and a "rationalist" are two different concepts.
When people talk about someone being rationality-adjacent or post-rational or whatever... there is no such thing! It's like saying that "2+2=5" is math-adjacent. Nope, it's just mathematically wrong. A person who says that "2+2=5" may still be a nice person and a good friend. Or they may be an oppressed minority, and pointing out their mathematical mistake may feel like punching down or kicking a puppy. I am not saying that you should stop being friends or provide support to people who say that "2+2=5". But please stop calling them math-adjacent, if you want to keep your individual and collective math skills sharp.
Community is not a project. Or rather, it is a very specific kind of project, unrelated to the Project you had originally in mind. Keep separate mental buckets. Think about some people as a part of the community, but not a part of the Project.
If we're doing modular arithmetic, 2+2=3 is valid only in the integers modulo 1, also known as the zero ring. This is the ring where 0 = 1, and so every number is equal to every other number (for every x, 0*x = 1*x, so 0 = x).
If you want to do arithmetic in the zero ring, that's fine! You can do anything you want there, including dividing by zero! But it's a number system where "the universe has imploded," all numbers are equal, and hence all numbers are equally boring. You can't learn any interesting facts about numbers by studying their behavior modulo 1, I'm afraid.
How big is the celebrating Charlie Kirk's death problem in the US? I'm not american, but from a distance it feels like way too many people are very cool with political murder of someone (who seems otherwise nice) just because they disagree with him.
Not really. Defacing memorials to someone who was brutally murdered should be rare in absolute terms. There should not be an abundance of cases for the media to highlight.
You’re asking people to doubt media reports, events captured on social media, reports from others about what they have seen, and reactions that they have seen themselves.
I don’t remember the specific articles. Search Kirk Memorial Vandalized on google and you will find many incidents. Also search on X and you’ll find people caught on video doing it.
The overwhelming sentiment I see from the left is "political killings are bad, but I'm not going to pretend I thought Kirk was a good person"
Personally, I find this not a problem whatsoever (I hold the same view). It's sad that Kirk was killed, both as a symptom of rising political violence/murder and because it is sad when anyone dies, but my opinion of him has not changed.
What people would like is that *maybe* some people, especially teachers nurses and doctors, don't treat people that did have a positive opinion of him like subhuman freaks.
>If they're not deliberately breeching their duties as a healthcare professional
(removed due to lack of confirmation) because their patients were white and/or conservative. That's the kind of thing I had in mind when suggesting they require a higher standard than, say, a Home Depot cashier.
I'm starting to feel like a crazy person because I would've sworn she was fired for it and it was fairly widely reported but now I can't find anything. The closest I can find is a nurse who implied she'd treat them worse but no evidence of actually doing so: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1650756805188428/posts/3892857900978296/
So, no, I'll edit that out. Trying to track it down has been eye-opening in how many nurses have been fired over Tiktoks (quite a few!) and the limits of questions where ChatGPT gets a bit squirrely.
I suspect that it likely *did* go around social media, but the veracity was unconfirmed and now so much has been scrubbed from 2020-2022 that anything left is deep in some unsearchable archive.
>"but I'm not going to pretend I thought Kirk was a good person"
Right, this is exactly the problem. I have not heard any sign that Kirk ever did anything other than virtuous in his personal or professional life. If someone thinks that Kirk was a bad person, they think so purely on the basis of his political views, which were not extreme. If someone thinks that Charlie Kirk was a bad person then they are someone who cannot imagine someone holding normal conservative views and being a good person, which means they've written off half of the society in which they live as being bad people.
That's not a healthy way for a society to be. It's untenable.
Judging someone on the basis of policy views rather than behavior is a big shift in the wrong direction. I noted this back when the New Yorker (iirc) piece came out and accused Scott of talking to "Monstrous people" on SSC.
That said, I think it's fair to count activism type activities against someone. (Although I generally disagree with those doing so here on the object level)
"If someone thinks that Charlie Kirk was a bad person then they are someone who cannot imagine someone holding normal conservative views and being a good person, which means they've written off half of the society in which they live as being bad people."
This happened many years ago. Remember, Clinton made that "basket of deplorables" comment thinking she was basically stating the obvious, not saying something anyone (any REAL person, anyway) could take issue with.
Second, I think separating views entirely from the judgement of a person is silly. If I knew someone (let's call him Bob) who was nothing but kind to me and others in his life, but expressed repeatedly that all people of X ethnicity should be executed, well then I'd say Bob was a bad person. Pretending otherwise would be silly.
I think often views get a pass because they are "indirect" and sure, I'll agree that saying "I think all X should be killed" is on a much different scale than going out and actually doing it. However, I don't agree that it being indirect suddenly makes it perfectly morally neutral.
In the same way, Kirk's views may not been as bad as if he had gone out and done them himself (the "taken care of the way we used to take care of things back in the 50s and 60s" reference to assaulting trans people being a prime example), but that does not mean I have to disregard them completely when judging him as a person.
Separating my reply into two comments since I want to cover two separate aspects
First, Kirk's views were pretty extreme (although not as extreme as someone like Fuentes, but still decently close). Are you at all familiar with them? A quick search shows heavy religious fundamentalism, anti-LGBT, etc. Some views he was known for:
- "Prowling blacks go around for fun to target white people"
- Believed and promoted the 'Great Replacement' theory that
- Birth control makes women angry and bitter and "messes with their brains"
- Abortion is worse than the Holocaust
- Being gay is an "error" and the LGBT pride movement is like encouraging drug addicts
- Doctors who provide gender-affirming care should be imprisoned and have "Nuremberg-style" trials
- Gays "want to corrupt our children" and the legalization of gay marriage was a mistake
- "You cannot have liberty without a Christian population"
- "This is a Christian state"
- Promoted election fraud claims during 2020 election
- Believed the Civil Rights Act was a mistake
- Black people in government positions got there by "taking a white man's spot"
- "Muslims want to import values into the West and seek to destabilize our civilization"
- Mehdi Hasan and Ilhan Omar should be deported from the US
- Biden should receive the death penalty
I don't see most these as moderate whatsoever. If you believe that the average conservative agrees with all or most of these statements then all I can do is hope that you're wrong.
>- "Muslims want to import values into the West and seek to destabilize our civilization"
I wouldn't say "destabilize". "Conquer" is probably closer. And there are non-practicing Muslims who don't do any of this. But many Muslim clergy basically say this themselves.
>Birth control makes women angry and bitter and "messes with their brains"
Angry and bitter is a stretch, it's well-founded that any hormonal treatment has an effect on mood though.
>"You cannot have liberty without a Christian population"
Echoing well known extremists John Adams and James Monroe.
>Black people in government positions got there by "taking a white man's spot"
He had a narrow and specific list of three people who had admitted they benefited from the the dreadfully unpopular and unconstitutional policy that is affirmative action. Not a general statement.
Isn't it so strange you can't even critique him honestly?
Yes, I object to that statement as well for the same reason. Both statement imply a more systemic/large problem by leaving the actual amount of people doing the crime purposefully vague. It also does nothing to narrow down the factors describing the person other than their race - a statement like "prowling Neonazis/KKK members target black people for fun" I'd object to less, though I'd still prefer an actual qualifier of the percentage/amount of them actually doing it.
The statement "Lightning strikes many people every year", is technically true but misrepresents the scale by using the vague descriptor "many". Many could mean 20 people a year, could mean thousands, could mean millions. The scale matters, a lot, and leaving it vague allows the listener to fill in the blank based on their own biases.
I think the number of people willing to actively celebrate the murder is low, but the number of people with a gnawing sense of satisfaction somewhere in the back of their minds is worryingly high.
The number of people who say things like "Well of course I don't condone it. But then again, he did say X, Y and Z. Which kinda makes you think, doesn't it?" is too darn high. Especially because most of these people had no strong concept of Charlie Kirk a week ago, and now they're suddenly able to drop six of the dumbest things that Charlie Kirk said in his whole life into any conversation.
Are you claiming that there does not exist a level at which a person’s behavior can be deemed to be corrosive enough to society that his demise can be considered a boon? I don’t personally know enough about him to know one way or another but most of the, “my feelings are conflicted,” takes feel, of that nature, to me. It feels to me, perfectly reasonable to regret someone’s demise while simultaneously wondering if perhaps this is not entirely black and white.
I think it's obviously true that there are people for whom it would be a net benefit to humanity if they died, but: there are many, many fewer people who would benefit humanity if their demise were by means of a high profile political assassination; and if someone who is in the former category dies by means of the latter method, I think it's very plausible that it's a bigger benefit to humanity for everyone else to deplore the manner of their demise than to focus on whether or not they were someone whose all-else-equal demise would have been a benefit.
This is a better articulation of my thoughts than my own statement. I did not intend to conflate their wondering how "black and white" it was with their actually articulating this. That it is okay to be conflicted. It is okay to point out his flaws. But that one ought to leave the statement of ones feelings at, "regret."
Yeah, I don't think one is obliged to ignore the things that might factor in one's decision as to whether the person in question benefits humanity by their absence; but discussion of that issue specifically *at best* adds nothing.
>Are you claiming that there does not exist a level at which a person’s behavior can be deemed to be corrosive enough to society that his demise can be considered a boon?
I think it exists.
We should also, *absolutely* never discuss what that level is, and *absolutely* no one should ever have that level be set to "guy says things I don't like."
Edit: Angela Davis, Bill Ayers, Paul Erlich, Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun have all been massively net-negative for humanity, far worse than Charlie Kirk. Given the first two are actual convicted terrorists saying they should've been sentenced to capital punishment is rather different than people whose primary sin is to have written incredibly evil books.
And yet! If someone murdered any of them, that would be a horrible offense. If anyone said it was good that they were murdered, or focused on calling them and their supporters evil and stupid immediately after the murder, that would be gross and ghoulish and soulless.
> Are you claiming that there does not exist a level at which a person’s behavior can be deemed to be corrosive enough to society that his demise can be considered a boon?
I would modify it slightly to say say there is not a level at which a law-abiding person's behaviour can be deemed corrosive enough that his murder can be considered a boon.
I am struggling to imagine who is supposed to be the left-wing equivalent, the person that I'm supposed to secretly know I'd be happy if they were murdered. Van Jones? Keith Olbermann? George Soros?
“… that I'm supposed to secretly know I'd be happy if they were murdered,” is in complete opposition to what I said. I do not see a point in debating if it is not to be in good faith.
Yes, too many people, but I don't sense it is much different from when Luigi Mangioni shot down a health insurance CEO on the street. Maybe even less now, because the earlier murder seemed too cool across a bit more of the political spectrum, and entailed a lot more nonsense about Mangioni being a hero.
For better or worse (hint: it's worse), we have a for-profit health care system. The CEO had a responsibility to his shareholders to maximize share value. The responsibility to the customer is to provide an insurance policy that covers whatever the fine print says it covers (often not much). It's an inhumane system, involving lots of moral hazard, but it's hard to blame the CEO for creating the system, or UHC for maximizing profit.
I couldn't confidently put an estimate on how much of a problem it is; I'm pretty cynical about what the left half of the country will say about any given event so I don't find it that surprising, and I think studies back that up (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231180971). I am darkly amused/disappointed multiple replies are supporting that perception of being completely unhinged about a debate bro being a debate bro.
Was he perfectly kind and gentle? No, of course not. Was he more of an asshole than the average leftist debate bro, or worse for society than, say, any ~progressive-liberal getting famous for their crazy books and articles in 2020? No, of course not.
Respectfully, I think citing the study "Political (Meta-)Dehumanization in Mental Representations: Divergent Emphases in the Minds of Liberals Versus Conservatives" to explain why you feel very cynical about half the country is pretty ironic (regardless of which half you pick).
I wouldn't say it's why I feel cynical. I feel cynical from personal experience of how selective people are in their concerns, and I added that in for the people that like to have Expert Citations about such things.
People celebrate death all the time. E.g. when they killed Bin Laden, Americans were delighted.
>who seems otherwise nice
Ah, there's your problem. He wasn't nice, he was a hate-filled, violence-loving extremist. He told women to "submit to your husbands." He called trans people an "abomination" and a "throbbing middle finger to God," and called for "Nuremberg-style trials" for doctors who let trans people be trans. He said that watching a public execution would "make my day better."
Murdering Charlie Kirk was of course murder. It was a crime, and on top of that it was idiotic. I also think it's foolish to publicly celebrate (normalizing domestic political murder won't end well for anyone). But I'm not going to pretend it's weird to hate someone who hated you and your loved ones and wanted to use state power to violently strip you of your rights (even if he used a calm voice).
Can you provide evidence of his hate filled violence loving extremism? The other use in this thread linked to what he believes counts, but those examples do not make their case at all.
Imo some amount of the people celebrating aren't actually endorsing murder, but do think it's fine to make jokes, or to use it to make the far-right scared and try to show them how unpopular their views are. Or are just annoyed at how this evil murder victim gets a quadrillion times more attention and sympathy and expectation of grief than any random nameless stranger, or victims of school shootings, or the recent 11 victims in a boat that Trump murdered, or people being genocided in Gaza with US tax dollars, etc.
>Or are just annoyed at how this evil murder victim gets a quadrillion times more attention and sympathy and expectation of grief than any random nameless stranger
Like George Floyd!
>people being genocided in Gaza with US tax dollars
Not a genocide. If you want words to continue meaning things instead of people ignoring them, much like "fascist," stop overusing them for things they're not.
There is an official definition of genocide and ample evidence that Israel is guilty of it. In particular, attacks on civilian water and healthcare infrastructure necessary for life, intentional destruction of homes, imposed starvation, indiscriminate killing of civilians with no military objective, statements from high ranking officials demonstrating genocidal intent.
I understand it is difficult for many people to accept, but I encourage you to look into the evidence. It is impossible to take an honest look at what is happening and deny the truth at this point. Look at part 3 of the definition.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Like most people who debates these genocide deniers, you're making the mistake of focusing on the wrong part of the definition of "genocide".
"Genocide" requires:
(1) acts of violence as you described...
(2) ...with the intention to destroy a people.
Genocide deniers have a problem with (2) because they don't understand how the reported 66k deaths could ever add up to the destruction of an entire people. That makes genocide sound like a crazy notion.
What they're missing is that you can destroy a people by driving that people out of their land, which fits (2), and such is the project openly endorsed by Trump, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
At this point the deniers will object to a definition that includes driving out, even though it is, in fact, the established definition. Fine then, let's put aside the word "genocide". Let's just say "ethnic cleansing". It's still indefensible.
Then the next objection will be "all wars create refugees". My answer to that:
(a) The difference between evacuation and ethnic cleansing lies in whether displaced people are allowed to return when the crisis ends. Will Palestinians who leave the Strip ever be allowed to return? We all know Israel will steal the land for settlers and never let any Palestinian return.
(b) One thing is refugees as an accidental byproduct of war, another thing is when your tactics are meant to maximize refugees. According to those who say it's a genocide, Israel tactics are designed to drive out the population, they're not merely designed to defeat Hamas. Israel is trying hard to make Gaza impossible to live in, so people will have to leave.
(c) Most importantly, according to those who say it's a genocide, Israeli leaders have admitted to getting rid of the population being the goal.
It is weird to me that there's no numbers on any of those. Incredibly loose definition, practically any murder could be a genocide if one wanted to name it that way.
Surely killing one person for their identity, which may be a hate crime, would be absurd to call it a genocide. What's the minimum number for it to be considered genocide? Ten people? One hundred? One percent of the pre-genocide population? Ten percent?
The Palestinian and Gazan populations have *only* grown since 1948! What Israel has done to them can be named many many bad things, but calling it genocide weakens the word from being an ultimate crime against humanity to being whatever the speaker wants it to be.
Edit:
>attacks on civilian water and healthcare infrastructure necessary for life
Would you say that Ukraine is committing a genocide against Russians? They are certainly killing members of the group, as well as causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group. So twice met on "any".
I think you are missing a key part of the definition: "...with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"
I'm not aware of that happening against Russians to any significant degree. If it is happening I'm open to seeing the evidence. I do remember some reports of suppression of the Russian language and other general discrimination in the ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine. Which is worthy of concern, but nothing remotely like the brutality currently seen in Gaza and the West Bank.
He wasn't personally a hero. He happened to be the guy that a cop murdered on camera. You'll answer "well Kirk happened to be the guy that a politically-motivated assassin murdered on camera"—I agree, that's why I'm one of the ones giving him more attention and sympathy than I do nameless strangers.
>Not a genocide. If you want words to continue meaning things
You misunderstood; I'm not hyperbolizing. Feel free to read the arguments of leading human rights groups like B'Tselem and Amnesty International (who concluded it's the crime of genocide) or Human Rights Watch (who concluded it's at least the crime of "extermination" and may be the crime of genocide).[1] Or read the arguments presented to the ICJ.[2] There are even op-eds making the argument in both NYT and WaPo (newspapers you can hardly consider biased towards Palestinians).[3] Or the recent resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.[4]
If you liberally interpret the UN definition, every Palestinian mother who yells at her own child is committing genocide. But when people hear genocide they think Israel is killing all the Palestinians, which couldn't be further from the truth. It's a really unfortunate Newspeak situation.
>who concluded it's at least the crime of "extermination"
How in the actual name of sanity and words meaning things can it be extermination when the Palestinian population and the population of Gaza has increased, continuously, over the last several decades?
It is gross! It is violent! It is a tragedy! It is violent authoritarianism! What Israel has done to Palestine can be named many many bad things, but by no stretch of a sane man's mind is it extermination or genocide.
>Or the recent resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars
You mean the organization that literally anyone can join for $125 and sound official in their condemnations? Well, they could before that little fact when viral: https://genocidescholars.org/join/
I'll charitably assume you're repeating something you heard, instead of being bad-faith yourself.
Trump's a brutal authoritarian, trying to destroy checks and balances, who wants to be above the law instead of under the Constitution, who had legal immigrants kidnapped to an El Salvador torture prison, who had other legal immigrants kidnapped for using their free speech, who's talking about stripping Americans of citizenship, who wants to use the military to crack down on US cities, whose VP openly said "I don't give a shit what you call it" about being told it's criminal to murder 11 people on a boat, etc.
When someone says "don't call them fascists," it's because they want to silence any and all ability to ever warn about fascism before it's too late.
There's this amazing word, "authoritarian," that I will never ever complain that anyone use for Trump and require tying him to a 1940s Eurocentric ideology for the sake of guilt-by-association.
My belief is that people *don't* use authoritarian instead because they don't really oppose authoritarianism; they want to narrow it down to a kind of authoritarianism they're willing to oppose.
It is not. If anyone is guilty of genocide it is Hamas and maybe Egypt. Israel is killing approximately the minimum number of civilians possible under these circumstances, for a country that wants to win the war they are in. Israel feeds the Gazan population as well as providing their water and energy, etc. That's not genocide- quite the opposite.
Israel is stopping aid from getting into Gaza. This isn’t Israel supplying aid but blocking it. I have no idea why Egypt is mentioned, although I’ve seen people argue that they are responsible for not allowing Palestinians in. So the obligation is on Egypt to allow in the Palestinians fleeing genocidal destruction but not in Israel to stop said destruction.
What's wrong with "submitting to your husbands"? Of course, one must not do this blindly, but one ought to submit to a loving husband whose will is that the wife be better off.
Yes, it also works the other way. A man must submit to his wife, or he will certainly regret it.
I saw a few content creators I follow condone it or mock his death. A surprising number of people I know in real life softly implied that he had it coming. eg. "The only thing significant thing here is the irony of a gun supporter killed by a gun." "He wasn't just giving an opinion. Trans rights are not up for debate." Overall I would say: enough to be concerning, but not accurately represented by the most extreme takes you will see highlighted online.
The first thing I saw when I logged in after hearing about Kirk’s murder was a post from an old friend reading only: “A good start.”
Perhaps that was the worst of it, but I would say I absolutely saw a lot of online glee from people I knew (not bots), sometimes muted by a halfhearted caveat, in the immediate aftermath. Often it was a somewhat restrained “well, he made his bed, and now he’s lying in it.” All stuff that at the very least would have been seen as crass or in bad taste to say about a murder victim in most contexts.
That said, I later saw a countercounterreaction; as more and more Kirk-shakes-hands-with-Jesus AI images appeared, as Trump called for a prayer vigil, etc., more restrained people started saying, “Whoa, whoa! Kirk was actually a bad guy. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” It rapidly became hard for me to tell what people were reacting to: Kirk’s life, Kirk’s death, or others’ responses to Kirk’s life or death.
Personally: I generally try not to celebrate others’ misfortunes or deaths (I sometimes fail at this); I am always 100% opposed to violence in response to speech; I’m aware there’s a long tradition of joking around after a tragedy (“how many space shuttle astronauts fit in a car” etc.) and I don’t really want that to die out under some kind of chilling propriety; finally, please never make AI art of a dead celebrity meeting Jesus, as the proper medium for such scenes is painting on velvet.
More or less offtopic, but this I find really funny actually, because, well, that's what's happening right now in heaven, isn't it?, and shows therefore what's so weird about Christians:
There is never ever a reason to grieve or worry about anything, *ANYTHING*, because God has absolutely everything, *EVERYTHING*, under control. If he exists, he is f*€#&@g GOD! And still they grieve and worry about so many things. As if they wouldn't believe any of this and are just saying it.
They could at least try a little bit harder to believe in their own faith. At least Muslims believe in paradise enough to sacrifice themselves for the cause.
That probably would have been the mature thing to do, but I found (in the days when I used to respond to my friends' excesses) that I am spectacularly bad and counterproductive at confronting them. So I just looked on and kept mum, like a man at the freak show.
I think the vast majority of normal folks see it as a terrible thing. One big surprise for me has been the number of tech industry figures who have celebrated it, including the European Tech Evangelist for Red Hat (although even most of the industry sees it as terrible). You would think they would have more sense.
The views they've publicly expressed over the last ten years, the views they HAVEN'T expressed that they would have if they were held by more than a vanishingly small minority, and their reaction to the views that are being expressed right now.
I've been too busy offline to check very thoroughly, and what little I see from the left was either flatly opposed to murder (e.g. Newsom, Harris) or so unconfirmed in provenance that I instantly assume it's a bot, possibly one designed to stir the pot.
There are a few communities of people I know personally that I haven't talked to in a while; I could check. Progressive, that is; I don't expect any celebrating among the people I know on the right, not even of the "hell yea, it's backlash time" flavor. I expect almost no celebrating among my friends on the left, either.
So this is a sort of no-op opinion, but I'm sharing it anyway because it might be a common one. Most people I know barely know who Charlie Kirk was, and a growing number of us have tuned out social media, so responses tend to be "that's terrible, but I don't know him or anyone close to him".
Being deep in the heart of blue America with many progressive friends and colleagues, I've been struck by how different the IRL response has been from what I see reported to be the online response. [Having deleted FB/Twitter/Instagram years ago and never tried TikTok, can't say firsthand about the latter.] It's so stark that makes me wonder how much of the online "glad the fascist bastard is dead" stuff is actually bots.
I was surprised in the other way (also in the heart of blue America with most of my colleagues being progressives). I assumed it was the usual online-only crap, maybe bots or russians, until I heard some coworkers suggesting that he deserved it.
>It's so stark that makes me wonder how much of the online "glad the fascist bastard is dead" stuff is actually bots.
Probably a substantial amount of *volume*, but afaict people like Matthew Dowd, Karen Attiah, Ilhan Omar, etc are confirmed to not be bots, no matter how much they act like algorithms programmed to promote outrage and hate.
The issue isn’t merely that you put quotations around something that wasn’t an actual quote, it’s that, literal quote or not, you clearly claimed that Omar said she was glad that Kirk was dead, a claim you have provided no evidence for but haven’t clearly disavowed either.
In her interview on Zeto, Omar said, “It was really mortifying to hear the news, to see the video. You know, all I could think about was his wife, his children — that image is going to live forever.”[1] You cite that interview as evidence that Omar is a bad person, but link to a New York Post article, which predictably does not include that quote, instead of linking to a somewhat more neutral site like The Hill. While the full interview is probably reserved for subscribers, you can read or view a substantial excerpt here[2]. If you stand by your assessment of Omar after reading the quotes in context, we will have to agree to disagree.
(There is an error in the transcript at the second link. The statement that Kirk called George Floys a “scumbag” was an interjection by Hassan, not a statement by Omar.)
"There are a lot of people who are talking about him [Kirk] just wanting to have a civil debate, These people are full of s— and it’s important for us to call them out while we feel anger and sadness."
and
"There is nothing more f—ed up than to pretend that his words and actions haven’t been recorded and in existence for the last decade or so"
All but one of the people I've talked to (tending to be younger and left-leaning, often personally affected by Trump's funding cuts) are not celebrating the death; the one person who's celebrating the death is a centrist (like, wanted Nikki Haley to be president, agrees with Kirk on quite a few issues) with some odd political views, not any kind of leftist like you would expect. It's definitely widely discussed among people I know (again, disproportionately in their 20s and politically engaged). A minority of people seem to have mixed emotions, like that it's partially his fault for being anti gun control, but still think that his death is a bad thing. Thinking Republicans have gone too far in the Charlie Kirk hagiography or are using it as an excuse to threaten Democrats or rein in free speech or something like that is pretty common. People seem split (haven't talked to enough people about this to know the exact split) on whether it's okay to make flippant jokes about his death, but not because of Kirk specifically, just because people disagree on making jokes about dead public figures.
There's definitely a small but sometimes loud minority who are okay with political murder, but it seems like there's also a lot of people taking some of the other reactions I described out of context and using it to overexaggerate the support for political murder.
I am a member of a political discussion organization at a state college in Colorado. We had a discussion the day of the shooting.
Most people condemned the violence, but at the same time said that they vehemently oppose(d) Charlie Kirk. One person said his death was a good thing because he was a fascist, comparing Kirk to Joseph Goebbels. I pointed out that even Goebbels received a trial. He was the only one with this view though. Another girl pointed out that she was disturbed by posts online celebrating Kirk's death. The club overall has a strong left lean.
Overall I'd say it's not a big issue, the people celebrating his death are mostly just a minority online. Even the people who dislike him are still disturbed by the way he died.
I find it helpful to assume that people that use the word "fascist" when discussing any group after, say, the 1950s is at best deeply unserious and can't be trusted.
I don't think he ever advocated for the establishment of an autarchic state in modern day Italy, but we have to understand that 'fascist' nowadays is commonly used as a catch-all term for right-wing authoritarians.
Given how he advocated for a society in which women should be subservient to men because the bible says so (just a sample of his views) I don't find it hard to see how he could be perceived as a right-wing authoritarian.
I have not met or heard anyone celebrating in real life. The only people to mention it at all were my girlfriend after she saw the news on her phone, “who’s Charlie Kirk?” and a Korean co-worker “Did you see that guy get shot…America’s crazy”
I'm on several group texts and email chains with Democrats planning for the next election and there hasn't been a single word about it. Even from those I expected to let me down.
Anecdata from a Canadian university: everyone who talks about it (a surprising number of people!) is worried/dismayed about political violence. Quite a few people don't have any sympathy for him personally, but even they think the killing was wrong and will make things worse. I haven't heard anyone say it was a good idea.
I haven't heard the killing mentioned at all by people I know personally - the closest was an elderly neighbor who had CNN playing in another room while we visited, with of course wall to wall coverage, which we ignored while we watched my three year old investigate a grandfather clock. I guess this may mark a turning point where I am no longer young enough to be 'with it-' I'm not in any group chats to speak of, which is where most of the other commenters are seeing non-algorithm-driven evidence that there is an outpouring of support for political killing.
Ever since the last link roundup I’ve been looking through my books to find a poem similar to “The Yeti Speaks,” and I finally found it. It’s “The Cynic’s Soliloquy; Her Reply” by Bonita C. Miller, from 1974. I got it from David Orr’s book on poetry, Beautiful and Pointless. “Yeti” is better, I think.
How much time do you typically spend writing and editing blog post? I tend to build up a lot of drafts and unstructured ideas which I'd like to share as proper posts, but I tend to get bogged down or stuck in decision paralysis.
Should I just set a 60 to 90 minute timer, force myself to write as much as possible in that time, and publish whatever comes out?
On Substack I have 3x more drafts than published blog articles.
On LessWrong it is about 1:1.
I don't have as much uninterrupted time as I would like to have, and continuing an article on another day feels extremely difficult. I am no longer in the same mood, I don't have the same mental picture as when I started writing it...
Maybe the answer is writing shorter articles, dunno.
"How much time do you typically spend writing and editing blog post?"
I have a personal on-line journal (which is similar to a blog, but probably more similar to the 'personal web pages' from the last 1990s) where I split things into long and short form entries. The short form entries I spend less time on. Sometimes it can be just a few minutes because I tripped over something that I found interesting or amusing (e.g. $470 Louis Vuitton sells an iPhone Case for $470) or insightful (e.g. All-You-Can-Eat Buffets Cannot Afford Excellent Food ... which applies to streaming services, too). Some of these I spend up to about five hours on (though that is rare). More common is well under an hour. Then I have long form entries. These can take from a few hours to 10s of hours.
I find that the split helps because I feel that I'm getting *something* done with the short form entries while I'm working on my long form essays.
Different strokes ... It's hard to know what will ring with people and what will also "be a memory".
Several people are saying Little Tokyo. I find the Little Tokyo depressing personally so to each their own. There's way more Japanese activity and authticity in other parts of the city but they aren't "Little Tokyo" with it's 1 or 2 small walking streets. If you do go downtown, there's Grand Central Market, Olivera Street, Philippe's, The Broad. Also if you're down there you can drive on "Grand Lower" which is a short section of street underground that's been used in like 30+ movies for car chases (Terminator, Batman, Heat, ...). It's a moment drive by but still....
There are also several neighborhoods where all the signs are Chinese, or Vietnamese, or Korean for miles and miles. But none of them have specific "destinations" but they are full of restaurants with the "real deal".
There is Disneyland. If Disney doesn't turn you off it is a unique destination (I'm a fan). Universial Studios is an actual studio in LA and has a studio tour where the other locations (Florida, Singapore, Japan) are just amusement parks. There's also the Warner Bros Studio tour which is even more of a "studio" tour as they'll take you on the sets of Friend, NCIS, The West Wing (or at least they did when I went ~2 years ago). They don't have any tour attractions like Universal though. There's 2 other amusement parks if that's your thing. Knott's Berry Farm, and Magic Mountain.
There's various beaches, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach are highlights to me but if you already live near an ocean then maybe not? Venice Beach is a sight. You can walk the boardwalk. There may be an event on a weekend. You can rent a bike and ride along the beach ~5 miles north or 15 miles south. Take low-elevation hang gliding lessons at Dockweiler Beach https://www.windsports.com/ That would certainly be memorable. Maybe less memorable but stil beautiful are the Korean Friendship Bell (not the bell itself but the view from the park) and the Terranea Resort which has a restaurant on the cliffs facing Catalina Island.
It's still on my list but there's the Getty Villa (needs reservations) and also "The Getty" (might also need reservations).
I agree with some of the other recommendations. The Huntington Library (it's a huge complex with gardens, museums, a mansion). I'm not sure how much they cover it but Mr. Huntington in some ways, made LA as he owned/built much of the huge transit system LA used to have and many of the cities started around train stations.
This is the trouble with globalisation, "great ethnic food" is the same everywhere, or at least in every major first-world city. So what's the point of going anywhere?
The Mexican food, specifically, in Los Angeles is probably better than the Mexican food in my home town. But if I'm going to fly somewhere to get Mexican food it might as well be Mexico.
(2) there is not good food of different cultures everywhere. There is no good authentic Chinese food, especially given the variety, in most of Europe for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTa_T2pVwuk While LA doesn't have all of that, it has far more than London, Paris, Berlin. Similarly with Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese.
Maybe not. I read about a Mexican Airbnb hostess who was very upset that when she would make spaghetti for her guests, they would complain about not getting Mexican food.
In her opinion, Mexican food was food that a Mexican might prepare for herself, but her guests knew better.
- Mount Wilson observatory: It's where people discovered that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way
- Huntington Library: Mostly gardens, but a very nice place to meander
- Little Tokyo: Shopping district with Japanese food and assorted goodies. I consider ramen to be one of the foods that LA is best at, and Orochon in Little Tokyo is very good. You could make this one stop on a ramen tour of the city.
- Hsi Lai Temple: In the San Gabriel Valley. Was once the largest Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere.
- And yes, Museum of Jurassic Technology
I'd also go to Erewhon just to soak up the absurdity. LA's absurdity is one of the things I love about it.
If I were going again soon, I'd want to make sure to do two things inspired by David Lynch:
- Drive at night in the hills and stop to appreciate the view of the city.
- DL has the phrase "night blooming jasmine" on his tombstone, which he said is a reminder of old Hollywood. Perplexity suggests that Westwood, Bel-Air, and the Japanese garden at Lake Balboa Park might be good places to enjoy that scent.
You will probably remember the Time Travel Mart and Museum of Jurassic Technology if you attend, although I'm not sure they're what people usually go to Los Angeles for.
I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Griffith Observatory in 2010, and they were two of the few memories I have of the place. I intend to visit both again. Time Travel Mart will be added to my list.
I second paying extra for the Universal Studios VIP tour, which also includes a personal guide for several hours after the tour, to walk you to the front of every line at every attraction and ride.
Here was a real exchange I had with a friend as we were *very literally* trotting past *very literally* many hundreds of people waiting to go through the Walking Dead haunted house:
Gavin comes from the Welsh Gawain, one of Arthur's knights. Nephew of the king, said to wield Excalibur and is depicted as a villain in later versions of the story. Mirroring nepotism and corruption.
Gawain also meaning the hawk of May or the hawk of the plains. May comes from Maia, a goddess associated with among other things Abundance. A hawk can also be an eagle, symbolizing the American president and the great plains of Iowa that lend them their power.
Newsom comes from literally new+house in old English.
So we have a morally ambiguous but undeniably powerful character who will be an eagle (president) arising from the plains (Iowa caucus) bringing Abundance (of the Extra Klein variety) and new houses. Exactly what America needs.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.
All I know about Sir Gawain is his whole thing with the Green Knight, who as an absurdly powerful prankster impervious to things that can kill mortals, is clearly Donald Trump.
(The link in the commentary is broken, but it's referring to Morte d'Arthur Book 5, Chapter 10:
> I was so elate and hauteyn in my heart that I thought no man my peer, nor to me semblable. I was sent into this war with seven score knights, and now I have encountered with thee, which hast given to me of fighting my fill, wherefore sir knight, I pray thee to tell me what thou art.
> I am no knight, said Gawaine, I have been brought up in the guardrobe with the noble King Arthur many years, for to take heed to his armour and his other array, and to point his paltocks that long to himself. At Yule last he made me yeoman, and gave to me horse and harness, and an hundred pound in money; and if fortune be my friend, I doubt not but to be well advanced and holpen by my liege lord.
> Ah, said Priamus, if his knaves be so keen and fierce, his knights be passing good: now for the King’s love of Heaven, whether thou be a knave or a knight, tell thou me thy name.
> By God, said Sir Gawaine, now I will say thee sooth, my name is Sir Gawaine, and known I am in his court and in his chamber, and one of the knights of the Round Table, he dubbed me a duke with his own hand. Therefore grudge not if this grace is to me fortuned, it is the goodness of God that lent to me my strength.)
In early portrayals Gawain is often the Main Guy, but in later works when his spot's been usurped by Lancelot (and later Tristan as well) he kills King Pellinore in a duel framed as fairly unjustified, he and his brothers flat-out murder Lamorak of Wales for carrying on with their mom, and worst, he gets all fucked up about the whole thing with Lancelot killing his brothers and causes the entire civil war with Arthur which is the downfall of Camelot due to his psychotic devotion to revenge; although it's his half-brother Mordred who actually ends up killing Arthur, this happens only after Lancelot murks Gawain as well; for the most part Gawain is the leader of the rebellion.
With all the talk about the fertility crisis, I haven't seen much discussion of the obvious solution: a Brave New World system of orphanages raising kids born to surrogates or, if possible, gestated in a lab.
Given what we know now, would we be able to design orphanages to be consistently safe, pleasant, and nurturing? If so, would that be enough to raise happy, stable adults, or is there something intrinsic about being raised in a nuclear family that can't be replaced?
Artificial wombs will quite likely be developed but by then the fertility crisis will already be ravaging most non-poor countries, and replacing the populations with biologically low average IQ people from africa , pakistan and afghanistan will just make the countries being ravaged by the fertility crisis even more ineffcient, high crime, low trust, low competence and more Mad-Max-y.
I don't see how orphanages and surrogates solve anything . A very small % of the population want to become surrogates even with the current large financial rewards, so how much larger would financial rewards need to be in order to motivate enough people to carry babies to term to increase the fertility rate by 0.5 or more ? Seems like it would cost too much.
Could we design an orphanage to be consistently safe, pleasant, and nurturing? Yeah, probably. There are cultures which have different family structures -- where the parents play some role, but less of one -- and they seem to do basically fine. I don't trust our institutions to do it right, though. It would be designed by committee, underfunded, used as ammunition in political battles, etc. Raikoth could pull it off, but not our mortal governments.
I propose a much easier way of eliminating the fertility crisis: Not making people choose between their livelihood and child bearing. For average young folks, having multiple kids results in near certain poverty. Of course if one of the parents already has a well paying job that can support the entire family, it's somewhat easier, but most young couples don't have that. Child tax credit will be $2.2K this year. If the government raised it to $10K, you'd see people having way more kids.
Even if they have the means, as long as women have ambitions of having careers (or anything other than being a child-rearing housewife), you're going to have trouble encouraging more births. You will probably have to ban contraception as well. People can't be allowed to have a choice on whether to have children.
Yeah, there's a load of ways, big and small, in which you could make it easier for people who have two children to have three or four children instead. And they're cheaper and more humane than state-run baby factories.
But it'll always be cheaper and quicker to import an immigrant than to educate a child, so from a pure economic point of view it makes no sense to have children at all.
Isn't Brave New World explicitly a utilitarian paradise, or at least one from before wireheading was the topic du jour? In that case, shouldn't one try to emulate it (assuming again no wire-heading, or at least on the margin as compared to current society)?
Not if you agree with J. S. Mill that there are higher and lower pleasures. The dystopian aspect of Brave New World is that everything is base and trivial.
"We shouldn't do it now." WTF, dude, no. We shouldn't do it ever.
Let me ask you a question -- would YOU want to be one of those kids born and raised in the government baby factory? Even a "less dystopian" baby factory?
(Also, do you hear yourself? "LESS dystopian" -- as in, still dystopian, but an acceptable amount of dystopian?)
I misspoke, I meant not dystopian. Obviously I wouldn’t want to be raised in a dystopian institution, or a traditional orphanage. I was just wondering if there’s a non-dystopian non-bad way to do it. Maybe not, but there’s a lot of possible versions other than the ones that have been done or written about.
I'd love to think nobody would design the decanting factory in "Brave New World" but someone is going to think this is a guidebook, not a warning. We got the tank kids already just like the book, why not follow the rest of the procedure!
Really smart kids here, the dumb labour there, and we can *make* the dumb labour happy with their lot and not envy the others and not want to change! Social cohesion at last!
Except that most people aren't restricted in fertility by virtue of not being able to have kids or to afford them. It's a choice made, consciously or unconsciously, on the presumption that fewer offspring will result in an advantageous selective outcome. Remove that possibility from their lives, and humans will make pandas look like rabbits. A world where having offspring is disconnected from evolutionary outcomes is one where the action of their creation ceases to matter. You are describing the worst-case solution.
>>It's a choice made, consciously or unconsciously, on the presumption that fewer offspring will result in an advantageous selective outcome
I'm not sure I follow. I could see people having fewer children on the assumption that they can better focus greater resources into fewer offspring, but I'm not sure if that's an "advantageous selective outcome. "Advantageous" perhaps, but not really "selective." And at any rate, it wouldn't account for the number of people producing *zero* offspring - I don't see how those people could be thinking they'd get any trait selection advantages from that, even unconsciously.
So, seeking some clarification, what "advantageous selective outcome" do you think these people are under the impression that they are getting, and what kind of changes are you talking about when you refer to "remov[ing] that possibility from their lives?"
'Selective' in the sense of selective processes, which can be sexual or artificial in nature, not necessarily natural selection. Civilization produces selective influence on populations, too.
I'm not really referring to the minority of people who cannot produce children. The people who have the ability/means to afford children, and yet produce zero children nevertheless, are not always *aware* of why this is. The excuses given (politics, expense, lack of interest) are all secondary to what we've known for a long time: people limit their offspring when there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. The minute a society rewards a lack of children with life outcomes, it will bring selective pressure to limit offspring further.
The advantages fewer offspring offer in a modern society are in relation to perceived socio-economic status. But it is not as simple as choosing to have fewer kids, because (per Ronald Fisher) there are probably run-away effects like genetic inclination and mate preference that exacerbate the problem by providing a unconscious drive to a conscious action (i.e. some may limit children because they are genetically inclined to do so, as a result of selective pressures).
The change in the proposed scenario would be to remove the selective advantages to having offspring at all, considering that its aim would be increase. You cannot address an essentially social/cultural problem with a scientific solution. So long as we continue to value and evaluate people on the basis of their economic success, we provide an incentive towards population decrease - beginning at the top, with the most intelligent and capable eventually dying off, and then proliferating further. A society that would be comfortable with 10 children per couple via artificial reproduction would have to have completely different values to the one in which we currently live. I imagine that any scientific solution implemented without addressing the social and cultural issues first is liable to backfire tremendously.
>>The excuses given (politics, expense, lack of interest) are all secondary to what we've known for a long time: people limit their offspring when there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. The minute a society rewards a lack of children with life outcomes, it will bring selective pressure to limit offspring further.
Point of clarification - is your hypothesis that people are responding to their perceptions of "evolutionary advantage" or "life outcomes?" There's some overlap to those two concepts, but I don't think they're interchangeable.
My cousin had a vasectomy, so there's basically nothing that can be done at this stage to give him "evolutionary advantage." At least not directly; maybe my wife and I could give him some indirectly with our own childbearing decisions, or he could indirectly gain some relative advantage by doing things to help our hypothetical offspring. In any event, though, at this point his potential gains are limited and indirect as to "evolutionary advantage"
This doesn't seem to be the case, though, for his "life outcomes." He'll never reproduce at this point, but can still do a lot directly to increase (or decrease) his own personal quality of life.
A primary parent usually can't quit being a parent, so even people growing up in bad families typically have at least one consistent person in their life. This is necessary for developing normal attachment. Even a very well run orphanage will systematically neglect children because they cannot provide consistent caregivers, because people are free to leave employment. Few places will have the same workers for 16 years of a child's life (many orphanages have over 50 caregivers by the age of 3).
For this reason, children growing up in a nunnery or similar are probably better off that those in a secular orphanage, as being a nun is a job for life. So to answer your question, if you were doing Brave New World style orphanages, you'd want to structure running the orphanage as a lifelong vocation.
President Trump has tasked me with developing a new measurement system, to avoid having to teach American youngsters the kilogram/meter/second system, which just reeks of the surrender-monkey Europoors.
I'm thinking of using an average Bald Eagle (5.5 kg) as the basis for mass, and the length of an American football field without endzones (91 m) as the basis for distance. But I'm having trouble with the basis for time. I was planning to use the length of the typical school schooting, but that stat is surprisingly hard to come by. So perhaps the time for an AR-15 full auto mag dump (3.0 s) would do.
The time taken for light to travel from the lowest point in the United States (Badwater Basin, Death Valley, California) to the highest point in the United States (the Moon).
One Tape is the equivalent of one 25-foot measuring tape. One Whizz is the length of time it takes for a fully-extended measuring tape to fully retract.
Assuming costs and speeds continue to scale multiplicatively between F-models, the F-1.5 should cost about $180 billion and cruise at 10,000 km/h, or 92 football fields per mag dump in the new units. That's slow for a space probe, but very fast for an aircraft.
Well, something did. Traditionally there were 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, and the length of those hours adjusted based on the time of year. Now we use the same hours for everything.
60 seconds to the hour, 24 hours to the day, 28 - 31 days to the month, 12 months to the year and 365 (sometimes 366) days to the year isn't metric at ALL.
Do require that using the new measurement system preclude the Oxford comma.
No one has time for averages, so just any old big bird would probably work. At the smaller end of the scale the weight of a single liberal tear could work out nicely. Star spangled banners would do it for time, as Kuiperdolin suggests, and you have the added benefit that everyone would have to go around humming it to themselves.
If we're designing an entire new measuring system, surely we can at least push through a bill to ditch that awful noise and make the Stars and Stripes Forever the official anthem.
> I’ve always liked ‘stone’ — 14 pounds— as a weight measure. Only recall seeing it in print James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.
You can also see it in 'The 13 Clocks'. And of course the still-extant phrase "98-pound weakling" makes more sense if you know that that's seven stone.
I am given to understand that the stone is still the unit generally used for the weight of a person in Britain.
I still regularly use hands and cubits around the house. When I'm trying to judge things like "will this board game fit on this table?" or "will this chair fit through this door?", I can compare the two dimensions in whatever arbitrary system I want - and the measuring-stick that's literally attached to my body is right there to use.
I would like to register that despite OTs with announcements getting fewer likes and/or comments, it does help me feel "in the loop" with ACX goings-on. One doesn't always have time to peruse the comments.
Relatedly, meant to post this weeks ago, but Substack only recently decided to stop stopping me from commenting here: wish to express gratitude towards rationalism community generally, for teaching me skills related to reasoning under uncertainty, (re)building a functional mind from scratch, and noticing cognitive biases/anomalies as map rather than territory. These were all very helpful during my first acid trip! The dosage ended up being unexpectedly high, and I was stupid to go without a trip sitter, so there was a...memorable Save-or-Die (yeah, literally, coulda ended up like that one girl in Breaking Bad who aspirates) that I'm not sure I woulda succeeded at counterfactually. Universal love and transcendent joy is actually kinda dangerous if you forget to breathe, it turns out. Still - nice to touch eternity once, shrooms never quite got me that high. Ongoing boon seems to be persistent +~2 status bonus to Will saves; hoping it lasts. Lots of things to get annoyed and depressed about these days, so bouncing back faster is convenient.
(On the other hand, not sure I woulda gotten interested in psychedelics to begin with as a normie, so...maybe it's a wash overall? It's hard to know what sort of life one might have led with vastly different preferences...)
Three weeks ago I asked if anyone knew a good writing forum, and the one reply I got was for a weird online RPG writing game called 4TheWords. I feel like commenting today, that that site has proven astonishingly effective, and I'm pretty sure I've written more in the last three weeks than I have in the last two years, despite last year being the previous high-water mark for most productive I'd ever managed to be. (I'll also thank the link to the flash fiction competition in the Links Post, which reminded me that I can also write flash fiction.)
So, thanks to the recommender, and a recommendation of 4TheWords if anyone else likes the idea of writing but has consistent trouble getting started. Bite-sized quests lead to lots and lots of biting, and before you know it the entire nothingburger will be consumed.
What other approaches have you tried that didn't work? And what kind of writing do you do or aim to do?
I've found that over the years I've trained myself to produce words somewhat easily. But then taking those words and editing them into something good is where the steep scramble begins and often just the thought of that challenge makes me put it off until a better moment.
I'll probably give 4thewords a go though since I can't tell how the skills are connected so maybe it'll help unblock me.
Fantasy fiction, mostly comedic. "What happens when the Muse of History takes the day off and her shift is covered by the Muse of Dance and Choral Song?" "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you no remorse?" I'm trying not to worry about quality; that path leads to blank pages. The Ghost of Lambchops Past doesn't have to be cool, he just has to do enough talking for me to defeat this Wingow.
Other approaches I've tried; The Atomic Habits approach worked for a while, where every time I got a cup of coffee, I'd sit down to write at least one sentence. It lasted several months, in which I started about fifty stories and finished about eight, with most of them petering out after the opening and most of the finished ones being finished in the one sitting. But then I took a trip out of town, got out of the habit, and could never get back in.
Last year I set myself a deadline for all the major holidays I could think of, including birthdays. Made it from May to September finishing a four-or-so-page story every three-or-so weeks, but the Labor Day story fell way behind schedule and didn't get finished until Halloween, and it and the Columbus Day story felt like pulling shrapnel from a wound, so that was the end of that. I've only finished one or two of them in 2025.
I've never done a thorough edit of my own stuff, although if I come back to something (outside 4TheWords) I usually read through it before I start writing on it again, and will edit as I go. But I very much have trouble with getting the words moving in the first place, and the external pressure of "this Desert Rudakai will only go down if you type 1000 words" is very useful for that.
> Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises
The ADL has been constantly criticizing Trump's actions for years, often using language like "We are appalled", "We unequivocally condemn", "indisputably dangerous and reprehensible", etc, but somehow only the very rare exceptions are the ones people notice. It's very confusing. Yes, Trump has done some decent things in fighting anti-semitism, and yes the ADL will endorse those things (even while they often need to condemn dangerous rhetoric taking place within minutes of the good things), but the perception of the ADL "singing his praises" doesn't really match the facts.
I haven't read every statement of the ADL about Trump, but it seems like it's thinned out a lot since his second term started.
In particular they lost a lot of credibility by defending Musk when he did a Nazi salute; backing Trump's acts "fighting anti-Semitism" that amounted to illegal impoundment and extorting law firms and other businesses for personal gain, with the thinnest pretexts; and backing detaining legal immigrants for criticism of Israel. All while continuing to go out of their way to paint critics of Israel as anti-Semitic as much as possible.
A lot of liberals who want to view the ADL as a civil rights, anti-discrimination group with a focus on Jewish people, now see it as a pro-Israel group that praises or ignores actual abuses elsewhere.
Only time I remember them criticizing Trump recently was over his use of the word "shylock" and my sense was they thought this was a "safe" subject to criticize him over, to throw a bone to people who are pissed at the direction they're going, but doesn't have any actual policy content and that most people won't care about.
Fun fact: That was less then four hours before the ADL's condemnation of Trump's pardons of the Jan 6 insurrectionists. ( https://xcancel.com/ADL/status/1881526538367369625 ) But yeah, I agree that trying to defend Musk there was a pretty terrible decision.
The head of the ADL has unambiguously recognized anti-Zionism as an antisemitic ideology, so their approach will necessarily be somewhat alienating to those who disagree.
> Only time I remember them criticizing Trump recently
That's a reflection of the fact that it's rarely covered, not that it doesn't happen. The ADL's criticism of Trump's immigration policies, or of many of his appointments, or of his interactions with racist or antisemitic individuals, just didn't reach many people.
>Shooting him in the head only makes him stronger.
He wasn't shot in the head either, probably not even in the ear. That might have tipped you off that some exaggeration has been employed for dramatic effect.
It was a ketchup bottle, aren't you aware of the Real Truth promulgated at the time by the guardians of truth and enemies of fake news and disinformation?
It wasn't an assassination attempt, Trump wasn't injured, he planned it all, total fake all round (I don't know how they explain away the man who was shot and killed). But anyway, not even an injured ear, movie blood, you fell for the hoax, chump.
So nice to have EngineOfCreation making sure we know nothing happened (and if it did, it was a MAGA right-wing Deep State false flag operation).
He might have bumped his head into a Secret Service agent as he ducked and got rushed by the agents. I understand the FBI later confirmed it was a bullet or bullet shrapnel, but initially the then-director Christopher Wray gave an ambiguous statement.
> "There's some question about whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear," Wray testified, before he seemed to suggest it was indeed a bullet.
That seems extremely unlikely (and pointless if true?).
Given where the shooter was and where the person behind Trump was hit, we have a very high degree of certainty as to the trajectory of the bullet. There was nothing between him and Trump that could be hit and turn into shrapnel, and the seating and people behind Trump were too far away for shrapnel to fly back at him.
It seems like an extremely unlikely hill to die on, with no interesting or useful implications if true.
What evidence is there for this? I'm not saying it can't happen. Sometimes I'm amazed what LLMs do. Other times I'm infuriated how bad they are. Given the bad experiences that make it clear they really are just glorified next word completers that just happen to have a trillion stats to help completion, I feel like self improvment is going to require changes we haven't seen yet. They might be right around the corner but I don't think LLMs will discover them.
Most of this hinges on the first point, but it's not well-justified. In what way is self-improvement necessarily going to lead to recursively smarter AI and therefore singularity? Maybe the improvements have a plateau, maybe they will take too long to iterate, maybe the AI can only improve on some things but not others...
I'm with TGGP. It's a big world and there has always been a lot going on. Are you tripping?
- Tariffs cause price inflation which encourages higher interest rates, but also uncertainty-induced economic slowdown that encourages lower Fed interest rates*, and Trump is pushing for the "lower" option (as politicians tend to do). The BBB greatly exacerbated deficits mainly by extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which will make inflation worse, which encourages a higher Fed rate; and long-term bond interest rates should rise as a result of decreased confidence in the US dollar as a result of U.S. policy.
- Meanwhile California/tech companies are nuts for AI and are doing their own thing. And immense amounts of money are going in, which helps make the stock market go up, and AI is really useful, so there are various impacts across the country and in China too.
- There's always some amount of discussion about UFOs, and sometimes it reaches government level (e.g. [1])
- I've been following the Ukraine war closely the whole time. From the start it was the biggest land war in Europe, and Russia has been steadily ramping up the number of soldiers it throws in. Trump's trying to put himself in the middle of it, but Putin barely pretends to care[2], and Zelenskyy just says nice things to avoid provoking Trump/Hegseth into cut off aid from the 2024 aid bill yet again.
- Gaza is unrelated. Before the attacks of Oct 7 2023, historically, Israel would kill about 30 to 100 Palestinians for every person killed by Hamas. And when Hamas killed ~1100, Israel decided to stick with that ratio and expand home demolitions similarly. Looks like it'll be more like 100x this time, if not more. Note: Hamas ≠ Palestinians.
- American internal divisions seem mildly related to divisions in Europe; there seems to be a global decline in democratic values and civility.
* Trump tariffs not only cannot be expected to continue beyond the end of his term, and since Trump often changes his deals (and he's misusing emergency powers that were not designed to allow blanket tariffs), tariffs can and will change much more quickly than that. This uncertainly very strongly undercuts the purpose for which tariffs are normally used, namely to encourage building out local factories.
They are more easily connected by poor governance and hysteria. I would think of the singularity as a minimum of five years out, if it happens.
As far as the stock market, I understand it less. My gut tells me it's something like a uncoordinated savings technique where everyone puts their savings in equities thereby boosting valuations. Or maybe a self fulfilling prophecy of growth where people feel that it should grow, so if underperforms, they might shift more wealth there? I would really prefer an explanation that involved fundamentals and stability though.
It’s pretty easy to explain the combination of debt, political polarization, and geopolitical conflict. Possibly even the UAP stuff - maybe the conflict is what’s making this get exposed now.
What I find surprising is the AI thing happening at the exact same time. That’s the thing that seems to require explanation to me. It’s just too unlikely.
Unless all of that is caused by the acceleration of information density hitting some kind of critical point. Like humanity is undergoing a phase change in our social structure.
"What I find surprising is the AI thing happening at the exact same time. That’s the thing that seems to require explanation to me. It’s just too unlikely."
FYI, 1968 was a pretty insane year all around: Soviets invade Czechoslovakia, RKF and MLK assassinated, Australia literally "loses" a prime minister (went swimming, never came back), Tet offensive, *lots* of protests (not just in the USA) ...
And Apollo 8 -- with Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders -- circles the moon.
I see lots of trends involving exponential growth, or things that look like them. Accelerating AI is just one dimension that could totally change the future in a massive way.
Others are
- accelerating money printing leading to “super inflation”, say 3% month over month inflation that destroys the dollar
- uap stuff in congress showing that some structure inside the us government has been beyond political oversight and accountability for a long time, possibly hiding evidence of non-human technologies
- the breakdown of political structures all over the world
All three of those things, alone, would be enough to make the future unpredictable. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that’s happening at the same time as AI. But the other possibility is that those are all facets of a single hyper-object.
Curious about the Newsom post. In the last two weeks Sir Keir Starmer has lost his Deputy Prime Minister because of corruption (tax evasion) and his ambassador to the US because of corruption (being friends with Epstein). Now maybe these two weren't chosen by God, or: the left these days is just less tolerant of corruption in its ranks than the right. I'm not saying the right doesn't care about corruption, but there are some tendencies that mean prominent right wingers accused of corruption are more likely to be backed by the party machine. One tendency is consistently libertarian: laws are bad (in certain contexts), therefore defending this accused person is good. Another is pragmatic: the law on e.g tax is so complex that many people in public life are technically breaking the law, why focus on this one individual? Again: the blob is picking on our side for political reasons and we should stick up for our own. No-one on the left feels this way about Peter Mandelson. Maybe they should! I am Spartacus!
Another factor is party unity vs disunity. A more unified party will close ranks to defend a member accused of moderate wrongdoing, whereas a factional or disunited party will have plenty of insiders angling to push that person out. This is not a left vs right thing, it varies strongly from place to place and from time to time.
I don't think there's anything systematically different about the way the left vs right approach these sort of minor scandals; whether the accused can keep their job depends mostly on who their friends and enemies within the party are. I guess that Angela Rayner didn't have enough friends.
The parliamentary Conservative Party under Johnson was still divided re: brexit and covid restrictions. The current schism was there embryonically (another former minister defected to Reform today). The point is that while the right consider, say, Nadim Zahawi to be a naughty boy and defending him isn't necessarily in their interest, to the left, Peter Mandelson is a heretic. If they were Americans and running for office I think Mandelson would have a harder time winning a primary.
This doesn't mean the right doesn't care about corruption in their fashion. I saw a debate between Megan McCardle and a Rolling Stone journalist about the mistakes leading to the financial crisis, the journalist was scathing about bankers selling toxic assets they knew to be toxic, while Megan McCardle argued that anyone selling an asset by definition doesn't value it as highly as the person buying it, that's why they are selling. I assume Megan McCardle cares about corruption but I think on the right people see that finance can be very complex and there are grey areas, and those are the kinds of things the media likes to simplify in order to skewer politicians.
I'm surprised that this particular one caught up with him, but then again if anything will, it's Epstein connections.
And in a year or two he'll bounce back, just like all the other times (Mandelson is gay, so it's going to be hard to link him with sex with underage girls, which is what is being alleged regarding Epstein's guests).
Yes he was a surprising appointment but he's a package deal and I thought he'd done okay, I can't help feeling that Trump or Farage or Johnson would have stuck by him, but this generation of leaders on the left want caesar's wife (different story with JFK, Clinton)
My impression is that starmer's just very unpopular across the board (only won an election because people were so dissatisfied with the tories and didn't consider ukip a serious option, and hasn't done great on governance since). So it's like Nixon getting killed by Watergate because high inflation made him vulnerable.
The 2024 UK election had turnout of 59%, the lowest of any national election since 2001, and the Labor Party got the actual votes of only 34% of those who showed up.
That got them firm control of the government because parliamentary system; and the incumbent Tories had achieved approval ratings down near what we in Chicago currently call "Brandon Johnson level" and the polling pros call "never seen _that_ before"; and because the other two-thirds of votes cast happened to distribute just about perfectly for Labor's benefit in terms of seats in Parliament.
Overall point being that only one-fifth of British adults actually voted for Keir Starmer to be prime minister and an even smaller fraction was genuinely enthusiastic about the idea. He's one of the most "accidental" national leaders in UK history and, if my Economist subscription plus current national polls are any fair guide, has shall we say not done anything in office to improve that standing.
Not because of parliamentary system, because of First-past-the-post voting. In a parliamentary system with proportional voting they wouldn't be close to have a majority.
One aspect of his unpopularity is he just seems like a people-pleaser and I think not backing Rayner and Mandelson is part of that problem. Johnson might have eventually sacked them but there would have been an attempt to show the media who's in charge - "this is not what the British people are interested in"
Starmer & his government are also very unpopular, so it makes sense for them to try and do whatever it desperately takes to shore up that popularity. Almost nobody outside the Westminister bubble liked Mandelson to begin with, so it was a no-brainer to ditch him.
Yeh Mandelson almost too easy an example, but in the end dont we want people with connections to Trump's circles as US ambassador? He got the trade deal done after all. Thinking back on the last year of the Johnson premiership, the right seemed genuinely outraged that the standards committee were picking on tory MPs for very dubious lobbying activities, and it almost became a test case for whether you opposed the blob. I don't believe it would have happened quite like that in a Labour government.
Labour are held to a higher standard in general, I agree. I wonder though if that's coming from the voters (the left are probably more against grift) or the press (the right-wing press are dominant in the media landscape and so are more likely to monster Labour politicians).
For me the key skill of certain politicians such as Trump (or Obama, or Mandami, or Chavez...) is his charisma.
A word that fittingly also has a religious connotation. Per Wikipedia "the term charisma appears as the Spiritual gift (charism) which is an endowment with an extraordinary power given by the Holy Spirit."
Do you think that an autonomous AI would be capable of having charisma? Or is this a skill in which humans will naturally possess a comparative advantage?
Politicians can be charismatic to the public, and they can be charismatic interpersonally. If they nail down AI voices and holographs or robots, an AI could possibly seem charismatic on television or radio. It would be much more difficult for an AI like that to be charismatic in person.
I think it has to do with something like, human limbic resonance. I think the only way AI could do it is if it walked around in a human looking body, and people thought it was human.
My child used to go behind the couch, only peeking at intervals, during the Wishbone “The Time Machine” episode. I was surprised a PBS show starring a little dog could be so scary.
To me The Good Son (1993) was really scary. It's rated R, but I only remember PG content in it. Would recommend. (edit: I notice "it received negative reviews from critics" and is 6.4 on IMDB. I saw it as a teen; maybe something is wrong with it that I didn't notice back then.)
Start with something that scared people since they were kids. The more kids, the better. Examples: the dark, ghosts, monsters, madness, fire, death, the unknown. I can pick more than one if I have a way to work with it.
Now I want to go in two directions from here. One is to find a more concrete manifestation of that ur-fear, like the feeling of being surrounded by monsters, relying on a friend to guide you to safety, and then that friend goes mad. The other is to dig deep into that ur-fear to understand why it's so gripping. That's my anchor: as much of the movie has to connect to it as possible. Being surrounded by monsters is scary because it's the feeling of danger one cannot overcome, only avoid. So scenes allude to or depict various insurmountable obstacles, dangers. An old man tells of a dog he had to hide from. A nearby radio reports an earthquake and tsunami ravaging a coastline somewhere. The protagonist needs to go to the bathroom in a building he's never been in before, and keeps trying various halls and running into dead ends and locked doors. Scenes play into the madness of that friend with things that are usually reliable, breaking down instead - computers, a comfy chair, a scene where the camera angle isn't where it should be.
Can't neglect the rest of moviemaking, of course. Scenes have to make sense at first so they connect with the viewer, the story has to be interesting, motivations have to be consistent (at first), and so on. The production values have to be reasonably good and non-distracting, and the acting has to be competent. And as with any story, it needs a buildup, climax, and denouement.
Even then, be prepared to not be universal. Some things are skin-blanching scary to one person and nothing much to another. Part of the art here is finding something broad enough and getting the fear across, and some people just won't be reached, but for those who can, you don't even need gore.
One of the scariest films I ever saw was 1999's _The Blair Witch Project_, which had some PG language, but no one was struck (there was some angry pushing at worst IIRC), no blood was seen on camera (a little implied dried blood at worst, and barely a second of it), and even the "monster" was never shown. It hit me just right, because I've been an avid camper, and very receptive to strange noises heard far off in the night, coupled with nearer ones, and not knowing what the hell is really out there. Sprinkle in some fake folklore about witches and I was in.
What was interesting was that I was of two minds seeing it, one fully invested, the other sitting partway out and watching the first mind. My logical side wasn't bothered, but appreciated how eerie the whole show was if I let myself sink in. Which drives a point above: some viewers just won't be scared, and in some cases they have to want to be. (Some people will literally buy a ticket to a horror film, pointedly yawn their way through it, and then later complain they didn't get their money's worth. Gotta come halfway, man...)
The movie Heretic did eventually devolve into stabbings and such but I thought it was already extremely scary when it was just Hugh Grant ranting about religion to two presumably-but-not-definitively trapped young women. I really wanted to watch a version of that where he was deeply unsettling for two hours and then just let them leave his house.
Traditional horror before gore and splatter became trendy. "The Haunting" as recommended is a great one, it scared the socks off me when I saw it on TV years and years ago.
Jacques Tourneur movies from the 40s like "Cat People". Generally, psychological/spiritual horror - a scary monster or serial killer is indeed scary, but if they're physical they can be killed. How do you kill a ghost or spirit, though?
The Gate does this well. The clay demon doesn't explode into gore when it falls over in the boy's room; it explodes into a dozen smaller clay demons. Stomping on one of the little ones doesn't crush them, it just makes them wriggle.
Twice in the film, it seems like the parents are home, so everything is safe--only for it to be revealed that they're just illusions. One's home, one's room, one's parents--these are all supposed to be sanctified safe spaces, but the film violates all three.
I second this pick. The Gate scared the dickens out of me as a kid; I had nightmares about those little clay guys for years. Another terrifying element is the body-horror of the eye growing in the middle of the kid’s palm. Even without any gore, the trope of your body being directly invaded / turning against you is really unsettling.
Check out the 1963 movie The Haunting. I took my 8yo to a local screening (she likes horror movies in theory but I don't want to traumatize her with modern fare), and while there's no blood, the atmosphere is terrifying. It was a hit!
I was telling my friends about the experience the next day, and one said that when she and her roommate saw the film in college, they were both so scared they slept in the same bed that night.
The Babadook is pretty close. A monster is presumably following the family, and takes the form of a semi-ordinary arrangement of clothes. Extreme "something in the darkness" dread.
There was a short book I read for grade school, about a bunch of children in an occupied country trying to hide valuables from the Nazis by burying them in the bottoms of their snowmen. So not so much a physical threat, but a heavy "fear of discovery" kind of thing.
...I like time travel gone wi- er, wrong. I actually had hope upon seeing The Flash movie, because they introduced changes that happened BEFORE the event he changed, and I thought to myself, "My God, they're treating time like a windshield, and a crack will radiate out in both directions, corrupting both the future, and the past." So, radiant changes, getting worse on their own over time.
...what does that get us? Um... a boy, with deeply religious parents, discovers a creature that contradicts the faith. It touches him, and he starts seeing visions of alien places. He hides them from his parents because they'll lock him in his room if they know he doubts the Faith, but the visions grow more frequent and interfere with normal tasks (like walking), and also the creature grows bigger when he has them. like an Audrey 2 for memories. Probably they stop clearing up fully, and ordinary life starts looking alien.
There's an unanswered question about whether the creature is deliberately causing the visions, and we get reverse jumpscares of the kid thinking he's being followed, either by the parents when he goes to see the creature, or the creature when he goes to see the parents. It ends with... well it probably ends like My Girl; turns out the alien lifeform is super allergic to bees. Probably the ol' classic horror ending where the threat is gone, but oh wait, the boy has another vision anyway, and when he comes to, the dead creature is nowhere to be found, it could be right behind YOU, Audience Member, wooooo.
A sense of dread, gloom, and spooky music can go a long way to making something unsettling. And events can be conceptually horrifying without being visually horrifying. A film like Get Out is unsettling because of the atmosphere of dread and what you slowly discover, rather than gore— a hypothetical re-cut could still be an effective film with a lower age rating.
I'm not having children, so I'm thinking of simply donating my savings (and whatever money it'll make when they sell my property) when I'm dead. It probably won't be exactly 10% of my lifetime earnings, but close enough. On the grand scale it doesn't really matter if I'm saving starving kids now or in 30 years.
Find a good lawyer now and, if you're serious about this, set up a charitable remainder trust. That way all your money will go to charity when you die (more efficient) and none to the feds and then to charity (less efficient).
This also posits that you're fine permanently locking up your savings.
If you're serious about this strategy, you'll probably want to consult with a financial advisor who can help you maximize your eventual donation. End-of-life care costs can eat your entire savings if they are not isolated from the rest of your estate, and there are tax loopholes that can change your donated amount significantly.
(E.g. the stepped-up basis loophole: Sell assets and then donate cash -> 15% tax on capital gains; donate assets and recipient sells them -> 0% tax on capital gains.)
I don't know how 401k's etc. behave when inherited, but it's possible you can increase your eventual donation by changing where you allocate savings now, so the sooner the better.
The obvious most serious danger is that you will change your mind and not donate due to some reason. By donating now you are locking in your future self.
For example, maybe you would end up having kids, or spend all your savings on hard drugs, or realize that end of life costs are much higher than you though.
...also true if you are saving it in a bank account, which IS what most people mean when they say savings (the national average savings account interest rate in the US was 0.41%, while inflation in 2024 was ~3%)
Although some banks might try to trick people by putting the word "savings" on some terrible account, it's trivially easy to get 4%+ at zero risk. I don't think averages matter.
* We might expect it to be cheaper to save lives now than in the future (e.g. if malaria is cured, then that saves a lot of lives and raises the cost of the "cheapest life to save").
* You get interest on your money, but on the other hand, the people whose lives you save could be having positive effects on the world that compound over 30 years
* If transformative tech comes in the next 30 years, either an extreme form of the first bullet could happen or we could all be dead; this gives some reason to think your money is more leveraged now.
But I don't think this is anywhere near decisive, and there are good reasons to wait to give. See the EA discussion of "patient philanthropy" for more.
The recent post about AI alignment finally motivated me to post something I've been mulling over for a while now.
Let us assume that AI alignment is solved, by which I mean, that
* given any set of values V
* given a moral framework F which maps the values of V to decisions in reality
we have the tech to align AI so that their decisions in reality always derive from V, as mapped to reality by F.
Example for demonstration, please don't rule lawyer: We impose upon a car-driving AI the sole value "human lives are valuable" and utilitarianism as the moral framework. So aligned the AI will not ram random random people on the street, but it will ram someone shooting into a crowd.
I think it's fair to say this alignment-ability would be a great improvement over what we have today, but to me this is clearly not enough to ensure safety of an ASI so aligned.
The issue is that if you posit something with approximately unlimited power and agency (relative to us) you would really like to avoid it deciding to do horrible things because you can't stop it. But I don't know of any combination of values V and moral framework F, consistently applied, which does not occasionally endorse horrible actions.
The only way I know to square that circle and not have horrible (to me) things be moral is to drop the consistency requirement. But I don't think that generalizes, especially not to ASI.
As a result every time the ASI alignment debate comes up for another round I think to myself that, hey, even if we solved alignment we'd still be fucked, right? Since even if we could impose our values V and moral framework F on ASI, we'd first need some V and F that are not occasionally horrible and I don't know that exists.
So to me, solving AI alignment would not in itself be the solution people seem to treat it as.
These posts don't really make sense to me, a humble programmer, because from my perspective it is not possible to encode a moral framework non-fuzzily. What does it mean to "install utilitarianism on the computer"? How does the computer encode egalitarian values when they have necessarily formless and ambiguous definitions? A human moral framework probably cannot be turned into a form you could write formal proofs about.
But even if you did have that kind of technology, the computer would probably be able to invent its own internally consistent behavioural frameworks by that point anyway.
I understand you to say "even if we had the perfect values and moral frameworks it's probably impossible to align an AI to it".
I say "even if we could align AI to given values and moral framework there's probably no set of values and moral framework that would be non-catastrophic".
We focus on different parts of the difficulty of AI alignment, but I feel we agree that it's probably impossible.
I agree with everything you said. And the only solutions I can think of are:
A) don’t let any one thing have unlimited power and agency
B) only let that happen to beings which are loving and compassionate and desire cooperation with other intelligent beings
I think our universe actually enforces the latter. It’s unpredictable and chaotic so everything dies eventually. If you’re both loved and understood by something that isn’t you, you’ll get turned back on after you die.
I'm very sympathetic to these concerns. Devil's advocate: an ASI wouldn't be dependent on our Vs and Fs but would be able to refine them. But I suspect our Vs and Fs are largely to do with the shared experience of being human especially mortality.
This is essentially THE consideration that started the AI alignment movement in the first place. There are some more complicated arguments involved, but the core idea is what you appeared to have rediscovered.
The technical problem, the "how" of aligning the AI is secondary. The bigger problem is that we don't know what even to align it to, or how to decide that.
For what it's worth, these questions have been discussed for quite some time now.
Nobody so far have offered a good solution to that problem.
I'm sure there will be people attempting to tell you you got something wrong, but they would be wrong at that.
From another perspective, the "how" is primary, because proper aligning with any at least somewhat reasonable values is somewhat comparable to what we can get with current human leadership - e.g. some atrocities happen, but in general it's something I can live with and it excludes all kinds of scenarios that are fundamentally many orders of magnitude worse than that; but on the other hand figuring a better alignment target (e.g. what Coherent Extrapolated Volition theory aspires to do) is kind of useless if we can't possibly implement alignment for anything at all.
In essence, even picking a random person from my political opponents whose values I despise, I'd argue that a superpowerful AI with solid alignment to their values is infinitely better than a superpowerful AI aligned to random values, since only an infinitely tiny fraction of random values are within the range of what a sane human would have, and everything else might as well be the proverbial paperclip maximizer or worse. Like, pick the most obnoxious political "talking head" who argues against everything "your tribe" holds sacred, and alignment with their values is still preferable to no alignment, because their values still are human values and at least represent *a* future for humanity.
I live outside the US but keep up with its politics. I had no idea, when it happened, that Kirk's assassination would have such an impact on online discourse. It felt as if my Substack feed had been switched with that of a highly polarized user's. I'm not sure I liked anything I read in that time.
This made me think of a broader point - Substack's recommendation algorithm seems to suffer from the platform's growth. I wish there was a way I could bypass some of its assumptions about me, like flipping a "I'm not a dopamine zombie" switch that'd make it much more likely to recommend weird, fascinating stuff to me.
I have 3-4 authors I follow, and I open their individual substacks directly every now and then via browser-bookmarks. For me most substack-features have been pretty confusing and not very useful (e.g. the recommendation algorithm, but also the notifications and the messages), thus I use them very little.
What I am trying to say is that, I have not noticed any difference in the substack-recommendation-algorithm, because it was useless for me to begin with.
> like flipping a "I'm not a dopamine zombie" switch that'd make it much more likely to recommend weird, fascinating stuff to me.
I think Substack would be happy to flip such a switch across the platform. Recommending "weird, fascinating stuff" tends to be a good long-term driver of paid subscriptions. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to determine what qualifies as fascinating without looking at short-term engagement signals... and this always risks skewing towards click-bait.
Please reach out if you have ideas, or if there is something clearly broken we can fix. Will see what we can do regardless.
I’d like some sort of ‘I’m not interested in this’. Sometimes people post things that I think are likely to be absolutely not what I want in my feed, but it’s ambiguous enough that I tap through to verify before I mute or block. That sort of content seems to have grown, though (or algorithm changes are just pushing a lot more really aggravating content into all feeds now), and I worry that just checking before I mute is actually being read as a ‘Show me more’ signal.
Let us have a little down arrow (even if there’s no visibility of the result for anyone else) to help the system understand us better (so long as you actually respect it and don’t just see it as engagement data).
There is a "hide" option that you can use to give negative signal on specific items, but it is hidden in the `...` menu and not as discoverable as we'd like. Some of my more design-oriented colleagues are looking at better options.
Cases where you click to check something out and then subsequently block or mute the author are treated as negative examples. We definitely don't want to be showing you more in those cases!
Oh cool - I’ll try to give the ‘hide’ option more of a workout. Appreciate that the mute/block signal overrides the access signal. Probably just shifts in the overall tide that I’m noticing, but it’s always hard to be sure.
It probably has to do with what's currently trending. Meaning, if you took someone's typical recommendations and classified them into trending vs non trending topics, a way to filter out trending topics would be interesting.
Interesting! Seems like there is a big divide between people who do / don't want to get frequent updates on the news. I'm not yet sure how to deal with this in a good way.
One reason it resonates online is that Kirk is effectively an online poster.
The shot at the former President on July 13 2024, while shocking and illegal and not allowed, was within the parameters of what we expect. There's a cultural expectation that people might go after the President. Not excusable, but explainable. If the guy who fell through a time warp from 200 years ago is applying for the Secret Service job and says "I don't understand, why would anyone try to hurt the President?" you just mark do-not-hire. No time to bring him up to speed.
But if posters are now part of the "well you should just expect that[1]" fair game, so are most of the people I read, even those who are diametrically opposed to him.
[1] and soooo many of the "well what did you expect when he made people so angry?" posts are a perfect pattern match here.
The closest example I could find (with ChatGPT's help) of a non-politician media commentator being assassinated was clear back in 1984, Jewish radio host Alan Berg shot by neo-Nazis (actual neo-Nazis, back when the word meant something) in his driveway.
One side effect of Captain Kirk getting written out of the show is hearing anecdotes like this about "the Substack algorithm", which I wasn't even aware was A Thing. (Saw several similar incidents of confusion in the Slow Boring comments over last few days as well.) Doesn't everyone just go to SS directly via email links to posts, and mostly just stick around the ones they're subscribed to? I only really venture afield via links post-style recommendations, which obviously are highly selected for appealing to existing audience. But maybe that's unusual, and others start at the actual Substack main site, or *shudder* the app? It's strange how such seemingly innocuous access choices can lead to vastly different experiences of the same platform. Kinda like Twitter's following lists vs For You nonsense, I guess. Or FdB recently writing that Substack Notes was causing him problems, which reminded me that Notes existed at all...
I pretty much only access Substack through the app because I do most of my reading when not at home (Scott Alexander is not exactly bedtime reading, except to the extent that my superpower is the ability to put anybody to sleep by reading anything).
It's usually a race to hit the Subscriber tab before The Feed loads.
Substack seems to have changed a lot in the last year (perhaps since January 20th). It used to be all very thoughtful posts about culture and science and philosophy and arts, but recently, it's well over 50% politics. I guess some of that is my fault because I've clicked or commented on posts about Trump or Kirk or immigration. It's not entirely my fault, though, because even the intellectual people that I follow are posting about politics when they didn't before.
Even in politics, I used to be able to discuss difficult topics politely. That's mostly gone now. I hadn't been called names in three years, but now it's three times per day. I don't think my manner has changed — I hope I'm always respectful — but the vibe has changed.
Stewart-Williams posted this week about how people with political ideas exaggerate their beliefs about what 'the other side' believes. I expect this is a big part of the problem, and Charlie Kirk's murder has brought this to the fore — it's rare to find people on Substack who have a measured opinion about what Kirk stood for.
In my country (England), the big issue is immigration: the people who think that immigration is too high are far-right racists, while the people who think that more immigration is a good thing hate their country and hate the England flag. It's almost impossible for them to talk to each other reasonably. This was always true on Twitter, but it's true now on Substack, too.
>people with political ideas exaggerate their beliefs about what 'the other side' believes.
I think this is part of it, but I also observe another consistent, related phenomena at work at times like this. My thesis is this: Demand for overt, obvious acts of leftwing political violence far outstrip the actual supply of the same. When finally presented with something that pattern matches an event that a political partisan is convinced must be happening constantly, they can't help but run wild with it. This works both directions.
I wrote my own version of this comment (less organized than yours) but I have to accept I'm a belligerent and that is going to colour how people view my appeals for calm.
I have seen many declare openly, not under cover of the anonymity you think exculpatory, both that we are fascists, and that fascists should be killed. What "weaker or more charitable assumption" would you have us draw from this?
I don't think fascists should be killed, but they sure shouldn't be holding political power. As for whether or not the current leadership of the U.S. is fascist, what requirements for fascism do you think exist that they don't fulfill?
I too would prefer political power be held only by people I agree with on everything.
I'm sure you can construct a sufficiently broad definition to encompass anyone you want, just as I can construct one narrow enough to exclude them. I don't think that's going to be illuminating in any way. The meaning or lack thereof of the term doesn't bear on the point of my previous comment: if they had said instead that gostaks are doshes, and that doshes ought to be distimmed, I would conclude they wished to distim the gostaks.
It has nothing to do with "agreeing with them on everything." I disliked George W. Bush immensely. He was not a fascist. I was not altogether fond of Mitt Romney or John McCain. Also not fascists. The U.S. has, in fact, never had a president I've agreed with on everything. Never really had one I agreed with on most things.
It's also never had a president launch this many blatant assaults on democratic norms and make this many brazen attempts to centralize power in so short a time. THAT is the fascist bit, not the fact that he has some views I don't share.
I honestly have trouble taking this sort of question seriously: it just feels like playing dumb to waste time. "He won the election, therefore he gets to do whatever he wants and you don't get to object" is understanding civics at about a 3rd grade level.
But if I wanted to split hairs, I'd say I don't object to him *holding* power, I object to him *wielding* power in ways that are plainly dangerous, destabilizing and in some cases illegal. Nor am I sure he actually *did* say he would do all of this: was "when I'm elected, I'll use the power of my office to cancel any media personality who offends me" actually one of his campaign promises? I mean...I suppose it could have been. It's not like I could actually feel *more* contempt for the American electorate than I already do.
No offense, but I'm going to trust a professional historian with a long history of clear communication who lays out a detailed argument and cites his work over...some dude who's apparently been active around here for all of a few days, and routinely makes wild claims with no support whatsoever.
I've seen Donald Trump - not a random person on the Internet - compare both Harris and Biden to Nazis/fascists, and said that Biden committed treason, and tweeted out AI generated videos of violence against Biden.
My evidence that Trump voters want to kill my side is stronger than your evidence of the opposite.
Wow yeah, pretty prescient. At least unplugging wouldn't get you committed IRL, though! ...well maybe if you do it by running your wife's smartphone through the garbage disposal, ok yeah.
There's also The Machine Stops from even earlier. It's more fantastical and not corresponding so directly to modern life as this one... but it did nail "react" streams like a century before the concept sounded like it had any chance of being a popular form of entertainment.
It's dismaying to see the number of people who will proudly talk about being 'radicalized'.
It used to be understood that 'I'm too angry to think rationally' was a good thing to admit as a sign that you needed to step back. Now some treat it like a badge of honor.
It doesn't necessarily mean that. I don't consider myself 'radicalized,' but all the word really means in this context is "I think the comfortable boundaries of 'mainstream' political beliefs no longer accurately reflect reality."
Which I guess describes me pretty well right now. I don't even live in the U.S. anymore, and it seems like a large portion of the U.S. is taking some really, really, EXTREMELY dangerous and not-at-all-normal stuff as if it's no big deal.
I think you are failing the ITT here. People who are proud to be radicalized do not perceive themselves as "too angry to think rationally". Instead they think that being angry is, in fact, a rational response to the way world is.
(I don't know what 'ITT' refers to in this context.)
But to your point: you're correct. The norm I'm referring to is one that should be imposed by the community, such that people should be more willing to tell others (especially their co-partisans) that maybe it's time to take a break, since by its nature (as you say) this is not a problem that is prone to self-policing.
But the modern attention economy doesn't reward that. Nowadays you can proclaim radicalization and get much more positive feedback rather than negative.
This is all human nature + social media, of course, and nothing new. But I sense it spreading sometimes even in communities that should favor rational thinking - places where you should expect either (a) some degree of self-policing or (b) stronger pushback from peers.
ITT = Intellectual Turing Test, i.e. "can you describe the opponent's position in such a way that they would not be able to tell your description from a description written by someone that agreed with them", as a preventative against rallying around strawmen.
What are you even hoping to accomplish? His ambitions are backed by both the popular will and the military. Centrists are bending over backwards to accommodate him, only caring about their income streams remaining intact. If your issue is that you've seen enough "cruelty and ignorance" for one lifetime, well... there are less painful ways to go about this.
Alternatively, you can leave the country. It's certainly not too late.
Echoing Cancelled Paid Subscriber, I too would like to know what you were gesturing at with your ellipsis. What *were* the less painful ways you were suggesting someone who had had enough cruelty and ignorance for a lifetime could employ?. How about responding? If you do not, or do not have a convincing response, I'm going to report this comment. And in fact I'm going to back up the report with a personal email to Scott.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I'm completely stunned I'm the first person to address this:
You had a paid subscription...
...on a Substack account you generated on September 17, 2025?
Seems unlikely, so we have to conclude you're posting your flounce using a sock puppet account.
Except why on early would anyone use an *anonymous* account to announce they're leaving and say their goodbyes?
It sure looks like you're maybe not that committed to actually leaving if you're afraid to do it under your regular username. Or perhaps you were never a paid user.
Thank you for taking the sock off your hand to bring some much-needed context to the entire thread.
You provided some good commentary over the years, so I'll be sorry to see you go, and will slightly amend my request that you not come back.
That said, I think you're the one who is out of your element, Donnie, for allowing yourself to be so emotional about commenters on an internet forum.
Yes, of course there could be bots or troll farm operators working the comments here - and there almost certainly are, given that some very high profile people have been known to read Scott's work! - but getting so emotional about it and flouncing out isn't the heroic, rebellious act you seem to think it. A more useful response is to point out your suspicions as you see them, so that those who are not yet skeptical enough to discount unhinged commenters get a clue.
I agree with your general principles about how to handle situations like the present mosh pit, but I think Gunflint is having a personal crisis and you should cut him some slack. He is for sure someone who does not resort to drama to get his points across. In fact he is the opposite of that kind of person. I'm pretty worried about him and I don't scare easily.
It does seem out of character for him, I'll agree. I hadn't considered a more serious crisis, given the repeated (and imo, obnoxious) use of Big Lebowski quotes, but you do have a point.
You posted to say something, and then later assert that Christina has no idea what you're thinking.
In nearly all places I've been, if someone makes an announcement and most people get the wrong idea for why it was made, the most straightforward cause is usually ruled to be the announcer not getting their message across.
Alexander, I KNOW you're smart enough to understand the difference between "private citizens are voting with their feet and declining to patronize this business" and "The Office of the President is abusing its granted power specifically to silence criticism." Those are WILDLY different things. And the second one is, in fact, rather strongly prohibited by the U.S. constitution.
Nobody owes you and audience or a platform or a megaphone or views or the time of day. But if "free speech" is to mean ANYTHING AT ALL, the government cannot be repressing speech it doesn't like.
>Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
This is one of the silliest adages ever. Of course freedom from consequences is an important part of freedom of speech. Can the government take away my welfare check because they don't like my opinions? Can they jail me? Of course not.
Well, as the finger-wagging cartoon from when it was the left doing it pointed out, "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". The government can't jail you. But anyone else can fire you, boycott you, kick you off their site, deplatform you, etc. and all this means is that you are on the wrong side so vae victis.
I don't know if it was copied from the cartoon or was a talking point on the lefty side, but I saw a *hell* of a lot of "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" on social media when someone (on the right) complained over doxxing or someone trying to get them in trouble with their employer over a post they'd made.
I'm sorry, are you under the impression that I am the author of that cartoon? You must be, otherwise I can't fathom why you are talking about it in response to my post.
Nor do I understand why you think, "one of my enemies said something stupid, so it is ok for me to say that same stupid thing, which I do not actually believe, if it allows me to 'score points' against my enemies" is a particularly compelling argument.
And, by the way, private actors punishing g someone for their opinions IS a violation of freedom of speech. It just doesn't happen to be a violation of the First Amendment. Though it can be a violation of state law. eg
O come on. Said company is being threatened by the full force of the federal government, including removing license AND doj investigation. The threats alone are wildly unconstitutional, if not in law then certainly in spirit. Comparing boycotts composed of individual actions to the coordinated behavior of the only entity that has a monopoly on violence beggars belief.
Even if you take your point that these actions are not comparable, ignoring certain Biden administration actions,* so what? You have the right in America to refuse to patronize a business. You have the right to encourage others to do the same thing. But if you then call that business owner up and tell him "my rights are being violated by the government, please help me," what do you think he's gonna do? He's gonna slam that phone down. If you want people to be part of a political coalition defending your liberty, you have to offer them something.
I've lost the thread. Call the business owner? What are you talking about?
Maybe some people are mad at Disney and abc, but that's obviously the wrong target. The FCC (and the trump admin) is the one violating liberal norms and abusing federal power.
I love the way that a company's decision that caving to pressure was more important than closing ranks around their people is the protestors' faults, somehow. Don't get me wrong, I tend to think trying to get someone fired is shitty. But if your boss fires you because of a few angry phone calls, your main problem is that you had a shitty boss.
This is a very poor use of irony. There is nothing ironic about it, these are just two completely different scenarios. If a 5 yo was being teased by a 7yo on the playground, and then someone else came and beat the shit out of the 7yo, that would not be "ironic."
I genuinely think you haven't been paying attention to what was going on around 5 years ago. Because "private company" and "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" are very obvious memes.
If I said "they hate us for our freedoms" in 2005 and someone took it literally that's just a lack of media literacy on their part.
Things really suck now for free speech more than ever, but part of the reason we got here was the "LOL FREEZE PEACH" attitude that got built-up so much. Bondi even tried the "hate speech isn't free speech" line, which thankfully no one bought, so be thankful for small favors.
I was on one of the most progressive campuses in the world ~five years ago. I'm well aware of the excesses of the progressive left.
I do not agree with individual people trying to cancel others for speech reasons. But there is a *categorical difference* between individual private actors organizing themselves to do something -- which is itself a critical part of the first amendment! you cant make people buy things if they dont want to, even if you think the reasons for them doing so are ridiculous! -- and the federal government stepping in and doing so.
An escalation is not "ironic." It's just sad.
If you can find evidence that the federal government was doing things like threatening fox news, I will retract my statement.
Remember the days of "if you don't like it, set up your own [payment processor/social media site/other things]" when it was the good liberals and progressives doing the censoring, except that wasn't censoring because speech is violence and stopping hate speech is the most important task?
Pepperidge Farm remembers (as the youngish people say).
I think you may have misunderstood what people meant when they said those things.
People on the left NEVER, EVER assumed that capitalist-run media, social media, or finance was fair or impartial. Why on Earth would it be? It's going to do whatever it thinks maximizes revenue.
Lines like that were basically a way of pointing out "hey look, your behavior is so toxic that even these shamelessly profit-maximizing capitalists think the site is better off without you."
If at any point you're interested, I am very open to discussing here or DM's or wherever the reason why I am not giving up hope for all life in America and on earth (my reason is Jesus, but there's a lot that that implies).
If you want to discuss my hope or even give reasons against it or anything like that feel free to reach out. Probably a response to this comment before anything else, as I've seen that other people have had issues with receiving DM's. I haven't had any DM correspondence, so idk if I would have the same issues.
I'm not entirely sure I get what point you are trying to make. Are you saying "the alleged shooter being right-wing is foreign disinformation?" where later you seem to be saying "a guy saying the alleged shooter was right-wing" is, uh, something something free speech something?
So is Kimmel a jerk promoting a foreign psyop, or someone who is sheltered under the First Amendment?
The name was vaguely familiar to me but I had to look him up and Kimmel is some late night talk show host/comedian? Not very funny?
I think you'd have a stronger argument about free speech rights; Jeff Maurer of "I Might Be Wrong" generally drives me crazy because I disagree with his views (and how he *always* has to drop in to whatever post that he used to write for the John Oliver show), but here he makes a good point about "free speech applies even to jerks" (in among the outrage that a lefty comedian got cancelled):
I think the Kimmel show being dropped is down to money, in the end - big corporations like Disney don't fold this easily to outside pressure, even from the government, and if Kimmel's show was a cash cow they would have put up more of a fight, but the free speech angle still holds.
The left has in recent years typically been at pains to tell us there is no right to have one’s speech be “free of consequences” beyond prosecution while the right has largely argued a somewhat broader principle. There was no reason to think that the polarity wouldn’t someday reverse.
There is far too much speech nowadays, so it’s unlikely either way that it would not become very cheap, much like human life.
"There was no reason to think that the polarity wouldn’t someday reverse."
Oh, the xkcd cartoon aged like milk when it came to that; the smug preaching when it was people on the right being cancelled has come back like a boomerang.
Having your show cancelled is not violating your free speech rights? The best thing that can be said for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express?
Tell that to Jimmy Kimmel et al 😁 This truly is "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander".
I think that the executives at ABC could have made plenty of other arguments besides "it's not literally illegal." If it was merely Joe Random Rightwinger calling to cancel Kimmel, the executives could have done the normal thing and weighed "how good are Kimmel's ratings?" against "how bad were the comments?" and "how long will this controversy last?"
But instead, the argument they were weighing was "the Trump administration has literally threatened to stop us from broadcasting if we don't comply," and that outweighs any petty concerns about ratings.
This is why government censorship is much worse than simply having people yell at you or your employer.
If the FCC director threatened to pull Disney's license then this was government action to suppress speech and not merely private citizens expressing their opinion on Kimmel's speech.
Back in COVID times, I remember seeing a lot of right wingers being angry at supposed "jawboning" by the Biden admin - no explicit threats, simply telling the social media companies about COVID misinformation on their platform. That was apparently a government overreach, and people argued that simply *mentioning* that you find something wrong with their platform carries an implied threat when it comes from the government.
Now Brendan Carr literally says "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" and it's crickets from those same people.
I don’t know the grounds for this putative interference; what’s really interesting to me - is that it’s impossible to imagine Johnny Carson - I doubt he voted but like Kimmel I expect he would have voted exactly like the Hollywood people who produced his show - saying on air, that someone was killed by “one of *them*” and mean: half of his potential audience.
It’s just another of those bizarre, would-be-unrecognizable changes.
And of course what we know of the shooter is interesting too in that, if he himself had been the victim of violence in some notable way, he would have immediately been slotted into “one of *us*” because he was gay and his boyfriend claimed to be “trans” on social media.
>someone was killed by “one of *them*” and mean: half of his potential audience.
How is that relevant? Johnny Carson probably wouldn't have come out in support of same sex marriage on his show either, so does that mean that if Jon Stewart was suspended for doing so, that would be ok?
"he would have immediately been slotted into “one of *us*” because he was gay and his boyfriend claimed to be “trans” on social media."
Yup. The Minnesota shooter (and boy, how fast we've moved on, eh?) was the subject of (I want to say "demented screeching" but that's probably unkind) a *lot* of "no, he wasn't really trans, he wasn't one of us, he was a right-wing far right radicalised white nationalist white supremacist transphobe homophobe MAGA!!!!!" messaging by the types who like to draw cute lil' comics about the persecution they suffer from being trans or being such good, right-thinking people with all the correct views (which are, of course, liberal views).
If the person had been beaten up instead of going out to shoot up a church and school, these same people would have been shouting from the rooftops about trans genocide etc.
In general, the new line seems to be:
Democrat/liberal/progressive gets attacked - the right did it!
Conservative/Republican gets attacked - the right did it!
The left never, ever do anything naughty at all, so they can continue to be the good guys who are eternally persecuted and victims, instead of having to acknowledge "yeah, human nature is eternal, some of the people claiming to be with us are not doing good things" (and I think that was the rationale for Kimmel's remarks: 'our guys are never to blame for anything because we're the good guys, everyone knows that, so if something bad happened then it was their guys who did it').
I've seen comments online about "the Kirk shooter was MAGA because his parents were MAGA" when all we know so far about his parents is that they are Utah Mormons? So yeah probably conservative, but guessing their politics from that seems like crystal ball reading. But of course, it's all about deflecting blame.
Did you miss all the Republicans saying (without evidence) the shooter was trans? Like, on the day of the shooting I was already seeing tweets about how we need to take away guns from trans people.
Like, if you think that "the shooter must be one of *them* and not one of us" is a leftist-only thing, you are sorely mistaken.
Utah Mormons - so: the OG radicals. Instead of arcane memes, they had treasure hunts. And they often got kicked out of places. At least once they very memorably cosplayed …
Now of course I chiefly associate them with tidy, pleasant little Western towns - as against most Westwern towns.
I was just in Torrey UT where a big Mormon family reunion was going on. Great burger trailer. Nice seeming people. Cool town. As in, cool because it has nice old trees and hollyhocks, and an orchard or two, as there is a little irrigation canal running the length of it.
ETA: the old settlers’ Mormon church there is much more pleasing than the hideously tacky modern renditions.
If I had a nickel for every time I'd seen a right-winger angrily referencing that comic without any apparent understanding of it, I'd have at least four or five nickles.
If your show is cancelled because people stop watching because they *don't like your show*, that is clearly, CLEARLY not an infringement of your freedom of speech. Who said you have a right to a loyal audience. If the President of the United States coerces the network into cancelling your show because he doesn't like your content, that is *actual censorship.*
I honestly can't tell if all the seemingly-smart people here suddenly unable to tell the difference between "I had a product that depended on public goodwill and I squandered that" and "I had the government literally shut me down" is genuine, or if everybody just decided this is argue-in-bad-faith week.
Oh my fucking god, Deiseach, do you ever have your own opinion on anything, or do you just search for a left-winger who said something wrong and declare that they're the absolute authority on the topic? "The XKCD guy didn't write a paragraph-long panel on the legal nuances of government coercion, therefore I don't care about censorship."
You are indeed yielding to your baser impulses, you've been yielding to them all year. You have one joke and it's stopped being funny.
(Also, if the FCC pulls your broadcast license and you attempt to continue broadcasting, then you can in fact be arrested. So your dunk isn't even accurate.)
To make my position clear, I have long been pro-censorship, at least to some degree. I never believed in untrammelled free speech, and it was a long, hard road for me to travel to get to the point of "Okay, I don't like this, I even think it's bad not just wrong, but they have a right to express themselves even if I would prefer they shut up, or someone would shut them up".
And then the good liberals to the progressive side blew all that up in the hey-day of the SJWs. Then cancellation was the right thing to do. Then "error has no rights" was taken over from us ("It was still the official position of the Catholic Church in the 1950s, and was repudiated or superseded in the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965 by Dignitatis humanae") and used as a bludgeon. Damore could and should be fired by Google for expressing views at variance with the party orthodoxy. Then Brendan Eich could be forced out for making a donation to the 'wrong' side of a political campaign:
"This led to an online campaign against Eich's status as CEO of Mozilla, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). CREDO Mobile collected more than 50,000 signatures demanding that Eich resign."
So now "you broke it, you bought it". You guys wanted this? You're going to get it.
Funny thing, beleester. I do have my own opinions, and when I express them, I get told "That never happens/I never heard of that" (Gunflint, bless him, is the prime one here).
Then I go looking for "this did happen" and lo and behold, I get you telling me that I am a mindless drone.
Sorry friend, your lot *are* as bad as our lot, because we're all human. Trans people are not all suffering little blossoms, some of them are as bad as cis people. Being liberal to hardline Marxist-Leninist does not confer the aura of invincible truth.
And people with "the right side of history" opinions and views can do bad and wrong things, too.
Remember this the next time some pro-abortion zealot drags out the tired old argument "well if you pro-lifers *really* thought abortion was murder, you'd be out there blowing up abortion clinics, so plainly this is not your real reason to object to abortion and you hate women, hate sex, hate everything!" and then, when some lone nutcase *does* blow up an abortion clinic, the screams of outrage about "how could anyone do this? this is why the pro-lifers are all dangerous murderous zealots!" come about, like a clock striking on the hour.
I'm seeing more and more of this particular line recently. and no I *don't* go out searching for outrage bait (I don't need the jolt to my blood pressure): "if liberals are attacked, it's the fault of the right wing" (never get the benefit of 'it's just a crazy person') and "if right wing guy is attacked, it's the fault of the right wing" (can't be a good liberal, because liberals are all good and would never do a bad thing).
See the defenders of the black guy who slashed a woman's throat on the train: 'oh the poor guy, it's because of homelessness, it's because of untreated mental illness' - nothing can be attributed to him for blame or responsibility. Imagine a black or trans woman being attacked the same way by a white guy - there would be no 'oh poor guy, it's because of homelessness, it's because of untreated mental illness' but full-blown FAR RIGHT EXTREMIST WHITE SUPREMACIST RADICALISED BY MAGA, THIS IS TRUMP'S FAULT FOR HIS VIOLENT RHETORIC!!!! and certainly no GoFundMes for the suspect:
It will give the lawyers something to bill for then.
“Speech” is not my issue, and the airtime it gets is as usual rather inverse to its importance.
Graffiti is apparently speech, in the liberal mind, and littering I think will be next.
I fully expect to see the day when you throw some concrete across the river, leaving not a trickle to go through for downstream folks, and the lawyers will explain to us that concrete is speech. Lawyers are amazing and can do anything!
See you at Barnes & Noble where the employees often risk life and limb by wearing Banned Book buttons during Banned Book Week. In case you thought they were going to stop you making a purchase.
Or at the library, where The Catcher in the Rye will be front and center - people tend not to read it much anymore so the copy won’t be checked out - though any passing aspiring novelist might be forgiven for thinking, for the love of God and Mammon please, oh, please throw my book in that brer banned book patch. I too want to sell 5 million copies!
On the other hand, e.g. the children’s picture book about the little girl and her mother - enslaved people - who baked the cake for George Washington - is probably not going to be on that table. They culled it a few weeks after publication, voluntarily.
I've read your post twice over and I don't see an argument, just a rant about a bunch of random things that are loosely related to "speech." What does any of this have to do with government censorship?
Yeah, it’s hard. I had forgotten what you wrote, so I just looked at it again, and I believe I was trying to excuse myself from the suggestion on your part that people on left and right have argued in equal measure about speech (and wrongly on one side, if I understand you lr rant correctly) - something I’m almost savagely indifferent to, at least as currently and theatrically presented.
I wouldn’t count on that in future. Not that it matters, there being no enforcement and graffiti comporting so well with the world those in charge want to see.
There are people who had principled objections to the previous stuff and to this current stuff. You won't hear a lot positive about this sort of thing from, say, Sam Harris or Andrew Sullivan or Jonah Goldberg. But yes, a lot of people were only upset that other people had the speech-suppression tools, and are perfectly happy using those tools now that they've fallen into their hands.
I'm not sure why you're taking your anger out on Scott in particular, but it's your money I guess.
I'm thinking if there needs to be some kind of corollary to The Toxoplasma Of Rage, that any sufficiently major event will eventually evolve into something that splits the population 50-50. The mechanism is that if there's ever a major event that splits the population 80-20 or 90-10, then the "winning" side will capitalise on it, use it as an excuse to execute more of their agenda, massively overplay their hand, and wind up alienating all their new sympathisers.
This is where we're at now. We've quickly moved on from the actual event, and are now at the being outraged "what A said about what B said about what C said about the assassination" stage of the news cycle, because this is something we can argue about across the usual well-worn creases.
>The false claim was recited by a Russian-linked propaganda outlet and repeated by Google’s AI-generated news summary.
...you know what, I would love it to become a political talking point that Google AI is promoting Russian propaganda. Maybe getting tagged as straight-up traitors would be enough to make them undo their stupid "The Lie Machine always gets top search" bullshit.
You don't want the AI summary gone, you want 2015 Google back. Unfortunately, the only way forward is through: Deep Research is how search is going to become actually useful again. Automated use of human-level intelligence to burn away anything the SEO parasites might try.
No, first and foremost I want the AI summary gone. It's a fucking Search Engine, I use it to Search for things, not to make things up. Not just the first result, but all the Related Questiosn are Just The Lie Machine now. And they're advertising it in commercials as Totally Not A Lie Machine. They need to be sued for false advertising. Rip the damn thing out.
I find the present tense rosily optimistic, to be honest, but it's been that kind of week. The American experiment WAS in grave danger. And then a year ago a little over half the U.S. electorate said
"OK, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, vaccines, education, football, public order, irrigation, roads, the interstate highway system, the largest economy in human history, and public health ... what has the American Experiment ever done for us?"
I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people. I will say that, while the U.S. *looks* great on paper, it's increasingly set up for many of those fantastic things to bypass large portions of the population and turn into bigger houses, bigger yachts, bigger tanks, bigger bailouts and sometimes bigger wars for the people who already have enough. So when those people say "screw it, this system sucks, lets sink it," I do have sympathy. But when their method of doing that empowers most of the people who are already screwing them over *even harder* in favor of visiting terror and violence to people more vulnerable and worse off than they? Screw em. I don't wish harm on any of them, because I don't wish harm on anyone. But if harms do come from their poor choices (as they already have) justice would be for them to fall hardest on those who dragged everyone else into it. Reap what you sow.
I'll do the really cringe rationalist space thing and quote someone rather less well-known than Monty Python here:
"There is no road-sign set, to mark the place of your last chance to turn back. If you refuse one chance will you not refuse others?"
I hope I am wrong. I will try as hard as I can to *ensure* that I am wrong. But I really, truly, honestly don't believe that most Americans those still standing behind their so-called leader want a future for their children *more* than they want to screw over their enemies. The level of hate and bile I've seen out of them--even here, in this fairly low-key space--is frankly indescribable. I'm very, very glad I left when I did.
This week might be an exceptionally difficult time to make the argument they backed the wrong side when the other is making abundantly clear they want them all dead, rejoicing at the killing of one of them.
You and I apparently live on two different Internets. Here's what *I* saw:
From the Left:
-Some tasteless jokes and tasteless gravedancing (not great)
-Quite a lot post starting with things like "nobody should ever be shot for what they say," including every public figure I've checked, and most media personalities.
-A lot of people helping remember Charlie Kirk by literally quoting a bunch of things he actually said.
Great behavior? No. Uniformly terrible behavior? Also no.
From the Right:
-About 50 different calls for "civil war" and "violence against the left", mostly made before *any* concrete info was known about the shooter.
-Some guy literally referring to the event as "the American Reichstag fire" (way to say the quiet part out loud)
-Mindless repetition of whatever crap the FBI has claimed to know now, regardless of how implausible.
So yes, it's pretty clear that SOMEBODY in this dynamic wants a bunch of people on the other side dead. Not really sure it's the left though...
"The other side" is a huge amorphous group, some very small number of whom are cheering for Kirk's murder. The overwhelming majority aren't. Tons of public figures on the left have explicitly said they're horrified by this murder and oppose the use of murder to silence political opponents.
It's too easy to convince yourself that the other side is all evil when you (or your social media sources or whatever) seek out the most horrible people from the other side and serve them up to you.
Statistically, rightwing terrorism is much more common in the US than leftwing terrorism. This was the conclusion of the FBI itself, until it took down it's research for politically motivated reasons after the death of Kirk.
Just a few months ago Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed by a right-wing terrorist. She was a democratic legislator and the response from the right was basically a shrug at best and the standard barrage of jokes at worst
The right keep pushing this arguement that the left want them dead, but it's the right who are willing to ship people to El Salvadorian death camps without trial. Its the right who have embedded gangs such as 'the oath keepers' into police forces, it's the right who attacked the government on January 6th, it's the right who have dismantled health care provisions and undermined vaccination. Its the right who call for LGBT people to stoned to death.
People are merely looking for an excuse to do what they already wanted to do and the death of their favourite podcaster is just a convenience.
I think the Minnesota guy was more of a nutcase with some political motivations.
The dude who murdered Brian Thompson seemed to be pretty clearly politically motivated, on the other hand, much more like the guy who murdered Kirk. Probably neither one of them are exactly firing on all cylinders, but they had some kind of coherent explanation for their motives that make sense outside of a psych ward.
The guy that shot up that black church had a pretty clear ideological motive.
Nobody really knows the motive for Kirk's murder yet. Likely nobody will ever know, since the FBI seems rather determined to destroy any credibility the official investigation may have had.
I have not seen a study that proves this "right wing terrorism is more common" claim that doesn't have dozens of embarrassing methodological errors. My prior is btw that it's probably true still (but also not particularly useful as there is likely some meaningful qualitative differences between violence on both sides), but I am deeply convinced by the critiques.
I do remember seeing a link to one such study in the last few days. (I think I saw it on X, but I can't find it now.) In that particular study, the problem lay in classifying any act in which ethnicity was mentioned as "right-wing". This ended up incrementing the RW counter for incidents like "one Syrian gunned down another Syrian" or "white man killed a black man for sleeping with the white man's wife".
(What I remember of the study was a chart, showing colored bars for each type of terrorism, stacked on top of each other, and tracked by year, if that helps. It was promoted by the Guardian.)
Probably the one by the prosecution project (the Economist article on left wing vs right wing violence uses this chart). https://archive.is/EMh4x .
Another obvious issue is that it's tracking *criminal cases*. The caviat being that you don't open up criminal cases for people who are already dead (e.g. mass shooters who killed themselves or are killed after a rampage shooting). Or for example if, hypothetically, riots break out for a left wing cause and DAs refuse to prosecute those who are arrested for violence in those riots.
one of many issues but not even the most egregious. Look at the prison gang issue (some studies classify any violence committed by anyone who's ever been a member of a white prison gang as right wing terrorism). Not even to mention the "how do we classify Islamist violence" and "how do we avoid including 9/11" issues.
When nobody watches a show, they "suspend" it pretty easily. Roseanne got her ass canceled for saying stuff that she probably shouldn't have. But Roseanne (and her new show) was really popular. That's notable.
I'm not exactly "okay" with cancelling comedians for screwing up a joke, but I doubt that's what happened here. Crack open a comedian's substack ("I might be wrong" is pretty good), and ask yourself what someone who wrote for these programs has to say.
(Yes, I do think someone's trolling with that asinine troll account they're "claiming" is their real account. Do Not Feed The Trolls).
In the "Annals of the Last Administration" there were literal assaults on free speech for trade publications, where the government bought out and subsequently closed a magazine, because its content (In this case, obituaries) was too damaging.
Do you have any source or even a vague hint or direction for what you're talking about in the last paragraph. I do really hate the thing people do where they name-drop some obscure bit of trivia that for all we know might be made up, as if it were Shakespeare or Star Wars or the Odyssey.
The world is very large and contains a lot of media. Nobody has even heard of it all, much less consumed it all. If it's important enough to rest a point on, isn't it important enough to share with those curious souls among us languishing in ignorance?
Wimbli is simply making stuff up, and did the same in previous accounts, and almost all posts have this derailing dropping of "secret info" at the end of them.
Edit-typo, removed name of other accounts since only suspicion
Thanks for asking, I was going to do so myself! I was very curious about how on earth obituaries could be a threat to the government (Big Funeral Parlours?) but it seems to be "deaths associated with airplanes".
It feels like the internet has regressed by a decade or two. People used to confidently post trivially disprovable things but then they stopped for a while.
Is this an English language or a foreign language magazine, because Google has nothing about a magazine of that name, or one being shut down (it seems a lot of trade magazines have been taken over by new owners or they shut down because print is no longer economic in the digital age).
I tried looking this up and I can't find any record of what you're talking about with the government buying and closing a magazine, what was the name of the magazine?
Just once, I would like to see a Republican say "yes, I disapproved of this when the Biden admin did it and I disapprove of Trump doing it now" rather than "Biden did it, so that means we get to do it too, and ten times more aggressively!" Do you actually have a principle or do you just want to be the boot?
Something I've come to notice about political extremists is the tendency to exaggerate or outright fabricate real or imagined transgressions by their political opponents, always characterized as a homogeneous mass, in order to lay the foundations of a preemptive justification of actions they desire as being retribution in kind. That this sort of reciprocity principle supersedes other principles is actually made explicit in a comment in response to you. With this in mind it should be clear why he also insists that "the other side" is engaged in incitement to political violence and cheering for political assassination. It is another foundation being laid.
I DO consider it bad when both sides do this. I just also consider it far worse when ONLY the other other guys do it to us.
I value freedom of speech/expression extremely highly, but I consider it better that no one has it than only those who suppress ours do, and don't much care which levers of power are used to accomplish this end.
Go over to National Review, most of the commenters on the article I read about it were happy enough that Kimmel got canceled but very unhappy about the fact that it seemed like the network might have been bullied into it by the administration. So I would say there are indeed plenty of Reublicans who do not approve of it now, just as most Democrats do not approve of shutting up a contrary opinion with a bullet.
Or … could it be possible you’re referring to the “Twitter Files” stuff? I can’t imagine that’s it, since “encouraging social media moderation” is a gross mischaracterization of those so-called “revelations”.
> You haven't reported any Smithsonian exhibits for wrongthink, and had them subsequently removed, have you? If that doesnt' speak to "Direct Assault on the First Amendment" I don't know what does.
What has that got to do with free speech? It's a government agency. They have no obligation to show any exhibit. This, and most left wing freedom of speech complaints, seem to be nothing but demands that the government be required to fund their left wing activism. And there is no such requirement. If I don't have the right to government funding neither do these losers.
"You haven't reported any Smithsonian exhibits for wrongthink, and had them subsequently removed, have you?"
Stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Smithsonian a part of at least a direct affiliate of the U.S. Federal Government? If that's the case, then the First Amendment really, does not apply. The government is not allowed to restrict the speech of its citizens. That doesn't mean that government agencies don't have to follow directives from above. Without more info about the specific case, I can have no opinion on whether the admin was right or wrong[1]
"healthcare workers were absolutely fired in numbers large enough to cause Nursing Strikes, because they believed vaccination violated their religious beliefs. "
Firing healthcare workers who refuse to meet the requirements of the job is ABSOLUTELY the correct call. The government certainly should not be in the business of dictating to citizens what they may or may not do with their bodies. That's not a 1st Amendment thing, but bodily integrity is a human right. But this is nothing about that. Your employer can set standards for a job, as long as those standards aren't explicitly banning particular religions. If your religious beliefs conflict with the extremely necessary requirements of the job you have chosen, you are absolutely free to either find another religion or find another job. If you're a pacifist and you join the military to do a combat role, that's on you. If you're a Christian (who actually takes the Bible seriously) and you decide to work for a bank, that's on you. If you're a Muslim who takes a job that requires constant attention and precludes stopping several times a shift for prayer, that's on you. Have whatever religious beliefs you want, but you don't get to impose them on your employer. Otherwise I think I might have to found a religion whose commandments say it's immoral to be paid less than $100 an hour and then get a fast-food job. I'm sure that would work great.
If antivaxxers want to start their own parallel health institutions run by antivaxxers for antivaxxers and they're clearly marked (so no sane people wander in by accident), I'd be all for that. Sounds like a natural experiment. Let it run for a couple decades and we can see which system has the lower mortality rate. Though I'd still want their children to go to the regular hospital: I'm OK with voluntary opt-outs even when they're stupid. Less ok with allowing child abuse.
"This is a person who believes that violence against political opponents is a good thing. Your other workers ought not to feel safe around them, particularly if they hold opposing beliefs. This person is a liability, and you want them gone before they go postal."
This is a crap argument and any sane human knows it. First off, if you're not a strict pacifist and military, police and prison abolitionist, then you definitely, definitely believe in violence against your political opponents in SOME circumstances. Mostly circumstances where almost everyone around you agrees, and/or your political opponents live far away. But second, there is a HUGE difference between having an immoderate, illiberal or tasteless reaction to a current event and being willing to pick up a weapon and kill someone. Obviously. If that argument held water, very, very few people of any persuasion would ever work again.
Now, if they start loudly talking in the workplace about how great said violence is, to their point where their coworkers find them alarming and offputting and start considering other jobs, then there's a legitimate case to be made that they are *an actual business liability.* Or if they do something wildly contrary to the exceptions of the job: as a former educator, I have zero problem with a teacher who shows footage like that in class getting sacked. Fuck that teacher. But that's pretty different from blithely rationalizing why anyone who doesn't share your taste can't work.
Finally let me say, basically every single conservative complaint about unjust firings in similar cases treats the employer like they have no agency. If an online starts bombarding your workplace with angry messages about some shit you said online--something that I generally believe shouldn't happen to anyone--and your employer decides to let you go: then THE single person who had the biggest hand in firing you was your employer. They could have told the mob to go screw. Instead they treated you like you're a disposable cog instead of a human being.[2]
[1] I had no love for the Biden administration, and REALLY no love for Biden the man. But I'd have to be blind not to notice just how *bad* some of the critiques against him are.
[2] I once had some dude salty over an online dust-up track down my workplace and my boss's contact info and call and try to get me fired. My boss told me, gave me a serious look, and suggested I locked down my social media a little tighter. He was a great boss: I ended up leaving that job a few months after he did because the next boss couldn't measure up.
The Commonwealth Saga and the following trilogy (the Void Trilogy) were really refreshing and good SciFi reads. I particularly like the angles of both books on how certain technologies in the books had impacts on the human species at large.
Did you read the Book of the New Sun already? They're a bit older than 2000 (1980s, I think?) but very good, and Gene Wolfe was a Catholic so you're not going to see a lot of the ol' wokery. He kept writing this side of the millennium too, and almost all of his stuff is gold, only the later books predominantly become puzzle boxes which are *extremely* puzzling. It's quite possible that literally nobody on the planet has fully untangled two or three of them.
Ha, sorry, yeah that was a little annoying of me. Your description of him just sounded so exactly like the fantasy author from The Northern Caves that I couldn't help myself.
Oh, I see. I've never heard of The Northern Caves, I'm afraid. (No need to apologize, though. I don't think there was anything offensive in it, I just didn't get it.)
I was thinking about that too, if it's not too Catholic. It is great fun, but you have to be in the right mind set to enjoy it. I love Menelaus, but he is an idiot. It is appropriately Big Dumb Objects and Grand Science Fiction in the Golden Age style where vast swathes of time and space are the background to the plot.
I'm gonna have to quote the stealth baptism. I love this part.
“I had my doubts whether you were truly a Catholic, my son. I see now that you must be. No one knows less of our catechism and orders than one of our flock.”
“It was kind of a — I was unconscious at the time, and your grandpa had me watered down, enlisted, or whatever you call it—”
“Baptism.”
“Whatever — he told the padres there I was dying, and it was my last wish, and probably a whole mule train of lies, forty mules at least. So it doesn’t really count, right?”
“It counts for some things,” came the voice of the old priest, with a sigh, from behind the screen. “But not to stray far from the topic, no, my own wealth, since I have none, will not be affected if you command the contraterrene asteroids to stop broadcasting power. But I am not asking for myself. I am hardly the only one of your descendants who honors you and seeks your good.”
If you're in the mood for lighter fare than books, how about a webcomic?
Schlock Mercenary started in June 2000 and went until July 2020. (One of its claims to fame: at least ten years of daily strips, with zero interruptions or hiatuses. Possibly all twenty; I can't easily check. This is very rare, in a very crowded field; webcomics were frequently taking days, weeks, or months off, often without announcement, often just quietly stopping whenever the artist felt like it.) The style is not great at the beginning, but the jokes are good enough, and the SF content (teraports; wormgates; annie plants; Terran battleplates; nanny bags; galactic intelligences; weaponized longshoremen; the list goes on) is not bad either. I think both pick up as the series goes.
If you insist on books, well, the whole thing is also organized as "books" containing their own stories.
"Tilt" by Bill Adams! I think I ran across it on DSL, and I thought it would be good, but I didn't think it would be THAT good. But it is.
For less "hard sci-fi" and more "Hitchhiker's Guide" type, you could try Robert Kroese's series that starts with "Starship Grifters." The title of the third book, "Out of the Soylent Planet", gives you the general style.
Not sure what category "literary steampunk" is in, but Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next books ("The Eyre Affair" is the first one) are good, especially if you like catching all the literary references and want a world where there are performances of Richard III that go like RHPS screenings. Also there are werewolves, and you can alter books by "jumping" into first editions of them.
The Expanse is absolutely incredible. The TV adaptation was quite good, but doesn't do justice to just how good the books were. This is easily my top recommendation.
The Altered Carbon trilogy by Richard Morgan is also great (and vastly better than the adaptation). A warning in the opposite direction of your constraint: this author likes to detour into extremely graphic, extremely heterosexual sex scenes a few times per book. It's a little much IMO, but skippable so whatever.
I have a soft spot for The Dresden Files, which is "hard-boiled P.I. on the mean streets of Chicago, who is also a wizard". It's shlocky but I love it.
(As for your constraint, we're probably pretty aligned on our preferences: I wouldn't avoid a book just for having >0 LGBTQ characters, but I absolutely would if it was presented as a main focus.)
Since you mentioned The Dresden Files, I suppose I'll throw Jim Butcher's other books onto your list. They're good-not-great I'd say.
I've read Cursor's Fury, and none of the other books in the Codex Alera series; it was a fun read, but with a very "tune in next time" ending; you get your big climactic battles, but the villains are defeated in ways that let them come back for the next book. (There was also a bit of cheating during the climax; a character worries about a thing, and then later reveals they had it solved the whole time, so the earlier worrying was just to trick the audience.)
The Aeronaut's Windlass, likewise; All the characters feel like folks I've seen before, but the buildup and the worldbuilding is a good time, and it has a very climactic ending... at the 3/4 mark, after which it keeps going to another, less climactic ending. I haven't read the other Cinder Spires books.
I also accidentally read a James Butcher book, which... I now have to Google to remember any names at all. Ah, here it is: Dead Man's Hand was enjoyable, though you can feel that a young person is writing it; several strawman villain-for-a-scenes, a scene that falls flat solely because the book's tone doesn't allow for it, and lots of complaining about McDonalds in this supernatural buddy-cop story. Still, I read it to the end, and read the sequel. It's a fun popcorn flick. Eragon might be a good comparison.
Sorry, I don't follow. I'm familiar with Feel Good Inc and its music video, but don't know what it has to do with The Expanse. I had not heard of Letterkenny (watched some clips, and yeah, looks pretty good, thanks!) and don't understand how that or George Carlin relates either. Are we talking about the same Expanse? Jim Holden and Martian Congressional Republic and Belters?
> If you have a "good" review site, that would be best
I recently exported my good-read-reviews to CSV, and gave that data to AI and asked it to give me some recommendation based on my reading habit. That worked exceptionally well, and may work for you, too.
> that isn't good characterization (as Sanderson's done recently with Yasnah Kholin)
i have trouble parsing that sentence. Does "as Sanderson's done recently with Yasnah Kholin" refer to "good characterization " or does it refer to "isn't good characterization"?
"Recently" isn't really the best way to describe that, since in the latest book [rot13] Wnfanu vf irel zhpu ba gur erprvivat raq bs n oehgny ireony orngqbja.
I haven't had a chance to check them out, but I've heard good things about Karl Gallagher (Torchlight) and Devon Eriksen (Orbital Space).
You could also try searching from the "modern+good" direction, and start with Hugo and Nebula nominees from 2000 onward, and read synopses and reviews of what you find. If anything, you might find a reliable reviewer with those interests.
Finally, you might find something by looking at Atomic Rockets (projectrho.com) for modern references. AR is meanwhile just good for people seeking realistic, hard SF.
Just curious, why the specification of "more modern than 2000 or so"? I would assume both sci-fi and fantasy are largely unaffected by the year they were written, aside from what political undertones the book would have (in which case, it would seem like more modern books would have more of what you're looking to avoid).
Is it because you've already read most of the older stuff that you've heard of?
Well I'm glad a lot of other people replied, because I have nothing to contribute for your friend 😳 I was just curious as to your reasoning.
In case you're interested, two sci-fi books I've read in the past couple months are:
Ubik by Philip K. Dick (the guy who wrote the book 'Blade Runner' is based on) - very mind-bending, gave me a little mental breakdown that lasted a day or two.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Usula K. Le Guin (I guess if you want your child to be a great author you should give them the middle name 'K.') - Written in 1969, it's not necessarily LGBT aligned (as a Christian, I personally don't support that philosophy myself), but a main theme of the book is that it takes place on a planet where the beings are androgynous, and once a month get "in heat" or whatever and they become one of the two genders at random.
The book is written from the perspective of a normal human man coming to the planet as an ambassador to try and convince the planet to join this huge galactic conglomeration of planets. It was very interesting to me and highlighted how a lot of our own society is shaped purely by the biology of the two genders, in so many ways I never would have realized. There's a lot more to it than that, as well, it's a very thoughtful book and not very long.
I responded rather creatively to it as the planet the story takes place on is nicknamed 'winter', and parts of the story reminded me of the bitter winter that will begin to set in any day where I live 😭 It was pretty relatable, and maybe if I use my imagination, my next 6 months will be a little more bearable.
I just finished Dungeon Crawler Carl, and was a little disappointed in it, mostly because it was billed as similar to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which it assuredly is not. Perhaps the style is intended that way, but I was a bit turned off by the excessive profanity, and the humor level, though present, was pretty low. It seems the series gets dark instead of light-hearted.
It was still decent, though. It had some original plot points which were good, and the concept was acceptable, though fairly implausible.
The Culture books had a very woke-friendly worldview. (For example, Culture citizens can and routinely do change genders by deciding they'd like to and triggering some internal biological programming to absorb the old secondary sexual characteristics and grow new ones. This just happens causally as background in a couple stories.)
The Murderbot books are very clearly written from a woke-adjacent worldview, and are fun to read. They're in a sort of cyberpunk + space opera kind of setting.
The books in the Goblin Emperor series are similar in worldview/ideology, but in a fantasy setting.
I was looking for someone to mention the Culture novels because they are actually good books, and when there is "LGBT Friendly" content it has no agenda behind it and is always in service of the story. Many times like you say it happens casually in the background.
As per your request please find enclosed: Gideon the ninth is dripping with woke tropes, and I could not care less. It’s an amazing book Plot, characters, prose, subtext, thematic resonances, memes all a+. One of the only woke books I have unrelentingly enjoyed. For the Ninth!
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.
> 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!
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.
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> 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.
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[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.
Thank you for replying. I know you are threading a needle by offering anything, so I appreciate it.
Whether Kirk is a good person or not isn’t really based on how good a job he does at carving out weekly family time. You gloss over his views on gay marriage but presumably he is opposed to it. I admit I didn’t pay very much attention to him while he was alive. Wishing harm upon a significant chunk of the population because of your religious beliefs lands someone squarely in bad person territory, for me at least. And that’s without getting into the significant accusations of racism.
>Wishing harm upon a significant chunk of the population because of your religious beliefs lands someone squarely in bad person territory
Significant chunks of the population wish harm against conservatives for their political beliefs. Are they bad people?
Significant chunks of the population wish harm against white people for their race. Many of these people spent years on the NYT bestsellers list. Are they bad people?
More broadly: Every political policy that matters will harm sympathetic people. If you want affirmative action in college admissions, you want to make it harder for my kids to get into a good school. If you want to eliminate farm subsidies, you want to put some of my relatives out of business. If you want to deport people here illegally, there are literally millions of basically sympathetic people who came to the US to get jobs that paid better than they could make at home whom you're planning to kick out. If you want to move to single-payer healthcare, you will put a ton of people working in private insurance out of work, and you will make some peoples' actual healthcare worse in order to make the whole thing cheaper or to make the average person better off.
Table stakes for talking about politics in any serious way is that you will be proposing stuff that will hurt real people, whose pain hurts as much as yours does, whose lives will be made harder by your proposals. So if you define someone as bad if their proposed policies would impose harm on lots of people, you will just always define everyone having a real political discussion as a bad person.
Whether someone is morally good or bad depends on their intent, not their beliefs*. Kirk did not wish harm upon homosexuals, he believed that homosexuality was bad (for the homosexuals themselves most of all). You can believe that his belief was wrong, of course, and that the actions he took under those false beliefs caused harm, or could cause harm. But I see no evidence that Kirk wished to do harm to others.
*For example, lets say I was told by a legitimate authority that I must press a red button when signaled in order to save the life of a man in the next room, and I believed him. With that belief in mind it would be wrong for me to decide not to press the button, and right for me to decide to press the button, since I believe that pressing it will save a life and that if I don't press it someone will die. The fact that it would be good to press it and bad not to remains that case even if my belief is wrong, and in reality pressing the button does nothing at all, or even causes harm to someone.
Alice believes that homosexuality is bad for you and for society and says so in public.
Bob believes that religion is bad for you and for society and says so in public.
How do we decide which of these is the bad guy?
Does Alice or Bob kinda hope that their disfavored population dies? How would they react when someone of their disfavored population gets murdered?
It seems unlikely that Kirk hoped gay people would die, nor celebrate a gay person being murdered.
Agreed.
Maybe if the gay person happened to be a terrorist there would be some less than maximally nice comments?
<Whether someone is morally good or bad depends on their intent, not their beliefs*.
Not entirely. I think part of being morally good is trying to have accurate beliefs, it least when it comes to beliefs that determine your impact on the world. Kirk was in a position where he was able to have far more impact on the world than most of us., and so had a much greater moral obligation to be accurate. Of course there is no way to test the accuracy of religious beliefs, but Kirk also talked about subjects where fact checks are possible and knowing the facts influences what opinions make sense. Kirk recommended a ban on all hormonal and surgical treatments for trans people, and jailing doctors who carried out those treatments. Had he spoken with any trans people or people with gender dysphoria? Had he spoken with the doctors? Did he know the impact a felony conviction would have on a doctor? Had he read a summary of the research on gender transition outcomes? He said continuing to have relatively few gun control laws in the US was worth a few deaths. agree that lots of policies that harm a few people are nevertheless a net good. Raising the speed limit frm 55 to 65 probably leads to more highway death, but may benefit more people overall. But was he familiar with the gun death stats -- for instance the number of accidental deaths, suicides and child deaths that would not have occurred if we had stricter gun laws? Maybe he was, but still believed having this many guns in this many hands is worth the price. But the gun numbers, in particular, are pretty daunting. I don't think many people could read the stats and not at least have some second thoughts -- not become willing to consider at least a few more constraints on gun-buying.
I suspect his views on guns were based on a values question rather than a utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits.
Well, I think he'd say that. but what values, really? I don't think it's the product of some big thought-out philosophy of life, where there are first priniciples, etc. For instance I don't think it's based on anything in the bible. You can find endorsement of all kinds of stuff in the bible, but I don't think I've heard anyone quoting the bible in gun arguments. Is it a deep love of the Constitution and its amendments, with all that stuff taken literall? If so, he'd be quoting lots of the constitution, right, not just talking about the second amendment. To me it seems like where he's coming from is not a worked-out set of values, but a cluster of attitudes that a lot of people have, attitudes about guns, sexual roles, etc. It's vibes, basically. The stuff he's for feels right and true to him. Um, I mean felt.
I can't really speak to Kirk's beliefs (before his assassination, I vaguely knew he was some kind of Republican activist, but I don't think I could have picked him out of a police lineup and don't know his writings or anything). But I think many of the most contentious issues come down to values conflicts, and so aren't really subject to change because of factual claims or statistics.
Like, if someone demonstrated the old Freakonomics idea that widespread abortion had caused the crime rate to massively fall, this would be a convincing reason to suppport legal abortion for many people, but a whole bunch of anti-abortion people would just say "yeah, we don't care that your baby murder policy preferentially murders babies that would have grown up to commit crimes, it's still bad." The disagreement isn't about the factual question, but about an unproveable values/morality question.
>Had he spoken with any trans people or people with gender dysphoria?
Yes? He spoke with a lot of them on video, and I assume he spoke with them when not being recorded as well.
>Had he spoken with the doctors?
Seems like he probably has, though I don't have direct evidence on that. He was pretty involved in the topic though, certainly did a lot of research on it, so I would assume he spoke to doctors about trans issues at some point.
> Had he read a summary of the research on gender transition outcomes?
He and his organization Turning Point have cited research on this multiple times, such as the Cass report. Given that the government of England is not sure if these treatments are helping, is it unreasonable for someone like Kirk to believe they don't? This is pretty far from settled science.
>But was he familiar with the gun death stats -- for instance the number of accidental deaths, suicides and child deaths that would not have occurred if we had stricter gun laws?
Yeah, of course he was, his career was literally debating topics like gun control. This is what he did for a living, he was very familiar with the research.
>>But was he familiar with the gun death stats -- for instance the number of accidental deaths, suicides and child deaths that would not have occurred if we had stricter gun laws?
>Yeah, of course he was, his career was literally debating topics like gun control. This is what he did for a living, he was very familiar with the research.
I asked GPT5 to search for any direct quotes from Kirk in which he cites gun statistics. I asked for statistics that supported the beneficial effects of guns, and statistics that undercut the idea that guns cause much pointless harm. Here is its response:
"Across the sources above and broader searches (including coverage aggregating “Kirk in his own words”), I didn’t find any verified, direct quotes where Kirk himself cites numerical statistics (e.g., FBI homicide breakdowns, rates of defensive gun use, percentages of shootings in gun-free zones, etc.) to argue that guns are beneficial or to counter claims of harm. The material I can verify on the record is value-based (tradeoff framing) rather than numeric. " . . . " I can’t find any direct Charlie Kirk quotes that cite statistics to argue guns “don’t do much harm” (e.g., knives kill more than guns, or similar minimization claims). The on-record, verifiable remarks I can find are value-judgment framings (a “trade-off”), not numerical comparisons."
It then offered to search deeper, looking at the video/transcripts of The Charlie Kirk Show, TPUSA event videos, or archived posts on his X/Facebook. I asked it to do that. Here is its response:
"VERIFIED QUOTE WITH STATISTIC
“Fact: 98% of all mass shootings occur in gun free zones.” — Charlie Kirk on X/Twitter, May 19, 2018.
WHAT I SEARCHED FOR AND DIDN'T FIND
I checked Kirk’s X/Twitter history and recent compilations of his quotes, plus event clips and coverage pointing back to primary sources. Beyond the 2018 “98%” tweet above, I did not find other direct quotes from Kirk where he himself recites statistics"
Here is a link to my exchange with GPT: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68c8bd19754481919deb64547cbfe63c
The man died while he was literally in the act of discussing gun violence statistics. His last words, in response to the question "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?" were "Counting or not counting gang violence?"
The organization he founded and ran, Turning Point USA, put out a 23 page booklet called "The Case Against Gun Control" (https://cdn.tpusa.com/assets/books/TheCaseAgainstGunControl.pdf) in 2016. It features such statistics as "between 1950 and 2016, 98.8% of mass public shootings occurred in gun-free zones" and "60% of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they knew the victim was armed. 40% of convicted felons admitted that they avoided committing crimes when they thought the victim might be armed" and "the year after Texas passed their concealed carry law, murder rates fell 50% faster than the national average. The rate of murder wasn’t the only the only crime affected. Rape rates fell 93% faster in the first year after enactment and 500% faster in the second! Additionally, assaults fell 250% faster in the second year." It also features line graphs depicting crime rates and firearm crime rates in the U.K. and Australia, a bar graph about statistics on self defense measures, and statistics about changes in firearm crime rates over time, the effectiveness of gun control measures, and firearm suicides.
I don’t really care about your hypothetical button. Everyone realizes that opposing gay marriage makes you a bad person unless you are a Christian fanatic.
"Everyone" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Many voters in the US don't realize that, most people in the world don't realize that, almost nobody 20 years ago even in the liberal parts of the US realized that, etc.
I certainly don't think that opposing gay marriage makes you a bad person. Nor that supporting gay marriage makes you a bad person.
But I do think that thinking that having the opposite opinion to you on gay marriage makes someone a bad person makes you a bad person.
There are questions on which reasonable people cannot disagree, but gay marriage (which is fundamentally a semantic and administrative question) is not one of them.
>But I do think that thinking that having the opposite opinion to you on gay marriage makes someone a bad person makes you a bad person.
+1
> Everyone realizes that opposing gay marriage makes you a bad person unless you are a Christian fanatic.
Isn’t opposition to gay marriage most of the world (it’s a world minority position) and all of the world a few years ago. Hillary wasn’t a supporter until 2013. Obama until 2012.
In fact marriage wasn’t even a major concern of homosexual activists until recently - even opposed by some.
> Isn’t opposition to gay marriage most of the world (it’s a world minority position) and all of the world a few years ago.
Isn’t opposition to slavery and child marriage a minority position in most or all of the world a few years ago?
I don't know about "a few years" but let's say yes, what's your point?
Is it that everyone prior to 2005 was a bad person, and that only now is virtue possible? What luck to be alive at such a time!
I also didn't follow him during life, and it sounds like I disagree with him on most things.....but your "Everyone realizes" is carrying an entire elephants worth of weight there. Put me in the camp of "people can believe and even advocate for harmful things without being bad people" camp.
36% of the country things gay and lesbian sex is morally wrong (https://news.gallup.com/poll/507230/fewer-say-sex-relations-morally-acceptable.aspx), so it's hardly "everyone".
If you ignore intentionality when making moral judgments then everyone who disagrees with you is a "bad person". It's an internally consistent way to judge morality, but not one I would want to adopt.
I'm sorry that this happened to someone you cared about and that you're going through this. As I alluded to elsewhere in this thread, I think people celebrating his death or saying he deserved it are a relatively vocal subset of too-online people who are not really representative of anything, other than perhaps the fact that people are too whipped up over stuff.
I am reminded strongly of this: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/orthographic/
Candidly I did not care very much for what Charlie Kirk had to say and if you wanted to discuss this at some more appropriate point in the future I would be happy to tell you why, but at the moment I think the best thing you can do is not engage with that sort of thing. Some people will want to scream about his faults. Some people will want to increase the visibility of the first group so they can lump in everybody who disagreed with him with his killer. Very few people on either side are going to engage very well with his essential humanity right now.
+1. The "was he good or not" inquiry really seems to be people trying to determine how they feel about the murder. This is misguided and pointless; this is a tragedy on multiple levels, most of all for free speech and civil society.
I don't know of any data to support or reject claims about how most people are thinking. However, this is not how I feel about the "was he good or not" inquiry.
The reason is because how I feel about the murder is straightforward: the murder was bad, it a crime that should be prosecuted, and it is unfortunate that it happened.
I think that is also the take from almost all "official" voices (political party leaders, senior elected officials, corporate spokespeople, etc.)
For me, the inquiry into "was he good or not" is a response to a lot of loud claims that he was good and should be venerated in an unusual way.
+1
Assassination of political organizers for what they say is bad regardless of whether their ideas are good or bad ones.
My feelings on this topic are still quite muddled and I'm unsure how to exactly express these feelings. I was personally more shocked about this event than any other in recent memory.
When I went to work (in an office in DC) after Charlie died, two of my coworkers who I would describe as "normie libs" suggested in no uncertain terms, during casual conversation, that he deserved to be killed. Charlie was definitely to the right of me but most of his views were not *that* different than mine. Which of his views were so awful that they mean that his death is justified? Would my coworkers speak the same about me? To be blunt, this sort of toxicity is far more normalized than I realized. Maybe it's something unique to the left, maybe it's both sides and I'm just waiting for a good unambiguous example to show that the right is just as vicious or something. But it still rattled me.
Honestly this was the most shocking aspect to me, moreso even than Kirk's death, which to be honest I only felt a token amount of badness about (I had filed it away initially in the "mass shooting" category in my head, which is to say that I guess crazy people sometimes do crazy stuff like this and and obviously nearly everybody condemns it). To see ~20% of my peers try to justify it was about as shocking as if I heard someone try to justify or a mass shooting.
You mentioned wondering about an example on the right and just because you seem to be legitimately curious I would say the natural retort from a more left-wing perspective would probably be one of:
- People celebrating putting Kilmar Abrego Garcia in CECOT
- People regularly trashing victims of police killings, no matter what the circumstances
- The weird retcon of January 6th, complete with mass pardons for people who attacked DC police
- Making a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse
- Making a hero out of Daniel Penny
I don't say these to be like "Aha the right is trash and we, the good liberals, are superior", just to note there's plenty of sh** to go around. Most people don't build their politics out of a careful consideration of the issues. Most people are just on a team with their friends and family, and everybody is increasingly more and more rabid these days, even as the US remains quite prosperous and safe and so forth by historical standards.
I think when you're talking about broad political movements, you will always be able to find a lot of dumb, evil, or ill-considered things being said or valorized. That's just life in a world where the bell curve (of intelligence, involvement, or decency) has a left half.
It's only when you get to individuals or small groups that you can really expect anything like consistency.
>Making a hero out of Daniel Penny
What's wrong with Daniel Penny? He was acquitted. Same with Rittenhouse.
So was OJ Simpson, but that doesn't make him heroic.
"Was not 99% certain to be legally liable for those people they killed" is not a good basis for praise. I've never even killed anybody in the first place and this has earned me no praise by either political party.
LOL!!!
What do you think Daniel Penny did wrong? From the Right's point of view he stopped a madman who was threatening to immanently kill people. The court agreed. What was Charlie Kirk threatening to do such that his killer could be considered a hero?
I think all of those have some complicating factor or nuance that makes it harder to fully compare them to Kirk's assassination. It's why I mentioned wanting an unambiguous example, like where someone innocent gets killed soley for their beliefs or nonviolent advocacy. The only ones I can think of are like, synagogue attacks by neo-nazis? The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. maybe (a comparison that certainly won't ruffle any feathers)?
I think probably not that many people on the left would agree with you that those are definitely so complicated as to justify how (some) people responded to them. Although we can throw in "that time people mocked the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband" if you want something closer to the same shape.
(Also I don't think January 6th is very nuanced. People shouldn't be lauding it. It, much more directly than some of the others, normalizes political violence.)
Honestly I think even assassinations of politicians aren't the same shape or without nuance. What I mean is that in some sense, in some limit case the assassination of particularly bad politicians, especially in non-democratic situations, could possibly be justified. There is a steelman for the assassination of a politician based on how evil they are; while there are still some pacifists who are staunchly against killing even the worst of tyrants, for most people it's a question of magnitude (how bad of a politician do they have to be to justify an assassination).
But I struggle to find a good steelman for the assassination of a political commentator/activist/podcaster/writer even in the worst cases. "This person advocated for X, therefore it is good that they are assassinated" is unjustifiable for pretty much any value of X.
The attack on paul pelosi is a closer comparison (a non-politician attacked purely for his association) but even there I think it matter what the actual critiques are! For example, I'm much more forgiving of critiques in the realm of fog of war, not knowing what the facts are, being skeptical of reported narratives, and careless speculation about motive; it seems like a different category of error than "justifying the attack itself" which I think is uniquely bad.
> (Also I don't think January 6th is very nuanced. People shouldn't be lauding it. It, much more directly than some of the others, normalizes political violence.)
That would be a perfectly reasonable reaction if the left hadn't spent the last seventy years normalising disruptive, destructive and even sometimes violent protests as a reasonable reaction to not getting what you want.
> To be blunt, this sort of toxicity is far more normalized within the mainstream left than most people on the left would like to admit or acknowledge.
I feel pretty comfortable agreeing with this in particular; I think people in general have this sense that their team is civil and the other team is a bunch of psychos and we should probably just admit that the national discourse is terrible all around, equal parts stupid and awful regardless of the actual point being made.
I'm not sure I follow what your definition of authoritarianism is.
I would never claim that all of Charlie's critics are celebrating his demise, or most of them, but I will be frank: It is clear to me that it's a LOT of people, a lot more than a small cabal of the incredibly online. I was DM'd by a person I last spoke with 10+ years ago to gloat about his demise. There is an apartment complex across the street from our HQ, and somebody was playing Bella Ciao from their balcony to disrupt the ongoing prayer vigil at our front entrance. I screenshotted the front page of Reddit the day of the killing and the #2 thread on r/all was "Obituary of a hateful douche." I saw endless "he deserved it" takes all over the comments that were well-upvoted.
Several of my friends have told me about losing friends over this because they were celebrating or justifying the murder -- these were not "too-online" people, but rather people they knew in real life. Several fall into the box of "normal liberal women."
It is a very large number of people treating this as either good or at minimum justified and I will not be convinced otherwise.
Okay. I'm not trying to fight with you about this. I'm just trying to put forth a more hopeful perspective, for what it's worth. I think a lot of people say and do shitty stuff when something is the hot-button political issue of the day. I think they get a bit whipped up and don't really think very clearly. I'm sorry that you're in the middle of that. I hope it doesn't shake your faith in humanity too much.
Most people do not believe political violence is justified (https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/survey-results/daily/2025/09/11/0d4bd/3) and I strongly suspect a lot of the people acting like garbage right now will probably feel differently when this is no longer one of the main news stories.
Moreover, I think sh**'s just kinda crazy right now and I think there's a real chance of a vicious cycle of escalation if we spend too much time focusing on the worst things people do in politics, or in response to politics. Obviously I can appreciate how empty that must sound to you in this context. I don't think there's any justification for somebody killing your friend. I don't think there's any justification for people celebrating it. People can be pretty trash sometimes. That's not all they are, though. Please do your best to take care of yourself and those around you right now. I think it's possible you might feel very tempted to come to a forum like this one and engage with people and that might not necessarily end up being very helpful.
I apologize if that sounded hostile to you personally, I did not intend it that way. But I did want to reply because I do feel like I'm going through a big push by a lot of people to obscure/deny what I saw play out with my own eyes. I want it to be clear that a LOT of people did celebrate this. It angers me and it frightens me.
No, I think that's totally fair. And that's super gross and I don't begrudge you feeling any way about it; I've never had to deal with something like that and I'm sure it's a nightmare.
Personally I think that kind of the root problem facing the world in general and the US in particular is that we've gotten to the point where this stuff is all so predictably bad, that people react this way without really thinking, and that that behavior is aided and amplified by our communication platforms, and it gets normalized, and it spirals. It really plays to people's worst instincts.
My partner has been reading Stanley Milgram's "Obedience To Authority", about his famous electric shock experiment, and one thing I've always taken from that is that it's trivial to get people to commit horrible acts (in that case, pretty much literal murder).
One way to look at that is that everybody is basically scum. Another way to look at that is that sometimes people do awful stuff even if they're basically normal, decent human beings at heart. I can't tell you which one of those is true.
+1
I think a lot of people say horrible things in an ill-considered moment. But before, they said it at the bar and their buddies all winced and said "Jesus, Fred, dial it back a notch!" Now, they say it on social media, they get upregulated by the algorithm because their outrage-inducing content is sticky, and there's a permanent record for their future cancellation.
And in his name the pogroms will begin.
"Miller did not specify any specific groups. He vowed to “use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”
He added they would do it “in Charlie’s name.”"
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-presidency-charlie-kirk-repercussions-09-15-25#cmflcegbv00053b6oq4234yye
And that's a good thing because disrupting leftist terrorist networks and patronage networks who want to bring about anti-white race-communism increases human flourishing and reduces human harm. Thank goodness we have people like JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk.
Are they going to disrupt any actual terrorist networks? Do we have evidence of some sort of shadowy leftist conspiracy arming and training the shooter? Or are they just going to harass a bunch of random journalists for the crime of truthfully reporting what Charlie Kirk said?
(I never thought I'd see conservatives cheering on a government crackdown on "hate speech," but that's exactly what Pam Bondi just promised.)
Yes they are going to disrupt actual terrorist networks. There is evidence of leftist terrorist ideology radicalising the shooter and causing him to carry out the attack, in the same way that in many cases there is evidence of Islamic terrorist ideology radicalising islamic terrorists and causing them to carry out attacks. Whether journalists will be harrassed depends on whether there is evidence of them inciting murder and suporting terrorism.
Pam Bondi's comments about hate speech are a mistake and she'll likely be forced to retract them. The problem is terrorism.
There is some evidence to that effect, yes. There was much more evidence for a Communist conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert key American institutions in the 1950s, And indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that one was true. Yet the populist demagogue of a politician who rose to lead the great crusade to rid America of Communist influence, failed to disrupt any actual Communist networks except by dumb luck because he really, really sucked at figuring out who the bad guys actually were. We had to wait for his successors to actually get anything useful done, far later than we should have.
Why do you imagine that Donald Trump and his crack team of yes-men will do any better than Joseph McCarthy? The recent Hyundai arrests, for example, look like the same sort of pathology at work. So I'm not expecting much good to come of this.
>Why do you imagine that Donald Trump and his crack team of yes-mien will do any better than Joseph McCarthy? The recent Hyundai arrests, for example, look like the same sort of pathology at work. So I'm not expecting much good to come of this.
Ouch! Thanks for the heads-up. Aargh. In November 2024 I viewed Trump as the marginally lesser evil, but I really wish his administration wasn't so frequently _sloppy_ .
Obviously, the winning strategy is to have a buffoonish yet popular demagogue lead the great crusade against foreign infiltration, with a quiet followup team to get the actual useful work done!
Time to fire up my Kalshi and Manifold. Soon as I find out who those followup teams are.
(Oh, and I'm assuming there's enough market demand for a Joseph Welch that the problem of finding one will solve itself.)
Suppose McCarthy had a 20% chance of being successful at purging communism. Suppose the Trump admin is less competent and in a worse position than McCarthy so only have a 10% chance of being successful at purging leftist anti-white race communism. That's still an order of magnitude better position than America has been prior to Trump winning in 2024.
Hilarious, the admin busy sobataging USA's trade and weakening the Dollar is going crazy full autoimmune disorder on itself to try to "avenge" the rightful neutralization of a weak specimen who talked shit one time too many and got hit.
Can't wait to see the burning streets.
"two more weeks! this time for sure Drumpf is going to destroy the economy!"
lol
typical, genetic dead-end, resentful mutant babble.
It's not cancel culture, it's accountability culture! Paradox of tolerance! Freeze peach!
It was entirely predictable conservatives would pick up these tools--they're just so useful in bashing enemies!
Also, "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" and "Paradox of tolerance."
I keep telling left wing friends of mine that opposition to free speech will rebound on them eventually. And well here we are (and the Palestine arrests here in the U.K.).
Don't forget a link to that XKCD comic.
As the famous song says, comrades shot by our enemies march in spirit within our ranks.
Besides Miller, many people are *trying* to start the pogroms:
Jesse Watters:
"They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us. What are we gonna do about it?... . Everybody’s accountable … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now. … This is a turning point and we know which direction we’re going.”
Steve Bannon:
“We have to have steely resolve ... Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
Even Trump offered to go after George Soros (??) for RICO (????).
So far it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
>Particularly the sex trade.
Don’t hold your breath.
> someone with no positive qualities.
He's handsome (obviously), rich (~$50 million seems to be the estimate), and powerful (he's governor of California). To say these are not positive qualities strikes me as deranged. Is this the "slave morality" thing again?
I think by "qualities" he meant personality traits and moral standards.
Yes, and those are also subjective. Hence the accusation of "slave morality".
Most people distinguish qualities that are admirable from ones that are merely enviable. While both could be considered "positive" in the broad sense, in context Scott pretty clearly meant admirable ones.
(If the distinction isn't clear to you, it roughly maps to "beneficial to others" vs "only beneficial to you.")
Scott clearly considers wealth to be a material condition rather than an inherent quality, see "[Positive qualities] can get you a billion dollars". It follows that holding political office is disqualified on the same grounds, and he is eliding Newsom's looks in the same spirit of hyperbole as saying Trump has 100% support.
The post is satire.
I understand the endorsement is not sincere, thank you.
Do you? It seems like you asked a question one would not ask knowing the post is intended primarily as comedy.
I see why it might seem that way to you.
Is this the "master morality" thing again?
No idea what that means, but if that's what it is to consider being handsome, rich, and powerful a success, sure.
"Master–slave morality" was a classification Nietzsche came up with. Anytime someone refers to slave morality, they're contrasting it with master morality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality
An acquaintance claims to be interested in being the “Pro” adversary in an experiment to show the legitimacy of astrology to anyone who lacks a Religious commitment to the absence of the supernatural. She claims that a lot of skill is involved in chart-reading, and that she has this skill (I'll grant the implied claim to set aside every Unqualified Fool that may have been taken in by experimentors prior), and was not offended by my pointing out that the sheer power of the Barnum Effect makes anything but the most rigorous and powerful tool (RCTs with blinded graders) a must.
I suggested that if we end up deciding the juice isn't worth the squeeze doing that without institutional support (I am not “in academia”, nor do I have a degree in statistics or sociology or anything remotely related to this topic), an easier yet maybe <em>more</em> powerful alternative for “at least turning heads” in the rationalist and academic communities would be to set up a Polymarket account, place 100+ bets over the course of the next 2 years, and make a profit.
What measures should be taken to make the latter experiment more “head-turning”? The only measure I could think of <em>so far</em> was to have her legal name on the account, with a minimal-entropy handle, to (should the experiment yield a positive result) avoid the appearance of impropriety and defray accusations that she Cheated by simply creating many accounts, placing random or anticorrelaed trades, and only revealing the best-performing account.
Perhaps your acquaintance should try for this prize? https://cfiig.org/
> the sheer power of the Barnum Effect
I didn't know this name, and thought it referred to his "there's a sucker born every minute" quote.
Eastern or Western astrology? Which system of houses? Going to use the asteroids in the 'new' astrology systems or not? Indian astrology takes account of the precession of the equinoxes which might make it a better system for Scientific Testing, Western astrology is a little more symbolic.
Personally I think these kinds of tests are like "we wanted to see if holy water does anything so we used it to water plant seeds versus a control group watered with tap water; result was no significant difference" tests. Well duh no, that's not what holy water is for.
I don't think astrology works in the sense of doing what it claims to do (foretell future events) but rather it's one way of using symbolism to think about interior work.
> Well duh no, that's not what holy water is for.
That seems like a completely inapplicable criticism to the kind of tests I've described, though. The astrologer/interpretor is going to have full freedom in what kind of predictions to make about peoples' lives (in the RCT option) or what questions to wager on (in the Polymarket option), *and* she has already stated that either of these would be reasonable things to attempt.
This is no "[abusing] holy water [by] pouring it on plants" case, unless you would like to claim as an astrologer that the astrologer I've met would Blaspheme by _daring_ to make testable predictions?
Frankly, if any system (east, west, Native American, asteroids, or even magma-flow or galaxy based) works, that would be a reality-shattering revelation. I predict the experiment to “fail”; I seriously expect no outcome besides the Astrologer in question being converted to a Rationalist, or to One Who Copes. Obviously, every other astrologer under the sun will remain unconvinced by this one; but that's just the cost of playing.
Worst case scenario is rather *I* fuck up an experiment's design or execution and render the results moot with no interesting outcome at all.
This is what I mean that "prediction" markets do not really "predict" anything. Most of them are not liquid enough to prevent market manipulation. You would be better off just making very public yet falsifiable (ie specific) claims and posting them here
Kudos for being willing to subject to rigorous analysis, and to her for recognizing she'll needto be be very specific.
ClearerThinking.org set up a challenge last year; not sure of the current status:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/we-re-launching-a-scientific-test-of-astrology-and-anyone-can-participate
> recognizing she'll need to be be very specific.
I thought (and told the astrologer) that RCTs would actually allow detecting signal in even the “vaguest” of claims, with a high enough sample size. Am I wrong here?
It would, after all, be prima facie unfair to exclude an *actual divination* method that happens to have outputs that must be subjectively judged. But—crucially—unlike Christian prayer, where we can't give placebo rosaries or whatever (and even if we found some sect that claims the sanctity of accessories matter, they would have no problem coping a negative result afterwards about how God works in mysterious ways and accepted/blessed the placebo accessories as real anyway due to the faith of the prayors), randomized charts are indisputably fair for statistical analysis.
If I take 100 strangers (or friends of mine who do not know the interpretor), and I give the interpretor 50 real charts and 50 fake charts assigned to these strangers, ask for an interpretation, then have someone (who was blinded to the randomization) work with the interpretor to produce a fair and reasonable itemized summary of each of the interpretations and agree on a reasonable delay (if any) to wait before giving each of these itemized interpretations to the subject, then have the subjects themselves *grade* the items for accuracy with likert scale, wouldn't that be the scientific foot in the door to show the presence/absence of a separation between the ratings by people whose charts were actually read, and the ratings by people who were given interpretations from fake charts (provided the Barnum Effect wasn't so strong that all items were clamped to max)?
Broadly, pre-registered RCT are the gold standard for a good reason. Of course, failure to pre-register just sends you right back to the garden of forking paths (a more charitable phrase than "p-hacking"). But how large does the sample need to be? That depends on the measurement error, and the effect size.
You can use a Likert-style rating and have N independent reviewers decide "how accurate" a statement was. But you should definitely have her go through several rounds of post-dictions and having them get rated, to see just how precise she needs to be to avoid everything getting Barnumed right off the bat. You could use those pre-tests to practice getting specific enough that the statements are actually meaningful. If they're too bland, then your measurement tool is so crappy that your "power" will be garbage anyway. For more, see here:
https://putanumonit.com/2016/04/17/022-power_skeptic/
But if she gets good **AHEAD** of time at writing statements that are actually Likert-divisive, then you could use the variation in the scores to estimate the sample size needed. But off-the-cuff, you're going to need MANY HUNDREDS.
Nice post on effect size at https://datacolada.org/18
As a rule of thumb, "large" effect sizes are "so obvious we didn't need to do the experiment"; things like
- "men are heavier than women"; you can get away with only ~20 samples per condition for things like that.
- A "medium" effect size is things like "people who like eggs eat egg salad more tan those who don't"... going to need 50+ per condition for these
- A "small" effect size is things like "smokers believe smoking is less harmful than non-smokers"... for this you need many hundreds; this is where your astrology results will be, AT BEST.
(notice that most psych studies are run with only handfuls of students... most psych studies are absolute garbage)
What’s she hoping to predict exactly?
idk, various chaotically nonhomogenous shit
for a true RCT, it would be arbitrary claims about the lives of the sample subjects I would select; for the Polymarket quasi-experiment it would just be (allegedly) anything “The Charts” say “The Market” is wrong about
This proposed Polymarket test doesn’t seem to be a test of astrology. It’s a test of whether the astrologer can identify Polymarket markets where the market predictions are wrong, which doesn’t establish anything about astrology in the absence of evidence that the astrologer couldn’t have accomplished the same result without using astrology.
Most people can't just go on Polymarket and make a bunch of money by identifying places where the market predictions are wrong. If this person can, and she claims to be using astrology to do it, it's definitely non-zero evidence that the astrology is actually working.
Maybe she just happens to be a really good forecaster who also wants to pretend astrology works for some reason. But that's somewhat unlikely in its own right.
There’s no way that astrology can predict markets even by its own logic. All human traits that are “influenced” by the stars are influenced individually not in aggregate. It’s like trying to use Myers Briggs to predict an election
> All human traits that are “influenced” by the stars are influenced individually not in aggregate.
What are you basing this claim on? It disagrees with both the person I'm speaking to, and Wikipedia (which does not seem to have been vandalized):
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology?oldid=1311407346#:~:text=human%20affairs-,and%20terrestrial%20events,-may%20be%20discerned
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_astrology?oldid=1307950636#:~:text=similar%20cycles%20of%20change%20observed-,on%20earth%20and,-within%20the%20individual
Although if she CAN actually do this... she should keep it secret, and become fabulously wealthy. Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/808/
What’s the current status of The Bay Area in the rationalist and AI safety communities? Is it still the main hub for rationalists and AI safety research? Do people expect it to stay that way as AI development accelerates? How does the rationalist community relate to the broader Bay Area tech scene? There’s overlap, but tech workers often move for jobs or lifestyle, while rationalists seem more likely to stay put because that’s where the community is, right?
For context: I’ve never been to The Bay and don’t work in tech, but the rationalist/EA community are central to my social life in the town current live in. I’m wondering I should move to The Bay to be closer to the community I identify with.
Rather than attempting to answer your questions directly, I will tell you about my own experience. I won't attempt to describe a causal mechanism by which one event led to the next, but maybe you can infer one. And perhaps my description of how I "eased into" the Bay is also one that can serve as an example that you or others might pilot test a move to the Bay Area.
I have been a SSC/ACX reader since 2017, and regularly attended SSC/ACX meetups in the western Pennsylvania from 2017 - 2025 (becoming the lead organizer in 2021 in the "post-covid" era that also coincided with the transition from "SSC meetups" to "ACX meetups." We got decent turnout (~10 people at normal meetups, 20+ people at the big meetups announced on Scott's blog), with ~half of our regular attendees being SWEs who were in Pittsburgh to work for companies like Google, Duolingo, and Uber ATG (the "self-driving car" unit that was later sold to Aurora).
In June 2024, I attended LessOnline and Manifest in Berkeley, and spent ~2 weeks living in the Bay Area, attending both the big weekend conferences, and smaller weekly Bay Area meetups; I quickly learned that it is not hard to fill up consecutive weekday nights with events like "AI paper book club" or "weekly LessWrong dinner" or "public weekly dinner hosted by the cofounder of Manifund," and I also quickly learned that the East Bay is full of friendly people who are pleasant to talk to even when discussing random personal topics.
In June 2025, I returned to Berkeley for LessOnline/Berkeley and gave several talks about my experience working on educational YouTube videos. The subtext of any talk like this (sometimes elevated to the text when I remember to add a slide at the end to say it) is that "I know a lot about this topic because it's literally my job to care about it, and if you'd like to be my client, you should talk to me afterward," and that led to a series of conversations that led to me working on videos about AI safety for the AI Species YouTube channel. This was a remote working relationship for June/July, and things went well enough during that time that in August I moved to the Bay so that I could continue working on AI safety videos (and be closer to important conversations) happening in that environment.
One of the things I realized during my first forays into "the scene" is that I can overhear and join a conversation about a topic I'm interested, tentatively express my own understanding of the topic with a soft invitation for correction, and someone present who knows more about the subject than I do will say something to either confirm or counter my intuition. (Sometimes that person will be an employee at a frontier AI lab, or someone who is working on AI research, or just someone who has spent more time reading papers than I have.) And then this will repeat maybe half a dozen more times over the course of a night, and theoretically I probably could have gotten most of that signal from being sufficiently curious online, but the communication is much higher fidelity (I'll get random asides that I wouldn't have gotten from just reading the papers), and much higher bandwidth (there's a real sense in which 1 hour of conversation can replace a full day of reading). And then there are some nights when I don't particularly learn much of anything about any of my professional interests and I "just" spend several hours enjoying tacos and pleasant conversation with people who share my values, or (because I have spent a decade working) sometimes I find myself in the position of being the subject matter expert in an area where someone else expresses curiosity.
I will also remark that several of my friends from Pittsburgh are currently working in the Bay Area, falling into the camps of "in SF working for an AI company" or "in Berkeley working on AI research." Some of these are people who were part of the Pittsburgh "rationality community," but the majority of them were just CMU students who moved to the Bay after finishing their PhDs (or bachelor's programs).
I specifically mentioned LessOnline and Manifest which happens May/June, which are the biggest and most public events that draw people to Lighthaven in Berkeley, but you might be able to replicate a smaller version of this experience by attending a smaller event at Lighthaven. Alternatively, if you wish to spend the entirety of November at Lighthaven writing a large volume of blog posts, the Inkhaven Residency is currently accepting applications.
That all sounds sooo awesome. (But the Bay Area is so expensive. Can there not be a cheaper Schelling point? There should be a third-world Schelling point too. Surely not more than a small fraction of Earthlings is allowed to visit, let alone live, in the U.S.)
Not if you want to hang out with the Cool People who are building the Tech Abundance Future. If it somehow transpires that all those people are in say Nairobi, then Nairobi will be about as expensive as San Francisco is now.
The urban Bay Area is a pair of thin, tall corridors along the coastline with the large San Francisco Bay running through the middle of them, boxed in from the north. This is exacerbated by rigid height limits, zoning restrictions, wildlife preserves and other veto points. In my city, you can always tell when the economy is booming because there are construction cranes everywhere. I was in SF when the economy was booming, and saw none.
So yes, much cheaper Schelling points are possible.
The height limits, zoning restrictions, wildlife preserves, and other veto points are there because the Cool People collectively want them there, So they'll be there in any new Cool-People Mecca you manage to set up. If these things do not exist in your city, then the Cool People are not going to move to your city en masse. Which may be a good thing from your perspective, but it's a real limitation for what we're talking about here.
If you can find a flat non-coastal city that isn't bisected by a major river, that would be at least somewhat helpful, but then there's the question of water and transportation access.
I'm not sure who you're talking about, but they sound uncool to me.
> the Cool People who are building the Tech Abundance Future
This seems to be an attempt to conflate (a) the creepy businesspeople pushing AI, always-online telemetry, and other questionable features into products to make them more anti-consumer; and (b) the cool members of the neo-Enlightenment movement who read and write LessWrong essays.
The only connection I can see is if some of the latter decided to hold their nose and join the former in order to afford the high cost of living of the Berkley area. (No, wait...)
I’m a college student in a rural red state where it’s almost impossible to find people to talk about this kind of stuff with. I’ve never been to the Bay Area. It’d be very interesting to me to go to a meetup or something sometime and see what a whole community of these people is actually like
I want to find people who are interesting without being weird and low-status.
I know these people exist. I know that having the ability to discuss interesting ideas doesn't necessarily mean you need to forget how to bathe or form a polyamorous group house.
But somehow it seems to be a weird divot in personality space, so many people set out to start thinking about interesting ideas and somehow always wind up in a polyamorous group house in Berkeley.
If a conversation progresses to deeper things, that inevitably raises the question of what the deepest thing is - the pearl of great price, which men sell all they have to purchase: love, of some sort.
I would point out that in attempting to meet people, explicitly trying to filter for non-weirdness and/or intelligence is a pretty good indicator somebody is weird.
A plague on the neurotypical! It's all smoke and mirrors with you people! I want to cut to the chase! "ARE YOU WEIRD?!!"
I still think the definitive piece on this was written...god bless it, 8 years ago by Sarah Constantine and the Zvi. Links below. I'll quote the Zvi, because his experience and opinions mirror my own:
"Many of our best and brightest leave, hollowing out and devastating their local communities, to move to Berkeley, to join what they think of as The Rationalist Community. They feel comfortable ripping apart those other communities because they think the point of those communities was to feed their best people to the ‘real’ community in Berkeley; when not being careful they use the term ‘rationalist community’ interchangeably with ‘rationalists living in Berkeley’. Once there, they have an increasingly good time and develop new ways to have an increasingly good time, forming a real community. But that ‘rationalist community’ is ‘increasingly ill-named.’ Its central cultural theme is not rationality, or becoming stronger, or saving the world; it is, Sarah reports, an unconditional tolerance for weirdos, a paradise for Bohemians, a place built on warm connections of mutual support for those who don’t fit into broader society.
The rationalists took on Berkeley, and Berkeley won.
Berkeley doesn’t work for us. We work for Berkeley.
Huge, if true.
…And That’s Terrible?
Yes.
This is bad.
This is really bad.
This is unbelievably, world-doomingly bad. It means we’ve lost the mission.
This is taking many of the people most capable of saving the world, and putting them in a culture focused instead on better living. A culture that, rather than enforcing the mission, is encouraging them to lose the mission. A culture that is such a failure in its outward-facing goals that one of its best and brightest is now suggesting that anyone who wants to impact the outside world should do so without the community’s help."
Sarah Constantin's "The Craft is not the Community": https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html
The Zvi "What is rationalist Berkley's community culture":
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/
Yes, this is very important.
I think it is important to keep separate mental buckets for your values. Yes, I want to live in a nice environment. Yes, I want to be rational. Both are things that I want, but they are not the same thing; "living in a nice environment" is not the same as "being rational". At best scenario, both happen at the same time; but they are still not the same thing.
Similarly, I want to have good friends. I also want to have a rationalist community. At best scenario, the good friends happen to be rationalists, and the rationalists happen to be good friends. Still, a "good friend" and a "rationalist" are two different concepts.
When people talk about someone being rationality-adjacent or post-rational or whatever... there is no such thing! It's like saying that "2+2=5" is math-adjacent. Nope, it's just mathematically wrong. A person who says that "2+2=5" may still be a nice person and a good friend. Or they may be an oppressed minority, and pointing out their mathematical mistake may feel like punching down or kicking a puppy. I am not saying that you should stop being friends or provide support to people who say that "2+2=5". But please stop calling them math-adjacent, if you want to keep your individual and collective math skills sharp.
Community is not a project. Or rather, it is a very specific kind of project, unrelated to the Project you had originally in mind. Keep separate mental buckets. Think about some people as a part of the community, but not a part of the Project.
2+2=3 can be valid.
This is what you call "rationality done right"?
In modular arithmetic.
Motte: 2+2=3
Bailey: 2+2=3 in modular arithmetic
If we're doing modular arithmetic, 2+2=3 is valid only in the integers modulo 1, also known as the zero ring. This is the ring where 0 = 1, and so every number is equal to every other number (for every x, 0*x = 1*x, so 0 = x).
If you want to do arithmetic in the zero ring, that's fine! You can do anything you want there, including dividing by zero! But it's a number system where "the universe has imploded," all numbers are equal, and hence all numbers are equally boring. You can't learn any interesting facts about numbers by studying their behavior modulo 1, I'm afraid.
So, is it "Pritzker by a whisker?"
How big is the celebrating Charlie Kirk's death problem in the US? I'm not american, but from a distance it feels like way too many people are very cool with political murder of someone (who seems otherwise nice) just because they disagree with him.
At least three separate memorials to Kirk in different states have been defaced by leftists celebrating and mocking his death.
This does not really answer the question. This seems like a great example of the Chinese Robber fallacy though
Not really. Defacing memorials to someone who was brutally murdered should be rare in absolute terms. There should not be an abundance of cases for the media to highlight.
You’re asking people to doubt media reports, events captured on social media, reports from others about what they have seen, and reactions that they have seen themselves.
I don’t remember the specific articles. Search Kirk Memorial Vandalized on google and you will find many incidents. Also search on X and you’ll find people caught on video doing it.
The overwhelming sentiment I see from the left is "political killings are bad, but I'm not going to pretend I thought Kirk was a good person"
Personally, I find this not a problem whatsoever (I hold the same view). It's sad that Kirk was killed, both as a symptom of rising political violence/murder and because it is sad when anyone dies, but my opinion of him has not changed.
>my opinion of him has not changed.
Good, nobody's asking you to do that.
What people would like is that *maybe* some people, especially teachers nurses and doctors, don't treat people that did have a positive opinion of him like subhuman freaks.
>If they're not deliberately breeching their duties as a healthcare professional
(removed due to lack of confirmation) because their patients were white and/or conservative. That's the kind of thing I had in mind when suggesting they require a higher standard than, say, a Home Depot cashier.
I'm starting to feel like a crazy person because I would've sworn she was fired for it and it was fairly widely reported but now I can't find anything. The closest I can find is a nurse who implied she'd treat them worse but no evidence of actually doing so: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1650756805188428/posts/3892857900978296/
So, no, I'll edit that out. Trying to track it down has been eye-opening in how many nurses have been fired over Tiktoks (quite a few!) and the limits of questions where ChatGPT gets a bit squirrely.
I suspect that it likely *did* go around social media, but the veracity was unconfirmed and now so much has been scrubbed from 2020-2022 that anything left is deep in some unsearchable archive.
>"but I'm not going to pretend I thought Kirk was a good person"
Right, this is exactly the problem. I have not heard any sign that Kirk ever did anything other than virtuous in his personal or professional life. If someone thinks that Kirk was a bad person, they think so purely on the basis of his political views, which were not extreme. If someone thinks that Charlie Kirk was a bad person then they are someone who cannot imagine someone holding normal conservative views and being a good person, which means they've written off half of the society in which they live as being bad people.
That's not a healthy way for a society to be. It's untenable.
Judging someone on the basis of policy views rather than behavior is a big shift in the wrong direction. I noted this back when the New Yorker (iirc) piece came out and accused Scott of talking to "Monstrous people" on SSC.
That said, I think it's fair to count activism type activities against someone. (Although I generally disagree with those doing so here on the object level)
"If someone thinks that Charlie Kirk was a bad person then they are someone who cannot imagine someone holding normal conservative views and being a good person, which means they've written off half of the society in which they live as being bad people."
This happened many years ago. Remember, Clinton made that "basket of deplorables" comment thinking she was basically stating the obvious, not saying something anyone (any REAL person, anyway) could take issue with.
Second, I think separating views entirely from the judgement of a person is silly. If I knew someone (let's call him Bob) who was nothing but kind to me and others in his life, but expressed repeatedly that all people of X ethnicity should be executed, well then I'd say Bob was a bad person. Pretending otherwise would be silly.
I think often views get a pass because they are "indirect" and sure, I'll agree that saying "I think all X should be killed" is on a much different scale than going out and actually doing it. However, I don't agree that it being indirect suddenly makes it perfectly morally neutral.
In the same way, Kirk's views may not been as bad as if he had gone out and done them himself (the "taken care of the way we used to take care of things back in the 50s and 60s" reference to assaulting trans people being a prime example), but that does not mean I have to disregard them completely when judging him as a person.
Separating my reply into two comments since I want to cover two separate aspects
First, Kirk's views were pretty extreme (although not as extreme as someone like Fuentes, but still decently close). Are you at all familiar with them? A quick search shows heavy religious fundamentalism, anti-LGBT, etc. Some views he was known for:
- "Prowling blacks go around for fun to target white people"
- Believed and promoted the 'Great Replacement' theory that
- Birth control makes women angry and bitter and "messes with their brains"
- Abortion is worse than the Holocaust
- Being gay is an "error" and the LGBT pride movement is like encouraging drug addicts
- Doctors who provide gender-affirming care should be imprisoned and have "Nuremberg-style" trials
- Gays "want to corrupt our children" and the legalization of gay marriage was a mistake
- "You cannot have liberty without a Christian population"
- "This is a Christian state"
- Promoted election fraud claims during 2020 election
- Believed the Civil Rights Act was a mistake
- Black people in government positions got there by "taking a white man's spot"
- "Muslims want to import values into the West and seek to destabilize our civilization"
- Mehdi Hasan and Ilhan Omar should be deported from the US
- Biden should receive the death penalty
I don't see most these as moderate whatsoever. If you believe that the average conservative agrees with all or most of these statements then all I can do is hope that you're wrong.
>- "Muslims want to import values into the West and seek to destabilize our civilization"
I wouldn't say "destabilize". "Conquer" is probably closer. And there are non-practicing Muslims who don't do any of this. But many Muslim clergy basically say this themselves.
>"Prowling blacks go around for fun to target white people"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/nyregion/transgender-pepper-spray-attack.html (A twofer!)
>Birth control makes women angry and bitter and "messes with their brains"
Angry and bitter is a stretch, it's well-founded that any hormonal treatment has an effect on mood though.
>"You cannot have liberty without a Christian population"
Echoing well known extremists John Adams and James Monroe.
>Black people in government positions got there by "taking a white man's spot"
He had a narrow and specific list of three people who had admitted they benefited from the the dreadfully unpopular and unconstitutional policy that is affirmative action. Not a general statement.
Isn't it so strange you can't even critique him honestly?
Yes, I object to that statement as well for the same reason. Both statement imply a more systemic/large problem by leaving the actual amount of people doing the crime purposefully vague. It also does nothing to narrow down the factors describing the person other than their race - a statement like "prowling Neonazis/KKK members target black people for fun" I'd object to less, though I'd still prefer an actual qualifier of the percentage/amount of them actually doing it.
The statement "Lightning strikes many people every year", is technically true but misrepresents the scale by using the vague descriptor "many". Many could mean 20 people a year, could mean thousands, could mean millions. The scale matters, a lot, and leaving it vague allows the listener to fill in the blank based on their own biases.
I think the number of people willing to actively celebrate the murder is low, but the number of people with a gnawing sense of satisfaction somewhere in the back of their minds is worryingly high.
The number of people who say things like "Well of course I don't condone it. But then again, he did say X, Y and Z. Which kinda makes you think, doesn't it?" is too darn high. Especially because most of these people had no strong concept of Charlie Kirk a week ago, and now they're suddenly able to drop six of the dumbest things that Charlie Kirk said in his whole life into any conversation.
Are you claiming that there does not exist a level at which a person’s behavior can be deemed to be corrosive enough to society that his demise can be considered a boon? I don’t personally know enough about him to know one way or another but most of the, “my feelings are conflicted,” takes feel, of that nature, to me. It feels to me, perfectly reasonable to regret someone’s demise while simultaneously wondering if perhaps this is not entirely black and white.
I think it's obviously true that there are people for whom it would be a net benefit to humanity if they died, but: there are many, many fewer people who would benefit humanity if their demise were by means of a high profile political assassination; and if someone who is in the former category dies by means of the latter method, I think it's very plausible that it's a bigger benefit to humanity for everyone else to deplore the manner of their demise than to focus on whether or not they were someone whose all-else-equal demise would have been a benefit.
This is a better articulation of my thoughts than my own statement. I did not intend to conflate their wondering how "black and white" it was with their actually articulating this. That it is okay to be conflicted. It is okay to point out his flaws. But that one ought to leave the statement of ones feelings at, "regret."
Yeah, I don't think one is obliged to ignore the things that might factor in one's decision as to whether the person in question benefits humanity by their absence; but discussion of that issue specifically *at best* adds nothing.
>Are you claiming that there does not exist a level at which a person’s behavior can be deemed to be corrosive enough to society that his demise can be considered a boon?
I think it exists.
We should also, *absolutely* never discuss what that level is, and *absolutely* no one should ever have that level be set to "guy says things I don't like."
Edit: Angela Davis, Bill Ayers, Paul Erlich, Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun have all been massively net-negative for humanity, far worse than Charlie Kirk. Given the first two are actual convicted terrorists saying they should've been sentenced to capital punishment is rather different than people whose primary sin is to have written incredibly evil books.
And yet! If someone murdered any of them, that would be a horrible offense. If anyone said it was good that they were murdered, or focused on calling them and their supporters evil and stupid immediately after the murder, that would be gross and ghoulish and soulless.
> Are you claiming that there does not exist a level at which a person’s behavior can be deemed to be corrosive enough to society that his demise can be considered a boon?
I would modify it slightly to say say there is not a level at which a law-abiding person's behaviour can be deemed corrosive enough that his murder can be considered a boon.
I am struggling to imagine who is supposed to be the left-wing equivalent, the person that I'm supposed to secretly know I'd be happy if they were murdered. Van Jones? Keith Olbermann? George Soros?
“… that I'm supposed to secretly know I'd be happy if they were murdered,” is in complete opposition to what I said. I do not see a point in debating if it is not to be in good faith.
Yes, too many people, but I don't sense it is much different from when Luigi Mangioni shot down a health insurance CEO on the street. Maybe even less now, because the earlier murder seemed too cool across a bit more of the political spectrum, and entailed a lot more nonsense about Mangioni being a hero.
There are people alive today, who would not be otherwise, because UHC got a bit skittish about denying claims after their CEO was brought to justice
For better or worse (hint: it's worse), we have a for-profit health care system. The CEO had a responsibility to his shareholders to maximize share value. The responsibility to the customer is to provide an insurance policy that covers whatever the fine print says it covers (often not much). It's an inhumane system, involving lots of moral hazard, but it's hard to blame the CEO for creating the system, or UHC for maximizing profit.
How do you know this is true? How many more claims did they approve now?
I know this is true because UHC's profit margins shrunk in the aftermath and their shareholders sued them over it.
I don't know the exact number.
Shareholders sued UHC for hiding the losses, not the losses per se.
>UHC's profit margins shrunk in the aftermath
It seems like that could be explained by factors other than a change in the rate of claim approvals.
FWIW I've noticed far fewer people celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder than I noticed lionizing Mangione. This one feels different.
Also one of the murderers is unusually good-looking and the other one isn't.
I couldn't confidently put an estimate on how much of a problem it is; I'm pretty cynical about what the left half of the country will say about any given event so I don't find it that surprising, and I think studies back that up (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231180971). I am darkly amused/disappointed multiple replies are supporting that perception of being completely unhinged about a debate bro being a debate bro.
Was he perfectly kind and gentle? No, of course not. Was he more of an asshole than the average leftist debate bro, or worse for society than, say, any ~progressive-liberal getting famous for their crazy books and articles in 2020? No, of course not.
Respectfully, I think citing the study "Political (Meta-)Dehumanization in Mental Representations: Divergent Emphases in the Minds of Liberals Versus Conservatives" to explain why you feel very cynical about half the country is pretty ironic (regardless of which half you pick).
I wouldn't say it's why I feel cynical. I feel cynical from personal experience of how selective people are in their concerns, and I added that in for the people that like to have Expert Citations about such things.
People celebrate death all the time. E.g. when they killed Bin Laden, Americans were delighted.
>who seems otherwise nice
Ah, there's your problem. He wasn't nice, he was a hate-filled, violence-loving extremist. He told women to "submit to your husbands." He called trans people an "abomination" and a "throbbing middle finger to God," and called for "Nuremberg-style trials" for doctors who let trans people be trans. He said that watching a public execution would "make my day better."
Murdering Charlie Kirk was of course murder. It was a crime, and on top of that it was idiotic. I also think it's foolish to publicly celebrate (normalizing domestic political murder won't end well for anyone). But I'm not going to pretend it's weird to hate someone who hated you and your loved ones and wanted to use state power to violently strip you of your rights (even if he used a calm voice).
Can you provide evidence of his hate filled violence loving extremism? The other use in this thread linked to what he believes counts, but those examples do not make their case at all.
Imo some amount of the people celebrating aren't actually endorsing murder, but do think it's fine to make jokes, or to use it to make the far-right scared and try to show them how unpopular their views are. Or are just annoyed at how this evil murder victim gets a quadrillion times more attention and sympathy and expectation of grief than any random nameless stranger, or victims of school shootings, or the recent 11 victims in a boat that Trump murdered, or people being genocided in Gaza with US tax dollars, etc.
>Or are just annoyed at how this evil murder victim gets a quadrillion times more attention and sympathy and expectation of grief than any random nameless stranger
Like George Floyd!
>people being genocided in Gaza with US tax dollars
Not a genocide. If you want words to continue meaning things instead of people ignoring them, much like "fascist," stop overusing them for things they're not.
There is an official definition of genocide and ample evidence that Israel is guilty of it. In particular, attacks on civilian water and healthcare infrastructure necessary for life, intentional destruction of homes, imposed starvation, indiscriminate killing of civilians with no military objective, statements from high ranking officials demonstrating genocidal intent.
I understand it is difficult for many people to accept, but I encourage you to look into the evidence. It is impossible to take an honest look at what is happening and deny the truth at this point. Look at part 3 of the definition.
https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Like most people who debates these genocide deniers, you're making the mistake of focusing on the wrong part of the definition of "genocide".
"Genocide" requires:
(1) acts of violence as you described...
(2) ...with the intention to destroy a people.
Genocide deniers have a problem with (2) because they don't understand how the reported 66k deaths could ever add up to the destruction of an entire people. That makes genocide sound like a crazy notion.
What they're missing is that you can destroy a people by driving that people out of their land, which fits (2), and such is the project openly endorsed by Trump, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
At this point the deniers will object to a definition that includes driving out, even though it is, in fact, the established definition. Fine then, let's put aside the word "genocide". Let's just say "ethnic cleansing". It's still indefensible.
Then the next objection will be "all wars create refugees". My answer to that:
(a) The difference between evacuation and ethnic cleansing lies in whether displaced people are allowed to return when the crisis ends. Will Palestinians who leave the Strip ever be allowed to return? We all know Israel will steal the land for settlers and never let any Palestinian return.
(b) One thing is refugees as an accidental byproduct of war, another thing is when your tactics are meant to maximize refugees. According to those who say it's a genocide, Israel tactics are designed to drive out the population, they're not merely designed to defeat Hamas. Israel is trying hard to make Gaza impossible to live in, so people will have to leave.
(c) Most importantly, according to those who say it's a genocide, Israeli leaders have admitted to getting rid of the population being the goal.
How does driving people out of a particular region entail "destroying" them? They still exist.
It is weird to me that there's no numbers on any of those. Incredibly loose definition, practically any murder could be a genocide if one wanted to name it that way.
Surely killing one person for their identity, which may be a hate crime, would be absurd to call it a genocide. What's the minimum number for it to be considered genocide? Ten people? One hundred? One percent of the pre-genocide population? Ten percent?
The Palestinian and Gazan populations have *only* grown since 1948! What Israel has done to them can be named many many bad things, but calling it genocide weakens the word from being an ultimate crime against humanity to being whatever the speaker wants it to be.
Edit:
>attacks on civilian water and healthcare infrastructure necessary for life
As I recall Hamas quite famously testified *they* tore up civilian water infrastructure to turn pipes into missiles (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57396819).
> The Palestinian and Gazan populations have *only* grown since 1948!
Yeh the claim of genocide is from the last two years. Clearly.
Would you say that Ukraine is committing a genocide against Russians? They are certainly killing members of the group, as well as causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group. So twice met on "any".
Intent is trickier, much as it always is.
I think you are missing a key part of the definition: "...with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"
I'm not aware of that happening against Russians to any significant degree. If it is happening I'm open to seeing the evidence. I do remember some reports of suppression of the Russian language and other general discrimination in the ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine. Which is worthy of concern, but nothing remotely like the brutality currently seen in Gaza and the West Bank.
Er, no. These comments are hardly serious.
>Like George Floyd!
He wasn't personally a hero. He happened to be the guy that a cop murdered on camera. You'll answer "well Kirk happened to be the guy that a politically-motivated assassin murdered on camera"—I agree, that's why I'm one of the ones giving him more attention and sympathy than I do nameless strangers.
>Not a genocide. If you want words to continue meaning things
You misunderstood; I'm not hyperbolizing. Feel free to read the arguments of leading human rights groups like B'Tselem and Amnesty International (who concluded it's the crime of genocide) or Human Rights Watch (who concluded it's at least the crime of "extermination" and may be the crime of genocide).[1] Or read the arguments presented to the ICJ.[2] There are even op-eds making the argument in both NYT and WaPo (newspapers you can hardly consider biased towards Palestinians).[3] Or the recent resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.[4]
[1] https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide; https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/; https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza
[2] https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
[3] https://archive.is/ffCfQ; https://archive.is/yJakB. Ofc they also published op-eds againt this conclusion: https://archive.is/wDAnE; https://archive.is/NW6kE
[4] https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf
None of these arguments are at all persuasive.
If you liberally interpret the UN definition, every Palestinian mother who yells at her own child is committing genocide. But when people hear genocide they think Israel is killing all the Palestinians, which couldn't be further from the truth. It's a really unfortunate Newspeak situation.
Israel is indeed attempting to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza
>who concluded it's at least the crime of "extermination"
How in the actual name of sanity and words meaning things can it be extermination when the Palestinian population and the population of Gaza has increased, continuously, over the last several decades?
It is gross! It is violent! It is a tragedy! It is violent authoritarianism! What Israel has done to Palestine can be named many many bad things, but by no stretch of a sane man's mind is it extermination or genocide.
>Or the recent resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars
You mean the organization that literally anyone can join for $125 and sound official in their condemnations? Well, they could before that little fact when viral: https://genocidescholars.org/join/
they've slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza and have openly expressed their intent to kill the rest
what you're doing is morally akin to holocaust denial, if not worse, because at least the holocaust is over
>much like "fascist," stop overusing them
I'll charitably assume you're repeating something you heard, instead of being bad-faith yourself.
Trump's a brutal authoritarian, trying to destroy checks and balances, who wants to be above the law instead of under the Constitution, who had legal immigrants kidnapped to an El Salvador torture prison, who had other legal immigrants kidnapped for using their free speech, who's talking about stripping Americans of citizenship, who wants to use the military to crack down on US cities, whose VP openly said "I don't give a shit what you call it" about being told it's criminal to murder 11 people on a boat, etc.
When someone says "don't call them fascists," it's because they want to silence any and all ability to ever warn about fascism before it's too late.
There's this amazing word, "authoritarian," that I will never ever complain that anyone use for Trump and require tying him to a 1940s Eurocentric ideology for the sake of guilt-by-association.
My belief is that people *don't* use authoritarian instead because they don't really oppose authoritarianism; they want to narrow it down to a kind of authoritarianism they're willing to oppose.
> Like George Floyd!
Agreed. I’m particularly annoyed that I know about either Floyd or Kirk here in Britain
> Not a genocide
I mean it is, except for the people who think genocide is killing absolutely everybody.
It is not. If anyone is guilty of genocide it is Hamas and maybe Egypt. Israel is killing approximately the minimum number of civilians possible under these circumstances, for a country that wants to win the war they are in. Israel feeds the Gazan population as well as providing their water and energy, etc. That's not genocide- quite the opposite.
"Israel is killing approximately the minimum number of civilians possible under these circumstances"
...that's what Israel says.
Any calculation of the ratio of civilian casualties to total casualties is entirely dependent on the word of Israel.
Such and such number of "terrorists" have been killed, says who? Israel.
Of course Israel will say that a high proportion of casualties are combatants. What else do you expect them to say?
(And of course the claim that Israel is providing aid to Gaza is a 180 degree reversal of the truth, as Peter Defeel noted).
Israel is stopping aid from getting into Gaza. This isn’t Israel supplying aid but blocking it. I have no idea why Egypt is mentioned, although I’ve seen people argue that they are responsible for not allowing Palestinians in. So the obligation is on Egypt to allow in the Palestinians fleeing genocidal destruction but not in Israel to stop said destruction.
It's a hell of a genocide where the population has been continually increasing.
What's wrong with "submitting to your husbands"? Of course, one must not do this blindly, but one ought to submit to a loving husband whose will is that the wife be better off.
Yes, it also works the other way. A man must submit to his wife, or he will certainly regret it.
> A man must submit to his wife,
The traditional teaching is for men to LOVE their wives.
> Yes, it also works the other way. A man must submit to his wife
Funny how, when someone is talking about women needing to submit, this is usually left out
I think you've misunderstood what "submit" means.
What, exactly, do you interpret it to mean here? Arrk Mindmaster's interpretation is the one I am familiar with.
I saw a few content creators I follow condone it or mock his death. A surprising number of people I know in real life softly implied that he had it coming. eg. "The only thing significant thing here is the irony of a gun supporter killed by a gun." "He wasn't just giving an opinion. Trans rights are not up for debate." Overall I would say: enough to be concerning, but not accurately represented by the most extreme takes you will see highlighted online.
I've heard that from people I know in real life, too. I'm saddened.
The first thing I saw when I logged in after hearing about Kirk’s murder was a post from an old friend reading only: “A good start.”
Perhaps that was the worst of it, but I would say I absolutely saw a lot of online glee from people I knew (not bots), sometimes muted by a halfhearted caveat, in the immediate aftermath. Often it was a somewhat restrained “well, he made his bed, and now he’s lying in it.” All stuff that at the very least would have been seen as crass or in bad taste to say about a murder victim in most contexts.
That said, I later saw a countercounterreaction; as more and more Kirk-shakes-hands-with-Jesus AI images appeared, as Trump called for a prayer vigil, etc., more restrained people started saying, “Whoa, whoa! Kirk was actually a bad guy. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” It rapidly became hard for me to tell what people were reacting to: Kirk’s life, Kirk’s death, or others’ responses to Kirk’s life or death.
Personally: I generally try not to celebrate others’ misfortunes or deaths (I sometimes fail at this); I am always 100% opposed to violence in response to speech; I’m aware there’s a long tradition of joking around after a tragedy (“how many space shuttle astronauts fit in a car” etc.) and I don’t really want that to die out under some kind of chilling propriety; finally, please never make AI art of a dead celebrity meeting Jesus, as the proper medium for such scenes is painting on velvet.
"Kirk-shakes-hands-with-Jesus AI images"
More or less offtopic, but this I find really funny actually, because, well, that's what's happening right now in heaven, isn't it?, and shows therefore what's so weird about Christians:
There is never ever a reason to grieve or worry about anything, *ANYTHING*, because God has absolutely everything, *EVERYTHING*, under control. If he exists, he is f*€#&@g GOD! And still they grieve and worry about so many things. As if they wouldn't believe any of this and are just saying it.
Jesus mourned and wept alike.
That should have prompted you to evaluate the coherence of that whole story, but apparently, it didn't.
Maybe you give a try now?
Indeed, we don't mourn like the pagans do, without hope.
But family and friends are going to miss him, and that's sad.
Being spiritual beings with biological brains means we don't always emote in line with our eternal perspective.
They could at least try a little bit harder to believe in their own faith. At least Muslims believe in paradise enough to sacrifice themselves for the cause.
That probably would have been the mature thing to do, but I found (in the days when I used to respond to my friends' excesses) that I am spectacularly bad and counterproductive at confronting them. So I just looked on and kept mum, like a man at the freak show.
I think the vast majority of normal folks see it as a terrible thing. One big surprise for me has been the number of tech industry figures who have celebrated it, including the European Tech Evangelist for Red Hat (although even most of the industry sees it as terrible). You would think they would have more sense.
> including the European Tech Evangelist for Red Hat
To be fair that's hardly a household name type position.
> most of the industry sees it as terrible
I doubt this claim.
The views they've publicly expressed over the last ten years, the views they HAVEN'T expressed that they would have if they were held by more than a vanishingly small minority, and their reaction to the views that are being expressed right now.
That’s funny because there’s a growing panic about the tech bro right.
It's also funny because "the views they HAVEN'T expressed" is just about the most colorectal citation I've ever seen in my life.
"Source is- 'I made it up.'"
Indeed, and that's truly farcical to anyone who has been on the receiving end of their "trust and safety" policies.
How many people do you estimate to be in the industry that you consider three people a significant fraction of them?
I've been too busy offline to check very thoroughly, and what little I see from the left was either flatly opposed to murder (e.g. Newsom, Harris) or so unconfirmed in provenance that I instantly assume it's a bot, possibly one designed to stir the pot.
There are a few communities of people I know personally that I haven't talked to in a while; I could check. Progressive, that is; I don't expect any celebrating among the people I know on the right, not even of the "hell yea, it's backlash time" flavor. I expect almost no celebrating among my friends on the left, either.
So this is a sort of no-op opinion, but I'm sharing it anyway because it might be a common one. Most people I know barely know who Charlie Kirk was, and a growing number of us have tuned out social media, so responses tend to be "that's terrible, but I don't know him or anyone close to him".
Being deep in the heart of blue America with many progressive friends and colleagues, I've been struck by how different the IRL response has been from what I see reported to be the online response. [Having deleted FB/Twitter/Instagram years ago and never tried TikTok, can't say firsthand about the latter.] It's so stark that makes me wonder how much of the online "glad the fascist bastard is dead" stuff is actually bots.
I was surprised in the other way (also in the heart of blue America with most of my colleagues being progressives). I assumed it was the usual online-only crap, maybe bots or russians, until I heard some coworkers suggesting that he deserved it.
>It's so stark that makes me wonder how much of the online "glad the fascist bastard is dead" stuff is actually bots.
Probably a substantial amount of *volume*, but afaict people like Matthew Dowd, Karen Attiah, Ilhan Omar, etc are confirmed to not be bots, no matter how much they act like algorithms programmed to promote outrage and hate.
That sucks that Ilhan Omar said "glad the fascist bastard is dead." That's a really evil thing to say. Could you link a source where she says that?
You've caught me, I didn't take the quote to be exact! That's drawing the lines rather narrowly, don't you think?
https://nypost.com/2025/09/11/us-news/rep-ilhan-omar-cruelly-stomps-on-conservative-activist-charlie-kirks-legacy-full-of-s/
There's what she actually said, she's still a ghoul and a horrible, hateful liar of a representative.
The issue isn’t merely that you put quotations around something that wasn’t an actual quote, it’s that, literal quote or not, you clearly claimed that Omar said she was glad that Kirk was dead, a claim you have provided no evidence for but haven’t clearly disavowed either.
In her interview on Zeto, Omar said, “It was really mortifying to hear the news, to see the video. You know, all I could think about was his wife, his children — that image is going to live forever.”[1] You cite that interview as evidence that Omar is a bad person, but link to a New York Post article, which predictably does not include that quote, instead of linking to a somewhat more neutral site like The Hill. While the full interview is probably reserved for subscribers, you can read or view a substantial excerpt here[2]. If you stand by your assessment of Omar after reading the quotes in context, we will have to agree to disagree.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5499924-ilhan-omar-criticizes-republican-attacks/
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/09/12/rep_ilhan_omar_trump_has_incited_violence_against_me_charlie_kirk_supporters_are_full_of_sht.html
(There is an error in the transcript at the second link. The statement that Kirk called George Floys a “scumbag” was an interjection by Hassan, not a statement by Omar.)
"There are a lot of people who are talking about him [Kirk] just wanting to have a civil debate, These people are full of s— and it’s important for us to call them out while we feel anger and sadness."
and
"There is nothing more f—ed up than to pretend that his words and actions haven’t been recorded and in existence for the last decade or so"
are the statements causing concern?
All but one of the people I've talked to (tending to be younger and left-leaning, often personally affected by Trump's funding cuts) are not celebrating the death; the one person who's celebrating the death is a centrist (like, wanted Nikki Haley to be president, agrees with Kirk on quite a few issues) with some odd political views, not any kind of leftist like you would expect. It's definitely widely discussed among people I know (again, disproportionately in their 20s and politically engaged). A minority of people seem to have mixed emotions, like that it's partially his fault for being anti gun control, but still think that his death is a bad thing. Thinking Republicans have gone too far in the Charlie Kirk hagiography or are using it as an excuse to threaten Democrats or rein in free speech or something like that is pretty common. People seem split (haven't talked to enough people about this to know the exact split) on whether it's okay to make flippant jokes about his death, but not because of Kirk specifically, just because people disagree on making jokes about dead public figures.
There's definitely a small but sometimes loud minority who are okay with political murder, but it seems like there's also a lot of people taking some of the other reactions I described out of context and using it to overexaggerate the support for political murder.
> Thinking Republicans have gone too far in the Charlie Kirk hagiography
Fuck man, they haven't even declared a public holiday for him yet, let alone named a street after him in every city.
I am a member of a political discussion organization at a state college in Colorado. We had a discussion the day of the shooting.
Most people condemned the violence, but at the same time said that they vehemently oppose(d) Charlie Kirk. One person said his death was a good thing because he was a fascist, comparing Kirk to Joseph Goebbels. I pointed out that even Goebbels received a trial. He was the only one with this view though. Another girl pointed out that she was disturbed by posts online celebrating Kirk's death. The club overall has a strong left lean.
Overall I'd say it's not a big issue, the people celebrating his death are mostly just a minority online. Even the people who dislike him are still disturbed by the way he died.
Not important to the overall point, but Goebbels killed himself, and never received a trial.
Good catch. Was *going* to receive a trial. And this was right after a war!
Do you know why these people think he was a fascist? I saw some of his conversations and he doesn't come across as a fascist.
I find it helpful to assume that people that use the word "fascist" when discussing any group after, say, the 1950s is at best deeply unserious and can't be trusted.
I don't think he ever advocated for the establishment of an autarchic state in modern day Italy, but we have to understand that 'fascist' nowadays is commonly used as a catch-all term for right-wing authoritarians.
Given how he advocated for a society in which women should be subservient to men because the bible says so (just a sample of his views) I don't find it hard to see how he could be perceived as a right-wing authoritarian.
I have not met or heard anyone celebrating in real life. The only people to mention it at all were my girlfriend after she saw the news on her phone, “who’s Charlie Kirk?” and a Korean co-worker “Did you see that guy get shot…America’s crazy”
I'm on several group texts and email chains with Democrats planning for the next election and there hasn't been a single word about it. Even from those I expected to let me down.
Anecdata from a Canadian university: everyone who talks about it (a surprising number of people!) is worried/dismayed about political violence. Quite a few people don't have any sympathy for him personally, but even they think the killing was wrong and will make things worse. I haven't heard anyone say it was a good idea.
I haven't heard the killing mentioned at all by people I know personally - the closest was an elderly neighbor who had CNN playing in another room while we visited, with of course wall to wall coverage, which we ignored while we watched my three year old investigate a grandfather clock. I guess this may mark a turning point where I am no longer young enough to be 'with it-' I'm not in any group chats to speak of, which is where most of the other commenters are seeing non-algorithm-driven evidence that there is an outpouring of support for political killing.
Ever since the last link roundup I’ve been looking through my books to find a poem similar to “The Yeti Speaks,” and I finally found it. It’s “The Cynic’s Soliloquy; Her Reply” by Bonita C. Miller, from 1974. I got it from David Orr’s book on poetry, Beautiful and Pointless. “Yeti” is better, I think.
Wit: howl on, gibe: rate the semen
Of thy men “waste.” Stedfast—be low!
Be foul, men, ever. No moralist and
Ho! nor able to go do good.
--------
With Ow! long I berate these men.
Oft hymen was tested fast below.
Befoul me never. No; moral I stand,
Honorable to God. O, good.
How much time do you typically spend writing and editing blog post? I tend to build up a lot of drafts and unstructured ideas which I'd like to share as proper posts, but I tend to get bogged down or stuck in decision paralysis.
Should I just set a 60 to 90 minute timer, force myself to write as much as possible in that time, and publish whatever comes out?
On Substack I have 3x more drafts than published blog articles.
On LessWrong it is about 1:1.
I don't have as much uninterrupted time as I would like to have, and continuing an article on another day feels extremely difficult. I am no longer in the same mood, I don't have the same mental picture as when I started writing it...
Maybe the answer is writing shorter articles, dunno.
"How much time do you typically spend writing and editing blog post?"
I have a personal on-line journal (which is similar to a blog, but probably more similar to the 'personal web pages' from the last 1990s) where I split things into long and short form entries. The short form entries I spend less time on. Sometimes it can be just a few minutes because I tripped over something that I found interesting or amusing (e.g. $470 Louis Vuitton sells an iPhone Case for $470) or insightful (e.g. All-You-Can-Eat Buffets Cannot Afford Excellent Food ... which applies to streaming services, too). Some of these I spend up to about five hours on (though that is rare). More common is well under an hour. Then I have long form entries. These can take from a few hours to 10s of hours.
I find that the split helps because I feel that I'm getting *something* done with the short form entries while I'm working on my long form essays.
Try: https://dynomight.net/danger.html
How do I have a memorable trip to Los Angeles?
I visited in 2010, but barely remember it because nothing great happened while I was there. I want things to be different this time.
Different strokes ... It's hard to know what will ring with people and what will also "be a memory".
Several people are saying Little Tokyo. I find the Little Tokyo depressing personally so to each their own. There's way more Japanese activity and authticity in other parts of the city but they aren't "Little Tokyo" with it's 1 or 2 small walking streets. If you do go downtown, there's Grand Central Market, Olivera Street, Philippe's, The Broad. Also if you're down there you can drive on "Grand Lower" which is a short section of street underground that's been used in like 30+ movies for car chases (Terminator, Batman, Heat, ...). It's a moment drive by but still....
There are also several neighborhoods where all the signs are Chinese, or Vietnamese, or Korean for miles and miles. But none of them have specific "destinations" but they are full of restaurants with the "real deal".
There is Disneyland. If Disney doesn't turn you off it is a unique destination (I'm a fan). Universial Studios is an actual studio in LA and has a studio tour where the other locations (Florida, Singapore, Japan) are just amusement parks. There's also the Warner Bros Studio tour which is even more of a "studio" tour as they'll take you on the sets of Friend, NCIS, The West Wing (or at least they did when I went ~2 years ago). They don't have any tour attractions like Universal though. There's 2 other amusement parks if that's your thing. Knott's Berry Farm, and Magic Mountain.
There's various beaches, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach are highlights to me but if you already live near an ocean then maybe not? Venice Beach is a sight. You can walk the boardwalk. There may be an event on a weekend. You can rent a bike and ride along the beach ~5 miles north or 15 miles south. Take low-elevation hang gliding lessons at Dockweiler Beach https://www.windsports.com/ That would certainly be memorable. Maybe less memorable but stil beautiful are the Korean Friendship Bell (not the bell itself but the view from the park) and the Terranea Resort which has a restaurant on the cliffs facing Catalina Island.
It's still on my list but there's the Getty Villa (needs reservations) and also "The Getty" (might also need reservations).
I agree with some of the other recommendations. The Huntington Library (it's a huge complex with gardens, museums, a mansion). I'm not sure how much they cover it but Mr. Huntington in some ways, made LA as he owned/built much of the huge transit system LA used to have and many of the cities started around train stations.
Next year there will be this: https://www.lucasmuseum.org/
I really liked The Last Bookstore. I also liked Guggenheim LA but apparently it is no more, alas.
Try taking an Esotouric tour.
See live comedy or music at one of many classic venues. Eat great ethnic food. See a movie at a classic theater. There are always things happening.
> Eat great ethnic food
This is the trouble with globalisation, "great ethnic food" is the same everywhere, or at least in every major first-world city. So what's the point of going anywhere?
The Mexican food, specifically, in Los Angeles is probably better than the Mexican food in my home town. But if I'm going to fly somewhere to get Mexican food it might as well be Mexico.
(1) I hate that word "ethnic".
(2) there is not good food of different cultures everywhere. There is no good authentic Chinese food, especially given the variety, in most of Europe for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTa_T2pVwuk While LA doesn't have all of that, it has far more than London, Paris, Berlin. Similarly with Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese.
https://bestneighborhood.org/race-in-los-angeles-ca/
Ok go to Mexico then I don’t care. I disagree from my own experience having traveled.
Maybe not. I read about a Mexican Airbnb hostess who was very upset that when she would make spaghetti for her guests, they would complain about not getting Mexican food.
In her opinion, Mexican food was food that a Mexican might prepare for herself, but her guests knew better.
I didn't always love LA, but I do now.
A few of my favorite things there:
- Mount Wilson observatory: It's where people discovered that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way
- Huntington Library: Mostly gardens, but a very nice place to meander
- Little Tokyo: Shopping district with Japanese food and assorted goodies. I consider ramen to be one of the foods that LA is best at, and Orochon in Little Tokyo is very good. You could make this one stop on a ramen tour of the city.
- Hsi Lai Temple: In the San Gabriel Valley. Was once the largest Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere.
- And yes, Museum of Jurassic Technology
I'd also go to Erewhon just to soak up the absurdity. LA's absurdity is one of the things I love about it.
If I were going again soon, I'd want to make sure to do two things inspired by David Lynch:
- Drive at night in the hills and stop to appreciate the view of the city.
- DL has the phrase "night blooming jasmine" on his tombstone, which he said is a reminder of old Hollywood. Perplexity suggests that Westwood, Bel-Air, and the Japanese garden at Lake Balboa Park might be good places to enjoy that scent.
What is "Erewhon"?
A ridiculous grocery store with famously over the top smoothies
Google Maps says there are several in L.A. Is any one of them fine, or should I be looking for "the original"?
I’d say just go to whichever location is most convenient for you. Enjoy!
You will probably remember the Time Travel Mart and Museum of Jurassic Technology if you attend, although I'm not sure they're what people usually go to Los Angeles for.
Otherwise, Griffith Observatory is nice.
I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Griffith Observatory in 2010, and they were two of the few memories I have of the place. I intend to visit both again. Time Travel Mart will be added to my list.
I second paying extra for the Universal Studios VIP tour, which also includes a personal guide for several hours after the tour, to walk you to the front of every line at every attraction and ride.
Here was a real exchange I had with a friend as we were *very literally* trotting past *very literally* many hundreds of people waiting to go through the Walking Dead haunted house:
My Friend: Wow! This is almost better than sex!
Me; *genuinely incredulous* "Almost?!!!??"
Unsong vibes for no.3.
Gavin comes from the Welsh Gawain, one of Arthur's knights. Nephew of the king, said to wield Excalibur and is depicted as a villain in later versions of the story. Mirroring nepotism and corruption.
Gawain also meaning the hawk of May or the hawk of the plains. May comes from Maia, a goddess associated with among other things Abundance. A hawk can also be an eagle, symbolizing the American president and the great plains of Iowa that lend them their power.
Newsom comes from literally new+house in old English.
So we have a morally ambiguous but undeniably powerful character who will be an eagle (president) arising from the plains (Iowa caucus) bringing Abundance (of the Extra Klein variety) and new houses. Exactly what America needs.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence.
>the American president and the great plains of Iowa that lend them their power.
The President runs directly off of Ethanol. The corn only makes him STRONGER.
All I know about Sir Gawain is his whole thing with the Green Knight, who as an absurdly powerful prankster impervious to things that can kill mortals, is clearly Donald Trump.
Gawain is an old character. There's more to him.
Gawain's strength grows as the sun rises higher in the sky, and ebbs as it sinks back down. Night is presumably a minimum.
He also did this: https://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/0848.htm
(The link in the commentary is broken, but it's referring to Morte d'Arthur Book 5, Chapter 10:
> I was so elate and hauteyn in my heart that I thought no man my peer, nor to me semblable. I was sent into this war with seven score knights, and now I have encountered with thee, which hast given to me of fighting my fill, wherefore sir knight, I pray thee to tell me what thou art.
> I am no knight, said Gawaine, I have been brought up in the guardrobe with the noble King Arthur many years, for to take heed to his armour and his other array, and to point his paltocks that long to himself. At Yule last he made me yeoman, and gave to me horse and harness, and an hundred pound in money; and if fortune be my friend, I doubt not but to be well advanced and holpen by my liege lord.
> Ah, said Priamus, if his knaves be so keen and fierce, his knights be passing good: now for the King’s love of Heaven, whether thou be a knave or a knight, tell thou me thy name.
> By God, said Sir Gawaine, now I will say thee sooth, my name is Sir Gawaine, and known I am in his court and in his chamber, and one of the knights of the Round Table, he dubbed me a duke with his own hand. Therefore grudge not if this grace is to me fortuned, it is the goodness of God that lent to me my strength.)
One must not neglect Gawain's marriage to the loathly lady.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loathly_lady
When was Gawain depicted as a villain?
In early portrayals Gawain is often the Main Guy, but in later works when his spot's been usurped by Lancelot (and later Tristan as well) he kills King Pellinore in a duel framed as fairly unjustified, he and his brothers flat-out murder Lamorak of Wales for carrying on with their mom, and worst, he gets all fucked up about the whole thing with Lancelot killing his brothers and causes the entire civil war with Arthur which is the downfall of Camelot due to his psychotic devotion to revenge; although it's his half-brother Mordred who actually ends up killing Arthur, this happens only after Lancelot murks Gawain as well; for the most part Gawain is the leader of the rebellion.
With all the talk about the fertility crisis, I haven't seen much discussion of the obvious solution: a Brave New World system of orphanages raising kids born to surrogates or, if possible, gestated in a lab.
Given what we know now, would we be able to design orphanages to be consistently safe, pleasant, and nurturing? If so, would that be enough to raise happy, stable adults, or is there something intrinsic about being raised in a nuclear family that can't be replaced?
Where are they going to live, when they are grown up?
> Given what we know now, would we be able to design orphanages to be consistently safe, pleasant, and nurturing?
I'll believe we can once we do the same with public schools.
> or is there something intrinsic about being raised in a nuclear family that can't be replaced?
The thing that can't be replaced is the lack of politics and bureaucracy. Though the nuclear family often fails horribly.
> I'll believe we can once we do the same with public schools.
Public schools could do a much better job if they were allowed to separate out the epsilons.
> Public schools could do a much better job if they were allowed to separate out the epsilons.
Yes, but the teachers' unions make them near-impossible to fire. And worse, I expect most of the good ones get hired by private schools.
I would guess Melvin was referring to expelling students rather than teachers.
Yeah, I know. I deliberately misunderstood him to make my point that bad teachers are a far bigger problem than bad students.
Why do you believe that?
What do you think the school is supposed to be doing? How much do bad teachers interfere with that, and how much do bad students do the same?
Artificial wombs will quite likely be developed but by then the fertility crisis will already be ravaging most non-poor countries, and replacing the populations with biologically low average IQ people from africa , pakistan and afghanistan will just make the countries being ravaged by the fertility crisis even more ineffcient, high crime, low trust, low competence and more Mad-Max-y.
I don't see how orphanages and surrogates solve anything . A very small % of the population want to become surrogates even with the current large financial rewards, so how much larger would financial rewards need to be in order to motivate enough people to carry babies to term to increase the fertility rate by 0.5 or more ? Seems like it would cost too much.
Could we design an orphanage to be consistently safe, pleasant, and nurturing? Yeah, probably. There are cultures which have different family structures -- where the parents play some role, but less of one -- and they seem to do basically fine. I don't trust our institutions to do it right, though. It would be designed by committee, underfunded, used as ammunition in political battles, etc. Raikoth could pull it off, but not our mortal governments.
I propose a much easier way of eliminating the fertility crisis: Not making people choose between their livelihood and child bearing. For average young folks, having multiple kids results in near certain poverty. Of course if one of the parents already has a well paying job that can support the entire family, it's somewhat easier, but most young couples don't have that. Child tax credit will be $2.2K this year. If the government raised it to $10K, you'd see people having way more kids.
>Child tax credit will be $2.2K this year. If the government raised it to $10K, you'd see people having way more kids.
If the nation wants more (non-imported) workers (and soldiers?), at $180K apiece, I expect it to soon make more sense to build robots for these roles.
Even if they have the means, as long as women have ambitions of having careers (or anything other than being a child-rearing housewife), you're going to have trouble encouraging more births. You will probably have to ban contraception as well. People can't be allowed to have a choice on whether to have children.
Yeah, there's a load of ways, big and small, in which you could make it easier for people who have two children to have three or four children instead. And they're cheaper and more humane than state-run baby factories.
But it'll always be cheaper and quicker to import an immigrant than to educate a child, so from a pure economic point of view it makes no sense to have children at all.
Also, 100% free education at elementary schools including school lunches, and zero homework.
Isn't Brave New World explicitly a utilitarian paradise, or at least one from before wireheading was the topic du jour? In that case, shouldn't one try to emulate it (assuming again no wire-heading, or at least on the margin as compared to current society)?
Not if you agree with J. S. Mill that there are higher and lower pleasures. The dystopian aspect of Brave New World is that everything is base and trivial.
859552: "Given the current Crisis Du Jour, should we create the horrible baby factory from the book 'Do not create the horrible baby factory`?"
Answer: No.
Yeah, obviously we shouldn’t do it now. I was just wondering, if it ever got to that point, is there a way to make it less dystopian.
Omitting the engineered class system and the practice of giving some of the kids fetal alcohol syndrome on purpose would be a good start.
"We shouldn't do it now." WTF, dude, no. We shouldn't do it ever.
Let me ask you a question -- would YOU want to be one of those kids born and raised in the government baby factory? Even a "less dystopian" baby factory?
(Also, do you hear yourself? "LESS dystopian" -- as in, still dystopian, but an acceptable amount of dystopian?)
I misspoke, I meant not dystopian. Obviously I wouldn’t want to be raised in a dystopian institution, or a traditional orphanage. I was just wondering if there’s a non-dystopian non-bad way to do it. Maybe not, but there’s a lot of possible versions other than the ones that have been done or written about.
I'd love to think nobody would design the decanting factory in "Brave New World" but someone is going to think this is a guidebook, not a warning. We got the tank kids already just like the book, why not follow the rest of the procedure!
Really smart kids here, the dumb labour there, and we can *make* the dumb labour happy with their lot and not envy the others and not want to change! Social cohesion at last!
Except that most people aren't restricted in fertility by virtue of not being able to have kids or to afford them. It's a choice made, consciously or unconsciously, on the presumption that fewer offspring will result in an advantageous selective outcome. Remove that possibility from their lives, and humans will make pandas look like rabbits. A world where having offspring is disconnected from evolutionary outcomes is one where the action of their creation ceases to matter. You are describing the worst-case solution.
There is no selective advantage for having 0 children, which is the case for many people now.
>>It's a choice made, consciously or unconsciously, on the presumption that fewer offspring will result in an advantageous selective outcome
I'm not sure I follow. I could see people having fewer children on the assumption that they can better focus greater resources into fewer offspring, but I'm not sure if that's an "advantageous selective outcome. "Advantageous" perhaps, but not really "selective." And at any rate, it wouldn't account for the number of people producing *zero* offspring - I don't see how those people could be thinking they'd get any trait selection advantages from that, even unconsciously.
So, seeking some clarification, what "advantageous selective outcome" do you think these people are under the impression that they are getting, and what kind of changes are you talking about when you refer to "remov[ing] that possibility from their lives?"
'Selective' in the sense of selective processes, which can be sexual or artificial in nature, not necessarily natural selection. Civilization produces selective influence on populations, too.
I'm not really referring to the minority of people who cannot produce children. The people who have the ability/means to afford children, and yet produce zero children nevertheless, are not always *aware* of why this is. The excuses given (politics, expense, lack of interest) are all secondary to what we've known for a long time: people limit their offspring when there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. The minute a society rewards a lack of children with life outcomes, it will bring selective pressure to limit offspring further.
The advantages fewer offspring offer in a modern society are in relation to perceived socio-economic status. But it is not as simple as choosing to have fewer kids, because (per Ronald Fisher) there are probably run-away effects like genetic inclination and mate preference that exacerbate the problem by providing a unconscious drive to a conscious action (i.e. some may limit children because they are genetically inclined to do so, as a result of selective pressures).
The change in the proposed scenario would be to remove the selective advantages to having offspring at all, considering that its aim would be increase. You cannot address an essentially social/cultural problem with a scientific solution. So long as we continue to value and evaluate people on the basis of their economic success, we provide an incentive towards population decrease - beginning at the top, with the most intelligent and capable eventually dying off, and then proliferating further. A society that would be comfortable with 10 children per couple via artificial reproduction would have to have completely different values to the one in which we currently live. I imagine that any scientific solution implemented without addressing the social and cultural issues first is liable to backfire tremendously.
>>The excuses given (politics, expense, lack of interest) are all secondary to what we've known for a long time: people limit their offspring when there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. The minute a society rewards a lack of children with life outcomes, it will bring selective pressure to limit offspring further.
Point of clarification - is your hypothesis that people are responding to their perceptions of "evolutionary advantage" or "life outcomes?" There's some overlap to those two concepts, but I don't think they're interchangeable.
My cousin had a vasectomy, so there's basically nothing that can be done at this stage to give him "evolutionary advantage." At least not directly; maybe my wife and I could give him some indirectly with our own childbearing decisions, or he could indirectly gain some relative advantage by doing things to help our hypothetical offspring. In any event, though, at this point his potential gains are limited and indirect as to "evolutionary advantage"
This doesn't seem to be the case, though, for his "life outcomes." He'll never reproduce at this point, but can still do a lot directly to increase (or decrease) his own personal quality of life.
> The advantages fewer offspring offer in a modern society are in relation to perceived socio-economic status.
What do you mean by this? Are you implying that, in a modern society, people associate fewer children with higher status?
It wouldn't need to replace people choosing to raise families, just supplement it to keep the population from crashing.
A primary parent usually can't quit being a parent, so even people growing up in bad families typically have at least one consistent person in their life. This is necessary for developing normal attachment. Even a very well run orphanage will systematically neglect children because they cannot provide consistent caregivers, because people are free to leave employment. Few places will have the same workers for 16 years of a child's life (many orphanages have over 50 caregivers by the age of 3).
For this reason, children growing up in a nunnery or similar are probably better off that those in a secular orphanage, as being a nun is a job for life. So to answer your question, if you were doing Brave New World style orphanages, you'd want to structure running the orphanage as a lifelong vocation.
Good point! I didn't think about the turnover.
President Trump has tasked me with developing a new measurement system, to avoid having to teach American youngsters the kilogram/meter/second system, which just reeks of the surrender-monkey Europoors.
I'm thinking of using an average Bald Eagle (5.5 kg) as the basis for mass, and the length of an American football field without endzones (91 m) as the basis for distance. But I'm having trouble with the basis for time. I was planning to use the length of the typical school schooting, but that stat is surprisingly hard to come by. So perhaps the time for an AR-15 full auto mag dump (3.0 s) would do.
Thoughts?
In Soviet Europe, they measure in time in seconds. But in Amerika, we measure time in firsts.
BECAUSE AMERICA NUMBA ONE, BABY.
The time taken for light to travel from the lowest point in the United States (Badwater Basin, Death Valley, California) to the highest point in the United States (the Moon).
One Tape is the equivalent of one 25-foot measuring tape. One Whizz is the length of time it takes for a fully-extended measuring tape to fully retract.
The time it takes for a penny to drop from the top of the Empire State building. Or Trump Tower.
As it happens, one football field per mag dump is a very comfortable driving speed, just right for taking your F-150 down Route 66.
How long would it take for me to take my F-15 down Route 66?
At typical cruising speed, an F-15 will travel about one statute mile per mag dump.
Assuming costs and speeds continue to scale multiplicatively between F-models, the F-1.5 should cost about $180 billion and cruise at 10,000 km/h, or 92 football fields per mag dump in the new units. That's slow for a space probe, but very fast for an aircraft.
Alright I'm convinced. Where do I sign to make this a reality?
What about the length of Superbowl commercial?
Weird that you want to change time at all, since SI didn't change the definition of hours/minutes/seconds.
Well, something did. Traditionally there were 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, and the length of those hours adjusted based on the time of year. Now we use the same hours for everything.
"But I'm having trouble with the basis for time."
Don't worry about time.
60 seconds to the hour, 24 hours to the day, 28 - 31 days to the month, 12 months to the year and 365 (sometimes 366) days to the year isn't metric at ALL.
Do require that using the new measurement system preclude the Oxford comma.
No one has time for averages, so just any old big bird would probably work. At the smaller end of the scale the weight of a single liberal tear could work out nicely. Star spangled banners would do it for time, as Kuiperdolin suggests, and you have the added benefit that everyone would have to go around humming it to themselves.
standard duration of Star-Spangled banner
If we're designing an entire new measuring system, surely we can at least push through a bill to ditch that awful noise and make the Stars and Stripes Forever the official anthem.
No, Hail, Columbia!
It has the line "Sound, sound the Trump of fame," which should help.
With which lyrics? "ere we go ere we go ere we go" or "Be kind to your web-footed friends?"
"We are the Berenstain Bears, we live in a split-level tree"
Terry Pratchett gives us the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.
Isn't that just the Planck time?
Well the guy honking certainly is a plank.
> I’ve always liked ‘stone’ — 14 pounds— as a weight measure. Only recall seeing it in print James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.
You can also see it in 'The 13 Clocks'. And of course the still-extant phrase "98-pound weakling" makes more sense if you know that that's seven stone.
I am given to understand that the stone is still the unit generally used for the weight of a person in Britain.
To my UK-adapted ear that makes you sound like a dangerously slender (nigh [neigh?] on two-dimensional) racehorse!
I've only ever heard of horses being measured in hands.
I still regularly use hands and cubits around the house. When I'm trying to judge things like "will this board game fit on this table?" or "will this chair fit through this door?", I can compare the two dimensions in whatever arbitrary system I want - and the measuring-stick that's literally attached to my body is right there to use.
I would like to register that despite OTs with announcements getting fewer likes and/or comments, it does help me feel "in the loop" with ACX goings-on. One doesn't always have time to peruse the comments.
Relatedly, meant to post this weeks ago, but Substack only recently decided to stop stopping me from commenting here: wish to express gratitude towards rationalism community generally, for teaching me skills related to reasoning under uncertainty, (re)building a functional mind from scratch, and noticing cognitive biases/anomalies as map rather than territory. These were all very helpful during my first acid trip! The dosage ended up being unexpectedly high, and I was stupid to go without a trip sitter, so there was a...memorable Save-or-Die (yeah, literally, coulda ended up like that one girl in Breaking Bad who aspirates) that I'm not sure I woulda succeeded at counterfactually. Universal love and transcendent joy is actually kinda dangerous if you forget to breathe, it turns out. Still - nice to touch eternity once, shrooms never quite got me that high. Ongoing boon seems to be persistent +~2 status bonus to Will saves; hoping it lasts. Lots of things to get annoyed and depressed about these days, so bouncing back faster is convenient.
(On the other hand, not sure I woulda gotten interested in psychedelics to begin with as a normie, so...maybe it's a wash overall? It's hard to know what sort of life one might have led with vastly different preferences...)
Three weeks ago I asked if anyone knew a good writing forum, and the one reply I got was for a weird online RPG writing game called 4TheWords. I feel like commenting today, that that site has proven astonishingly effective, and I'm pretty sure I've written more in the last three weeks than I have in the last two years, despite last year being the previous high-water mark for most productive I'd ever managed to be. (I'll also thank the link to the flash fiction competition in the Links Post, which reminded me that I can also write flash fiction.)
So, thanks to the recommender, and a recommendation of 4TheWords if anyone else likes the idea of writing but has consistent trouble getting started. Bite-sized quests lead to lots and lots of biting, and before you know it the entire nothingburger will be consumed.
What other approaches have you tried that didn't work? And what kind of writing do you do or aim to do?
I've found that over the years I've trained myself to produce words somewhat easily. But then taking those words and editing them into something good is where the steep scramble begins and often just the thought of that challenge makes me put it off until a better moment.
I'll probably give 4thewords a go though since I can't tell how the skills are connected so maybe it'll help unblock me.
Fantasy fiction, mostly comedic. "What happens when the Muse of History takes the day off and her shift is covered by the Muse of Dance and Choral Song?" "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you no remorse?" I'm trying not to worry about quality; that path leads to blank pages. The Ghost of Lambchops Past doesn't have to be cool, he just has to do enough talking for me to defeat this Wingow.
Other approaches I've tried; The Atomic Habits approach worked for a while, where every time I got a cup of coffee, I'd sit down to write at least one sentence. It lasted several months, in which I started about fifty stories and finished about eight, with most of them petering out after the opening and most of the finished ones being finished in the one sitting. But then I took a trip out of town, got out of the habit, and could never get back in.
Last year I set myself a deadline for all the major holidays I could think of, including birthdays. Made it from May to September finishing a four-or-so-page story every three-or-so weeks, but the Labor Day story fell way behind schedule and didn't get finished until Halloween, and it and the Columbus Day story felt like pulling shrapnel from a wound, so that was the end of that. I've only finished one or two of them in 2025.
I've never done a thorough edit of my own stuff, although if I come back to something (outside 4TheWords) I usually read through it before I start writing on it again, and will edit as I go. But I very much have trouble with getting the words moving in the first place, and the external pressure of "this Desert Rudakai will only go down if you type 1000 words" is very useful for that.
> Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises
The ADL has been constantly criticizing Trump's actions for years, often using language like "We are appalled", "We unequivocally condemn", "indisputably dangerous and reprehensible", etc, but somehow only the very rare exceptions are the ones people notice. It's very confusing. Yes, Trump has done some decent things in fighting anti-semitism, and yes the ADL will endorse those things (even while they often need to condemn dangerous rhetoric taking place within minutes of the good things), but the perception of the ADL "singing his praises" doesn't really match the facts.
I haven't read every statement of the ADL about Trump, but it seems like it's thinned out a lot since his second term started.
In particular they lost a lot of credibility by defending Musk when he did a Nazi salute; backing Trump's acts "fighting anti-Semitism" that amounted to illegal impoundment and extorting law firms and other businesses for personal gain, with the thinnest pretexts; and backing detaining legal immigrants for criticism of Israel. All while continuing to go out of their way to paint critics of Israel as anti-Semitic as much as possible.
A lot of liberals who want to view the ADL as a civil rights, anti-discrimination group with a focus on Jewish people, now see it as a pro-Israel group that praises or ignores actual abuses elsewhere.
Only time I remember them criticizing Trump recently was over his use of the word "shylock" and my sense was they thought this was a "safe" subject to criticize him over, to throw a bone to people who are pissed at the direction they're going, but doesn't have any actual policy content and that most people won't care about.
> defending Musk when he did a Nazi salute
Fun fact: That was less then four hours before the ADL's condemnation of Trump's pardons of the Jan 6 insurrectionists. ( https://xcancel.com/ADL/status/1881526538367369625 ) But yeah, I agree that trying to defend Musk there was a pretty terrible decision.
The head of the ADL has unambiguously recognized anti-Zionism as an antisemitic ideology, so their approach will necessarily be somewhat alienating to those who disagree.
> Only time I remember them criticizing Trump recently
That's a reflection of the fact that it's rarely covered, not that it doesn't happen. The ADL's criticism of Trump's immigration policies, or of many of his appointments, or of his interactions with racist or antisemitic individuals, just didn't reach many people.
>Shooting him in the head only makes him stronger.
He wasn't shot in the head either, probably not even in the ear. That might have tipped you off that some exaggeration has been employed for dramatic effect.
Where did the blood come from if he wasn’t shot in the ear?
From his ear.
I don’t get it. Why would his ear bleed if he wasn’t shot in the ear?
It was a ketchup bottle, aren't you aware of the Real Truth promulgated at the time by the guardians of truth and enemies of fake news and disinformation?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/comments/1mtl7mu/its_about_time_someone_called_this_hoax_out_best/
It wasn't an assassination attempt, Trump wasn't injured, he planned it all, total fake all round (I don't know how they explain away the man who was shot and killed). But anyway, not even an injured ear, movie blood, you fell for the hoax, chump.
So nice to have EngineOfCreation making sure we know nothing happened (and if it did, it was a MAGA right-wing Deep State false flag operation).
I'm convinced that humans have a supply of Belief which, lacking a focus in religion naturally gravitates toward Believing Any Damned Thing at All.
I'm struggling to come with a counterexample or at least show that p > 0.05....
Thank you for closing my eyes on this issue.
He might have bumped his head into a Secret Service agent as he ducked and got rushed by the agents. I understand the FBI later confirmed it was a bullet or bullet shrapnel, but initially the then-director Christopher Wray gave an ambiguous statement.
> "There's some question about whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear," Wray testified, before he seemed to suggest it was indeed a bullet.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/fbi-says-trump-was-indeed-struck-by-bullet-during-assassination-attempt/
I've heard people say he was probably just hit by shrapnel or something
That seems extremely unlikely (and pointless if true?).
Given where the shooter was and where the person behind Trump was hit, we have a very high degree of certainty as to the trajectory of the bullet. There was nothing between him and Trump that could be hit and turn into shrapnel, and the seating and people behind Trump were too far away for shrapnel to fly back at him.
It seems like an extremely unlikely hill to die on, with no interesting or useful implications if true.
Am I just connecting dots here or:
- ai close to, if not at self improvement
- fed about to cut rates with 2 trillion+ annual deficits and stocks at all time highs
- congress openly discussing what might be ufo’s
- multiple geopolitical flashpoints in active shooting (Ukraine, Israel)
- American internal divisions are increasingly violent
Are these all connected somehow? Is it just a coincidence or are these all different facets of the singularity?
- ai close to, if not at self improvement
What evidence is there for this? I'm not saying it can't happen. Sometimes I'm amazed what LLMs do. Other times I'm infuriated how bad they are. Given the bad experiences that make it clear they really are just glorified next word completers that just happen to have a trillion stats to help completion, I feel like self improvment is going to require changes we haven't seen yet. They might be right around the corner but I don't think LLMs will discover them.
Most of this hinges on the first point, but it's not well-justified. In what way is self-improvement necessarily going to lead to recursively smarter AI and therefore singularity? Maybe the improvements have a plateau, maybe they will take too long to iterate, maybe the AI can only improve on some things but not others...
I'm with TGGP. It's a big world and there has always been a lot going on. Are you tripping?
- Tariffs cause price inflation which encourages higher interest rates, but also uncertainty-induced economic slowdown that encourages lower Fed interest rates*, and Trump is pushing for the "lower" option (as politicians tend to do). The BBB greatly exacerbated deficits mainly by extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which will make inflation worse, which encourages a higher Fed rate; and long-term bond interest rates should rise as a result of decreased confidence in the US dollar as a result of U.S. policy.
- Meanwhile California/tech companies are nuts for AI and are doing their own thing. And immense amounts of money are going in, which helps make the stock market go up, and AI is really useful, so there are various impacts across the country and in China too.
- There's always some amount of discussion about UFOs, and sometimes it reaches government level (e.g. [1])
- I've been following the Ukraine war closely the whole time. From the start it was the biggest land war in Europe, and Russia has been steadily ramping up the number of soldiers it throws in. Trump's trying to put himself in the middle of it, but Putin barely pretends to care[2], and Zelenskyy just says nice things to avoid provoking Trump/Hegseth into cut off aid from the 2024 aid bill yet again.
- Gaza is unrelated. Before the attacks of Oct 7 2023, historically, Israel would kill about 30 to 100 Palestinians for every person killed by Hamas. And when Hamas killed ~1100, Israel decided to stick with that ratio and expand home demolitions similarly. Looks like it'll be more like 100x this time, if not more. Note: Hamas ≠ Palestinians.
- American internal divisions seem mildly related to divisions in Europe; there seems to be a global decline in democratic values and civility.
* Trump tariffs not only cannot be expected to continue beyond the end of his term, and since Trump often changes his deals (and he's misusing emergency powers that were not designed to allow blanket tariffs), tariffs can and will change much more quickly than that. This uncertainly very strongly undercuts the purpose for which tariffs are normally used, namely to encourage building out local factories.
[1] https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=UFOs
[2] He appreciates Trump's propaganda value though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qbkWE4aAM
Run an experiment: If you turn off the news, how many of these impact your daily life?
Even with the news on, I would say close to zero effect. Despite the strange news, we are still living in the Golden Age.
We're just consuming more news.
They are more easily connected by poor governance and hysteria. I would think of the singularity as a minimum of five years out, if it happens.
As far as the stock market, I understand it less. My gut tells me it's something like a uncoordinated savings technique where everyone puts their savings in equities thereby boosting valuations. Or maybe a self fulfilling prophecy of growth where people feel that it should grow, so if underperforms, they might shift more wealth there? I would really prefer an explanation that involved fundamentals and stability though.
It’s pretty easy to explain the combination of debt, political polarization, and geopolitical conflict. Possibly even the UAP stuff - maybe the conflict is what’s making this get exposed now.
What I find surprising is the AI thing happening at the exact same time. That’s the thing that seems to require explanation to me. It’s just too unlikely.
Unless all of that is caused by the acceleration of information density hitting some kind of critical point. Like humanity is undergoing a phase change in our social structure.
"What I find surprising is the AI thing happening at the exact same time. That’s the thing that seems to require explanation to me. It’s just too unlikely."
FYI, 1968 was a pretty insane year all around: Soviets invade Czechoslovakia, RKF and MLK assassinated, Australia literally "loses" a prime minister (went swimming, never came back), Tet offensive, *lots* of protests (not just in the USA) ...
And Apollo 8 -- with Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders -- circles the moon.
These things happen.
I'm not seeing the connection and I don't fully understand your question. Could you clarify or restate the question?
I see lots of trends involving exponential growth, or things that look like them. Accelerating AI is just one dimension that could totally change the future in a massive way.
Others are
- accelerating money printing leading to “super inflation”, say 3% month over month inflation that destroys the dollar
- uap stuff in congress showing that some structure inside the us government has been beyond political oversight and accountability for a long time, possibly hiding evidence of non-human technologies
- the breakdown of political structures all over the world
All three of those things, alone, would be enough to make the future unpredictable. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that’s happening at the same time as AI. But the other possibility is that those are all facets of a single hyper-object.
Curious about the Newsom post. In the last two weeks Sir Keir Starmer has lost his Deputy Prime Minister because of corruption (tax evasion) and his ambassador to the US because of corruption (being friends with Epstein). Now maybe these two weren't chosen by God, or: the left these days is just less tolerant of corruption in its ranks than the right. I'm not saying the right doesn't care about corruption, but there are some tendencies that mean prominent right wingers accused of corruption are more likely to be backed by the party machine. One tendency is consistently libertarian: laws are bad (in certain contexts), therefore defending this accused person is good. Another is pragmatic: the law on e.g tax is so complex that many people in public life are technically breaking the law, why focus on this one individual? Again: the blob is picking on our side for political reasons and we should stick up for our own. No-one on the left feels this way about Peter Mandelson. Maybe they should! I am Spartacus!
"No-one on the left feels this way about Peter Mandelson."
That's probably because the law on fucking minors on Epstein Island isn't so complex that many ordinary people are technically breaking the law.
Another factor is party unity vs disunity. A more unified party will close ranks to defend a member accused of moderate wrongdoing, whereas a factional or disunited party will have plenty of insiders angling to push that person out. This is not a left vs right thing, it varies strongly from place to place and from time to time.
I don't think there's anything systematically different about the way the left vs right approach these sort of minor scandals; whether the accused can keep their job depends mostly on who their friends and enemies within the party are. I guess that Angela Rayner didn't have enough friends.
The parliamentary Conservative Party under Johnson was still divided re: brexit and covid restrictions. The current schism was there embryonically (another former minister defected to Reform today). The point is that while the right consider, say, Nadim Zahawi to be a naughty boy and defending him isn't necessarily in their interest, to the left, Peter Mandelson is a heretic. If they were Americans and running for office I think Mandelson would have a harder time winning a primary.
This doesn't mean the right doesn't care about corruption in their fashion. I saw a debate between Megan McCardle and a Rolling Stone journalist about the mistakes leading to the financial crisis, the journalist was scathing about bankers selling toxic assets they knew to be toxic, while Megan McCardle argued that anyone selling an asset by definition doesn't value it as highly as the person buying it, that's why they are selling. I assume Megan McCardle cares about corruption but I think on the right people see that finance can be very complex and there are grey areas, and those are the kinds of things the media likes to simplify in order to skewer politicians.
"his ambassador to the US because of corruption (being friends with Epstein)"
Peter Mandelson has a track record of being involved in scandals, but also of being too important/well-connected to dump.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2025/09/11/peter-mandelsons-many-scandals-a-steam-bath-with-a-billionaire-an-undeclared-loan-and-pure-poison/
I'm surprised that this particular one caught up with him, but then again if anything will, it's Epstein connections.
And in a year or two he'll bounce back, just like all the other times (Mandelson is gay, so it's going to be hard to link him with sex with underage girls, which is what is being alleged regarding Epstein's guests).
Yes he was a surprising appointment but he's a package deal and I thought he'd done okay, I can't help feeling that Trump or Farage or Johnson would have stuck by him, but this generation of leaders on the left want caesar's wife (different story with JFK, Clinton)
My impression is that starmer's just very unpopular across the board (only won an election because people were so dissatisfied with the tories and didn't consider ukip a serious option, and hasn't done great on governance since). So it's like Nixon getting killed by Watergate because high inflation made him vulnerable.
The 2024 UK election had turnout of 59%, the lowest of any national election since 2001, and the Labor Party got the actual votes of only 34% of those who showed up.
That got them firm control of the government because parliamentary system; and the incumbent Tories had achieved approval ratings down near what we in Chicago currently call "Brandon Johnson level" and the polling pros call "never seen _that_ before"; and because the other two-thirds of votes cast happened to distribute just about perfectly for Labor's benefit in terms of seats in Parliament.
Overall point being that only one-fifth of British adults actually voted for Keir Starmer to be prime minister and an even smaller fraction was genuinely enthusiastic about the idea. He's one of the most "accidental" national leaders in UK history and, if my Economist subscription plus current national polls are any fair guide, has shall we say not done anything in office to improve that standing.
Not because of parliamentary system, because of First-past-the-post voting. In a parliamentary system with proportional voting they wouldn't be close to have a majority.
Right, point taken.
They would likely still have cobbled together a coalition government, I think? Not certain though.
One aspect of his unpopularity is he just seems like a people-pleaser and I think not backing Rayner and Mandelson is part of that problem. Johnson might have eventually sacked them but there would have been an attempt to show the media who's in charge - "this is not what the British people are interested in"
Starmer & his government are also very unpopular, so it makes sense for them to try and do whatever it desperately takes to shore up that popularity. Almost nobody outside the Westminister bubble liked Mandelson to begin with, so it was a no-brainer to ditch him.
Yeh Mandelson almost too easy an example, but in the end dont we want people with connections to Trump's circles as US ambassador? He got the trade deal done after all. Thinking back on the last year of the Johnson premiership, the right seemed genuinely outraged that the standards committee were picking on tory MPs for very dubious lobbying activities, and it almost became a test case for whether you opposed the blob. I don't believe it would have happened quite like that in a Labour government.
Labour are held to a higher standard in general, I agree. I wonder though if that's coming from the voters (the left are probably more against grift) or the press (the right-wing press are dominant in the media landscape and so are more likely to monster Labour politicians).
For me the key skill of certain politicians such as Trump (or Obama, or Mandami, or Chavez...) is his charisma.
A word that fittingly also has a religious connotation. Per Wikipedia "the term charisma appears as the Spiritual gift (charism) which is an endowment with an extraordinary power given by the Holy Spirit."
Do you think that an autonomous AI would be capable of having charisma? Or is this a skill in which humans will naturally possess a comparative advantage?
Politicians can be charismatic to the public, and they can be charismatic interpersonally. If they nail down AI voices and holographs or robots, an AI could possibly seem charismatic on television or radio. It would be much more difficult for an AI like that to be charismatic in person.
I think it has to do with something like, human limbic resonance. I think the only way AI could do it is if it walked around in a human looking body, and people thought it was human.
It doesn't need to look "human". Even if it looked like, say, Wall-E, people would love it as long as it's cute.
It's easy to make gore and atrocities frightening, but doing so doesn't interest me much.
How would you go about making a horror movie that had to be PG rated or lower as scary as possible?
My child used to go behind the couch, only peeking at intervals, during the Wishbone “The Time Machine” episode. I was surprised a PBS show starring a little dog could be so scary.
Night of the Hunter has very little violence and no gore but the villain is terrifying! Robert Mitchum was amazing.
To me The Good Son (1993) was really scary. It's rated R, but I only remember PG content in it. Would recommend. (edit: I notice "it received negative reviews from critics" and is 6.4 on IMDB. I saw it as a teen; maybe something is wrong with it that I didn't notice back then.)
Start with something that scared people since they were kids. The more kids, the better. Examples: the dark, ghosts, monsters, madness, fire, death, the unknown. I can pick more than one if I have a way to work with it.
Now I want to go in two directions from here. One is to find a more concrete manifestation of that ur-fear, like the feeling of being surrounded by monsters, relying on a friend to guide you to safety, and then that friend goes mad. The other is to dig deep into that ur-fear to understand why it's so gripping. That's my anchor: as much of the movie has to connect to it as possible. Being surrounded by monsters is scary because it's the feeling of danger one cannot overcome, only avoid. So scenes allude to or depict various insurmountable obstacles, dangers. An old man tells of a dog he had to hide from. A nearby radio reports an earthquake and tsunami ravaging a coastline somewhere. The protagonist needs to go to the bathroom in a building he's never been in before, and keeps trying various halls and running into dead ends and locked doors. Scenes play into the madness of that friend with things that are usually reliable, breaking down instead - computers, a comfy chair, a scene where the camera angle isn't where it should be.
Can't neglect the rest of moviemaking, of course. Scenes have to make sense at first so they connect with the viewer, the story has to be interesting, motivations have to be consistent (at first), and so on. The production values have to be reasonably good and non-distracting, and the acting has to be competent. And as with any story, it needs a buildup, climax, and denouement.
Even then, be prepared to not be universal. Some things are skin-blanching scary to one person and nothing much to another. Part of the art here is finding something broad enough and getting the fear across, and some people just won't be reached, but for those who can, you don't even need gore.
One of the scariest films I ever saw was 1999's _The Blair Witch Project_, which had some PG language, but no one was struck (there was some angry pushing at worst IIRC), no blood was seen on camera (a little implied dried blood at worst, and barely a second of it), and even the "monster" was never shown. It hit me just right, because I've been an avid camper, and very receptive to strange noises heard far off in the night, coupled with nearer ones, and not knowing what the hell is really out there. Sprinkle in some fake folklore about witches and I was in.
What was interesting was that I was of two minds seeing it, one fully invested, the other sitting partway out and watching the first mind. My logical side wasn't bothered, but appreciated how eerie the whole show was if I let myself sink in. Which drives a point above: some viewers just won't be scared, and in some cases they have to want to be. (Some people will literally buy a ticket to a horror film, pointedly yawn their way through it, and then later complain they didn't get their money's worth. Gotta come halfway, man...)
I don't think the MPAA ratings existed yet, but Night of the Hunter is an absolute classic horror film with child protagonists.
Oh, yeah. Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum just hit it right. Talk about "the Devil can quote Scripture"!
EDIT: Uh, if you're sensitive about cute widdle bunny wabbits, maybe don't watch all the way to the end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyxSm91eun4
The movie Heretic did eventually devolve into stabbings and such but I thought it was already extremely scary when it was just Hugh Grant ranting about religion to two presumably-but-not-definitively trapped young women. I really wanted to watch a version of that where he was deeply unsettling for two hours and then just let them leave his house.
Traditional horror before gore and splatter became trendy. "The Haunting" as recommended is a great one, it scared the socks off me when I saw it on TV years and years ago.
Jacques Tourneur movies from the 40s like "Cat People". Generally, psychological/spiritual horror - a scary monster or serial killer is indeed scary, but if they're physical they can be killed. How do you kill a ghost or spirit, though?
>How do you kill a ghost or spirit, though?
"How are you gonna kill a tornado?"
"Shoot it."
The Gate does this well. The clay demon doesn't explode into gore when it falls over in the boy's room; it explodes into a dozen smaller clay demons. Stomping on one of the little ones doesn't crush them, it just makes them wriggle.
Twice in the film, it seems like the parents are home, so everything is safe--only for it to be revealed that they're just illusions. One's home, one's room, one's parents--these are all supposed to be sanctified safe spaces, but the film violates all three.
I second this pick. The Gate scared the dickens out of me as a kid; I had nightmares about those little clay guys for years. Another terrifying element is the body-horror of the eye growing in the middle of the kid’s palm. Even without any gore, the trope of your body being directly invaded / turning against you is really unsettling.
Check out the 1963 movie The Haunting. I took my 8yo to a local screening (she likes horror movies in theory but I don't want to traumatize her with modern fare), and while there's no blood, the atmosphere is terrifying. It was a hit!
I was telling my friends about the experience the next day, and one said that when she and her roommate saw the film in college, they were both so scared they slept in the same bed that night.
The Babadook is pretty close. A monster is presumably following the family, and takes the form of a semi-ordinary arrangement of clothes. Extreme "something in the darkness" dread.
There was a short book I read for grade school, about a bunch of children in an occupied country trying to hide valuables from the Nazis by burying them in the bottoms of their snowmen. So not so much a physical threat, but a heavy "fear of discovery" kind of thing.
...I like time travel gone wi- er, wrong. I actually had hope upon seeing The Flash movie, because they introduced changes that happened BEFORE the event he changed, and I thought to myself, "My God, they're treating time like a windshield, and a crack will radiate out in both directions, corrupting both the future, and the past." So, radiant changes, getting worse on their own over time.
...what does that get us? Um... a boy, with deeply religious parents, discovers a creature that contradicts the faith. It touches him, and he starts seeing visions of alien places. He hides them from his parents because they'll lock him in his room if they know he doubts the Faith, but the visions grow more frequent and interfere with normal tasks (like walking), and also the creature grows bigger when he has them. like an Audrey 2 for memories. Probably they stop clearing up fully, and ordinary life starts looking alien.
There's an unanswered question about whether the creature is deliberately causing the visions, and we get reverse jumpscares of the kid thinking he's being followed, either by the parents when he goes to see the creature, or the creature when he goes to see the parents. It ends with... well it probably ends like My Girl; turns out the alien lifeform is super allergic to bees. Probably the ol' classic horror ending where the threat is gone, but oh wait, the boy has another vision anyway, and when he comes to, the dead creature is nowhere to be found, it could be right behind YOU, Audience Member, wooooo.
(Also hire ugly actors. Ugly people are scarier.)
A sense of dread, gloom, and spooky music can go a long way to making something unsettling. And events can be conceptually horrifying without being visually horrifying. A film like Get Out is unsettling because of the atmosphere of dread and what you slowly discover, rather than gore— a hypothetical re-cut could still be an effective film with a lower age rating.
I recently designed a very simple, slightly educational browser game where you build an AI Governance Strategy to avert doom. It probably still has a few bugs, but might be fun: https://jack-stennett.github.io/AI-Governance-Strategy-Builder/ . Accompanied by short substack post: https://torchestogether.substack.com/p/playing-at-saving-the-world
It's open source, so please steal and make a better version!
Questions for the EAs:
I'm not having children, so I'm thinking of simply donating my savings (and whatever money it'll make when they sell my property) when I'm dead. It probably won't be exactly 10% of my lifetime earnings, but close enough. On the grand scale it doesn't really matter if I'm saving starving kids now or in 30 years.
Thoughts?
Find a good lawyer now and, if you're serious about this, set up a charitable remainder trust. That way all your money will go to charity when you die (more efficient) and none to the feds and then to charity (less efficient).
This also posits that you're fine permanently locking up your savings.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-remainder-trusts#how
If you're serious about this strategy, you'll probably want to consult with a financial advisor who can help you maximize your eventual donation. End-of-life care costs can eat your entire savings if they are not isolated from the rest of your estate, and there are tax loopholes that can change your donated amount significantly.
(E.g. the stepped-up basis loophole: Sell assets and then donate cash -> 15% tax on capital gains; donate assets and recipient sells them -> 0% tax on capital gains.)
I don't know how 401k's etc. behave when inherited, but it's possible you can increase your eventual donation by changing where you allocate savings now, so the sooner the better.
The obvious most serious danger is that you will change your mind and not donate due to some reason. By donating now you are locking in your future self.
For example, maybe you would end up having kids, or spend all your savings on hard drugs, or realize that end of life costs are much higher than you though.
The average price of gas thirty years ago was $1.11. The longer you hold your money, the less it's worth.
I guess that's true if you're literally stuffing the money in your mattress, but that's not what most people mean when they refer to their savings.
...also true if you are saving it in a bank account, which IS what most people mean when they say savings (the national average savings account interest rate in the US was 0.41%, while inflation in 2024 was ~3%)
Although some banks might try to trick people by putting the word "savings" on some terrible account, it's trivially easy to get 4%+ at zero risk. I don't think averages matter.
And an index fund gets you 10% nominal returns, on average
Some thoughts:
* We might expect it to be cheaper to save lives now than in the future (e.g. if malaria is cured, then that saves a lot of lives and raises the cost of the "cheapest life to save").
* You get interest on your money, but on the other hand, the people whose lives you save could be having positive effects on the world that compound over 30 years
* If transformative tech comes in the next 30 years, either an extreme form of the first bullet could happen or we could all be dead; this gives some reason to think your money is more leveraged now.
But I don't think this is anywhere near decisive, and there are good reasons to wait to give. See the EA discussion of "patient philanthropy" for more.
The recent post about AI alignment finally motivated me to post something I've been mulling over for a while now.
Let us assume that AI alignment is solved, by which I mean, that
* given any set of values V
* given a moral framework F which maps the values of V to decisions in reality
we have the tech to align AI so that their decisions in reality always derive from V, as mapped to reality by F.
Example for demonstration, please don't rule lawyer: We impose upon a car-driving AI the sole value "human lives are valuable" and utilitarianism as the moral framework. So aligned the AI will not ram random random people on the street, but it will ram someone shooting into a crowd.
I think it's fair to say this alignment-ability would be a great improvement over what we have today, but to me this is clearly not enough to ensure safety of an ASI so aligned.
The issue is that if you posit something with approximately unlimited power and agency (relative to us) you would really like to avoid it deciding to do horrible things because you can't stop it. But I don't know of any combination of values V and moral framework F, consistently applied, which does not occasionally endorse horrible actions.
The only way I know to square that circle and not have horrible (to me) things be moral is to drop the consistency requirement. But I don't think that generalizes, especially not to ASI.
As a result every time the ASI alignment debate comes up for another round I think to myself that, hey, even if we solved alignment we'd still be fucked, right? Since even if we could impose our values V and moral framework F on ASI, we'd first need some V and F that are not occasionally horrible and I don't know that exists.
So to me, solving AI alignment would not in itself be the solution people seem to treat it as.
Feel free to tell me why I am wrong :)
These posts don't really make sense to me, a humble programmer, because from my perspective it is not possible to encode a moral framework non-fuzzily. What does it mean to "install utilitarianism on the computer"? How does the computer encode egalitarian values when they have necessarily formless and ambiguous definitions? A human moral framework probably cannot be turned into a form you could write formal proofs about.
But even if you did have that kind of technology, the computer would probably be able to invent its own internally consistent behavioural frameworks by that point anyway.
I don't think we disagree.
I understand you to say "even if we had the perfect values and moral frameworks it's probably impossible to align an AI to it".
I say "even if we could align AI to given values and moral framework there's probably no set of values and moral framework that would be non-catastrophic".
We focus on different parts of the difficulty of AI alignment, but I feel we agree that it's probably impossible.
There are a few people currently working on this. Forethought has written up a number of posts about similar ideas: https://www.forethought.org/research/better-futures
Discussion about this was frequently around ideas like the "long reflection", a hypothetical period after ASI where humanity+ASI think about moral value. There's a number of posts about this collected here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/H2zno3ggRJaph9P6c/quotes-about-the-long-reflection?commentId=z2ybSC353mPHpCjbn
I agree with everything you said. And the only solutions I can think of are:
A) don’t let any one thing have unlimited power and agency
B) only let that happen to beings which are loving and compassionate and desire cooperation with other intelligent beings
I think our universe actually enforces the latter. It’s unpredictable and chaotic so everything dies eventually. If you’re both loved and understood by something that isn’t you, you’ll get turned back on after you die.
I'm very sympathetic to these concerns. Devil's advocate: an ASI wouldn't be dependent on our Vs and Fs but would be able to refine them. But I suspect our Vs and Fs are largely to do with the shared experience of being human especially mortality.
This is essentially THE consideration that started the AI alignment movement in the first place. There are some more complicated arguments involved, but the core idea is what you appeared to have rediscovered.
The technical problem, the "how" of aligning the AI is secondary. The bigger problem is that we don't know what even to align it to, or how to decide that.
For what it's worth, these questions have been discussed for quite some time now.
Nobody so far have offered a good solution to that problem.
I'm sure there will be people attempting to tell you you got something wrong, but they would be wrong at that.
From another perspective, the "how" is primary, because proper aligning with any at least somewhat reasonable values is somewhat comparable to what we can get with current human leadership - e.g. some atrocities happen, but in general it's something I can live with and it excludes all kinds of scenarios that are fundamentally many orders of magnitude worse than that; but on the other hand figuring a better alignment target (e.g. what Coherent Extrapolated Volition theory aspires to do) is kind of useless if we can't possibly implement alignment for anything at all.
In essence, even picking a random person from my political opponents whose values I despise, I'd argue that a superpowerful AI with solid alignment to their values is infinitely better than a superpowerful AI aligned to random values, since only an infinitely tiny fraction of random values are within the range of what a sane human would have, and everything else might as well be the proverbial paperclip maximizer or worse. Like, pick the most obnoxious political "talking head" who argues against everything "your tribe" holds sacred, and alignment with their values is still preferable to no alignment, because their values still are human values and at least represent *a* future for humanity.
"So aligned the AI will not ram random random people on the street, but it will ram someone shooting into a crowd."
To your point that's basically a well established and exploited mechanism in EVE online
I live outside the US but keep up with its politics. I had no idea, when it happened, that Kirk's assassination would have such an impact on online discourse. It felt as if my Substack feed had been switched with that of a highly polarized user's. I'm not sure I liked anything I read in that time.
This made me think of a broader point - Substack's recommendation algorithm seems to suffer from the platform's growth. I wish there was a way I could bypass some of its assumptions about me, like flipping a "I'm not a dopamine zombie" switch that'd make it much more likely to recommend weird, fascinating stuff to me.
I had that too; it gave Twitter flashbacks.
I have 3-4 authors I follow, and I open their individual substacks directly every now and then via browser-bookmarks. For me most substack-features have been pretty confusing and not very useful (e.g. the recommendation algorithm, but also the notifications and the messages), thus I use them very little.
What I am trying to say is that, I have not noticed any difference in the substack-recommendation-algorithm, because it was useless for me to begin with.
> like flipping a "I'm not a dopamine zombie" switch that'd make it much more likely to recommend weird, fascinating stuff to me.
I think Substack would be happy to flip such a switch across the platform. Recommending "weird, fascinating stuff" tends to be a good long-term driver of paid subscriptions. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to determine what qualifies as fascinating without looking at short-term engagement signals... and this always risks skewing towards click-bait.
Please reach out if you have ideas, or if there is something clearly broken we can fix. Will see what we can do regardless.
I'd really love a "turn off the algorithms" button
I’d like some sort of ‘I’m not interested in this’. Sometimes people post things that I think are likely to be absolutely not what I want in my feed, but it’s ambiguous enough that I tap through to verify before I mute or block. That sort of content seems to have grown, though (or algorithm changes are just pushing a lot more really aggravating content into all feeds now), and I worry that just checking before I mute is actually being read as a ‘Show me more’ signal.
Let us have a little down arrow (even if there’s no visibility of the result for anyone else) to help the system understand us better (so long as you actually respect it and don’t just see it as engagement data).
Thank you! This is quite helpful.
There is a "hide" option that you can use to give negative signal on specific items, but it is hidden in the `...` menu and not as discoverable as we'd like. Some of my more design-oriented colleagues are looking at better options.
Cases where you click to check something out and then subsequently block or mute the author are treated as negative examples. We definitely don't want to be showing you more in those cases!
Oh cool - I’ll try to give the ‘hide’ option more of a workout. Appreciate that the mute/block signal overrides the access signal. Probably just shifts in the overall tide that I’m noticing, but it’s always hard to be sure.
Thanks for being open to feedback.
It probably has to do with what's currently trending. Meaning, if you took someone's typical recommendations and classified them into trending vs non trending topics, a way to filter out trending topics would be interesting.
Interesting! Seems like there is a big divide between people who do / don't want to get frequent updates on the news. I'm not yet sure how to deal with this in a good way.
One reason it resonates online is that Kirk is effectively an online poster.
The shot at the former President on July 13 2024, while shocking and illegal and not allowed, was within the parameters of what we expect. There's a cultural expectation that people might go after the President. Not excusable, but explainable. If the guy who fell through a time warp from 200 years ago is applying for the Secret Service job and says "I don't understand, why would anyone try to hurt the President?" you just mark do-not-hire. No time to bring him up to speed.
But if posters are now part of the "well you should just expect that[1]" fair game, so are most of the people I read, even those who are diametrically opposed to him.
[1] and soooo many of the "well what did you expect when he made people so angry?" posts are a perfect pattern match here.
The closest example I could find (with ChatGPT's help) of a non-politician media commentator being assassinated was clear back in 1984, Jewish radio host Alan Berg shot by neo-Nazis (actual neo-Nazis, back when the word meant something) in his driveway.
Does the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie in 2022 also fit in the same category?
I would think so, I should've clarified Berg was the last, uh, completed assassination of a political commentator in the US.
Some others in Europe like Charlie Hebdo and the other Mohammad-related attacks.
>Some others in Europe like Charlie Hebdo and the other Mohammad-related attacks.
Good point! Many Thanks!
One side effect of Captain Kirk getting written out of the show is hearing anecdotes like this about "the Substack algorithm", which I wasn't even aware was A Thing. (Saw several similar incidents of confusion in the Slow Boring comments over last few days as well.) Doesn't everyone just go to SS directly via email links to posts, and mostly just stick around the ones they're subscribed to? I only really venture afield via links post-style recommendations, which obviously are highly selected for appealing to existing audience. But maybe that's unusual, and others start at the actual Substack main site, or *shudder* the app? It's strange how such seemingly innocuous access choices can lead to vastly different experiences of the same platform. Kinda like Twitter's following lists vs For You nonsense, I guess. Or FdB recently writing that Substack Notes was causing him problems, which reminded me that Notes existed at all...
I pretty much only access Substack through the app because I do most of my reading when not at home (Scott Alexander is not exactly bedtime reading, except to the extent that my superpower is the ability to put anybody to sleep by reading anything).
It's usually a race to hit the Subscriber tab before The Feed loads.
Substack seems to have changed a lot in the last year (perhaps since January 20th). It used to be all very thoughtful posts about culture and science and philosophy and arts, but recently, it's well over 50% politics. I guess some of that is my fault because I've clicked or commented on posts about Trump or Kirk or immigration. It's not entirely my fault, though, because even the intellectual people that I follow are posting about politics when they didn't before.
Even in politics, I used to be able to discuss difficult topics politely. That's mostly gone now. I hadn't been called names in three years, but now it's three times per day. I don't think my manner has changed — I hope I'm always respectful — but the vibe has changed.
Stewart-Williams posted this week about how people with political ideas exaggerate their beliefs about what 'the other side' believes. I expect this is a big part of the problem, and Charlie Kirk's murder has brought this to the fore — it's rare to find people on Substack who have a measured opinion about what Kirk stood for.
In my country (England), the big issue is immigration: the people who think that immigration is too high are far-right racists, while the people who think that more immigration is a good thing hate their country and hate the England flag. It's almost impossible for them to talk to each other reasonably. This was always true on Twitter, but it's true now on Substack, too.
>people with political ideas exaggerate their beliefs about what 'the other side' believes.
I think this is part of it, but I also observe another consistent, related phenomena at work at times like this. My thesis is this: Demand for overt, obvious acts of leftwing political violence far outstrip the actual supply of the same. When finally presented with something that pattern matches an event that a political partisan is convinced must be happening constantly, they can't help but run wild with it. This works both directions.
I wrote my own version of this comment (less organized than yours) but I have to accept I'm a belligerent and that is going to colour how people view my appeals for calm.
In some it promotes a variant called governess mind.
I have seen many declare openly, not under cover of the anonymity you think exculpatory, both that we are fascists, and that fascists should be killed. What "weaker or more charitable assumption" would you have us draw from this?
It’s a big country and it’s got its fair share of knuckleheads and dumbasses who post stupid inflammatory stuff.
I don't think fascists should be killed, but they sure shouldn't be holding political power. As for whether or not the current leadership of the U.S. is fascist, what requirements for fascism do you think exist that they don't fulfill?
I too would prefer political power be held only by people I agree with on everything.
I'm sure you can construct a sufficiently broad definition to encompass anyone you want, just as I can construct one narrow enough to exclude them. I don't think that's going to be illuminating in any way. The meaning or lack thereof of the term doesn't bear on the point of my previous comment: if they had said instead that gostaks are doshes, and that doshes ought to be distimmed, I would conclude they wished to distim the gostaks.
It has nothing to do with "agreeing with them on everything." I disliked George W. Bush immensely. He was not a fascist. I was not altogether fond of Mitt Romney or John McCain. Also not fascists. The U.S. has, in fact, never had a president I've agreed with on everything. Never really had one I agreed with on most things.
It's also never had a president launch this many blatant assaults on democratic norms and make this many brazen attempts to centralize power in so short a time. THAT is the fascist bit, not the fact that he has some views I don't share.
Okay, but he said he would do all of this, and he got elected anyways. What right do you have to object to him holding power?
Wow, what a timely question! It turns out, Scott literally just wrote post on this.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
I honestly have trouble taking this sort of question seriously: it just feels like playing dumb to waste time. "He won the election, therefore he gets to do whatever he wants and you don't get to object" is understanding civics at about a 3rd grade level.
But if I wanted to split hairs, I'd say I don't object to him *holding* power, I object to him *wielding* power in ways that are plainly dangerous, destabilizing and in some cases illegal. Nor am I sure he actually *did* say he would do all of this: was "when I'm elected, I'll use the power of my office to cancel any media personality who offends me" actually one of his campaign promises? I mean...I suppose it could have been. It's not like I could actually feel *more* contempt for the American electorate than I already do.
No offense, but I'm going to trust a professional historian with a long history of clear communication who lays out a detailed argument and cites his work over...some dude who's apparently been active around here for all of a few days, and routinely makes wild claims with no support whatsoever.
https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/
> If you aren't talking about the merging of corporations and the state, you're better off using authoritarian.
Did Mussolini merge corporation and the state?
Were there any governments that merged corporations and the state, that aren't facist?
Under your definition, how are communists different than fashists?
----------------------------------
I am sorry if my questions seem a little dumb. I have not seen your definition of fashism before, and it confuses me a little.
I've seen Donald Trump - not a random person on the Internet - compare both Harris and Biden to Nazis/fascists, and said that Biden committed treason, and tweeted out AI generated videos of violence against Biden.
My evidence that Trump voters want to kill my side is stronger than your evidence of the opposite.
Yes, I think Biden ought to take measures to guard against assassination, perhaps some kind of security detail.
What precisely would that make you change your mind on?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderer
1953, folks.
Wow yeah, pretty prescient. At least unplugging wouldn't get you committed IRL, though! ...well maybe if you do it by running your wife's smartphone through the garbage disposal, ok yeah.
There's also The Machine Stops from even earlier. It's more fantastical and not corresponding so directly to modern life as this one... but it did nail "react" streams like a century before the concept sounded like it had any chance of being a popular form of entertainment.
It's dismaying to see the number of people who will proudly talk about being 'radicalized'.
It used to be understood that 'I'm too angry to think rationally' was a good thing to admit as a sign that you needed to step back. Now some treat it like a badge of honor.
It doesn't necessarily mean that. I don't consider myself 'radicalized,' but all the word really means in this context is "I think the comfortable boundaries of 'mainstream' political beliefs no longer accurately reflect reality."
Which I guess describes me pretty well right now. I don't even live in the U.S. anymore, and it seems like a large portion of the U.S. is taking some really, really, EXTREMELY dangerous and not-at-all-normal stuff as if it's no big deal.
I think you are failing the ITT here. People who are proud to be radicalized do not perceive themselves as "too angry to think rationally". Instead they think that being angry is, in fact, a rational response to the way world is.
(I don't know what 'ITT' refers to in this context.)
But to your point: you're correct. The norm I'm referring to is one that should be imposed by the community, such that people should be more willing to tell others (especially their co-partisans) that maybe it's time to take a break, since by its nature (as you say) this is not a problem that is prone to self-policing.
But the modern attention economy doesn't reward that. Nowadays you can proclaim radicalization and get much more positive feedback rather than negative.
This is all human nature + social media, of course, and nothing new. But I sense it spreading sometimes even in communities that should favor rational thinking - places where you should expect either (a) some degree of self-policing or (b) stronger pushback from peers.
ITT = Intellectual Turing Test, i.e. "can you describe the opponent's position in such a way that they would not be able to tell your description from a description written by someone that agreed with them", as a preventative against rallying around strawmen.
What are you even hoping to accomplish? His ambitions are backed by both the popular will and the military. Centrists are bending over backwards to accommodate him, only caring about their income streams remaining intact. If your issue is that you've seen enough "cruelty and ignorance" for one lifetime, well... there are less painful ways to go about this.
Alternatively, you can leave the country. It's certainly not too late.
Echoing Cancelled Paid Subscriber, I too would like to know what you were gesturing at with your ellipsis. What *were* the less painful ways you were suggesting someone who had had enough cruelty and ignorance for a lifetime could employ?. How about responding? If you do not, or do not have a convincing response, I'm going to report this comment. And in fact I'm going to back up the report with a personal email to Scott.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I'm completely stunned I'm the first person to address this:
You had a paid subscription...
...on a Substack account you generated on September 17, 2025?
Seems unlikely, so we have to conclude you're posting your flounce using a sock puppet account.
Except why on early would anyone use an *anonymous* account to announce they're leaving and say their goodbyes?
It sure looks like you're maybe not that committed to actually leaving if you're afraid to do it under your regular username. Or perhaps you were never a paid user.
Or perhaps both.
Either way, *please* don't come back.
Sorry to see you go. I too have enjoyed your comments here.
But I understand your decision completely.
Sorry to see you go Gunflint, I've enjoyed your comments over the years
Thank you for taking the sock off your hand to bring some much-needed context to the entire thread.
You provided some good commentary over the years, so I'll be sorry to see you go, and will slightly amend my request that you not come back.
That said, I think you're the one who is out of your element, Donnie, for allowing yourself to be so emotional about commenters on an internet forum.
Yes, of course there could be bots or troll farm operators working the comments here - and there almost certainly are, given that some very high profile people have been known to read Scott's work! - but getting so emotional about it and flouncing out isn't the heroic, rebellious act you seem to think it. A more useful response is to point out your suspicions as you see them, so that those who are not yet skeptical enough to discount unhinged commenters get a clue.
I agree with your general principles about how to handle situations like the present mosh pit, but I think Gunflint is having a personal crisis and you should cut him some slack. He is for sure someone who does not resort to drama to get his points across. In fact he is the opposite of that kind of person. I'm pretty worried about him and I don't scare easily.
It does seem out of character for him, I'll agree. I hadn't considered a more serious crisis, given the repeated (and imo, obnoxious) use of Big Lebowski quotes, but you do have a point.
I hope the deletion isn't permanent.
You posted to say something, and then later assert that Christina has no idea what you're thinking.
In nearly all places I've been, if someone makes an announcement and most people get the wrong idea for why it was made, the most straightforward cause is usually ruled to be the announcer not getting their message across.
I appreciated seeing you around. You and your family take care.
>I just cancelled my paid subscription.
And yet, after many following sentences, I still don't know why. What did Scott do that got you mad enough to cancel?
"Flouncing" is the internet equivalent of storming out of the room and making a dramatic exit.
You can just leave. No need to announce you're smarter than everyone else.
When I canceled my subscription, I didn't say anything to anyone, because I'm not trying to be the center of attention.
"Today we had a naked Putin-like assault on the First Amendment: Jimmy Kimmel Live indefinitely suspended"
Private company. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
Alexander, I KNOW you're smart enough to understand the difference between "private citizens are voting with their feet and declining to patronize this business" and "The Office of the President is abusing its granted power specifically to silence criticism." Those are WILDLY different things. And the second one is, in fact, rather strongly prohibited by the U.S. constitution.
Nobody owes you and audience or a platform or a megaphone or views or the time of day. But if "free speech" is to mean ANYTHING AT ALL, the government cannot be repressing speech it doesn't like.
>Private company
It is hardly that simple. https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/national-rifle-association-of-america-v-vullo/
>Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
This is one of the silliest adages ever. Of course freedom from consequences is an important part of freedom of speech. Can the government take away my welfare check because they don't like my opinions? Can they jail me? Of course not.
"Can they jail me? Of course not."
Well, as the finger-wagging cartoon from when it was the left doing it pointed out, "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". The government can't jail you. But anyone else can fire you, boycott you, kick you off their site, deplatform you, etc. and all this means is that you are on the wrong side so vae victis.
I don't know if it was copied from the cartoon or was a talking point on the lefty side, but I saw a *hell* of a lot of "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" on social media when someone (on the right) complained over doxxing or someone trying to get them in trouble with their employer over a post they'd made.
I'm sorry, are you under the impression that I am the author of that cartoon? You must be, otherwise I can't fathom why you are talking about it in response to my post.
Nor do I understand why you think, "one of my enemies said something stupid, so it is ok for me to say that same stupid thing, which I do not actually believe, if it allows me to 'score points' against my enemies" is a particularly compelling argument.
And, by the way, private actors punishing g someone for their opinions IS a violation of freedom of speech. It just doesn't happen to be a violation of the First Amendment. Though it can be a violation of state law. eg
https://california.public.law/codes/education_code_section_48950
www.thefire.org/research-learn/enacted-campus-free-speech-statutes-california
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/harassment/political-retaliation/
O come on. Said company is being threatened by the full force of the federal government, including removing license AND doj investigation. The threats alone are wildly unconstitutional, if not in law then certainly in spirit. Comparing boycotts composed of individual actions to the coordinated behavior of the only entity that has a monopoly on violence beggars belief.
Even if you take your point that these actions are not comparable, ignoring certain Biden administration actions,* so what? You have the right in America to refuse to patronize a business. You have the right to encourage others to do the same thing. But if you then call that business owner up and tell him "my rights are being violated by the government, please help me," what do you think he's gonna do? He's gonna slam that phone down. If you want people to be part of a political coalition defending your liberty, you have to offer them something.
*See https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerberg-joe-rogan-biden-officials-scream-curse-facebook-rcna187199
I've lost the thread. Call the business owner? What are you talking about?
Maybe some people are mad at Disney and abc, but that's obviously the wrong target. The FCC (and the trump admin) is the one violating liberal norms and abusing federal power.
Presumably Alexander is being ironic, because it was the oft-repeated mantra whenever some company fell to a harassment campaign and fired someone.
"feel to a harassment campaign and fired someone"
I love the way that a company's decision that caving to pressure was more important than closing ranks around their people is the protestors' faults, somehow. Don't get me wrong, I tend to think trying to get someone fired is shitty. But if your boss fires you because of a few angry phone calls, your main problem is that you had a shitty boss.
This is a very poor use of irony. There is nothing ironic about it, these are just two completely different scenarios. If a 5 yo was being teased by a 7yo on the playground, and then someone else came and beat the shit out of the 7yo, that would not be "ironic."
I genuinely think you haven't been paying attention to what was going on around 5 years ago. Because "private company" and "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" are very obvious memes.
If I said "they hate us for our freedoms" in 2005 and someone took it literally that's just a lack of media literacy on their part.
Things really suck now for free speech more than ever, but part of the reason we got here was the "LOL FREEZE PEACH" attitude that got built-up so much. Bondi even tried the "hate speech isn't free speech" line, which thankfully no one bought, so be thankful for small favors.
I was on one of the most progressive campuses in the world ~five years ago. I'm well aware of the excesses of the progressive left.
I do not agree with individual people trying to cancel others for speech reasons. But there is a *categorical difference* between individual private actors organizing themselves to do something -- which is itself a critical part of the first amendment! you cant make people buy things if they dont want to, even if you think the reasons for them doing so are ridiculous! -- and the federal government stepping in and doing so.
An escalation is not "ironic." It's just sad.
If you can find evidence that the federal government was doing things like threatening fox news, I will retract my statement.
Remember the days of "if you don't like it, set up your own [payment processor/social media site/other things]" when it was the good liberals and progressives doing the censoring, except that wasn't censoring because speech is violence and stopping hate speech is the most important task?
Pepperidge Farm remembers (as the youngish people say).
I think you may have misunderstood what people meant when they said those things.
People on the left NEVER, EVER assumed that capitalist-run media, social media, or finance was fair or impartial. Why on Earth would it be? It's going to do whatever it thinks maximizes revenue.
Lines like that were basically a way of pointing out "hey look, your behavior is so toxic that even these shamelessly profit-maximizing capitalists think the site is better off without you."
"Because individual people have done things I don't like and were being mean, it is ok for the federal government to stop them."
Is this a summary of your take?
How am I being played and what does Scott have to do with it?
If at any point you're interested, I am very open to discussing here or DM's or wherever the reason why I am not giving up hope for all life in America and on earth (my reason is Jesus, but there's a lot that that implies).
If you want to discuss my hope or even give reasons against it or anything like that feel free to reach out. Probably a response to this comment before anything else, as I've seen that other people have had issues with receiving DM's. I haven't had any DM correspondence, so idk if I would have the same issues.
That's good to hear! Take care.
I appreciate your honesty and hope you find some kind of balance soon.
I'm not entirely sure I get what point you are trying to make. Are you saying "the alleged shooter being right-wing is foreign disinformation?" where later you seem to be saying "a guy saying the alleged shooter was right-wing" is, uh, something something free speech something?
So is Kimmel a jerk promoting a foreign psyop, or someone who is sheltered under the First Amendment?
The name was vaguely familiar to me but I had to look him up and Kimmel is some late night talk show host/comedian? Not very funny?
I think you'd have a stronger argument about free speech rights; Jeff Maurer of "I Might Be Wrong" generally drives me crazy because I disagree with his views (and how he *always* has to drop in to whatever post that he used to write for the John Oliver show), but here he makes a good point about "free speech applies even to jerks" (in among the outrage that a lefty comedian got cancelled):
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/the-kimmel-cancelation-is-a-million
I think the Kimmel show being dropped is down to money, in the end - big corporations like Disney don't fold this easily to outside pressure, even from the government, and if Kimmel's show was a cash cow they would have put up more of a fight, but the free speech angle still holds.
The left has in recent years typically been at pains to tell us there is no right to have one’s speech be “free of consequences” beyond prosecution while the right has largely argued a somewhat broader principle. There was no reason to think that the polarity wouldn’t someday reverse.
There is far too much speech nowadays, so it’s unlikely either way that it would not become very cheap, much like human life.
"There was no reason to think that the polarity wouldn’t someday reverse."
Oh, the xkcd cartoon aged like milk when it came to that; the smug preaching when it was people on the right being cancelled has come back like a boomerang.
Having your show cancelled is not violating your free speech rights? The best thing that can be said for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express?
Tell that to Jimmy Kimmel et al 😁 This truly is "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander".
https://m.xkcd.com/1357/
I think that the executives at ABC could have made plenty of other arguments besides "it's not literally illegal." If it was merely Joe Random Rightwinger calling to cancel Kimmel, the executives could have done the normal thing and weighed "how good are Kimmel's ratings?" against "how bad were the comments?" and "how long will this controversy last?"
But instead, the argument they were weighing was "the Trump administration has literally threatened to stop us from broadcasting if we don't comply," and that outweighs any petty concerns about ratings.
This is why government censorship is much worse than simply having people yell at you or your employer.
Had not seen that, but very apropos.
If the FCC director threatened to pull Disney's license then this was government action to suppress speech and not merely private citizens expressing their opinion on Kimmel's speech.
Back in COVID times, I remember seeing a lot of right wingers being angry at supposed "jawboning" by the Biden admin - no explicit threats, simply telling the social media companies about COVID misinformation on their platform. That was apparently a government overreach, and people argued that simply *mentioning* that you find something wrong with their platform carries an implied threat when it comes from the government.
Now Brendan Carr literally says "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" and it's crickets from those same people.
I don’t know the grounds for this putative interference; what’s really interesting to me - is that it’s impossible to imagine Johnny Carson - I doubt he voted but like Kimmel I expect he would have voted exactly like the Hollywood people who produced his show - saying on air, that someone was killed by “one of *them*” and mean: half of his potential audience.
It’s just another of those bizarre, would-be-unrecognizable changes.
And of course what we know of the shooter is interesting too in that, if he himself had been the victim of violence in some notable way, he would have immediately been slotted into “one of *us*” because he was gay and his boyfriend claimed to be “trans” on social media.
I doubt it's possible to see Johnny Carson hosting The Man Show, either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0TgCgdvJ2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1By6Wj_sAU
Jimmy Kimmel's a different tone.
Don’t know about that show, but yeah, he’s scoldy. Funny though, I think, at least sometimes. Have seen only clips here and there, got no TV.
>someone was killed by “one of *them*” and mean: half of his potential audience.
How is that relevant? Johnny Carson probably wouldn't have come out in support of same sex marriage on his show either, so does that mean that if Jon Stewart was suspended for doing so, that would be ok?
"he would have immediately been slotted into “one of *us*” because he was gay and his boyfriend claimed to be “trans” on social media."
Yup. The Minnesota shooter (and boy, how fast we've moved on, eh?) was the subject of (I want to say "demented screeching" but that's probably unkind) a *lot* of "no, he wasn't really trans, he wasn't one of us, he was a right-wing far right radicalised white nationalist white supremacist transphobe homophobe MAGA!!!!!" messaging by the types who like to draw cute lil' comics about the persecution they suffer from being trans or being such good, right-thinking people with all the correct views (which are, of course, liberal views).
If the person had been beaten up instead of going out to shoot up a church and school, these same people would have been shouting from the rooftops about trans genocide etc.
In general, the new line seems to be:
Democrat/liberal/progressive gets attacked - the right did it!
Conservative/Republican gets attacked - the right did it!
The left never, ever do anything naughty at all, so they can continue to be the good guys who are eternally persecuted and victims, instead of having to acknowledge "yeah, human nature is eternal, some of the people claiming to be with us are not doing good things" (and I think that was the rationale for Kimmel's remarks: 'our guys are never to blame for anything because we're the good guys, everyone knows that, so if something bad happened then it was their guys who did it').
I've seen comments online about "the Kirk shooter was MAGA because his parents were MAGA" when all we know so far about his parents is that they are Utah Mormons? So yeah probably conservative, but guessing their politics from that seems like crystal ball reading. But of course, it's all about deflecting blame.
Did you miss all the Republicans saying (without evidence) the shooter was trans? Like, on the day of the shooting I was already seeing tweets about how we need to take away guns from trans people.
Like, if you think that "the shooter must be one of *them* and not one of us" is a leftist-only thing, you are sorely mistaken.
Utah Mormons - so: the OG radicals. Instead of arcane memes, they had treasure hunts. And they often got kicked out of places. At least once they very memorably cosplayed …
Now of course I chiefly associate them with tidy, pleasant little Western towns - as against most Westwern towns.
I was just in Torrey UT where a big Mormon family reunion was going on. Great burger trailer. Nice seeming people. Cool town. As in, cool because it has nice old trees and hollyhocks, and an orchard or two, as there is a little irrigation canal running the length of it.
ETA: the old settlers’ Mormon church there is much more pleasing than the hideously tacky modern renditions.
Yeah, the FCC making threats really is getting into "the government is policing speech".
At the same time, it's not "getting arrested", which is what our betters instructed us was what free speech only referred to:
https://m.xkcd.com/1357/
"Public Service Announcement: The right to free speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say".
The Schadenfreude is indeed thick, rich, creamy and delicious. Yielding to my baser impulses, I'm afraid!
If I had a nickel for every time I'd seen a right-winger angrily referencing that comic without any apparent understanding of it, I'd have at least four or five nickles.
If your show is cancelled because people stop watching because they *don't like your show*, that is clearly, CLEARLY not an infringement of your freedom of speech. Who said you have a right to a loyal audience. If the President of the United States coerces the network into cancelling your show because he doesn't like your content, that is *actual censorship.*
I honestly can't tell if all the seemingly-smart people here suddenly unable to tell the difference between "I had a product that depended on public goodwill and I squandered that" and "I had the government literally shut me down" is genuine, or if everybody just decided this is argue-in-bad-faith week.
Oh my fucking god, Deiseach, do you ever have your own opinion on anything, or do you just search for a left-winger who said something wrong and declare that they're the absolute authority on the topic? "The XKCD guy didn't write a paragraph-long panel on the legal nuances of government coercion, therefore I don't care about censorship."
You are indeed yielding to your baser impulses, you've been yielding to them all year. You have one joke and it's stopped being funny.
(Also, if the FCC pulls your broadcast license and you attempt to continue broadcasting, then you can in fact be arrested. So your dunk isn't even accurate.)
To make my position clear, I have long been pro-censorship, at least to some degree. I never believed in untrammelled free speech, and it was a long, hard road for me to travel to get to the point of "Okay, I don't like this, I even think it's bad not just wrong, but they have a right to express themselves even if I would prefer they shut up, or someone would shut them up".
And then the good liberals to the progressive side blew all that up in the hey-day of the SJWs. Then cancellation was the right thing to do. Then "error has no rights" was taken over from us ("It was still the official position of the Catholic Church in the 1950s, and was repudiated or superseded in the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965 by Dignitatis humanae") and used as a bludgeon. Damore could and should be fired by Google for expressing views at variance with the party orthodoxy. Then Brendan Eich could be forced out for making a donation to the 'wrong' side of a political campaign:
"This led to an online campaign against Eich's status as CEO of Mozilla, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). CREDO Mobile collected more than 50,000 signatures demanding that Eich resign."
So now "you broke it, you bought it". You guys wanted this? You're going to get it.
Funny thing, beleester. I do have my own opinions, and when I express them, I get told "That never happens/I never heard of that" (Gunflint, bless him, is the prime one here).
Then I go looking for "this did happen" and lo and behold, I get you telling me that I am a mindless drone.
Sorry friend, your lot *are* as bad as our lot, because we're all human. Trans people are not all suffering little blossoms, some of them are as bad as cis people. Being liberal to hardline Marxist-Leninist does not confer the aura of invincible truth.
And people with "the right side of history" opinions and views can do bad and wrong things, too.
Remember this the next time some pro-abortion zealot drags out the tired old argument "well if you pro-lifers *really* thought abortion was murder, you'd be out there blowing up abortion clinics, so plainly this is not your real reason to object to abortion and you hate women, hate sex, hate everything!" and then, when some lone nutcase *does* blow up an abortion clinic, the screams of outrage about "how could anyone do this? this is why the pro-lifers are all dangerous murderous zealots!" come about, like a clock striking on the hour.
I'm seeing more and more of this particular line recently. and no I *don't* go out searching for outrage bait (I don't need the jolt to my blood pressure): "if liberals are attacked, it's the fault of the right wing" (never get the benefit of 'it's just a crazy person') and "if right wing guy is attacked, it's the fault of the right wing" (can't be a good liberal, because liberals are all good and would never do a bad thing).
See the defenders of the black guy who slashed a woman's throat on the train: 'oh the poor guy, it's because of homelessness, it's because of untreated mental illness' - nothing can be attributed to him for blame or responsibility. Imagine a black or trans woman being attacked the same way by a white guy - there would be no 'oh poor guy, it's because of homelessness, it's because of untreated mental illness' but full-blown FAR RIGHT EXTREMIST WHITE SUPREMACIST RADICALISED BY MAGA, THIS IS TRUMP'S FAULT FOR HIS VIOLENT RHETORIC!!!! and certainly no GoFundMes for the suspect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska
"A GoFundMe crowd funding page that was opened for the suspect, Decarlos Brown, was closed by the company, after triggering public outrage."
And yeah, I think this guy got what he deserved because no, you should not call for the homeless to be exterminated like vermin:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/fox-news-host-kill-homeless-brian-kilmeade-apology-rcna231369
It will give the lawyers something to bill for then.
“Speech” is not my issue, and the airtime it gets is as usual rather inverse to its importance.
Graffiti is apparently speech, in the liberal mind, and littering I think will be next.
I fully expect to see the day when you throw some concrete across the river, leaving not a trickle to go through for downstream folks, and the lawyers will explain to us that concrete is speech. Lawyers are amazing and can do anything!
See you at Barnes & Noble where the employees often risk life and limb by wearing Banned Book buttons during Banned Book Week. In case you thought they were going to stop you making a purchase.
Or at the library, where The Catcher in the Rye will be front and center - people tend not to read it much anymore so the copy won’t be checked out - though any passing aspiring novelist might be forgiven for thinking, for the love of God and Mammon please, oh, please throw my book in that brer banned book patch. I too want to sell 5 million copies!
On the other hand, e.g. the children’s picture book about the little girl and her mother - enslaved people - who baked the cake for George Washington - is probably not going to be on that table. They culled it a few weeks after publication, voluntarily.
I've read your post twice over and I don't see an argument, just a rant about a bunch of random things that are loosely related to "speech." What does any of this have to do with government censorship?
Yeah, it’s hard. I had forgotten what you wrote, so I just looked at it again, and I believe I was trying to excuse myself from the suggestion on your part that people on left and right have argued in equal measure about speech (and wrongly on one side, if I understand you lr rant correctly) - something I’m almost savagely indifferent to, at least as currently and theatrically presented.
Leave me out, leave yourself in. It’s all good.
>Graffiti is apparently speech
Of course graffiti is speech. That doesn't mean that anti-graffiti laws are unconstitutional. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/time-place-and-manner-restrictions/
I wouldn’t count on that in future. Not that it matters, there being no enforcement and graffiti comporting so well with the world those in charge want to see.
There are people who had principled objections to the previous stuff and to this current stuff. You won't hear a lot positive about this sort of thing from, say, Sam Harris or Andrew Sullivan or Jonah Goldberg. But yes, a lot of people were only upset that other people had the speech-suppression tools, and are perfectly happy using those tools now that they've fallen into their hands.
I'm not sure why you're taking your anger out on Scott in particular, but it's your money I guess.
I'm thinking if there needs to be some kind of corollary to The Toxoplasma Of Rage, that any sufficiently major event will eventually evolve into something that splits the population 50-50. The mechanism is that if there's ever a major event that splits the population 80-20 or 90-10, then the "winning" side will capitalise on it, use it as an excuse to execute more of their agenda, massively overplay their hand, and wind up alienating all their new sympathisers.
This is where we're at now. We've quickly moved on from the actual event, and are now at the being outraged "what A said about what B said about what C said about the assassination" stage of the news cycle, because this is something we can argue about across the usual well-worn creases.
>The false claim was recited by a Russian-linked propaganda outlet and repeated by Google’s AI-generated news summary.
...you know what, I would love it to become a political talking point that Google AI is promoting Russian propaganda. Maybe getting tagged as straight-up traitors would be enough to make them undo their stupid "The Lie Machine always gets top search" bullshit.
You don't want the AI summary gone, you want 2015 Google back. Unfortunately, the only way forward is through: Deep Research is how search is going to become actually useful again. Automated use of human-level intelligence to burn away anything the SEO parasites might try.
No, first and foremost I want the AI summary gone. It's a fucking Search Engine, I use it to Search for things, not to make things up. Not just the first result, but all the Related Questiosn are Just The Lie Machine now. And they're advertising it in commercials as Totally Not A Lie Machine. They need to be sued for false advertising. Rip the damn thing out.
Paid, not payed.
"The American Experiment is in grave danger. "
I find the present tense rosily optimistic, to be honest, but it's been that kind of week. The American experiment WAS in grave danger. And then a year ago a little over half the U.S. electorate said
"OK, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, vaccines, education, football, public order, irrigation, roads, the interstate highway system, the largest economy in human history, and public health ... what has the American Experiment ever done for us?"
I'll be honest, I don't have a lot of sympathy for those people. I will say that, while the U.S. *looks* great on paper, it's increasingly set up for many of those fantastic things to bypass large portions of the population and turn into bigger houses, bigger yachts, bigger tanks, bigger bailouts and sometimes bigger wars for the people who already have enough. So when those people say "screw it, this system sucks, lets sink it," I do have sympathy. But when their method of doing that empowers most of the people who are already screwing them over *even harder* in favor of visiting terror and violence to people more vulnerable and worse off than they? Screw em. I don't wish harm on any of them, because I don't wish harm on anyone. But if harms do come from their poor choices (as they already have) justice would be for them to fall hardest on those who dragged everyone else into it. Reap what you sow.
I'll do the really cringe rationalist space thing and quote someone rather less well-known than Monty Python here:
"There is no road-sign set, to mark the place of your last chance to turn back. If you refuse one chance will you not refuse others?"
I hope I am wrong. I will try as hard as I can to *ensure* that I am wrong. But I really, truly, honestly don't believe that most Americans those still standing behind their so-called leader want a future for their children *more* than they want to screw over their enemies. The level of hate and bile I've seen out of them--even here, in this fairly low-key space--is frankly indescribable. I'm very, very glad I left when I did.
This week might be an exceptionally difficult time to make the argument they backed the wrong side when the other is making abundantly clear they want them all dead, rejoicing at the killing of one of them.
You and I apparently live on two different Internets. Here's what *I* saw:
From the Left:
-Some tasteless jokes and tasteless gravedancing (not great)
-Quite a lot post starting with things like "nobody should ever be shot for what they say," including every public figure I've checked, and most media personalities.
-A lot of people helping remember Charlie Kirk by literally quoting a bunch of things he actually said.
Great behavior? No. Uniformly terrible behavior? Also no.
From the Right:
-About 50 different calls for "civil war" and "violence against the left", mostly made before *any* concrete info was known about the shooter.
-Some guy literally referring to the event as "the American Reichstag fire" (way to say the quiet part out loud)
-Mindless repetition of whatever crap the FBI has claimed to know now, regardless of how implausible.
So yes, it's pretty clear that SOMEBODY in this dynamic wants a bunch of people on the other side dead. Not really sure it's the left though...
"The other side" is a huge amorphous group, some very small number of whom are cheering for Kirk's murder. The overwhelming majority aren't. Tons of public figures on the left have explicitly said they're horrified by this murder and oppose the use of murder to silence political opponents.
It's too easy to convince yourself that the other side is all evil when you (or your social media sources or whatever) seek out the most horrible people from the other side and serve them up to you.
Statistically, rightwing terrorism is much more common in the US than leftwing terrorism. This was the conclusion of the FBI itself, until it took down it's research for politically motivated reasons after the death of Kirk.
Just a few months ago Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed by a right-wing terrorist. She was a democratic legislator and the response from the right was basically a shrug at best and the standard barrage of jokes at worst
The right keep pushing this arguement that the left want them dead, but it's the right who are willing to ship people to El Salvadorian death camps without trial. Its the right who have embedded gangs such as 'the oath keepers' into police forces, it's the right who attacked the government on January 6th, it's the right who have dismantled health care provisions and undermined vaccination. Its the right who call for LGBT people to stoned to death.
People are merely looking for an excuse to do what they already wanted to do and the death of their favourite podcaster is just a convenience.
I think the Minnesota guy was more of a nutcase with some political motivations.
The dude who murdered Brian Thompson seemed to be pretty clearly politically motivated, on the other hand, much more like the guy who murdered Kirk. Probably neither one of them are exactly firing on all cylinders, but they had some kind of coherent explanation for their motives that make sense outside of a psych ward.
The guy that shot up that black church had a pretty clear ideological motive.
Nobody really knows the motive for Kirk's murder yet. Likely nobody will ever know, since the FBI seems rather determined to destroy any credibility the official investigation may have had.
I have not seen a study that proves this "right wing terrorism is more common" claim that doesn't have dozens of embarrassing methodological errors. My prior is btw that it's probably true still (but also not particularly useful as there is likely some meaningful qualitative differences between violence on both sides), but I am deeply convinced by the critiques.
I do remember seeing a link to one such study in the last few days. (I think I saw it on X, but I can't find it now.) In that particular study, the problem lay in classifying any act in which ethnicity was mentioned as "right-wing". This ended up incrementing the RW counter for incidents like "one Syrian gunned down another Syrian" or "white man killed a black man for sleeping with the white man's wife".
(What I remember of the study was a chart, showing colored bars for each type of terrorism, stacked on top of each other, and tracked by year, if that helps. It was promoted by the Guardian.)
Probably the one by the prosecution project (the Economist article on left wing vs right wing violence uses this chart). https://archive.is/EMh4x .
Another obvious issue is that it's tracking *criminal cases*. The caviat being that you don't open up criminal cases for people who are already dead (e.g. mass shooters who killed themselves or are killed after a rampage shooting). Or for example if, hypothetically, riots break out for a left wing cause and DAs refuse to prosecute those who are arrested for violence in those riots.
"I have not seen a study that proves this "right wing terrorism is more common" claim that doesn't have dozens of embarrassing methodological errors"
Yep, they use a "no-true Scotsman" definition of left-wing.
one of many issues but not even the most egregious. Look at the prison gang issue (some studies classify any violence committed by anyone who's ever been a member of a white prison gang as right wing terrorism). Not even to mention the "how do we classify Islamist violence" and "how do we avoid including 9/11" issues.
Don't think there's a point in arguing about it. Everyone knows that it isn't true that the left wants to kill everyone on the right.
Not literally EVERYONE on the left, no.
Everyone knows that nothing that's even kinda close to "the left wants to kill everyone on the right" is true, either.
I suspect you're right about the former, wrong about the latter.
When nobody watches a show, they "suspend" it pretty easily. Roseanne got her ass canceled for saying stuff that she probably shouldn't have. But Roseanne (and her new show) was really popular. That's notable.
I'm not exactly "okay" with cancelling comedians for screwing up a joke, but I doubt that's what happened here. Crack open a comedian's substack ("I might be wrong" is pretty good), and ask yourself what someone who wrote for these programs has to say.
(Yes, I do think someone's trolling with that asinine troll account they're "claiming" is their real account. Do Not Feed The Trolls).
In the "Annals of the Last Administration" there were literal assaults on free speech for trade publications, where the government bought out and subsequently closed a magazine, because its content (In this case, obituaries) was too damaging.
Do you have any source or even a vague hint or direction for what you're talking about in the last paragraph. I do really hate the thing people do where they name-drop some obscure bit of trivia that for all we know might be made up, as if it were Shakespeare or Star Wars or the Odyssey.
The world is very large and contains a lot of media. Nobody has even heard of it all, much less consumed it all. If it's important enough to rest a point on, isn't it important enough to share with those curious souls among us languishing in ignorance?
The magazine is still around; https://www.alpa.org/news-and-events/air-line-pilot-magazine
This is a conspiracy theory:
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.9UV4VV
Wimbli is simply making stuff up, and did the same in previous accounts, and almost all posts have this derailing dropping of "secret info" at the end of them.
Edit-typo, removed name of other accounts since only suspicion
Thanks for asking, I was going to do so myself! I was very curious about how on earth obituaries could be a threat to the government (Big Funeral Parlours?) but it seems to be "deaths associated with airplanes".
Reposting here for it to get seen; this is false, wimbli is making things up.
The magazine is still around; https://www.alpa.org/news-and-events/air-line-pilot-magazine
This is a conspiracy theory:
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.9UV4VV
It feels like the internet has regressed by a decade or two. People used to confidently post trivially disprovable things but then they stopped for a while.
Is this an English language or a foreign language magazine, because Google has nothing about a magazine of that name, or one being shut down (it seems a lot of trade magazines have been taken over by new owners or they shut down because print is no longer economic in the digital age).
I tried looking this up and I can't find any record of what you're talking about with the government buying and closing a magazine, what was the name of the magazine?
Do you consider this MORE of an "assault on the First Amendment" than previous administrations encouraging social media moderation?
Just once, I would like to see a Republican say "yes, I disapproved of this when the Biden admin did it and I disapprove of Trump doing it now" rather than "Biden did it, so that means we get to do it too, and ten times more aggressively!" Do you actually have a principle or do you just want to be the boot?
Something I've come to notice about political extremists is the tendency to exaggerate or outright fabricate real or imagined transgressions by their political opponents, always characterized as a homogeneous mass, in order to lay the foundations of a preemptive justification of actions they desire as being retribution in kind. That this sort of reciprocity principle supersedes other principles is actually made explicit in a comment in response to you. With this in mind it should be clear why he also insists that "the other side" is engaged in incitement to political violence and cheering for political assassination. It is another foundation being laid.
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VyOksGjatwk
I'd say it, but I don't fit your first condition, since I'm not a Republican. (Or a Democrat.)
I DO consider it bad when both sides do this. I just also consider it far worse when ONLY the other other guys do it to us.
I value freedom of speech/expression extremely highly, but I consider it better that no one has it than only those who suppress ours do, and don't much care which levers of power are used to accomplish this end.
Go over to National Review, most of the commenters on the article I read about it were happy enough that Kimmel got canceled but very unhappy about the fact that it seemed like the network might have been bullied into it by the administration. So I would say there are indeed plenty of Reublicans who do not approve of it now, just as most Democrats do not approve of shutting up a contrary opinion with a bullet.
It sounds like you are confusing the previous administration with the present one.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/15/trump-campaign-actually-does-with-extwitter-what-it-falsely-accused-the-biden-campaign-of-doing-four-years-ago/
Or … could it be possible you’re referring to the “Twitter Files” stuff? I can’t imagine that’s it, since “encouraging social media moderation” is a gross mischaracterization of those so-called “revelations”.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/05/twitter-admits-in-court-filing-elon-musk-is-simply-wrong-about-government-interference-at-twitter/
> You haven't reported any Smithsonian exhibits for wrongthink, and had them subsequently removed, have you? If that doesnt' speak to "Direct Assault on the First Amendment" I don't know what does.
What has that got to do with free speech? It's a government agency. They have no obligation to show any exhibit. This, and most left wing freedom of speech complaints, seem to be nothing but demands that the government be required to fund their left wing activism. And there is no such requirement. If I don't have the right to government funding neither do these losers.
"You haven't reported any Smithsonian exhibits for wrongthink, and had them subsequently removed, have you?"
Stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Smithsonian a part of at least a direct affiliate of the U.S. Federal Government? If that's the case, then the First Amendment really, does not apply. The government is not allowed to restrict the speech of its citizens. That doesn't mean that government agencies don't have to follow directives from above. Without more info about the specific case, I can have no opinion on whether the admin was right or wrong[1]
"healthcare workers were absolutely fired in numbers large enough to cause Nursing Strikes, because they believed vaccination violated their religious beliefs. "
Firing healthcare workers who refuse to meet the requirements of the job is ABSOLUTELY the correct call. The government certainly should not be in the business of dictating to citizens what they may or may not do with their bodies. That's not a 1st Amendment thing, but bodily integrity is a human right. But this is nothing about that. Your employer can set standards for a job, as long as those standards aren't explicitly banning particular religions. If your religious beliefs conflict with the extremely necessary requirements of the job you have chosen, you are absolutely free to either find another religion or find another job. If you're a pacifist and you join the military to do a combat role, that's on you. If you're a Christian (who actually takes the Bible seriously) and you decide to work for a bank, that's on you. If you're a Muslim who takes a job that requires constant attention and precludes stopping several times a shift for prayer, that's on you. Have whatever religious beliefs you want, but you don't get to impose them on your employer. Otherwise I think I might have to found a religion whose commandments say it's immoral to be paid less than $100 an hour and then get a fast-food job. I'm sure that would work great.
If antivaxxers want to start their own parallel health institutions run by antivaxxers for antivaxxers and they're clearly marked (so no sane people wander in by accident), I'd be all for that. Sounds like a natural experiment. Let it run for a couple decades and we can see which system has the lower mortality rate. Though I'd still want their children to go to the regular hospital: I'm OK with voluntary opt-outs even when they're stupid. Less ok with allowing child abuse.
"This is a person who believes that violence against political opponents is a good thing. Your other workers ought not to feel safe around them, particularly if they hold opposing beliefs. This person is a liability, and you want them gone before they go postal."
This is a crap argument and any sane human knows it. First off, if you're not a strict pacifist and military, police and prison abolitionist, then you definitely, definitely believe in violence against your political opponents in SOME circumstances. Mostly circumstances where almost everyone around you agrees, and/or your political opponents live far away. But second, there is a HUGE difference between having an immoderate, illiberal or tasteless reaction to a current event and being willing to pick up a weapon and kill someone. Obviously. If that argument held water, very, very few people of any persuasion would ever work again.
Now, if they start loudly talking in the workplace about how great said violence is, to their point where their coworkers find them alarming and offputting and start considering other jobs, then there's a legitimate case to be made that they are *an actual business liability.* Or if they do something wildly contrary to the exceptions of the job: as a former educator, I have zero problem with a teacher who shows footage like that in class getting sacked. Fuck that teacher. But that's pretty different from blithely rationalizing why anyone who doesn't share your taste can't work.
Finally let me say, basically every single conservative complaint about unjust firings in similar cases treats the employer like they have no agency. If an online starts bombarding your workplace with angry messages about some shit you said online--something that I generally believe shouldn't happen to anyone--and your employer decides to let you go: then THE single person who had the biggest hand in firing you was your employer. They could have told the mob to go screw. Instead they treated you like you're a disposable cog instead of a human being.[2]
[1] I had no love for the Biden administration, and REALLY no love for Biden the man. But I'd have to be blind not to notice just how *bad* some of the critiques against him are.
[2] I once had some dude salty over an online dust-up track down my workplace and my boss's contact info and call and try to get me fired. My boss told me, gave me a serious look, and suggested I locked down my social media a little tighter. He was a great boss: I ended up leaving that job a few months after he did because the next boss couldn't measure up.
> that happened last Administration.
I didn't hear about this, and can't find any articles about it. Could you please point me to one?
Banned Tori Swain, a.k.a. banned shimmergloom, he just makes shit up. It's like kleptomania, he cant stop himself.
I found the Oryx and Crake trilogy by Margaret Atwood excellent.
The Commonwealth Saga and the following trilogy (the Void Trilogy) were really refreshing and good SciFi reads. I particularly like the angles of both books on how certain technologies in the books had impacts on the human species at large.
Did you read the Book of the New Sun already? They're a bit older than 2000 (1980s, I think?) but very good, and Gene Wolfe was a Catholic so you're not going to see a lot of the ol' wokery. He kept writing this side of the millennium too, and almost all of his stuff is gold, only the later books predominantly become puzzle boxes which are *extremely* puzzling. It's quite possible that literally nobody on the planet has fully untangled two or three of them.
That sounds ominous. Did any of those later books descend into gibberish and refer to an entity called "the exechamp"?
Alas, I do not understand this reference.
Ha, sorry, yeah that was a little annoying of me. Your description of him just sounded so exactly like the fantasy author from The Northern Caves that I couldn't help myself.
Oh, I see. I've never heard of The Northern Caves, I'm afraid. (No need to apologize, though. I don't think there was anything offensive in it, I just didn't get it.)
"Count to a Trillion" by John C. Wright is a good one.
I was thinking about that too, if it's not too Catholic. It is great fun, but you have to be in the right mind set to enjoy it. I love Menelaus, but he is an idiot. It is appropriately Big Dumb Objects and Grand Science Fiction in the Golden Age style where vast swathes of time and space are the background to the plot.
I'm gonna have to quote the stealth baptism. I love this part.
“I had my doubts whether you were truly a Catholic, my son. I see now that you must be. No one knows less of our catechism and orders than one of our flock.”
“It was kind of a — I was unconscious at the time, and your grandpa had me watered down, enlisted, or whatever you call it—”
“Baptism.”
“Whatever — he told the padres there I was dying, and it was my last wish, and probably a whole mule train of lies, forty mules at least. So it doesn’t really count, right?”
“It counts for some things,” came the voice of the old priest, with a sigh, from behind the screen. “But not to stray far from the topic, no, my own wealth, since I have none, will not be affected if you command the contraterrene asteroids to stop broadcasting power. But I am not asking for myself. I am hardly the only one of your descendants who honors you and seeks your good.”
If you're in the mood for lighter fare than books, how about a webcomic?
Schlock Mercenary started in June 2000 and went until July 2020. (One of its claims to fame: at least ten years of daily strips, with zero interruptions or hiatuses. Possibly all twenty; I can't easily check. This is very rare, in a very crowded field; webcomics were frequently taking days, weeks, or months off, often without announcement, often just quietly stopping whenever the artist felt like it.) The style is not great at the beginning, but the jokes are good enough, and the SF content (teraports; wormgates; annie plants; Terran battleplates; nanny bags; galactic intelligences; weaponized longshoremen; the list goes on) is not bad either. I think both pick up as the series goes.
If you insist on books, well, the whole thing is also organized as "books" containing their own stories.
"Tilt" by Bill Adams! I think I ran across it on DSL, and I thought it would be good, but I didn't think it would be THAT good. But it is.
For less "hard sci-fi" and more "Hitchhiker's Guide" type, you could try Robert Kroese's series that starts with "Starship Grifters." The title of the third book, "Out of the Soylent Planet", gives you the general style.
Not sure what category "literary steampunk" is in, but Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next books ("The Eyre Affair" is the first one) are good, especially if you like catching all the literary references and want a world where there are performances of Richard III that go like RHPS screenings. Also there are werewolves, and you can alter books by "jumping" into first editions of them.
The Expanse is absolutely incredible. The TV adaptation was quite good, but doesn't do justice to just how good the books were. This is easily my top recommendation.
The Altered Carbon trilogy by Richard Morgan is also great (and vastly better than the adaptation). A warning in the opposite direction of your constraint: this author likes to detour into extremely graphic, extremely heterosexual sex scenes a few times per book. It's a little much IMO, but skippable so whatever.
I have a soft spot for The Dresden Files, which is "hard-boiled P.I. on the mean streets of Chicago, who is also a wizard". It's shlocky but I love it.
(As for your constraint, we're probably pretty aligned on our preferences: I wouldn't avoid a book just for having >0 LGBTQ characters, but I absolutely would if it was presented as a main focus.)
Since you mentioned The Dresden Files, I suppose I'll throw Jim Butcher's other books onto your list. They're good-not-great I'd say.
I've read Cursor's Fury, and none of the other books in the Codex Alera series; it was a fun read, but with a very "tune in next time" ending; you get your big climactic battles, but the villains are defeated in ways that let them come back for the next book. (There was also a bit of cheating during the climax; a character worries about a thing, and then later reveals they had it solved the whole time, so the earlier worrying was just to trick the audience.)
The Aeronaut's Windlass, likewise; All the characters feel like folks I've seen before, but the buildup and the worldbuilding is a good time, and it has a very climactic ending... at the 3/4 mark, after which it keeps going to another, less climactic ending. I haven't read the other Cinder Spires books.
I also accidentally read a James Butcher book, which... I now have to Google to remember any names at all. Ah, here it is: Dead Man's Hand was enjoyable, though you can feel that a young person is writing it; several strawman villain-for-a-scenes, a scene that falls flat solely because the book's tone doesn't allow for it, and lots of complaining about McDonalds in this supernatural buddy-cop story. Still, I read it to the end, and read the sequel. It's a fun popcorn flick. Eragon might be a good comparison.
Sorry, I don't follow. I'm familiar with Feel Good Inc and its music video, but don't know what it has to do with The Expanse. I had not heard of Letterkenny (watched some clips, and yeah, looks pretty good, thanks!) and don't understand how that or George Carlin relates either. Are we talking about the same Expanse? Jim Holden and Martian Congressional Republic and Belters?
Both The Expanse and Letterkenny are awesome! I highly recommend the audio book version of The Expanse.
Feel Good Inc is solid too.
> If you have a "good" review site, that would be best
I recently exported my good-read-reviews to CSV, and gave that data to AI and asked it to give me some recommendation based on my reading habit. That worked exceptionally well, and may work for you, too.
> that isn't good characterization (as Sanderson's done recently with Yasnah Kholin)
i have trouble parsing that sentence. Does "as Sanderson's done recently with Yasnah Kholin" refer to "good characterization " or does it refer to "isn't good characterization"?
"Recently" isn't really the best way to describe that, since in the latest book [rot13] Wnfanu vf irel zhpu ba gur erprvivat raq bs n oehgny ireony orngqbja.
Try Brent Weeks's Lightbringer series.
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series is great fun, with a working-class hero and a talking cat.
I haven't had a chance to check them out, but I've heard good things about Karl Gallagher (Torchlight) and Devon Eriksen (Orbital Space).
You could also try searching from the "modern+good" direction, and start with Hugo and Nebula nominees from 2000 onward, and read synopses and reviews of what you find. If anything, you might find a reliable reviewer with those interests.
Finally, you might find something by looking at Atomic Rockets (projectrho.com) for modern references. AR is meanwhile just good for people seeking realistic, hard SF.
Just curious, why the specification of "more modern than 2000 or so"? I would assume both sci-fi and fantasy are largely unaffected by the year they were written, aside from what political undertones the book would have (in which case, it would seem like more modern books would have more of what you're looking to avoid).
Is it because you've already read most of the older stuff that you've heard of?
Well I'm glad a lot of other people replied, because I have nothing to contribute for your friend 😳 I was just curious as to your reasoning.
In case you're interested, two sci-fi books I've read in the past couple months are:
Ubik by Philip K. Dick (the guy who wrote the book 'Blade Runner' is based on) - very mind-bending, gave me a little mental breakdown that lasted a day or two.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Usula K. Le Guin (I guess if you want your child to be a great author you should give them the middle name 'K.') - Written in 1969, it's not necessarily LGBT aligned (as a Christian, I personally don't support that philosophy myself), but a main theme of the book is that it takes place on a planet where the beings are androgynous, and once a month get "in heat" or whatever and they become one of the two genders at random.
The book is written from the perspective of a normal human man coming to the planet as an ambassador to try and convince the planet to join this huge galactic conglomeration of planets. It was very interesting to me and highlighted how a lot of our own society is shaped purely by the biology of the two genders, in so many ways I never would have realized. There's a lot more to it than that, as well, it's a very thoughtful book and not very long.
I responded rather creatively to it as the planet the story takes place on is nicknamed 'winter', and parts of the story reminded me of the bitter winter that will begin to set in any day where I live 😭 It was pretty relatable, and maybe if I use my imagination, my next 6 months will be a little more bearable.
I just finished Dungeon Crawler Carl, and was a little disappointed in it, mostly because it was billed as similar to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which it assuredly is not. Perhaps the style is intended that way, but I was a bit turned off by the excessive profanity, and the humor level, though present, was pretty low. It seems the series gets dark instead of light-hearted.
It was still decent, though. It had some original plot points which were good, and the concept was acceptable, though fairly implausible.
The Culture books had a very woke-friendly worldview. (For example, Culture citizens can and routinely do change genders by deciding they'd like to and triggering some internal biological programming to absorb the old secondary sexual characteristics and grow new ones. This just happens causally as background in a couple stories.)
The Murderbot books are very clearly written from a woke-adjacent worldview, and are fun to read. They're in a sort of cyberpunk + space opera kind of setting.
The books in the Goblin Emperor series are similar in worldview/ideology, but in a fantasy setting.
I was looking for someone to mention the Culture novels because they are actually good books, and when there is "LGBT Friendly" content it has no agenda behind it and is always in service of the story. Many times like you say it happens casually in the background.
As per your request please find enclosed: Gideon the ninth is dripping with woke tropes, and I could not care less. It’s an amazing book Plot, characters, prose, subtext, thematic resonances, memes all a+. One of the only woke books I have unrelentingly enjoyed. For the Ninth!